Blood of Dragons - Страница 27

The Chancellor had brought him here, apparently at great expense, and presented him to the Duke. The Duke had spoken kindly to him, had placed him here with this woman who tended him with both gentleness and disdain. What did they want of him? Why had his presentation to the Duke seemed so formal and portentous? Questions, but no clear answers. Life was suspended, his existence dependent on the whims of others. He had to decipher the mystery. In this woman’s care, he had the chance to regain his health. Could he manipulate that into a chance to regain his freedom?

Stay awake. Ask questions. Make plans. He fixed a smile on his face and inquired casually, ‘So. Chancellor Ellik is your father?’

She turned back to him, startled. Her upper lip was lifted like a cat’s that smelled something bad. He could not tell if she were pretty or even how old she was. He saw her pale-blue eyes and sandy lashes, a face sprinkled with faded freckles, a small mouth and a pointed chin. All else was hidden. ‘My father? No. My suitor. He wishes to marry me, to gather power to himself, so that as my father fails, he may assume it.’

‘Your father is failing?’

‘My father is dying, and has been for a long time. I wish he would accept that and do it. My father is the Duke of Chalced. Antonicus Kent.’

Selden was doubly startled. ‘Your father is the Duke of Chalced? That is his name? I’ve never heard it.’

She turned away from him again, hiding her face from his honest stare. ‘No one speaks it any more. When he made himself Duke, years before I was born, he declared that was all he would ever be, for the rest of his life. Even as a child, I did not refer to him as “father” or “papa”. No. He is always “the Duke”.’

Selden sighed, all hopes of an alliance fled. ‘So. Your father, the Duke, is my captor.’

The woman gave him an odd look. ‘Captor. That is a kind word for someone who intends to devour you in hopes of prolonging his own life.’

He stared at her without comprehension. She met his gaze. Perhaps she had intended to jab him with her words but as he looked at her, her face changed slowly. Finally she said, ‘You don’t know, do you?’

His mouth had gone dry at the look on her face. She didn’t like him, so how could she feel so much horror and pity at his fate? He drew an uncertain breath. ‘Will you tell me?’

For a moment, she bit her lower lip. Then she shrugged. ‘My father has been ill for a very long time. Or so he says. Others, I think, would simply accept it as ageing. But he has done all he could to stave off death. Many a learned healer he has brought here and many rare cures he has consumed. But over the last few years, all efforts have failed him. Death beckons, but he will not answer its call. Instead, he threatens his healers and in turn, fearing death just as much as he does, they have told him that they cannot cure him unless he can procure for them the rarest of all ingredients for their medicines. Powdered dragon liver to purify his blood. Dragon blood mixed with ground dragon’s teeth to make his own bones stop aching. The ichor from a dragon’s eye to make his own eyesight clear again. The blood of a dragon, to make his own blood run hot and strong as a young man’s.’

He shook his head at her. ‘I don’t even know where my dragon is right now. In the past three years, I have felt her mind brush mine only twice and never have I been able to reach out to her. She does not come at my call, and even if she did, she would not give up her own blood to save me. I feel sure she would be roused to killing fury at the thought of a man wishing to drink her blood or make medicine from her liver.’ He shook his head more strongly. ‘I am useless to him! He should ransom me and demand his healers find other cures for him.’

She cocked her head and the pity in her eyes became unmistakable. ‘You did not hear me out. He could not get his dragon’s blood, but what my suitor gave him woke his curiosity. A small square of scaled flesh. Flesh cut from your shoulder, if I am not mistaken. Which he ate. And it made him feel better than he had in months. But not for long.’

Selden sat up. The room began a slow turn, rotating around him in a sickening way. He shut his eyes tightly, but it only became worse. He opened them again, swallowing against the vertigo. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked her hoarsely. ‘He told you such a thing, that he ate my flesh?’

‘My father did not tell me, no. My suitor … Chancellor Ellik … bragged of it. When he … came to … tell me that you would be put in my care.’ The smoothness had gone out of her speech. Her words hitched along and he sensed a terrible story behind them.

Her eyes had gone distant and dark. He reached out to touch her arm. She gave a small shriek and leapt away from him. She stared at him wildly. ‘What is it?’ he demanded. ‘Tell me what you know.’

She retreated from him, reached the covered window and halted there. He feared suddenly that she might fling the cover wide and throw herself through the window. Instead, she turned back to face him, a cornered animal, and flung the words at him as she might fling stones at hounds baying after her. ‘He cannot have dragon’s blood, so he will have yours! He will consume you, as he consumes every living being that comes near him. Consume and destroy, for his own dark ends!’

To hear her speak the words made the unthinkable something he must confront. A strange coldness filled him slowly, flowing out from his bones. When he spoke, his voice was higher than usual, as if air could not quite reach the bottom of his lungs. ‘It won’t work,’ he said desperately. ‘I am as human as you are. My dragon has changed me, but I am not a dragon. Drink my blood, eat my flesh, it will not matter. He will die just as surely as I will.’

Full knowledge of the fate the Duke intended for him penetrated his mind. He had not, at first, comprehended why they had taken a sample of his flesh and skin when he was being sold. He had thought then that it was to prove that he was scaled. The wound on his shoulder from that ‘sample’ still oozed through the clean bandaging the woman had applied to it. He had thought it was healing and left it alone, but the girl had abraded away the thick scab to reveal the festering infection beneath. He wrinkled his nose as he recalled how bad it had smelled.

Even the meaning behind the Duke’s words when he had first been brought before him had slipped past Selden’s cognizance. But this woman who had been entrusted with his care seemed determined to make him confront it. She studied him from across the room, then, as abruptly as she had taken flight, she calmed. Her voice was low as she crossed the room to sit by his couch. ‘The Duke knows that your flesh and blood will not serve him as well as a dragon’s would. Knows it, and does not care. He will spend you ruthlessly, using you as a stopgap measure to keep himself alive until he can obtain the genuine cure.’

She tugged his blanket straight, her lips folded. Then spoke without hope. ‘And so I must heal you of infection, and clean your body, and ply you with food and drink, just as if you were a cow being fattened for the slaughter. We are both his cattle, you see. Chattel to be used however it best suits him.’

He stared into her face, expecting to see anger or at least tears. But she looked wooden, her eyes fixed on a hopeless future. ‘This is monstrous! How can you just accept what he does to me? To you?’

She gave a bitter laugh and slumped on the simple wooden stool and gestured around the little room. It was small and comfortably appointed, but the bars on the window and the stout door proclaimed what it was: a gilded cage. ‘I am as much his captive as you are, and as human as you say you are, but it will make no difference to him. He will consume us both. I am the bribe that he offers Ellik in return for the Chancellor doing all he can to preserve my father’s miserable life. It gives me a little comfort that you say that if he consumes you, your death will not buy him more life.’ She looked down at her hands and confided hopelessly, ‘Once, I had planned to outlive him and then to proclaim myself his rightful heir. All my brothers are dead, either at my father’s hands or of the blood plague. And I am eldest of my sisters and the only one not wed away in trade. The throne should be mine upon his death.’

He looked at her incredulously. ‘Would his nobles support you in such a claim?’

She shook her head. ‘It was a silly dream. Those I attempted to rally to my cause are, ultimately, as powerless as I am. It was the fancy I concocted to give purpose and hope to my life. Now it’s gone. I have no way left to reach out to those who also shared my ambition. Instead I shall comfort myself with the knowledge that he will not outlive me by much, if at all.’

Selden furrowed his brow. ‘But you are a young woman. Surely you shall outlive your father by many years.’

‘My father’s daughter might have a long lifespan, but not Ellik’s wife, I think. His last wife gave him heir sons for his own fortune and name. That was all he needed of her, and when he was finished with her, her life was finished, too. He needs but one son from me to establish a regency the other nobles will not challenge. I am sure that is why the mother of his sons died so suddenly; to make space for me.’ She looked at him. ‘I did not know her but I mourn her. His last woman has scarcely begun to rot in her grave, and Ellik is ready to begin on me. No. I will be consumed just as you are. But not, I am told, until I have restored you to health. So. To hasten our ends, you should eat.’ Her tone became falsely light, a mockery of the tragedy in her eyes.