Corroded

didn’t, not truly, but in my state, I could not force reason.

I balked suddenly, seized up through no will of my own and could not force myself to take one step farther. The servants around me tightened, four to escort me.

I would move, or I would be moved.

They screamed when they fell, shrill voices ended so suddenly. “You lot,” called the trainer, “get on to the other side or join ‘em.”

The Monsieur did not believe in nets.

I shivered in place, shaking so violently that the light from lamps lining the hall danced across the glass beads; a glittering shimmer.

A hand caught wrapped around a country cove’s fogle—the monsieur’s punishment leaves scars. Not for the crime, but for the catching.

“I won’t,” I whispered.

A hand in my lower back forced me to step—I flinched as it found the wound. I stiffened. Fear turned every limb to something immovably weighty. Iron and sand, an anchor that would not move were I even to try.

I couldn’t.

A crowd so tight as to pack the tent, mingled excitement turning the heat unbearably thick. They wanted blood. The monsieur had always been able to read the audience.

“Please.”

“Go,” ordered one servant, his gruff voice curt.

“I can’t,” I replied, fear turning my voice to something strident and alien. “I can’t, please!”

Another hand grasped my shoulder. Flanked though I was with four, I lashed out at the nearest.

I was in no shape. Though I cried out, pleading to be spared the canvas I dreaded, there was no sympathy in my captors. They dragged me, thrashing and screaming, into the hall. When my voice grew too loud, a hand slapped over my mouth and I was hauled bodily over one shoulder, my wrists held by one and my ankles another.

Shame was not a thing I understood—not then, trapped in the certainty of my own fears, lashed by memories I had never truly worked out. Not from the opium fog that held them.

Ghosts of them whose face bore no name, memories of children held in thrall; opium for the good ones, the boot for the bad—if we were lucky.

Blood was a color not easily forgotten, and I had never realized how much of it painted my life.

I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t! Let them punish all who’d ever spoken to me, I could not set foot in that tent.

Such shameful terrors, that I would sacrifice so many for it.

We passed gaping servants and I heard their startled cries. It did not silence me. As the air turned from the warmth of the manor to the biting frost of winter’s coming, my terror climbed.

I screamed against the hands that held me silent, tears running freely from my eyes and smudging the effect the women had worked so hard to achieve. With inhuman strength, I wrenched myself free of the arms that bound me, crashed to the cold ground. Pain streaked up my arm, jarred loose whatever spiritual gauze the Veil’s man had bound over the wound in my back, and I shrieked unholy madness into the stillness of the gardens.

A man leapt upon my chest, knees pinning my wrists. White teeth, golden eyes. Black skin revealed by his sleeveless shirt, and long hair plaited into a multitude of tiny braids slapped me in the face as he bent over me. Ikenna Osoba did not seem deterred by my panic.

He said nothing I understood, but his fingers prised open my mouth and tar fell to the back of my raw throat. I tried to spit it out, but he clapped that hand over my mouth, covered my nose until I could not breathe.

In defense, desperate for air, I swallowed the bitter lump, but I writhed and squirmed to force him from me. He did not budge. His knees ground into my wrists, forcing fresh tears.

He waited. The edges of my vision went black.

When the bliss took me and my body went slack, only then did he lift his hand.

“We’ll fix her face,” suggested a girl’s voice.

“No.” Ikenna’s deep resonance. “Leave her. It will titillate the spectators.”

“But...” A pause. “This isn’t—”

“Shut it. Or you’ll be in with her,” he said tightly. His knees eased from my limp arms. This time, it was him that lifted me, with an easy strength that belied his lithe figure.

Cradled against his chest, I stared listlessly at nothing as the opium took from me the last vestiges of my resistance.

Chapter Twenty-Two

They did not take me to the canvas tent.

I had assumed, in my folly, that I would be forced to endure the circus show. I did not understand what had happened when I became more aware of myself and my surroundings. Though my senses soared with forced bliss, I had not spent much of my life mired in it for nothing.

As Hawke had once counseled me, them what eat it by habit must always eat the more. For this reason, I was able to thrust myself from waking dream to a surreal actuality. I seemed to come into my skin a little bit more than I should have, for pliability. I was aware of the harsh glow bathing me in golden light, could feel the shuddering heat roiling against my flesh. Yet all of it retained its dreamy state.

The source revealed itself as that of candles lit by the dozens. Possibly even the hundreds. A wall of fire I could not climb.

Ringed as I was, near blinded by the flickering droplets of crystalline light, I did not realize exactly where I stood until I attempted to move from it.

A whisper of fabric, a silken rustle, and I gasped as the lengthy silk ribbons wrapped about my forearms tightened.

I stood, that much was clear, with my arms pulled above my head and given enough slack to allow them to bend, elbows splayed. My fingers clenched around the satiny material, jerked hard—it did not give. Where I might have spoken, a wooden shaft had been forced between my lips, banded to my skull by a tightly tied ribbon.

I could only bare my teeth and growl something wordless and angry. Saliva already gathered in my mouth; I could not swallow, and my jaw ached from the forced parting.

Candlelight flickered, painting wild shapes and demonic shadows.

Each wax column had been placed upon stone seating, arranged in such a way as to allow for empty seats just at the front. A faint haze clung to the air, swirling now and again in the warm glow. Inhaling through my nose left my senses twitching—the fragrance was a familiar one. I’d smelled it often on Hawke’s skin, and again when I’d spoken with the Veil last. Familiar, but different enough that it distracted me. I frowned as much as I was able around the wooden rod between my lips.

They’d placed me in the amphitheater. The seating was only partially familiar to me, as the last I’d been inside, the whole had been converted to the plush decadence of a Roman bathhouse. That I was not ensconced beneath the circus tent was a relief that nearly stole the support from my knees—at least until the rest of my predicament became clear.

Wherever I was—or was not—I was not safe.

I looked up, straining to see anything that I could in the midnight sky above, yet all I noted was that the acrobat ribbons binding me so securely trailed from an apparatus built to be as unimposing as possible to avoid detection by the casual observer. For an audience, it may appear as if the long, crimson stream of silk fell from the very sky.

I had been upon a trapeze, though I did not recall whether I enjoyed the sensation of flying or not. As I had little problem navigating Cat’s Crossing, I suspected I had not minded it. I recalled somewhat more clearly the art