Though most call her the daemon-archer, she titles herself the Marquise of Hearts. Loray toys with the men for whom she conceives a great lust, making them into her besotted slaves. Those she does not find appealing, she sets to run before her, and hunts them down like a stag or a boar, feathering them with arrows before finally feasting on their heart.

* The Marian Codex

☀

15th Day of New Summer’s Moon, 297 AC

The moment Avitus’ cruel fingers released their grip on Trist’s neck, he sucked in a breath and crumpled in on himself. He couldn’t think clearly through the pain: instinctively, he raised his hands to the bleeding holes where his eyes used to be, but the slightest touch only made everything hurt even worse.

“Trist!” Acrasia was shouting, and he recognized Enid De Lancey’s voice screaming as well, and even Dame Margaret.

“When I get out of here, I’ll cut you into pieces!” the Exarch in the cage next to him threatened. Everything was dark, every light in the world had been snuffed out in an instant.

“There you are, Sir Trist,” Decimus Avitus hissed from the other side of the bars. “Nephew. A caged, blind man. You’ll decorate my throne room until I grow tired of you. In the meanwhile, you will keep a respectful tongue in your mouth, or I will remove more pieces. I can display you just as well as an eyeless, noseless, limbless monster, so choose wisely.”

Trist tried to bite down his moans, so that he wouldn’t give the bastard any satisfaction, but it was like twin daggers had been stabbed deep into his skull, and he couldn’t help himself. He rolled around on the floor of the cage, curled into a ball, flinching back whenever his skin came in contact with the bars, like a child burned by a hot iron pot.

Some time later, the voices had receded. “He’s gone, now,” Margaret told him. “He’s gone, Trist.”

“My eyes,” Trist moaned. “Damn him.” He’d had a plan, but Trist had not anticipated the usurper doing something like this. “Acrasia. Can you hear me, Acrasia?” he called. She was the only one who had been at his side through everything, from the day under the chapel.

The faerie’s voice told him where the rear of the great hall was; he had become completely disoriented. “I’m here, Trist,” she called. “I’m here.”

“Is there anyone else in the room?” Trist asked, gritting his teeth against the agony of his wounds.

“No,” both Margaret and Acrasia said, at the same time. “They’ve all left the hall for the king’s solar,” Margaret continued. “That’s where they go whenever he wants to talk about the Cathedral. Never in front of us.”

That seemed important, but Trist couldn’t think about it right now. “I have a Tithe,” Trist gasped. “Acrasia, I want to use it.”

“On what?” she asked. “All your threads are at least orange, Trist. You don’t have enough Tithes for me to do anything with.”

“You told me once,” Trist said, forcing himself to sit up and lean back against the bars he’d wrapped in linen, “that Exarchs earned their Boon by their deeds.”

“Yes.” Acrasia’s voice held the same notes of pain that his did; Trist found that without sight, he focused all his attention on the sound and the feel and smell of what was happening around him, desperate for any clue that would help him understand the world he was now blind to.

“I have passed through a portal,” Trist said, putting words to the idea that he’d been ruminating on, silently, since the first night of their captivity. All he’d needed was Acrasia to pull herself out of her own misery long enough to listen to him, and it seemed that Avitus’ barbaric act had been the shock that she needed. “A door in the world, made by the Serpent of Gates.”

In the next cage, Margaret gasped. “You don’t mean…”

“Do it,” one of the men on the other side of the throne called.

“Is it enough?” Trist asked Acrasia. “Can you make it work?”

“I will try,” the faerie said, after a long moment. “I’ve never seen anyone with a Boon like that, other than Bathin,” she admitted. “I don’t even know if Auberon can do that. He can move through shadows, but I have never seen him make a door of darkness.”

Trist’s darkness exploded with light. A skein of burning whips and tendrils burst out of Acrasia’s core, fiery yellow and orange, and he could actually see it. He could see himself, as well, when he looked down, a tightly bundled knot of threads, and to his right Dame Margaret, burning there in her cage. Beyond her, farther away into the darkness, he could see the glowing cores of the other two Exarchs, as well, with a kind of vision that was beyond mortal sight.

One of Acrasia’s threads stretched out from where she was spiked to the wall, through the iron bars of his cage, and touched his core. A jolt of power seized every muscle in his body, and the pain receded, overwhelmed by a rush of sensation. A new thread, deep red, grew out from his core like the sprout of a plant bursting its seed. Trist focused on it, and found that it was like one of Clarisant’s needles: he could punch through the world with it, if he willed it so, as easily as a scrap of linen.

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“There,” Acrasia gasped, reeling in her tendril. The pain from Trist’s empty eye-sockets returned, and the light of five burning cores in the room faded away again, leaving him mired in a world that was painted entirely black.

“Did it work?” Margaret asked.

“I think so,” Trist answered. “You need to tell me when they all go to sleep,” he told the Exarch of Rahab. “When no one is in the hall, and they’ve put out the torches.”

“It will be many hours, yet,” she warned him. “They only just broke their fast.”

“We have nothing to do but wait,” Trist said, and slumped in on himself, lost in a world of blind pain.

Trist tried to mark the hours by the coming and going of footmen as they served meals, and by the echoing voices of Decimus Avitus and his sycophants conversing while they ate. He recognized the voice of the woman, Amélie. When the Exarchs and Angelus had a moment alone in the hall, again, Margaret told him that she was the sister of Avitus’ vassal, Sir Beaumains.

“The kind of woman who makes herself important by attaching herself to a powerful man,” the Exarch of Rahab judged, with clear contempt lacing her voice.

Trist marked Sir Moriaen’s voice, as well, throughout the day, and other men he did not recognize. Sometime before the evening meal, he received a most unwelcome visitor, announced only by Margaret’s fearful intake of breath, and the utter silence of the prisoners.

“Such a shame what Avitus did to your face,” the daemoness Loray purred, reaching in through the bars to stroke her hand along the bare skin of his chest. Trist flinched. “Though,” she continued, “You will find that I am more partial to such things than a mortal woman would be. How do you think it would feel, for me to tongue your empty eye sockets while I ride you?”

“Get away from me,” Trist gasped, flinching away from her fingers, but he could not see her. She circled his cage, reaching in to stroke him like a prized stallion, touching wherever she wished, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

“There is a place where pain and pleasure become indistinguishable,” the Marquise of Hearts continued. “I could take you there, Trist. You won’t care about anything but what I make you feel. All you have to do is reject that crippled bitch on the wall, and throw yourself at my feet. Avitus will let you out of the cage then, and we can go right to a bedchamber. I’ll help you… rest.”

“I am married,” Trist began, but Loray the daemon archer interrupted him.

“She can be my slave, as well.” The words dripped with cruelty and the promise of ravenous lust. “Or we can use her, together, until she dies of exhaustion. That would be entertaining.”

“If you ever touch my wife,” Trist blurted, before he could stop himself, “I will not rest until you are destroyed.”

“You actually care about her, don’t you?” The murmur came right at his ear, Loray’s hot breath caressing his skin. “Before it was just a passing fancy, but now I am intrigued. What’s her name?”

Trist clamped his jaw shut.

“Learn your place,” Loray hissed, her voice cold and hard. “You will be my slave, today or tomorrow, or a moon from now. You will break, sooner or later. Now.” The daemon’s hand grabbed him between the legs, and squeezed, hard. “Her name.”

“Clarisant!” Trist shouted, finally, to make the pain stop, and Loray’s hand withdrew.

“Excellent.” The daemon’s voice returned to that seductive purr, as if she had never shown her cruelty. “I will make certain to collect her. I think the three of us will have great fun playing together. Consider my offer, Trist,” Loray called, her voice receding. Trist realized she must be walking away, leaving the hall. “It is the only freedom you will ever taste again.”

He could do nothing but whimper from his pain.

At some point, Trist must have fallen asleep, for he jolted awake at the sound of shoes echoing off stone.

“Who is it,” he hissed to Dame Margaret.

“The girl he beat,” she replied.

“Enid?” Trist called out.

“Shush,” Enid De Lancey scolded him. “Be quiet, Trist. I cannot be found here or he’ll… he’ll do horrible things to me.”

“Then you should leave,” Trist urged her.

“You spoke up to save me,” she said, her voice now so close that he guessed she must be right up against the cage. “Didn’t you?”

“Aye,” he confirmed, after a moment. “I promised your father I would protect you.”

“I didn’t know that,” Enid said. “Here. Stay still. I have boiled wine and clean linens, to clean your eyes.”

“You have wine?” Trist asked. “Give it to me, Enid. Pass the cup through the bars.”

“It is to clean your wounds, not to get you drunk.” Of course she would think that - he remembered her father’s fondness for wine, in life.

“Do as he says, girl,” Acrasia hissed. She must have been thinking the same thing that Trist was.

“Fine. Here.” A hand wrapped around his, pulling his arm forward, and then Enid placed a goblet into his fingers. Despite himself, Trist smiled. He unwound the orange thread of a boon from his core, and touched it to the goblet in his hands. For a moment, the other Exarchs, Acrasia, and the Angelus all glowed at the edge of his vision, but he ignored them, stirring the wine until it shone.

“Will it be enough,” Trist wondered, aloud. In the stories, Sir Madoc was able to regrow even a severed arm after drinking from Auberon’s Graal; but the graal itself burned a blinding blue-white, much more powerful than Trist’s Boon.

“I don’t know,” Acrasia admitted.

Trist took a deep breath to steady himself, then tipped the goblet back to his lips and drank. The wine slid smoothly down his throat and to his stomach, heating his body the entire way, spreading a warm orange glow all through him. The aches of his muscles, cramped from days in the cage, eased. The lingering soreness of the wounds in his legs passed away, and even the dull ache between his legs where Loray had squeezed him in her fist.

When the agony of his empty eye-sockets subsided, Trist sighed in relief. Muscles he did not realize he’d clenched loosened, as for the first time in hours his pain went away. “It’s working,” he gasped, then tipped the goblet to continue drinking. A few more gulps, and the light of the world would return.

Trist drank, and drank, until only the dregs were left. “No,” he moaned, dropping the goblet, which rolled out of the cage and hit the stone floor of the hall with a metallic ring.

“What is it?” Margaret asked.

“It was not enough,” Acrasia said. “He is still blind.”