The smell of scorched salt and rendered pig fat filled the solar, thick enough to coat Sikara’s tongue. Across the slate table, Rurik did not squirm, though four iron clamps held his wrists and shins fast against the stone.
“Keep your chin flat,” Sikara ordered, her voice clipped, stripped of whatever false tenderness she usually showed the courtyard fools. “If you thrash, the silver needles will shear your meridian channels. Then you will simply be a cripple instead of an investment.”
“I won’t move, my lady,” the boy whispered. His skin possessed the dull, gray tinge of a frost-killed potato, yet his amber gaze stayed glued to her face, hungry, tracking every blink.
She dipped her stylus into a bowl of crushed sun-stone paste. The compound sizzled against the air, giving off a sharp stench of brimstone. “A trade, Rurik. Pain today, liberty tomorrow. You grant me a living weapon, and I give you a coach ticket beyond the Iron Spires once this house is cinder. Nothing more, nothing less.”
“Whatever you command.”
She ignored the wet eagerness in his tone. Sentimental entanglements were liabilities; contracts were durable. She pressed the bone carving tool directly against the hollow beneath his collarbone.
The child arched off the table until his spine looked ready to snap. A sound tore from his throat—not a scream, but the grating screech of metal scraped along a rusted barrel. Thick black tendrils, slick as lamprey eels, broke through the pores of his chest. They coiled around the carved point, fighting the sun-stone, hissing as sacred ash burned through their oily hide.
Sikara leaned closer, steadying her wrists against the violent tremors wracking the table. A draft seeped through the flagstones beneath her boots. As the parasitic mass was wrenched upward by the runic lattice drawn on the slate, the dark entity expanded, revealing distinct features within the shadowy smog.
It was not a feral forest shade.
It had a face. Sharp cheekbones, an aquiline nose, the distinct sneer of the high nobility.
Balthar.
The contours matched the portrait hanging above the great hearth. This was no wild spirit that had ambushed a scullery orphan in the woods. It was a splintered sliver of her uncle’s very soul, grafted into the marrow of an abandoned bastard like a butcher’s hook through meat. The rule of soul-splitting magic in Oskaro was absolute and obscene: a human spirit could only be partitioned by feeding upon a living relative until the host vessel was hollowed out, ready to receive the elder’s mind when his original flesh withered into rot.
Balthar was grooming Rurik to become his next body.
“He wanted... to eat me from inside,” Rurik wheezed. Blood bubbled at the corners of his mouth, staining his cracked lips scarlet, yet his gaze remained locked on Sikara. He smiled, a broken, red-toothed grin that had no business on a nine-year-old child. “He told me I was nothing. Just an empty cup. But you poured water in me.”
“Be silent,” Sikara snapped, applying three more inches of silver wire into the nexus of the shadowy parasite. “Do not talk through the extraction. You will swallow your tongue.”
“I killed her for you,” he said softly, through teeth slick with blood.
Sikara’s hand froze for half a heartbeat. “What?”
“The red-haired girl. Danica. The scullery maid who steeped the grey arsenic into your lavender tea.” His smile widened, grotesque and adoring. “She carried Balthar’s coin purse. I followed her down to the grain silos two nights ago. Snapped her neck against the millstone. Shoved her behind the mortar in the dry cellar. Nobody will find her until the thaw, my lady. She cannot touch your cup ever again.”
Cold calculations flashed across Sikara’s mind. A dead maid was convenient; Danica could no longer bear witness to Balthar or the church. It saved her an assassination of her own. She categorized the confession as a tactical bonus—an asset showing initiative, nothing more. The fact that an abused child had snapped an adult’s neck purely to avenge her breakfast meant only that his lethality was developing faster than anticipated.
“A tidy solution,” she said coldly, refusing to acknowledge the grotesque devotion burning in his pupils. “Now stop speaking, or this curse will tear your lungs apart.”
She wrenched the bone implement upward with both arms.
The parasitic soul-shard shrieked, a sound identical to Balthar’s aristocratic drawl distorted through fathomless depths. Black ichor sprayed across Sikara’s brocade gown, smoking where it touched the silk. The splinter of her uncle’s life-force severed from Rurik’s collarbone with a sound like ripping sailcloth, convulsing within the silver warding circle she had scratched into the tabletop.
Rurik collapsed against the iron restraints, limp, his ribs heaving in shallow, desperate gulps. The black veins across his neck began to recede, leaving pale, scarred flesh behind.
Then the containment circle failed.
The displaced soul-shard did not simply dissipate. Bereft of a host, the raw, severed psychic mass sought violent escape. It slammed against the boundary stones, detonating the protective runes in an ear-splitting crack of concussive force.
The stained-glass windows of the solar exploded outward into the freezing night, showering the snowy courtyard below with thousands of crimson and azure glass daggers. The mountain gale surged into the room instantly, carrying bitter frost that snuffed out the tallow candles and scattered her papers into a whirlwind.
Before Sikara could reach for the glass jar to seal the thrashing soul-shard, heavy boots hammered up the spiraling stone stairs outside.
“Open the door in the name of the Lord Regent!” a guard roared through the oak timbers.
Axes struck the reinforced wood. The iron hinges groaned under brute force.
On the table, Rurik hung half-conscious in his metal cuffs, unable to run. Across the floor, the splinter of Balthar’s soul writhed toward the shattered window, threatening to return to its master and expose Sikara’s treason before she could strike.