Chapter 55 The Wolf’s Restless Soul
“Open the slot and keep your hands clear.”
The command snapped down the stone corridor before the torchlight reached the door. The wardens obeyed with the tidy fear of men who knew the room beyond was not a room at all but a throat that sometimes swallowed. A metal panel scraped back. A wooden bowl slid through. The panel slammed shut again, too fast, as if speed could outpace hunger.
Ryder did not look up.
He sat where the chains put him, back against the pillar in the center of the cell, head bowed, hair damp with the night’s sweat. The floor was cold in a way that held memory; centuries of despair had cooled it and kept it so. Water, patient and unkind, made a music in the far corner, drip into drip, as if counting down a story that would not end.
“Drink,” one warden called, voice made steady on purpose. “It’s laced with lavender. The priest says it settles the blood.”
“It settles nothing,” the other muttered.
Ryder smiled without showing his teeth. “I can hear you,” he said softly.
Silence pricked the corridor. A torch hissed as pitch ran and found flame. The men went still, as if quiet might make them invisible to something with a nose. One cleared his throat.
“Back to your posts,” came a third voice, older, practiced. The captain of wardens. “No talking to the prisoner. No eye contact. No names.”
Bootsteps retreated. The door breathed in again.
Ryder raised his head.
The collar around his throat had carved a shadow into his skin. Chains wrapped his wrists and bit his ankles, a geometry of steel that glowed faintly where sigils had been cut into the links, lines of prayer burned into metal by a priest with a steady hand and a shaking heart. The words were the old ones. He could feel them even when he did not read them. Bind. Still. Forget.
Forget.
He let his head tip back until the back of his skull met the pillar. Stone took the weight without complaint. Above him, a narrow slit cut through the wall to a slice of sky, not enough to see a moon, enough to taste one. Air trickled down from there, cold and damp, carrying a breath of pine and rain and smoke.
He closed his eyes.
When he closed them, she was there.
No prelude now. No soft edge of dream. Lunaris came like a bell struck with hunger, bright and sudden behind his eyelids, and the cell filled with the old perfume of her: winter and flame, night on the tongue, stars turned to water. He had known her in light. He had known her in shadow. He knew her now, even with Sienna’s face over her like a veil.
“Don’t,” he whispered, so low even the rats in the wall did not hear. “Not with her face.”
“She is not your mask,” the goddess said, and the voice touched the back of his mind the way a hand touches the back of a neck when it wants to own. “She is your echo.”
He opened his eyes to darkness. He opened them again to silver. The cell could not decide which it was. The torches in the corridor guttered and steadied. The water stopped counting and then remembered how to count again.
“Leave her out of this,” Ryder said. He spoke to stone so the men would think he was speaking to stone. His breath fogged the air. “Take it back to where it belongs, Lunaris. Put it back on me.”
“Do you still imagine that pain has a single mouth?” the goddess asked. Her voice braided with another voice as it moved, the way two rivers braid when they have run side by side for too long not to marry. Sienna’s timbre threaded through it, warmer, more human, and that warmth made the cold worse.
He lowered his chin and found his hands with his eyes. The chains had rubbed the skin there raw again in two places and left it healing raw again in three more. He flexed his fingers. The sigils on the links answered by tightening a fraction. Priestwork. Good work. The kind that held until it learned a new name for the thing it held and failed.
“Do you want me to beg?” he asked.
“Once,” Lunaris said, and Sienna’s breath moved through the syllable like wind through a screen. “You begged for mercy. I gave you the moon.”
“You gave me a hunger I cannot feed,” Ryder said. The words did not have anger in them now. They had fact. He worked his jaw to chase out the ache. “And then you punished me for starving.”
The chain at his left wrist trembled. He went still and tasted the air to see if it was him. The tremor went on. It was not him.
Above the slit, sky flickered.
He frowned at nothing and everything. He had hunted under every kind of moon. He knew the way the light tasted when it was thin and born, fat and dying, heavy with rain, clear enough to cut your tongue. This tasted wrong. The wind carried iron. The light that found the slit hiccupped. The pulse of night above him found his pulse and stepped out of time with it and then back in.
“Do you feel it?” he asked.