Hounded [Wild Hunt Series: 2]

9: Ink

Three days passed. No food, no water, but the promise of both if I would just jump into the creature's stretching, ape-inspired arms of mud and blood. It would wail at night, and sometimes in the dark when the wind was dead, I heard its hands scraping wetly up the stone. In the morning, the ruddy attempts dried under the heat of the sun, the creature would drop down into the canopy to feed on lizards, swearing it was on my side, swearing it was loyal, that it was a wedding gift from the Marrow Witch because I was a Curiosity.

And the way it sang 'curiosity', so musical and pronounced, a nightjar's whistle, felt unlucky.

I believed the creature, to some extent. This thing stalking the canopy was exactly what I'd asked for. And I'd have to test it, and I'd have to find a use for it, and then, knowing it was formed from scraping together the flesh and blood of the deceased,  some unholy thing made of other people's lifetimes, I'd have to kill it.

But it wasn't the creature that bothered me as I sat in the dust of my sharpened pottery and contemplated all the ways I might try and kill the King. My body was changing, like a second, more awful puberty. It had been, and still was, coming into its own, crawling out from its earthly cocoon and shaking its wings loose. I wasn't hungry like a human. I wasn't thirsty like a human. I still craved those things, because I'd been brought into existence wanting them, but this far removed from either I was starting to understand that eating was a habit, and drinking was a comfort, not a necessity.

Pain, though.

Pain made my blood run cold with anticipation, a delicate chill of goosebumps like stepping naked from a hot tub in a winter's storm. There was something deep in my bones, something frozen and bitter and violent, and it couldn't get out, not without without cutting and breaking and hurting, but oh, did it need to get out. When it did seep through the human shell, a glittering frost spilled from a cracked egg, that was power.

That would kill the King.

I'd tried, the past two nights and days, sat and thought long and hard about what I was willing to do to myself to draw that cold magic out. Maybe there was a route, some switch, that if I experimented, I could learn to control without having becoming the demon equivalent of a squashed leech.

So I grit my teeth, and set myself up for rounds of failure, and the creature would howl below, like it knew blood had been spilled, and when I'd drag myself to the window to shush its pasty form, it would croon and shake the boughs and ask deep within its fleshy throat for an offering.

As dawn broke on the fourth day, when the last wisps of the smoldering horizon had been extinguished, the King returned. His beaky, half-rotted chin rubbed against the stone still, staring into the gloom. The feathered fur around his pupil gleamed with the cresting sun.

"Have you learned your lesson?" he rumbled. The tower swayed, crunched as his serpentine coils ground around the exterior.

"There's nothing to learn in the dark," I said, pushing off the gunky stone floor.

"There's much you can learn," the King continued, "both in and from the dark." A thin white lens flicked over the eye as he winked. I wondered if the little sharp edge in my palm could cut through it.

"I'm sure you'll teach me," I said, edging toward the seam of light. "Will you be joining me this morning or have you just come to play pigeon?"

"I'm in need of your lovely presence this evening, My Lady. Tomorrow, you will be mine, but tonight, tonight we will dine in the great hall with the rest of the lords and their blushing brides. A mere formality, but I would wish to present you before my court, and in turn offer you a small gift of my gratitude."