The Raven Girl

Chapter 11

This has now been rewritten. Whoop, whoop! Oh happy day!  

Unna would not have been pleased with Rickard. If his sister learnt of what he did next, she would condemn him and label him as being nothing more than Eirik's puppet. He was not sure if he wasn't.

Rickard was his brother's assistant, in more ways than one: he appeased the sour-faced lords when Eirik squandered his wealth on hunts, wine and extravagant feasts to display his apparent riches; he pacified the poor when they came in thousands with complaints of extortionate taxes; he watched the King's decisions as carefully as one could and altered them where he saw fit. He acted as a king behind a curtain, and he made sure the kingdom would not crumble beneath Eirik's hedonistic rule.

The price he had to pay for that, however, was with the less than desirable tasks his brother set for him. Eirik had a horrible habit of mistrusting hired torturers to weasel out answers from those with sealed lips. When Rickard had first been nominated as a better, safer option by the young king, he had returned from the dungeons as a changed man. His breath hung raggedly in his throat and his eyes wouldn't stop seeing those awful sights and his clothes, face and hair were soaked in blood, but Eirik saw only the latter.

He hadn't seen the change in him, but Unna certainly had.

"Promise me you'll never do another's work again," she'd pleaded him, watching his face with steady chestnut eyes that were not to be lied to. He looked away. "Promise me you won't go back down there, Rickard."

He had promised and he broke that promise only a few days later, when the man had healed a little and was ready for another round of questioning. Unna wasn't livid, as he had expected of his wild sister, but sad and strangely quiet. It was then he vowed to himself that he would never break his word again, nor make promises he couldn't keep.

He drew a dagger from its sheath, during which he caught a brief glimpse of the girl's face for the first time. Ever since she had been carried in here, her eyes had been cast down with not so much as a single glance upwards or around. She had burrowed herself into the straw like a little, frightened vole until she heard the sharp hiss of metal and her ears pricked and she looked directly to its owner.

The grey of her eyes was striking, Rickard thought. Not because they were particularly beautiful, particularly bright, but because they were the only thing remotely bright about her. They were set in deep sockets and the eye had seemingly shrunken away from the bone, which appeared far too protruding and sharp to be natural. Caught in the crevices of her skull, the pits in her face where cheeks should have been, was shadow. No matter how the light poured through the windows, that shadow wouldn't be chased away.

Her lips were moving. At first, he passed it off as nerves – they were trembling because she was on the verge of tears – yet when he looked closer, he realised that they moved to create words, words that spoke no fear. She may have been afraid, but all he was permitted to see was hate.

It was as if she were daring him to tell Eirik of her words, the way she was looking at him. Asta Ravner was ready to die and any sympathy she'd once borne for herself was all but gone. At least, that was what she wanted him to think; he could see from the way she eyed up his dagger that she'd met it before somewhere – the unmistakable panic that reached out from the very backs of her pupils, the way she couldn't quite look at it straight on, her struggling with some other memory from her past. It was all there and it was all visible and Rickard could read her better than she thought he could.

Something within her wanted to live.

"Will you walk?" Eirik asked her. Rickard had been so busy unriddling the raven that he'd quite forgotten where he was and what Eirik wanted to be done.