Page 19 of Kingdom of Ashes & Bone
That didn’t make any sense at all, and I felt trapped. “Any kind of magick that involves … whatever you were doing . . . can’t be good.”
Zephyr sighed. “Ah, I believe you said ‘evil,’ didn’t you?” He trapped me up against the stone wall, shoving his knife to the left of my head and into a crack in the stone. I squirmed, wondering how the mechanism worked to open it. I didn’t care that it led nowhere; I just wanted to be alone, and away from him. The darkness would be a welcome break from his madness.
“What if the demons get out before you can stop them? Everyone in the kingdom is at risk! We should just—”
“Put them down like the animals they are?” Zephyr interrupted, an odd gleam in his eyes.
I blinked, wondering if he was finally starting to understand. “I—I don’t know! They’re rabid! You saw that demon last night! You couldn’t reason with it! If you let it, it would have torn through this entire camp unless someone killed it first! How can you risk the lives of children over those … things? How could you kill those Fireguards like that? That wasn’t fighting. It was torture!”
There was nowhere to go. My back was already up against the wall.
“So the children and the women’s lives are more important than the Nobles’ lives?” he asked, his face twisting with emotion.
“Well, I don’t know, but it’s what’s best for everyone!” I argued back, not understanding why he couldn’t see it. Was he trying to say the demons deserved just as much protection as the children? That didn’t make any sense! He was the one who was trying to argue that sick experiments were necessary for the good of the whole! So why didn’t he see it here?
“I don’t understand,” I mumbled again, mostly to myself. He must have taken it as a challenge, though, because he stepped right up to me and got in my face, the blade of his knife at my throat.
I closed my eyes and waited for the sharp feel of steel slicing through my flesh.
“You want to know why they deserve a chance? Why Itrulywant to study magick?”
I heard the rustling of fabric, and the strike never came. My eyes cracked open to see the arm that held the knife against my throat, the sleeves of his long tunic pushed up to his elbow.
Ashy, gray scales covered his wrists and upper arm. Faint and barely detectable, but they were there.
“You’re—”
“A failed experiment,” he growled at me, shoving me hard against the door again. My head smacked against the stone and I saw stars.
Stay awake. Fight.
“My diluted mud blood staved off the effects longer than any other Noble I’ve seen,” he continued, anger and defiance in his eyes. “But it obviously wasn’t enough. A Noble is a Noble. They’re all cursed. Do we all deserve to die for something we don’t understand? For something we have no part of? For something that happened two hundred years ago?”
A small gasp left my mouth. “You know what happened.”
His curly black hair fell forward into his eyes, just like Zariah and Zion’s. “Of course I know what happened. It’s mud history—my history. Your history!”
It seemed stupid suddenly that we were fighting. With our dark hair and eyes, we could have been brother and sister. We should be working together and sharing information, not fighting and holding blades up to each other’s throats.
“Zephyr, I’m sorry. Let’s start over. I need to know about the curse. I know it has something to do with our people and how we were slaves.”
He snorted. “You are a bed warmer for the prince. Possibly both, if what I hear is accurate. You can’t be trusted. You’ll return to the castle and rat us out.”
My jaw dropped. “No more than Zariah or Zion would!”
He laughed. “Neither of them know exactly where we are. How could they when the queen could simply order them to tell her what they know? They know where the tunnel begins, but we have it laced with so many booby traps we’d hear the Fireguards screaming long before they reached us. How do you think you got here so quickly, and were able to race out without becoming a bloody smear on the wall? I disabled everything for you! Every time you travel with me or Shava, your path is clear. Try it now and see how far you get, you little weed.”
I glanced down at his ashen wrist. “Zephyr, please. Tell me what you know before it’s too late. Share your knowledge before it becomes lost. We don’t have magick! We—”
“I WON’T CHANGE!” he screamed in my face, bits of spit flying from my nose and hitting my cheeks with how close he was. “THEY CAN BE SAVED, we just haven’t figured out what to do yet! My cursed blood gives me magick, and I’ll butcher a hundred Fireguards if that’s what it takes to learn how to use it!”
It all came crashing together at once for me, and in the blink of an eye, I understood. Zephyr wouldn’t kill the demons no matter how dangerous they were, because killing them meant giving up. If a demon died, in his mind, it meant he would die as well. Yet he was fine torturing others to suit his own needs and thirst for knowledge.
“Zephyr, I’m going to figure out how to break the curse. But you can’t have these people living down here with the Nobles. If you won’t kill them, then the people have to go.”
His dark eyes met mine, flaring with anger. “You don’t tell me what to do. No one tells me what to do. My entire life, everyone else has told me what to do. My brothers have everything. I wonder if their dragons will feel it when you die?”
I whirled around and pressed my palms to the hard stone, looking for a lever or something that would indicate how it opened.
