Bounty (26 page)

Center point of his existence? How in the gods’ names did he do that? He couldn’t even think.

“
If your essence evades you, resort to your greatest desire,” the woman continued. “Envision it, reach for it, focus on it with everything you have inside you, and refuse to let go until it is yours in this world. But beware the danger of this last resort; many fall willfully short, their strength failing their mortal bodies but keeping their spirits attached to this world. That is how ghosts are born.”

Weakness started to pervade his body as the leeches withdrew the deadening poison but took his blood with it. He regained the barest ability to think, but lost the will to put forth the effort it would take to do so.

“
Fight
, Poison Lord,” the woman commanded. “
Want
. Your greatest desire; think of it. Let it possess you.”

A strand of will to obey swam through the darkness he wanted to drown in. What he wanted…well, that was easy, wasn’t it? It was the same now as what he’d always wanted, coinciding with his doom…

But the woman at his side spoiled it with an insightful warning; “But don’t, whatever you do, think of freedom. You will get it – you will die.”

Already halfway there, thinking of it, Godren tried to throw up walls to block the death he had called so swiftly. It had been hovering just beyond its breaking point, and rushed him at the first sign of an invitation. A broken dam. He choked, inside himself, and instinctively fought the assault as the woman’s chanting voice rose in volume and fed motivating nonsense into his head. She had a way of capturing the essence of something in her voice, so that he didn’t have to know the language to understand the impression of what the words meant. Visions poured into his mind, spawn of the vivid descriptiveness she possessed in her voice and the artistry that formed her words. A garden bloomed in his mind, and water streamed through his veins. Wind buffeted him and unfurled a pair of wings on his back, and the urge to fly overwhelmed him. Drums beat to the pumping rhythm of his heart. As the wind filled his lungs and forced him to breathe, he felt the desire to run – run forever, because he would never run out of breath.

Successfully filling him with the elation of life, of living and breathing and feeling, the woman moved on to describe beauty, adding attraction to the spell. The reflection of a lake at sunrise glinted and rippled in his eyes, then the glittering depths of brilliant constellations. He saw every detail of the blooming process of a rose, and marveled over the iridescent, fluid pooling waves of a green water until he realized it was actually a satin curtain flowing like liquid in the wind. He saw patterns – on leaves and feathers and stone, in the sky and on the water – even in the wind. Colors suddenly held such blinding, beautiful meaning, and a cascade of tempering snowflakes blanketed the world in lace.

Then she described pain. The art of her words created it for him, penetrating his numbness and stabbing him so fiercely that his livelihood flared. It was only an illusion, but it was stronger than anything he had ever felt. He would do anything to escape that pain, but he couldn’t – so he lived. It kept him awake, kept him agonizingly anchored to the world. Needles dug at his skin and soul-wrenching cramps twisted his innards. Through the darkness, through the otherwise numb curse on his body and paralyzed ability to do anything, he found his voice in the depths of his being and screamed. Mercilessly, the voice causing the pain intensified to be heard over his cry, keeping the agony steady. He wanted to writhe, wanted to cower, but could not move a muscle, couldn’t ease one relieving inch away from the anguish. It hounded him – beating him and stabbing him, eating him from the inside out, wrenching him apart.

He hardly realized when it started abating; his body still rang with it. But it finally registered that the cruel voice had relented to a murmur, and as it trailed off into a whisper he dared to hope he might soon feel the effects of relief. When the intensity did slack off, he still felt like steam should be rising from his body, like he should be trembling regardless of paralysis. Like his voice should be bleeding from the raucous volume of his tormented cry.

“
Now,” his uncanny healer said indifferently; though, the gentleness had never left her eyes – even as the intensity of her spell shared them. “Think of something you want. In the same way you just learned to avoid longing for freedom, avoid longing for relief now. Be strong. Envision something of a different nature – something beautiful, perhaps. That makes it easy, both to envision and to desire.”

Without having to execute any effort, a vision of the princess established itself in his mind. It was at once vivid and striking, capturing his focus. She was radiant – the sun in her skin and the depths of the sky in her eyes. She smiled at him, and her eyes creased, giving her features a slightly exotic angle. There was mischief in those eyes, but also sincerity. A true rebel at heart, but fiercely loyal to the people who demanded practicality of her.

Someone who, while demonstrating that truly noble love for her people, fell in love with a criminal.

The thought of Ossen deceiving her, of him taking advantage of her ignorance and rebelliousness and being an immoral influence, corrupting her…that planted a seed of resistance, of opposition, in Godren’s deadened mind. It was just a shred of purpose that called for action – which called for staying alive – but it was the last straw in this business with Ossen, which, as it sent him over one edge, was ironically what held him balancing precariously on another – that of survival. There were two personal sides to it: the opposition that had always festered between them, and the coincidental element of the princess, which they were both coming at from different angles than that of the usual rivalry. Then there was the bigger picture, which instilled more of a moral responsibility in him for knowing the aspects than it did personal drive for being emotionally stricken by them; the fact that the princess of Raven City was unknowingly falling into the arms of those who would use her. Treacherously and ruthlessly, they would use her. Regardless of if Ossen would actually ever contrive to harm her or not had he not been a victim of blackmail – Godren would never trust him for a minute, even then – he knew Mastodon would dig her claws in as soon as it fit her interests, and she would never let go. The princess would be at her mercy, a wretched puppet on a string, and Mastodon could wrench the nation apart and turn it upside down through her.

So he clung to the image of Princess Catris, letting it possess him, letting her hold onto him. And as the leeches drained him, weakening him and sending him under again, he dreamed deeper, more pleasant dreams of her.

24:
Recklessness

I
t took him a moment, after his eyelids fluttered slowly open, to realize that he was no longer surrounded by the cold, lifeless stone of the alley he had died in – and that he wasn’t in the realms of the gods, either. A lavish bedchamber came slowly into focus around him, decorated exotically in blacks and greens and maroons, and swamped with rugs and wall hangings. Gold, roping tassel-work draped around the chamber, and there was a presence of light that made him cast his eyes about for the windows it was surely attributed to, only to find solid walls that left him wondering. Mastodon’s strong incense laced the air of the still room, no doubt absorbed by now into the very souls of the carpets and tapestries and bedclothes.

So he wasn’t dead. Was this Mastodon’s
room
? Admittedly, the solid blackness of the bedclothes and canopy was a little deathly encompassing him, and, still disoriented, he blinked at the tomblike paradox immediately surrounding him, wanting to make sure. The rest of the chamber remained tuned to his focus, though, and for the first time he dared to hope that something had actually saved him back there in the alley.

A door clicked open, and a silent figure moved into the room. Struggling to lift his head as his stiff neck protested, Godren strained to see who had entered. His skull felt like it was made of lead, though, and the muscles in his neck felt like stone, preventing him from succeeding except for the barest glimpse before his head fell back on the pillow. The effort felt like it should have left him trembling, but his muscles were just too stony to turn to water. Feeling heavy, he lay there like a weighty statue, a burden unto himself, thinking that surely he was going to leave a deep impression in the expensive mattress beneath him.

A dark-skinned servant appeared next to the bed, setting a tray on the nightstand before she turned her eyes to the occupant of the canopy’s black shadows. She didn’t say anything – just looked at him, directly and penetratingly, and then took her leave.

What had she brought? Godren’s curiosity frustrated him as he couldn’t find the means to satisfy it, weighed down and restricted to the impression he made in the mattress. After a moment he caught a whiff of spicy sustenance, which only taunted him more as he lay there immobile, unable to get to it. Were they just going to leave him there, unknowing about his condition? He would go mad.

A few moments later, though, Mastodon came in. She looked out of place in this setting, even though it was her room; he was so used to only seeing her behind her desk. Even more awkward to behold, he realized, must be him; in
her
bed.

“
Welcome back, Godren,” Mastodon said, sitting calmly by the bed. She glanced at the food tray her servant had left on the nightstand. “Do you find you’re unable to fend for yourself?”

Wondering if he should trust himself to try to talk, Godren swallowed first. His tongue was thick and unmanageable, but he forced it into submission and managed a shallow swallow. Tediously, he formed his first word; “Yes.” It was a bit slurred, and came out a bit like a croak, but it came out. That was something.

“
Well you can speak, at least. I’ll have to have Lea nurse you back to health. Seth would help too, I’m sure. He’s positively beside himself.”

As he worked so hard to bring words to his stiff lips, Godren suddenly realized he didn’t know what was safe to say and so discontinued his effort. What did you say to someone when you didn’t know if she felt similarly murderous about the treachery that had gotten you almost killed in the first place? The fact that he was still here, with a tentative future of being nursed back to health, was comforting – but did he trust that? She could easily be nursing him back to health only to break him anew and really kill him the second time. Something ironic and ruthless like that would be just like her. How was he supposed to know what
she
knew? And how she felt about it?

And where was Ossen? There had undoubtedly been significant transpirations between significant figures during his absence, and it frustrated and uneased him to be so thoroughly out of the loop. How carefully should he tread? He knew he shouldn’t expect any coddling just because he was recovering from a brutal brush with death, lest he get a rude smack of further, vicious punishment in the face, or some such form of retaliation for the treacherous inconvenience he had caused – but the thought of playing his survival games, continuing to be crafty and discretional, was utterly exhausting in this state.

“
You are lucky, you know,” Mastodon told him.

Am I?
Godren wondered shrewdly, still on the same train of thought and immediately applying caution to everything that came out of her mouth – but he let her continue;

“
I daresay you wouldn’t have had a chance if you hadn’t shot yourself before. I believe the first time might have resulted in a small amount of immunity to the poison. Thanks to that, you had just enough of an edge to respond to the treatment Evantralis saved you with.”

Evantralis…she must mean the dark woman with the leeches. So his dream
hadn’t
been a dream. It had been real – or at least, parts of it had. He didn’t know how far he could trust his awareness during that bleak phase.

“
She had…” Godren managed, finding his faulty voice and painstakingly forcing it out, “…leeches.” There. At least he was coherent, however sluggish.

“
Yes. She had to bleed you near death to drain a lethal dose of the poison – a substantial risk, but necessary if you wanted any chance at all.”

“
But…why leech–” His unruly tongue balked in his throat and cut him off, and he tried to swallow to get it untangled, but didn’t try to finish his sentence.

“
A sacrifice of loyalty to me,” Mastodon explained. “Similar to how you signed a contract in blood, my servants offer their blood to me on a daily basis, surrendering control so I may use them for my causes. Typically, they keep only one pet each, but Evantralis is a bit of a special case; there is a shadow of magic in her blood, making it sweeter, and the leeches like that. They flock to her. Was the experience you had with them unpleasant? No, probably not; I don’t imagine you felt much at the time, did you?”

Godren’s silence served as confirmation enough, and Mastodon went on;

“
You should be aware that I expect you to overcome the ailments that impede your body and regain full aptitude for the things I’ve charged you with, or I will have no further use for you. You would do a service to yourself by making swift, thorough progress.”