Sing Me Your Scars (Apex Voices Book 3) (21 page)

She hears only the cicadas buzzing in the trees and the blood
rushing through her veins. As she moves, she inhales the thoughts and whispers
and turns them inside out. Each one leaves a stain beneath her skin, leaves her
ready for dissection. Obsession. Bifurcation into lady and whore. Or madness
and love. Her lips, dressed in gloss pink, lift into a smile, or perhaps a
cleverly concealed scream.

She moves on. Streets become blocks; blocks become houses stacked
up in neat rows with bay windows and wrought iron gates. Faces peer through the
glass, eyes wide and watchful. She drinks in their secrets. All the little lies
tucked into back corners and covered with dust. Houses become vacant lots.
Broken fences. Shattered glass. Battered men and women in tattered coats, their
dirty faces slack-jawed as they wait for time to pass. She takes in the sorrow.
The emptiness.

“Spare some change?” one asks.

“Go away. Leave us alone,” another mumbles, her mouth filled with
the solemn absence of teeth.

The voices flicker away as she steps through a shadow and into a
hidden door. Inside, all is quiet. All is still.

She retreats to a room at the top of a narrow staircase and
begins to strip away her glamour. Her heels cease their clicking. Her skirt
puddles on the floor. She wipes away a makeup mask of ivory, rose, and grey and
drops the colors one by one into a porcelain sink.

What remains is egg-smooth, featureless. She could be an illusion
or a shadow seen from the corner of an eye.

When the sun disappears, the girl climbs into a bed, and the
world swallows her whole. The sheet flutters down and falls flat, without curve
of hip or shoulder to change its shape.

Elsewhere, an old man dreams of tangled limbs and breathless
sighs. A construction worker dreams of a girl he once knew, a girl he loved and
let go. A homeless man hears the rustle of coins in a cup and wakes to find his
cheeks damp with tears.

And cicadas sing beneath a moon the color of cottage cheese.

When the footsteps approach, Isabel scrambles to her feet.
She staggers; spots of light dance in front of her eyes. Two days without food.
Two days without water. She backs up until her spine presses against the stone
wall. Tucks her hands behind her. She knows it won’t make a difference.

She tells herself she won’t scream.

The Healers, three women draped in robes of red, enter her cell.
They don’t say a word. She keeps silent when they grab her. Twists away from
their grasp. Fights against them with all the strength she can summon.

It’s not nearly enough.

Then they snap the first finger, the pinkie on her right hand.
The pain is white. Blinding. Below the pain, a sensation of leaking. Emptying.

Her cries echo off the stone. From another cell, she hears shouting.
One of the Healers laughs.

By the fifth finger, she doesn’t have the strength to struggle
anymore.

By the eighth, she can’t even scream. Wavery moans slip from her
lips. The greedy stone walls gobble them up and wait for more.

By the tenth, the world is grey, flickering in her vision like
candleflame.

After the last snap fills the air, the Healers weave a spell to
fuse her bones back together, to fill her up with something new. When they let
her go, she crawls to the corner of her cell, holds her ruined hands to her
chest, and sobs into the filthy straw.

§

Midday, a guard shoves a bowl of porridge through the bars
of her cell. Her stomach rumbles, but she makes no move for the food. If she
does not eat, will they force it down her throat, or will they allow her to
starve?

She knows the answer.

The porridge is bland, with neither milk nor honey to give it
flavor, but she eats it all. She does not want to die.

Not yet.

§

At night, a guard walks the passageway between the cells.
His feet tap a steady rhythm on the stone. He stops outside the bars of
Isabel’s cell, his face all sharp planes and angles, his clothing tainted with
sorrow.

She pulls her knees up to her chin. What does he see? A young
woman in a dirty dress or a monster in the making?

He runs his fingers along one
of the metal bars, his skin safe behind leather gloves. All the guards wear
them. For their protection.

“You knew it was forbidden,” he says, his voice a blade.

She holds her tongue.

“You knew the risk, the penalty, yet you still did it. Does that
make you brave or a fool?”

He walks away before she can take another breath. It is not her
fault. What she is. She holds up her hands. What she
was
.

They’ve made her something else now.

§

They came for her two days after Ayleth fell. She doesn’t know
how they knew what she’d
done. Perhaps someone was hiding nearby.
Watching.

She pushes the thoughts away and thinks of Ayleth’s dark hair,
her green eyes, the way she laughed into the wind.

§

She feels it growing inside her, a darkness where before there
was a spark of light. Their corruption.

If she had a knife, she would cut it out and leave it bleeding on
the floor.

§

The guards bring in a girl whose face still holds tight to
childhood. Her fingertips leak thin grey trails of smoke. Her fire is spent.
She does not fight against the guards’ grips. She does not cry. She is already
broken.

They put her in the cell across from Isabel’s.

The girl screams when the Healers come. Isabel covers her ears.
Had her own screams sounded so loud? So long? If her gift was fire, she
would’ve set the straw in her own cell ablaze and burned herself alive.

§

Moonlight peeks between the bars of her cell’s window, a
window too high to reach, even if she stands on her toes. It does not matter,
though. The only thing beyond her window is a rocky cliff facing the sea.

She closes her eyes, breathing in the stink of her own waste. The
hopelessness of the stone walls. How many were in this cell before her? How
many listened to the waves crashing against the rocks?

How long before they gave in?

§

She paces in her cell. The sun has turned the air thick and
sticky, and the straw rustles with each step of her bare feet, scratching
against her skin. They took away her shoes when they brought her here.

The guard in the passageway does not look in her direction. He
does not look at any of them. He smells of roasted meat; her mouth waters.

The girl in the cell across from Isabel trembles, her teeth
chatter, and ice crystals form on the straw beneath her. Is there even enough
left of her inside to miss the warmth of her flames?

She is too young, far too young, to be so defiled.

§

“Let me see your hands, little fool,” the night guard says.

She turns away so he cannot see them. Her heart races. Will he
kill her? It would be a kindness.

Instead, he walks away.

She doesn’t know why he wants to see. Nothing shows on the
outside. She feels it inside, ugly and wrong.

§

They bring in an old woman. Her back is bent; her eyes,
clouded with white. She cries for her children to save her, but no one will
come except the Healers and the guards. Everyone knows that.

Isabel doesn’t think it will take long for the old woman to give
them what they want.

§

She dreams of drops of blood falling from the sky, of a
field of knives littered with bones, and wakes drenched in sweat with a strange
taste in her mouth of sour milk laced with ashes.

Her old magic, her
real
magic, tasted of ripe raspberries.

§

The guards take away a woman with long dark hair. She walks
with her back straight and her mouth set in a thin line. Her eyes flash with
defiance.

A door slams. After a time, muffled screams creep into the air
and hang there for hours. When the guards bring the woman back, she smells of
urine, vomit, the acrid tang of fear. She leaves a trail of blood on the
stones.

The sight makes Isabel’s stomach twist into knots.

§

The new king took the crown the year of her sixth summer.
“You must never,” her mother said, time and again. Even at six, Isabel
understood why.

“Never, ever.”

And she listened. Until Ayleth.

She thinks of Ayleth’s broken body, the blood dripping from the
corner of her mouth. What would happen if she touched her now? Would she be
able to hold it in?

§

Finally, the guards come for her.

They bind her arms behind her back. Even with their gloves, they
do not touch her hands. They lead her into a windowless room; the door shuts
with a bang that vibrates in her teeth. The room smells of pain and sorrow. Of
giving up. Giving in.

The man in the room smiles. A lie.

There is a table covered with
a stained cloth, the fabric full of bumps and bulges. She does not want to see
what the cloth is hiding.

“Will you serve your king?” the man asks.

She takes a deep breath. Doesn’t answer.

She will not.

He does not remove the cloth from the table, he does not ask his
question again, and the guards take her back to her cell.

§

Magic was not always forbidden.

When Isabel was a small child, there were no Healers, and only
criminals were locked away. The old king was loved by the people, not feared.
He loved balls, grandeur, music. The new king does not care for music, save
that born of screams. Only those sworn to his service are allowed to wield
magic; even then, they are only allowed a magic that has been perverted.
Inverted. Fire to ice. Healing to—

No. She will not think of that now. She cannot.

Rumors say the king acts in cruelty because he secretly wishes he
was born female. If so, he might’ve held magic. Instead, he has only his cock
and the kingdom to grip.

But the why doesn’t matter. Not here.

§

She dreams of Ayleth running toward her. Though Isabel runs
as fast as she can to get away, to keep her safe, Ayleth won’t stop.

She wakes just before Ayleth touches her hand.

§

They take the young girl out and do not bring her back. When
the night wind blows cold through the window, Isabel thinks perhaps it is the
girl, making ice for the king’s wine.

§

The new magic inside her hungers. For what, she doesn’t
know.

She doesn’t want to know.

§

The guards take her to the stone room again. The table is
uncovered, revealing knives, hooks, spikes, and something shaped like a metal
pear, something that screams malevolence. Anguish.

She feels the blood run from her face. Her fingers tremble.

“Will you serve your king?”

She swallows before answering. “No, I will not.”

They laugh when they take her back. They know she will give in,
eventually.

Or she will die.

§

She and Ayleth grew up in the same village, casting shy
smiles at each other until finally, Ayleth kissed her behind the baker’s shop.
Their love was not as forbidden as magic; people pretended not to see.

The day Isabel broke her promise of never, they were foraging for
berries atop a wooded hill. In the distance, the spires of the castle gleamed
in the sunlight. Ayleth paused with a handful of berries and whispered, “I
would like to burn it down with the king inside.”

“Do not say such a thing,” Isabel said, casting a glance over her
shoulder.

Ayleth shrugged. “There is no one to hear. Only us.” She took a
step forward. A twig snapped. Leaves crackled. Her mouth dropped open as her
legs slipped out from under, and she tumbled down the side of the hill, her
shouts punctuated with thuds and thumps all the way.

Isabel raced down as fast as she could without falling herself.
At the bottom, she found Ayleth holding her belly, blood dripping from the
corner of her mouth. Isabel tried to help her stand, but Ayleth shrieked and
begged her to stop.

The village herbwoman would
not be able to help. Not with this. In spite of Ayleth’s protests, Isabel
grasped her hands and let the magic out.

And the sensation... Her
mouth flooded with the sweetness of berries, her fingertips tingled, and
inside, it was as if butterflies were dancing soft beneath her skin. She felt
it leave her body like a breeze through a window; as it flowed into her
lover’s, Ayleth’s eyes brightened, her mouth formed a circle of surprise, then
laughter bubbled up and out. They danced together like children, forgetting for
a moment that, as proscribed by
the king, the magic was wrong.

§

The guards carry out a body, laughing all the while. Isabel
sees long dark hair. Pale limbs streaked with the telltale lines of blood
poisoning. A face with blank eyes where defiance once lived.

§

The night guard
watches her through the bars. She
meets his stare, hiding her hands in the folds of her dress. She fears what
they’ve done to her, fears who they’ve made her become, but she is not her
hands. She is not their monster. She will not let it change her.

Yet she fears it already has.

§

She stumbles as they push her into the room with the table.
A skinny man with a ragged beard stands in the corner. His clothes are
tattered. Shackles bind his bloodied ankles.

“Will you serve?” the man with the false smile asks.

“Never.”

He nods at the guards. They hold her arms tight as they guide her
toward the shackled man. The smell of his unwashed body makes her eyes sting.