Chapter 56 The Wolf’s Restless Soul
“Yes,” Lunaris said, and this time Sienna’s voice was not braided with hers but set beside it like a shadow. He heard fear there, and something else he wanted worse than fear not to hear. Wonder. “The balance breaks.”
“What did you say to her?” Ryder asked. He had meant to say it the other way. He had meant to say, What did she say to you. But the night above his cell had juddered again, and the chain had answered it, and the question came wrong.
“I said true things,” the goddess replied.
True things. He laughed once, the low sound of a man who had learned to see the humor in a knife. “Your true things have a habit of cutting.”
“And yours,” said Lunaris, “have a habit of tasting blood.”
He closed his eyes again, because looking at the slit made his bones feel too long. Silver came, as it always came. Sienna came with it now, without permission, the way rain comes through a roof that has not been mended. Her face hung in the dark behind his lids, close enough that he could have counted the fine lines at the corner of her eyes, if she had had them. She did not have them. She had eyes like a storm that kept making new storms.
“Say my name,” he said.
Silence in the stone. Silence in the breath.
“Say it,” he said, and this time the stone was not enough to hold the command. Power licked his tongue without teeth. His hands clenched. The chain bit back. Heat ran up his wrist like a thing fleeing.
“Ryder,” she said, and there was no goddess in that syllable, only the woman. Her tone carried the fatigue of someone who had woken in a bed alone and then realized the bed had never been meant for sleep. “I’m here.”
The distance between cell and sky collapsed. For a breath long enough to save a man, he felt her as if she had put her palm in the middle of his chest and left it there. His body remembered her hand before his mind did: the small weight of it, how it knew where to rest, how it warmed. He forgot hunger long enough to remember being a man.
A sound tore across the earth above him.
The corridor torches went flat, flame hammered thin by shock. Dust shook from the arch. The men shouted a kind of prayer that also meant mother. The chain at his left wrist leapt. The one at his right sang. Every sigil in the iron went bright and then went dark and then went bright again.
“Stay down,” the captain yelled. “Do not open the door.”
“It hit the forest,” a guard cried. “I saw light, the trees, ”
“Stay down,” the captain repeated, and his voice had the shape a man’s voice has when he puts himself between other men and a thing with teeth. “Eyes away. Backs to the wall.”
Ryder lifted his head and bared his teeth at the slit.
Every bone in him wanted to run toward the sound. His body was a house built to run toward sounds like that; it had not forgotten its purpose. The chains made their position clear. He did not move.
“What fell?” he asked, because he already knew and wanted not to have known alone.
“The moon,” Sienna whispered, and Sienna did not whisper often. “A piece of it.”
Silver slid down the back of his throat. He swallowed and tasted pine and cold iron and her. “It called you.”
“Yes.”
He exhaled and bit back the thing that rose with relief, because hope was a knife here and he had bled enough on knives. “Don’t go to it,” he said.
“I’m already there.”
Of course. He let his head knock back against the stone again, gently, the way one knocks back the head of a friend who is sleeping so they wake smiling. “Then breathe slow,” he said. “Keep your feet under you. If it speaks your name, don’t answer.”
“You do not own my answers,” she said, and even braided with fear, her voice could still cut silk.
“That is not why I tell you,” he said. “It’s not a mouth when it speaks. It’s a hand. It will pull.”
The sky pulse matched his heart once more and then shattered out of rhythm. Something in the deep foundations of the Citadel moaned like a ship’s hull. The water in the corner forgot how to fall for a beat and then dropped all at once, fat sound, cold splash.
The lavender bowl rattled against the stone where it had been pushed. Liquid lapped. He looked at it. He had not taken the drug in four days. The priest wrote that down and looked satisfied, as if a man’s refusal to be made soft were proof he deserved to be made hard.
Lunaris moved in his head the way a woman moves when she is deciding whether to stay angry or be kind. “You would counsel her to ignore herself,” she said. “You would counsel her to reject her nature.”
“I would counsel her to remain alive,” he said, and did not lift his eyes to show the goddess the thing in them that was not for her. “She is not a prayer for you to learn to speak again.”
The chain around his throat tightened a fraction; the collar liked certain kinds of impertinence. He breathed through it and thought about counting.
“Listen,” Sienna said.
He did.
From the slit, through stone that did not want to share, came the faintest sound, not sound at all, more texture in the air: a heartbeat that was not his own, too slow to be a man’s, too steady to be animal, too close to be safe. It called the hair along his arms to stand. It called the other thing in him to step closer.
“Get away from it,” he said.
“It’s warm,” she murmured. “There’s someone inside. I can, ”
“Get away from it.”
“I can see eyes.”
“Get away.” He pulled against the chain without meaning to. The links sang. The sigils bit his skin where they were meant to bite iron. Blood ran.
A howl cut the sky open.
The wardens did not think before they moved. They ran. Boots slid and struck and found purchase. One fell and cursed, and another’s hand found him and yanked him up, and the captain’s voice came like a thrown rope: “Move.”
“Hold the door,” someone shouted.
“No,” the captain said. “Leave it shut.”
The corridor was a river and then nothing.
Ryder did not hear the men anymore. The howl had broken the part of his attention that could be spared for human concerns and emptied him into something older. It was not his voice in the howl. It was the part of him that remembered how to bare its throat and be given mercy. Or not.
“Ryder,” Sienna said, and the way she said his name was a hand on a shoulder before a man steps in front of a blade. “Ryder, look at me.”