I was unable to move as the knife bit into my skin. He was in possession of incredibly rare and powerful objects—the likes of which I had never even heard of. And yet he didn’t possess a single canister of cream to numb my skin, which could only mean that he simply didn’t wish to. I opened my mouth to scream but it was coaxed from my tongue before it could become sound. A faint tone rang inside the bell on the table. The ghost of my scream. It was followed by another, and another, until it became a muted kind of song. The man’s eyes sparkled with a concentrated fervour as his hands turned red, blood sluicing over his fingertips.
He wrapped my stolen birthmark in a canvas cloth as I stood, trembling, held up by magic alone. He placed it carefully in a small canister, handling it as though it were the most fragile jewel. He pulled a cotton rag out of his bag and began to wipe the blood off his hands, knife, and the canister. He did it all without taking his eyes off me. He watched the blood run down my leg before switching his attention to my breasts. His eyes slid between my legs, annoyance flashing as my mother rushed forward. She had a bandage in her hand, and her mouth was pinched into a tight line. She wrapped it around my leg, her movements brisk.
“This is not enough payment,” the man said as she stood again.
She spun, looking afraid. “You said—”
“It’s not enough,” he reiterated, annoyance increasing. He pushed her out of the way and stood before me. “Lay upon the ground.”
The collar around my neck heated, and my limbs collapsed even as I begged them not to. My leg was shaking, seizing up with the pain and shock. The man was unlacing his pants with one hand, the other landing heavily upon my bandage.
“She is not a kynmaiden,” my mother said evenly. “She can give you no births and no deaths.”
The man laughed, watching the tears stream wordlessly down my face. “I don’t want her children. She is not as you are. She has something different to offer me.” He stared down at me, freeing himself from his pants and adjusting his position between my legs. He seemed to pause there as though to savour the moment.
“This is punishable by death.” My mother’s voice had a wobble in it this time, and fear sparked in her eyes. She glanced to the door, and I realised with an awful, sinking feeling that she was thinking of fleeing. “If they find out…” Her breathing became heavy, panicked. “She’s still young … please, kongelig, this has gone too far.”
He smiled, leaning over me, still clutching himself in his fist, still hovering an inch from breaching me. His free hand slapped down beside my head, his beard tickling my chin as his face lowered to mine. He smelled like copper and smoke. My stomach heaved violently, tears running onto my tongue.
“Magical objects are not infinite,” he whispered, his eyes flicking from my lips to the collar around my neck. “They become living things, and living things need to be fed or else they die. The collar demands to be fed. What better price to pay for your wickedness than your innocence?”
A pounding noise began to surface somewhere in the back of my mind, like a distant army thundering down a mountain, kicking up dirt and beating a taboo against the earth. At first, I could only feel the pebbles that skipped down the mountain to pool about my feet, but the steady drumming grew louder and fiercer, rolling into my blood and moving outwards to my skin, covering me in a sweltering, vibrating rage. My mother watched as the man pumped his hand. She listened as he groaned. She waited as he waited, holding on to her fear as he savoured his complete lack of it. He was a sectorian. An Eloi. Strong with the power of spirit. He was important.
We were nothing.
I watched her as she watched him, my eyes drying out as hers began to water. The drumming in my head began to batter at the walls of my mind and then it all happened in an instant—too fast for me to do anything to stop it. He pushed inside me, and the boundaries of my mind snapped like a string pulled too far at each end. Power flooded out of me in the form of a shadow, a thin black wisp that split into two. One of the shadows jumped gleefully into the eyes and mouth of the man on top of me, the other curling toward my mother. Pain burned hot and sharp inside my chest, my heartbeat faltering, my breath halting. The man reared away from me, gasping wordlessly, his hands clawing at his throat, his eyes turning red. My mother collapsed to the ground. We all gasped, our hands gripping our necks. The collar burned up beneath my fingers, nothing more than flimsy, crooked metal as it crumpled away from my skin, the hinge swinging free. I scrambled away from the man as he writhed, the shadow winking out at me from behind his wide eyes.
I snatched for my dress, pulling it up against me as I huddled back against the kitchen cupboard. Dizziness took a hold of me, my heart skipping another beat, and then another. It fluttered weakly, and I watched the thin stream of blood drip from my mother’s parted mouth. I tried to reach out to her, the bell pulling a plea from my lips. My heart flopped sickeningly, like a waterlogged bird attempting to drag its wings up before collapsing one final time. I melted into darkness, my hand twitching into stillness against the floorboards.
My last thought was a final, desperate whisper in the recesses of my mind.
Forgive me.
3
Cursed
I awoke beneath a blanket of water, my eyes and cheeks aching, my brain sluggish, my limbs waterlogged. Sound was drowned out and muted, my vision blurry and warped. A pair of boots appeared by my head, leather against worn wood.
The worn wood of our kitchen … where I was lying on the floor, my arm still extended. The feeling of drowning swept away from me, reality crashing in.
I struggled to turn over, my eyes travelling up the leg of the man as others filled the room. The boots continued up his calves, long, featherlike pieces of armour sewn into a pattern from his ankle to his knee. His pants were a thick, woven material, patched in places by boiled leather. The same pattern of feather-shaped armour circled the hardened leather that circled the lower half of his torso. It was smoothed down in that area, the edges softened so that they wouldn’t tear into his skin. He wore a short cloak that looped dark grey material over his front and back, the armour pattern spanning over his shoulders and hooking together with a chain across his chest. His upper chest was bare beneath the sections of his cloak, the skin dark brown and riddled in scars. I knew that the cloak would have a hood of the same featherlike bronze, with a tarnished beak that would slip down over his forehead—though he currently wore the hood thrown off. It was a uniform that I had seen often. A uniform I had once dreamed of wearing, in the darkest, most private spaces of my mind.
The Sentinels had arrived.
The others in the room were dressed exactly like him, and I saw flashes of magic mutations as I tried to take in everything at once: clawed hands, scaled arms, a bright white rash. The man above me had a single golden eye, the colour dripping over the line of his lower lid, tracing a line down his face, his neck, and his chest. It disappeared beneath his armour.
I groaned, my head falling limp again, my eyes crawling over the floor, over the slight tinge of smoke and copper that still stained the air, over the limp body of the bearded man, his shrewd eyes sightless, his pants unlaced. I kept going even though I didn’t want to. I looked past him to the second inert form, whom one of the guards was kneeling beside.