Page 19 of The Hollow King

"Borin is sorry, Master," he cried.

“Yes. Yes. Now leave.”

He howled and his feet scraped against the wood as he ran out of the room.

I ran my fingers through my tangled hair, grunting when they got caught in the knots.

The silence he left behind was worse than his wailing had been. I had grown so accustomed to noise filling my castle—his mutterings, the scrape of chains, her small sounds through the wall—that its absence now pressed against me like something with weight. I sat in it a while, listening to nothing at all.

My notebooks lay open on the table where I had left them days ago, pages thick with ink in a hand I no longer fully recognised as my own. Recipes for balms that eased pain. Recipes for tonics that dulled the mind. Recipes, further back, for things I had stopped making centuries ago because even I had tired of the screaming. Three hundred years of study, all of it bent toward the same purpose. Keeping them alive long enough to suffer properly.

I closed the nearest notebook and stared at its cracked leather cover. What use was any of it, if she would rather ache than take what I offered her. All my knowledge, all my careful work, and I could not force this stubborn human to accept some relief.

Something twisted low in my chest, unfamiliar enough that I did not have a name ready for it. It was not anger. I understood anger well enough to recognise when it was absent. This was something closer to shame, though I could not have said what I believed I had done wrong. I had done nothing different than I had done to a hundred sacrifices before her.

I told myself that. I told myself that until the feeling receded enough to ignore, the way I had ignored it every year for three hundred years, and I reached for the next notebook and did not look at the jar again.

✛ ✛ ✛

Sleep would not have me.

I paced the length of my bedchamber until the floorboards had grown familiar beneath my feet, until I could have walked the distance blind. My blood would not settle. It had not settled in days.

I told myself it was the blood I craved. That was easier to believe. Her blood had been finer than any I had tasted in a hundred years, coppery and rich, and my body remembered it the way a starving man remembers the last true meal he ate. But it was not only her blood that plagued me. It was the rest of her. The scent that clung to my sheets long after Borin had changed them. The shape of her beneath me, small and shaking and alive in a way none of my sacrifices before her had ever felt alive. The taste of her still sat somewhere at the back of my tongue, faint now, but present, the way a scar remains long after the wound has closed.

I wanted her again. Not only her blood. All of her.

The wanting had no reason behind it that I could name, and that frightened me more than the wanting itself.

I stopped my pacing when the moonlight through my window began to change.

It was subtle at first, a brightening along the edge of the old mirror that stood against the far wall, the one I kept covered more often than not. The silver light gathered there, pooling, thickening, until it no longer resembled moonlight at all. I knew that light. I had not seen it in three hundred years, but a man does not forget the light that stole his soul from him and gave him something else in its place.

I threw my arm over my eyes as the light became a blaze.

“What do you want?” I growled.

“It is I, Enchantress of the Souls. The pact ends soon. Three hundred years are complete.”

I frowned and tried to lower my arm, but the light was so bright that it blinded me.

“What do you mean?” I asked, the pact had never come with an expiration date before now.

“The sacrifice is of your Queen's kin. She hails from Dornovia. From the house of Borja.”

I stumbled back so fast that I fell to the floor.

The word Borja struck something loose in me, and everything I had refused to look at came pouring through the crack at once. Her scent, which I had told myself was only the scent of fear and blood, but which had always carried something beneath it, something achingly familiar that I had not allowed myself to name.

Her eyes, grey as a winter sky, nothing like Morana's had been, and yet the way she had looked at me across that dining table, unflinching, had struck me even then. Her hair, dark as raven feathers, darker than Morana's had ever been, and still I had stood in that locked room only days ago with my wife's painted face before me and felt, without understanding why, that I already knew the shape of the woman chained in my dungeon.

I had fed from her. I had taken her blood to strengthen myself, the way I had taken the blood of a hundred sacrifices before her.

I had done worse than feed from her.

“It had to be this way to satisfy all,” the voice continued.

I clutched my chest as I thought of Morana, and then, worse, as I thought of what I had done to Iona in her name, in my own rage, in three hundred years of grief that I had never once let myself set down. Something wet landed on my cheek and dripped into my beard.