Page 119 of Skalterra By Nightmare
The night stilled, and for a moment, I thought maybe Ciarán wasn’t going to take me after all. Or maybe he’d overestimated his Nocturmancy skills, and he wasn’t able to pull me away even after I’d yielded to him.
But then some unseen force pulled at the Skalmagick buzzing through my being, gently at first, as if testing its strength. Something heaved inside me, flipping my stomach and catching my breath.
The invisible tether between me and Galahad snapped, and darkness rushed over me.
When my eyes fluttered open, I was met with bright orange irises set against black sclera.
“There she is,” Ciarán said under his black cowl. “Welcome back, Blue. Did you miss me?”
28. Advanced Interview and Interrogation
After hearing his voice in my head night after night, I was finally face-to-face with Ciarán Grimguard, Servant of the Frozen God, again.
And I was going to kill him.
I lunged forward, and his orange eyes widened in surprise.
Something hot seared into my wrists, and the muscles in my shoulders strained as my hands yanked me back. I fell against a stone column, landing on my backside.
My wrists were bound behind me, shackling my arms around the width of a pillar. Loose blue hair fell into my face when I fought against the bonds. My armor was gone, leaving me in a plain tunic and trousers, as if Ciarán hadn’t wanted to waste Skal on anything he didn’t deem necessary.
That was fine. I didn’t need armor to take down Ciarán, which was exactly what I was going to do as soon as I figured out how to break free.
“Is that a yes, then?” Ciarán crooned. “Youdidmiss me?”
“What is this?” I kicked out wildly and strained against the hot bonds that held me captive. I couldn’t see them, but the way they sizzled and burned told me the rope wrapped around my wrists was made of Skal.
“You were in my way.” Ciarán stood over me. Soft blue light seeped through the holes in his dark cloak and threw shadows across his patchwork leather armor. He’d done a crude job in trying to repair the pieces that Tiernan’s explosive had ripped to shreds.
Bits of night sky shined through the dilapidated roof above him, ringing his inky curls in a halo of stars that made the blacks of his eyes seem all the more dark.
“We’re still in Tulyr?” I demanded, looking around the stone room. The flooring was made of cracked cobblestone, and parts of the walls were falling down and replaced by curtains of lichen.
“Near it.” The bottom half of Ciarán’s face was covered in his black cowl, but the set of his eyebrows held a smirk. I flexed my fingers and tried to imagine them elongating into claws, but they stayed frustratingly human. “An old, forgotten outpost by the looks of things. It’s a bit drafty, but it suits my needs.”
He stepped aside so I could see the trickle of Skal leaking from a crack in the wall and pooling in a small basin. A bottle sat in the pool, collecting Skal as it streamed down the wall. A line of bottles stood beside the basin, half of them already full of the glowing liquid.
“A Skalspring?” It was tiny compared to the one in Tamora’s throne room and Tulyr’s Sanctum.
“Oh, yes. I could’ve made Nightmares for you to fight all night long, Blue.”
“You used me to follow us.”
“I could’ve stayed silent.” Ciarán knelt down so that his strange orange and black eyes were even with mine. He reached up to pull his cowl down away from his face. The blue light of the Skalspring turned his skin a sickly color, but he still looked a lot better than he had when I’d left him in Orla’s bed. “I didn’t have to speak to you to know what you were feeling and seeing. I could’ve gotten what I needed from you without you ever knowing I was there.”
“So?” I strained against the bonds again.
“I didn’t have to let you know Tamora’s brute was following you in Riverstead. I didn’t have to help you fight him in the Umberdust Plains. And I certainly didn’t have to tell you how to kill the rotsbane.”
“You helped me to help yourself. You wanted Titus and Tamora out of your way, and if the rotsbane had devoured me, you would’ve had no way to track the others.”
His mouth quirked, and he straightened up to stretch.
“You saved my life in Vanderfall, Blue. That’s no one’s mistake but your own. You better get comfortable. As long as you’re with me, the Lyrian can’t call you back to his side.”
He stalked to the doorway and leaned against the crumbling wall to stare out at the ruins and cliffs around us with his back to me.
“What do you mean?” I shifted around the stone column to keep him in view. “As long as I’m with you? You can’t keep me here!”
