Page 99 of The Blight of Hollowmire

I raise my fist to hit him again, but at that moment the guards pour in, too many for the cramped room and too close for a clean fight. I slash the first across the forearm with my dagger, and he drops his sword with a shout. The second drives his shoulder into my ribs, slamming me against the desk—sending an explosion of pain down my side. I bring my knee up hard into his stomach and shove him back into the third. I manage to get one more strike in before something heavy hits the back of my skull. The world flashes white and my knees finally give way beneath me.

Hands seize me from every side, wrenching my arms behind me with viciousness. Someone kicks the back of my bad knee, and I drop to the floor—my breath whooshing from my lungs. My vision flickers, and I taste blood.

“Alive,” Arden says, his cool, calculating voice distant. “For now.”

I force myself to look at him, pouring every shred of rage and disgust into my gaze. He crouches in front of me, careful to keep beyond reach even with three men pinning my arms behind me. His lip has swollen where I struck him. I hope it festers. The sight gives me petty satisfaction—apparently the only satisfaction I can access at the moment.

“You always did make things more difficult than they needed to be,” he says.

“Happy to be a fly in your ointment, brother,” I slur.

“Take him to the old holding rooms beneath the east tower. Not near her,” he spits.

The guards haul me upright and my vision swims, and I nearly retch on Arden’s boots. My dagger is gone, and my pack is torn from my shoulder. One guard twists my arm high enough behind my back that sparks burst at the edges of my sight.

As they drag me down a corridor I don’t recognize, blood drips from my nose and lip onto my shirt. Somewhere in this dungeon is Vireth—the woman I love—hopefully faring better, though that is unlikely. Each step away from her feels like another failure.

No. Not another failure. The same one, mayhap. The only one I have ever truly feared—to arrive too late when I was needed… to love someone, and still be unable to save them.

Yet I refuse to count my failures before they hatch. I won’t give up yet—not until one of us lies broken, our spirit knocking at the doors of the spirit realm. It might feel like failure now, but it isn’t. Not yet. Because somewhere in this crumbling castle, Vireth is alive, and as long as she still lives, so does the chance to make this right.

21

Vireth

I am retrieved just before dawn, when the sun should be scattering its pink and gold rays across the realm—but there are no windows in this wretched cell, and I suspect the sky is obscured by bland gray clouds, all the same.

The cell door groans open on rusty hinges, and three guards step inside with torches held aloft. The light is blinding after hours of dark, painting the walls in a sickly yellow, catching on the thin fur of pale mushrooms growing through the cracks in the mortar. One of the guards recoils, eyes wide with terror when he sees the mushrooms.

I bare my fangs at him, and he goes satisfyingly pale. It seems there are small joys yet in this wretched life.

“On your feet,” one of the other guards says.

His voice is far too young, which annoys me. If he were older—if he knew better, mayhap it would let me harden myself against him. Instead, he sounds like he should be whispering awful poetry to a tavern maid in an effort to lose his virginity.

“Lady Vireth,” I correct.

He shifts uncertainly, and I almost laugh when he appears to seek permission from the other guards before addressing me with my due honor.

“On your feet, Lady Vireth.”

The shackles around my wrists are cold enough to burn. They’ve wrapped the iron in some sort of spelled fabric, likely believing this can protect them from me—from us. Still, I don’t break them—not yet.

The Blight Mother is very quiet inside me, and I know she is pleased—smug, even.

To my surprise, she has been quiet since they dragged me down here. I expected her to rage, to curse—to summon me back to the strange place of sticky, slithering gray mist. But so far, she’s simple settled down in the dark emptiness behind my ribs—a vast and patient hunger waiting for me to summon her.

When I finally turned my attention inward, I felt her sigh. The imbalance must be corrected, she told me in the long hours before morning.

There I sat—knees drawn to my chest, my ass numb from the cold stone floor, while I watched the pale mushrooms spread from the cracks in the wall. I thought of Renard—of his rough hands and earnest words, of the way he looked at me as though I hadn’t been stitched together of every ill omen his people—and mine—ever feared. I thought of his shame in the clearing—his naked, dirt-streaked humiliation when the Blight Mother showed me what she wanted me to see.

He will come, I told her. Yet dawn has all but arrived, and Renard has not.

Hope, as it turns out, is a foolish little creature because it doesn’t have the dignity to die quickly. It lingers—twitching on the ground in its pain, making pathetic sounds beneath whatever boot heel attempts to crush it.

The guards lead me from the cell, passing beneath a low archway and into the dungeon corridor. The air down here smells of iron, mold, blood, vomit, piss, old straw, and fear—mine, theirs, everyone’s. It’s remarkable how alike fear smells no matter who carries it. Noble, peasant, guard, monster… all sour and salt and animal.

The Blight Mother finally stirs.