Page 9 of Scourged

Now it was empty. Void of all emotion. Absent of everything that had once made him so much more than the unworthy villain he’d long believed himself to be.

Her voice was soft, but despite her failing body, it was not weak. “This is not you.”

Something finally flickered in those flat blue eyes. Something like shadow and ice and seething flame.

As fast as it flickered, it vanished.

That same unfamiliar, cruel grin spread across the face of the one she loved most.

“You don’t recognize me, princess? Of course, it’s me. This has always been me.”

He turned on his heel and left her, bloody and weak and alone.

Mariah latched onto the glimmer of life she’d seen in his eyes, ignoring his words, as she finally fell unconscious.

Chapter 3

Andrian dragged his heavy, dulled training sword back to the rack. The blisters on his palms were painful and throbbing, his seven-year-old body weighted with bruises and soreness and exhaustion.

“May I go, Master Borus?” he asked, voice shaking with weariness.

The Antoris master-at-arms didn’t answer immediately, instead taking the training blade from Andrian’s hands, setting it back against the rack.

Andrian looked up at the elderly man, wrinkled face hidden behind a scraggly white beard. Something in his expression confused Andrian. It was a bit like sympathy, something Andrian had seen in so many of the castle staff’s faces, but just a little harsher.

Master Borus opened his mouth like he was about to speak but then glanced over Andrian’s shoulder and closed his mouth with a firm snap. Andrian turned, following the master-at-arms’s stare.

He just barely caught the disappearing shape of his father, the Lord of Antoris, stalking back towards the main gates of thekeep. Even through his exhaustion, the sting of disappointment and rejection hit him like a dulled blade.

He’d tried; he really had. He’d only been on the training pitch for a year, and the swords still didn’t fit in his hands. But Father had told him to be perfect. It hurt Andrian that he wasn’t.

Shoulder’s slumping, he turned back to the master-at-arms. “Master Borus?”

The older man dropped his gaze back to Andrian, lips turned down and dark eyes tired. “Yes, my boy. My apologies. Of course, you are dismissed. I will see you again tomorrow.”

Andrian dipped his head before trudging toward the main keep of Antoris, the same way his father had gone.

Inside, it was warm; the permeating northern cold chased away by a roaring hearth in the great hall. Andrian’s father was nowhere to be seen, but Andrian didn’t mind. He marched, as best he could with his aching muscles, straight to the blazing fire. He stuck his numb hands out to the flames, not even feeling the blood and blisters coating his palms.

After all, these weren’t his first blisters. Those had come last year when he’d turned six.

A flurry of movement rustled behind him, just before gentle hands gripped his shoulders and whirled him away from the flames. Andrian blinked heavily, exhaustion weighing his eyelids as he met his mother’s shimmering amethyst eyes.

“Oh, my sweet Andrian. Look at your hands.” She tsked, kneeling in front of him. Her movement was slow, awkward, her balance upset by her massive belly.

She’d let him touch her swollen stomach once when the baby inside her was moving and kicking. Andrian hadn’t quite understood what it all meant—how was a baby in her stomach? Had she eaten it? And why was it growing?—but he’d kept hisquestions to himself, content to share his mother’s excitement and the joy that lit up her lovely, cherished face.

It was so rare that Andrian saw her happy and smiling. Most of the time, she was so quiet, so empty-looking.

But she came alive in these moments when she was alone with him, her entire demeanor shifting into something vibrant and joyous.

She clucked her tongue, inspecting his palms. “These won’t do. Come with me, and I’ll fix you right up.” She heaved back to her feet, dropping Andrian’s hands before ushering him away from the fire, murmuring lilting words after him.

Andrian loved the way she talked. It was so different from his father or from anyone else in the keep. He’d heard someone call it an accent, a way of speaking she’d kept from her homeland of Leuxrith. It was cadenced and soothing as if she were singing every word she uttered.

She pushed him down the halls, and even though he was so, so tired, he managed to take each step towards his rooms. They arrived at his bathing chamber, a cozy room with a fire already burning in one corner and a great claw-foot tub fed byallume-heated water. His mother turned on the faucet, the basin beginning to fill, giving him another glowing smile before leaving him to his bath.

Once he was bathed and changed, his mother led him into his sleeping chamber, sitting him in front of yet another fire. She laid out various healing tools and materials, pulling them from a basket woven through with black and gold threads. A healer stepped into the room at one point, offering to take over for the lady of the keep, but his mother shooed her away.

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