The Road to Death

36

Esprë awoke to the sound of someone screaming. It took her a moment before she realized it was her.

She stared around with wide, terrified eyes. She was in a cabin of some sort, a room made entirely of wood stained mahogany-dark and polished to a glistening finish. She sat up on an overstuffed couch of crimson velvet, clutching at its back and arm.

A stiff wind blew in from the windows at the front of the room, which had been smashed through. The back of the couch had shielded her from the night chill. She stared out into the darkness beyond and could see nothing but a black, featureless void.

Several everburning torches lit the cabin, their magical lights guttering in the wind but never going out. A four-poster bed crouched in one corner, a paper-cluttered desk in the other. The wind had strewn the papers all about the room, most of them ending up near the door opposite the windows.

Esprë swung her feet off the couch and on to a carpet the same shade of red as the couch. She felt something wet on her hand as it brushed along the couch. She brought it to her face and saw blood on her fingers.

She inventoried her body, checking for pain or wounds but found nothing. Her head ached a bit, and she remembered the last thing she’d seen before falling asleep had been Te’oma’s face. The changeling had mentally battered her into unconsciousness as a pair of hands held her in place, hands that could only have belonged to Ibrido.

The cabin door opened, and a pair of Karrnathi skeletons stalked into the low-ceilinged room. An elf with dragonish features crept in behind them, keeping them between himself and the young elf. He wore a black cloak with the Karrnathi wolf embroidered on one breast. A triangle of knucklebones hung just below that, white and pure against the cloak’s dark fabric.

“Welcome to Keeper’s Claw,” the dragon-elf said. “Make yourself comfortable. You will be with us for some time.”

“I-Ibrido?” Esprë said. “Is that you?”

The dragon-elf nodded. “The time for masks is over. I have captured you, and no one can stop me from disposing with you as I please.”

At first, Esprë had wanted to scream again. Now, noticing how carefully the dragon-elf treated her, she had to struggle to keep a wry smile from her face. Ibrido knew of her dragonmark, and he feared her. She enjoyed knowing that.

“It’s hard to be comfortable with the wind blowing in like that,” Esprë said, pointing at the windows.

Ibrido grimaced. “I will have a detail assigned to repairing that right away. In the meantime, please keep yourself far from the windows. Come daylight, you’ll find that it’s a long, fatal drop to the ground.”

“Where are we going?” Esprë asked. She surprised herself by how calm she felt. Perhaps the growing power of her dragonmark came with a bit of maturity, or maybe she was just used to getting kidnapped by now.

“To visit an old friend. Someone I’ve not seen in many years but who is very eager to meet you.”

“Kandler will come after me. They all will.”

“How? In that battered airship you crashed to the earth? By the time they get that rowboat in the air, we will be leagues from Fort Bones, and they will have no idea which way we went.”

Esprë steeled herself as she felt her confidence waning. “They found me before. They’ll never give up.”

Ibrido bared his teeth. “If they somehow do manage to catch us, I will knock them from the sky. This is a warship on which we travel, not some enchanted pleasure boat.”

Esprë stood up, and the dragon-elf took one step back. The skeletons closed ranks in front of him, keeping him far from the young elf’s reach.

“Perhaps I’ll kill you myself,” she said, trying to inject some menace into her voice. The dragonmark on her back began to itch, and the tips of her fingers began to numb with cold.

“Take her,” Ibrido said.

For an instant, Esprë wondered whom he spoke to. Then the twin skeletons darted forward and grabbed her by her elbows. They shoved her back into the overstuffed couch and pinned her there.

Esprë struggled against the skeletons’ grasp, but they held her fast as steel. She kicked out at them, but they just draped their leg bones over her and pressed her feet to the floor too. She grabbed at them with her grave-chilled fingers, wishing them to die, to fall over at her feet into a pile of shuffled bones, but they ignored her.

“Your dragonmark has no power over those already dead,” Ibrido said. “Of all the creatures on this ship, only you, I, and the terrified bosun flying this ship still draw breath. They exist to help maintain this ship and to protect me. If I die, they have their orders.”

“Which are?” A ball of ice formed in Esprë’s gut.

“To kill you. To rend your corpse to pieces. To scatter it across open leagues of land.”

One thought speared through Esprë’s mind, and she gave voice to it. “What happened to Te’oma?”

The dragon-elf let loose a low, rumbling sound that Esprë guessed was meant to be a laugh.

“We had a parting of the ways,” Ibrido said. “She became a loose end, and I tied her off.”

“Where is she?” Esprë whispered, barely audible over the whistling wind.

Ibrido pointed a taloned finger over the young elf’s shoulder. She turned to gaze out the window and saw that something had been thrown through it from this side: something—or someone—who had probably fallen to her death.

Esprë bowed her head, her shoulders shaking. After a moment, she realized she was crying. How could she mourn for this twisted creature who had brought so much misery into her life? She didn’t know. She couldn’t explain her sadness to anyone, not even herself. All she could do was give herself over to it or fight it away.

She wept openly and unashamed.

“How ironic,” Ibrido said. “If she were here still, you’d be threatening her life as well. Now that she’s gone, though, you mourn her passing.”

The dragon-elf shook his head. “I do not understand the cruel tricks that fate plays on us all. That one such as you should have a gift like the Mark of Death bestowed upon you is beyond my ability to fathom. Is this a random world in which little makes sense, or is there some higher purpose to this choice that only the gods could possibly understand?”

Anger flared in Esprë’s heart. It was one thing for Ibrido to threaten her, but she could not abide being mocked. She kicked and struggled with the skeletons pinning her in place, but she made no headway against them.

As she tired, she glared up at the dragon-elf and said, “Why don’t you come a little closer and find out?”

Ibrido snorted at the young elf. Then he spoke to the skeletons. “Release her.”

The two creatures let Esprë go and stood up flanking her, ready to move against her again at Ibrido’s word. She rubbed the spots on her arms where they had pressed their thin, hard finger bones into her flesh, leaving livid marks. She wondered what the dragon-elf’s game might be, but she was willing to let him keep talking while she tried to figure a way out of this trouble.

Ibrido stepped forward until he was only a few feet from Esprë. She gauged the distance, wondering if she could reach out and touch him with her deadly power before he could dodge out of the way. It would be close, she was sure, and she was not ready to take that chance yet.

Then Ibrido leaned down until his snoutlike nose rested only inches from Esprë’s face. “Go ahead and give it a try,” he hissed through his long, sharp teeth. “You can kill me right here, right now. You can put an end to all of this. It will only cost you your life.”

The dragonmark started to burn on Esprë’s back. She wondered how it could get so hot and not scorch her shirt. She brought up her right hand, which felt as if she’d plunged it into a snow bank. She raised it toward Ibrido’s scaly face but stopped just before touching it.

The dragon-elf bared his teeth again. Esprë could smell old meat and fresh wine on his breath. “You may have something of the killer in you after all,” he said. “The changeling doubted it, but I can see it in your eyes. Still, you value life too much to risk tossing away your own, don’t you?”

Esprë growled in frustration as she threw herself back against the couch again. The icy sensation in her hand and the fiery one between her shoulder blades ebbed, each seeming to wash away the other.

Ibrido snorted as he stretched to his full height and glared down at Esprë with his unblinking, reptilian eyes. “I want you to remember this moment,” he said. “Etch it in your mind. Think back to it when you are brave enough to consider raising your hand against me again.

“I gave you your chance. I put myself almost literally in your hands. My life could have been yours to devour like an overripe fruit, but you were too cowardly to pluck it.”

With that, he spun on his heel and strode out the door. The two skeletons stayed there, standing at either end of the couch, undead escorts who gazed past her with nonexistent eyes.