Page 44 of The Bone King and the Starling

He is turned away from me at first and I can hear my heart in my throat, even louder than my voice as I shout, “Calai! Tori is here to kill you!” My hand fumbles in my skirts. I slide the straps of my pack down my arms and it hits the floor behind me with a heavy thud.

Tori turns towards me while Torbun and five other males crowd the space behind him. They are all brandishing swords except for Tori, who has an axe. He has bandages over both ears and his face looks like it’s been bashed many times, but he isn’t missing any other appendages, as I expected him to be. He meets my gaze before dropping his own to the ornamental dagger clutched in my fist, and then he does the most terrifyingthing he’s ever done. He smiles at me and raises his axe to point it at my nose.

“The things I’m going to do to you in front of your precious king.”

There are two rooms at the end of the hall, the one behind me and the one before me. The one before me is utterly silent but I hear a thud from within the one behind me and place my body before it. I hold my knife aloft and all of the men laugh.

“A disgrace,” Torbun hisses.

“Let’s go. Tonight is the night for killing kings — but not whores. Leave this one for me,” Tori says.

“Calai!” I shout — no, I don’t. My voice abandons me. I barely whisper his name as I fall back against the door. I rap on it frantically with the knuckles of my free hand, hoping, praying he’ll come out and somehow get his army up here to defend him in time. But then I consider that he might be inside, drunk on the wine Moira plied him with — at my behest — and asleep in the bath as Olec would have been. Then again, Olec would never have gotten off of his behind to chase down anything — let alone a woman. I’m such a fool. And now, I’ll die as one. But at least I won’t die a coward.

Tori charges down the hall and is on me in a flash, despite his multitude of injuries. “Stay back,” I gasp. But he only comes closer until we’re toe to toe. He reeks of blood and hate.

His men move to flank him, all of them turned towards me, towering over me and crowding the hall while my back remains pressed against the door. I hold out the king’s dagger. My grip is tight, but shaky. I know realistically that I can’t stop all of them — maybe, any of them. But I won’t simply lie down. I’ve laid down too many times in my life to do it here. I lay down every time Rosalind told me to turn for her and drop my shift. I lay down every time my father raised his hand to me. I laydown every time my mother looked at me with hollow eyes full of apathy.

But…I stopped lying down when the king’s violence made me afraid. Against his sadism, I found strength. Ironic that it should be the king to make me strong enough to run, that it is for the king I return. I will be strong for him now. I will fight for the king and the promises he’s made to my village and people like me. But also, I will fight for Calai and the small mercies he’s shown me. And most of all, I will fight for me.

“Turn away, Tori,” I whisper, tears pricking the backs of my eyes. I’m afraid to die. I feel like…my life has only just begun. “You don’t have to do this.”

Tori simply reaches past me with the blade of his axe. He smashes the blunted top of his axe against the door, letting the blade lightly skim my shoulder — a threat as clear as the bloodlust glossing his gaze. “Open up, my lord,” he sneers. “I have your precious queen.”

“Tori, don’t make me…” I say, pressing the tip of my dagger against his abdomen.

He looks down at me with blue eyes ringed in purple. His bruises are pronounced and grotesque. His nose looks broken. Dried blood crusts his nostrils. The men at his back are clamoring to break down the door, to hurry, but Tori takes the extra moment to bend down and whisper with blood-stained breath against my cheek, “You will leave this inn alive, but with no arms, no legs, no eyes, no tongue. You’ll be a simple carcass I’ll keep with me like a chest, one I can fuck whenever I like. You’ll breed me bastard after bastard and I’ll tear them to pieces in front of you. You won’t be able to see, but you’ll be able to hear their screams. I’ll keep you alive like that forever. You’ll be my special…little…toy…”

The door swings open at my back. I exhale, both panicked and relieved at the same time. “Calai…” I turn but the door slamsshut again on a squeal. One of the blonde women who I heard speaking about Calai in front of the tavern is who shut the door. And there was a man with her. I caught a glimpse of him and, though I couldn’t make out his features clearly, I could see well enough that he stood a foot shorter than Calai and had a round belly and brown hair.

I jolt as I stumble back against the door and turn to look at Tori. My eyes are strained against wide lids and in this moment, I manage to find it amusing that Tori and I share the same expression. The men behind Tori have started to turn, but they are too slow… Because the door across the hall is open and a bare chested Calai is filling up its breadth.

Two of the men hit the floor before the rest can turn. He holds no weapons and I don’t understand how he’s felled them. One of the men releases a battle cry, turns with his sword raised and stabs it towards Calai. I cry out, as if I might stop him. It is a senseless thought, for Calai is the bone king, used to the feeling of bathing in other mens’ blood.

Calai grabs the man’s arm at the wrist, not even blinking as his attacker’s sword stabs mere inches from his right eye. Calai outmuscles the man, twisting his arm back, and then drives his forehead into the man’s nose.

The man collapses and Calai raises his other arm, driving his fist into a fourth man’s nose. He takes his elbow to the man’s chin as he starts to fall and I hear a loud crack as the man falls back, collapsing into the servant’s stairwell. The man’s body makes terrible sounds as it falls down the stairs, hitting every one. Torbun, meanwhile, takes off down the hall, heading towards the guest stairs, but Calai rips a dagger from his next attacker’s hand and tosses it almost absently down the hall, hitting Torbun directly in the center of his back.

Calai has already moved on to his next attacker. The man punches Calai in the stomach four times, but Calai seems hardlyaffected. He doesn’t block. His muscles, shimmering with oils from his bath, simply contract as the man does his worst. And then Calai grabs the man by the head. He snaps his neck in one swift motion.

Two men lie grunting on the floor now, three more lie dead, the one in the stairwell I assume is either dead or sure to follow. That leaves only Tori — Tori, who lifts his axe. Calai’s arms are down. He has blood spatter on his face. I gasp.

And then my arms jerk. Tori grunts. He looks away from the king, twisting to slowly look at my face. He blinks at me, anger and rage swirling in his gaze, but sprinkled with surprise, too. It’s an honest sort of surprise that makes him look, for the first time I’ve ever known him to, quite boyish.

I imagine that this is the man he could have been, and for a moment, I feel deep sorrow…and anger…not only at his poisoned character, but at the fact that he’s been poisoned from his childhood, as we all have been, by Winterbren and the terrible way the people have been treated within it. The select few very wealthy taking all the spoils and stepping on or over the backs of those with so little. I didn’t realize there could be another way, that there was another way all along. That people could be treated with basic dignities. That the weak could be protected, rather than beaten, by the strong.

“It didn’t have to be like this,” I whisper, the burning in my eyes abating. I will not cry, not for Tori, though my entire body shakes beneath the magnitude of what I’ve done.

Tori looks down. I drop my gaze, and then drop my hand from the hilt of the beautifully ornamented blade. It doesn’t move. The blade remains embedded in Tori’s side, between two of his ribs. I don’t think it will kill him, but it’s enough to stop him. He drops his axe.

It lands hard on the ground between us, embedding itself in the wooden floor. I jolt at the shocking sound it makes and,when I step back, hit the back of my head on the door. “You should have been mine,” Tori hisses, his hands lightly closing around my throat. But King Calai grabs Tori by the back of his hair and rips him off of me easily, tossing him down the hall as if he weighs nothing more than the dagger I stabbed him with.

“She was always mine. As I was hers,” Calai says simply, following Tori down the hall and dropping to one knee. “Before you were born. Before time.”

I hear a horrible gurgling sound and then silence, before Calai rises. He turns and I notice his fingers look like they’ve been dipped in blood. We stare at one another, unmoving, for what feels like a dozen lifetimes. My gaze scours his massive frame, his unbraided hair falling free around his shoulders, the blood on his face, the oils gleaming on his skin accentuating the lines of his muscles and the hard planes and ridges of his body made for killing.

And for loving, when the mood strikes him.

He watches me in return, his gaze lingering over the top of my head, my hair, my chin and throat. His gaze drops lower, to my hand — my blood-stained hand. I follow his gaze down and, seeing the bloody pads of my fingers, I quickly twist my hands in my skirt.

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