Philippa Ballantine - Wrayth

Iuhmee’s gaze remained fixed on Fraine while those sharp bronze fingers danced along the girl’s pale skin, causing her breathing to come in tiny gasps, before one flicked at her throat. The thin line of blood oozed from the cut, shockingly red against her almost chalky flesh, before Iuhmee bent and licked it clean. Both drinker and supplier let out the slightest of groans: the kind that might be heard from a contented lover after long hours of play.

The Rossin, for once, had been speaking literally. Blood drinkers indeed. Summoning geists through from the Otherside, luring them with the spilling of blood in terrible ways, was something that only the mad and the foolish dared.

If ever he had seen a threat demonstrated more clearly, Raed could not think of it. Fraine blanched, and Tangyre’s hand went to the younger woman’s shoulder. “You have made your point,” the captain said, actually stepping between the Shin and her companion, “but that does not mean Her Grace will be tying herself to you as a peon. How dare you! She is of the greatest line of nobility in Arkaym!”

The Lady Iuhmee lifted herself from the peon’s throat, and wiped delicately at her mouth, for all the world like some aristocrat at a state banquet. “If she were a peon, she would hardly make a decent leader for the rebellion, would she? No, that is not what we ask.” She snapped her fingers, and a fourth slave appeared from out of the shadows of the room. She was carrying a tray with a curved silver bowl on it, from his position it was impossible to make out the nature of the symbols carved into it, but he did catch the gleam of tiny weirstones embellishing the rim. Not good.

Get out. The Rossin growled, angry and frustrated by the inability to take shape in the narrow stone confines of the shaft they were in. Get out of this place now!

However Raed was too transfixed to move. He wondered if his ancestors had known this about the Shin, or if this was a recent development. The west had always been a place of terrible legends and wildness—but he had never heard of anything like this. Blood drinking was the ultimate dark path to power, and had been one of the first things the Order of the Eye and the Fist had stamped out. How could they have missed all of this?

Now here was Fraine about to indulge in it. From all the threats he had faced in the ossuary under Vermillion and the temple of the false goddess Hatipai, Raed Rossin knew the power of his blood. The blood he shared with Fraine. He cast about for a way to get down there quickly, but the vent was made of stone, and all his shoving against it didn’t move it any discernible amount. The restrictions of the shaft meant he couldn’t swing his sword or anything else.

Fool! I cannot protect you forever. Get out!

His mind ran to the weirstone bullets he had taken off a bounty hunter in his travels across the west. Made by the scarlet witches, they were thought to be most useful against geists who had taken flesh. The bounty hunter had thought to use them on the Rossin. Now they could be put to better use. With frenzied wriggling, Raed was able to pull out the pistol and slide it between the grating. He knew what the consequences would be, but he could not merely watch as his sister aligned herself with these blood drinkers.

Raed pulled the trigger. His aim was off, thanks to the tight confines of the shaft, and the limitations that the grate afforded him. The bullet instead of striking Iuhmee, punched a neat hole through her reclining peon’s head.

The Princess of Ensomn screamed however, as if it had been she that had been struck. At least he presumed she was screaming, since the retort of the pistol had set his ears to ringing. She collapsed to her knees, and when she turned her face upward in his direction, it was a totally different one, with burning eyes and a mouth full of fangs.

She pointed at Fraine who was looking as pale as a Shin peon. While Raed yelled through the grate, since stealth was now abandoned, three slaves appeared and wrestled his sister to the ground. Two held her, while the third slid Fraine’s sleeve back, and sliced the softest part of her forearm. Her blood seemed to drip into the bowl the peon held beneath for a very long time.

When he had been a young man, Raed had seen his little sister do many foolish things, but coming to this nest of evil was an awful kind of grown-up idiocy. However she was no longer a little child he could warn away from open flames and sharp objects. The worst bit was that Captain Tangyre, supposedly her friend, stood by as she was forced into giving up her blood.

Finally it was done and Tangyre handed Fraine a towel to staunch the flow. She held it tight for the younger woman and whispered something soothing to her. Anger toward his once friend was catching up with Raed. He blamed all of his sister’s missteps and foolish dreams on that poisonous captain. She’d been dripping lies into the sheltered girl’s ear for years. He would make her pay for that disservice.

His ears were clearing, and he saw Iuhmee climb to her feet. Her momentary outrage at her peon’s death was replaced with a cruel smile, aimed in his direction. Raed knew he should move, and yet he found he could not. Dimly he could hear the Rossin howling at him to flee rapidly.

Raed made to wriggle away from the vent when his sister stood and drew his attention back to the activities below.

Fraine was visibly shaken, but she stood before the Lady Iuhmee. “So we have our pact?”

The Shin woman took the bowl from the slave and peered down into it. Her face was alight with avarice, so that even Raed could see, so much so it was as if she was holding a bowl of priceless gems. That made him even more sure that his sister had done something terribly wrong.

In his head the Rossin had gone silent, but the man could feel him watching with infinite cunning. Raed found that far more disturbing than when the Beast was roaring in his head.

Iuhmee smiled at her, a smile that made Raed’s skin crawl, and should have, if Tangyre was looking after Fraine’s best interests, caused the other captain to yank her charge out of the room immediately. Then, the Shin lady raised the bowl and drank deeply. The sound of her gulps turned Raed’s stomach.

However, the Young Pretender was not able to see her expression after that, because pain flared white-hot deep in his core. All he felt was his body screaming in pain. His throat clenched around a howl while his fingers spasmed tight on the vent. Nothing else mattered but this instant.

When it retreated he was left gasping and nauseous in its wake.

Too late. The Rossin snarled in outrage. Too late for anything.

In the room below, Tangyre was helping Fraine to her feet. Apparently both siblings of the Imperial line had experienced the excruciating pain. Lady Iuhmee was grinning like a wolf as she placed the bowl, quite empty of anything, upside down on a nearby table.

“Now we have an accord,” she said conversationally. “We shall give you our support for your rebellion, and once you have overturned Kaleva, you will turn out all the other western Princes, and give their kingdoms to us. We will make this coast our playground.”

Fraine nodded. She nodded, and then let herself be gathered into Tangyre’s arms like a complete child.

Iuhmee curled the fingers of one hand together: the brass of the fingernail guards rattling together like the unpleasant skittering of some many-legged insect. “But first, we shall have to deal with our little vermin problem.” Her eyes darted upward, and Raed realized with a start that she had not forgotten the shooting of her peon—she had merely had more pressing matters. The other Shin, and even his little sister Fraine, followed suit.