I tried to speak, but my swollen and cut mouth along with the retractor kept me basically mute.
“Hmm?” he asked. “What’s wrong, cousin? Cat got your tongue?”
He had no idea how close to the truth he was.
“Oh, well. I’ll tell you anyway. It was really very simple,” he started. “Do you remember how High Cliff gave the rule back to the House of Gill after they took control of Lowden in the eleventh reaping?” He snorted. “All because of some misguided notion that the idiot Gills deserved it? Though let me ask you this; if the oh-so-perfect Gills were stupid enough to let a Graykey take their crown four generations ago, why does anyone in their right mind believe they would’ve been any more capable of keeping hold of it in this day and age? Because they definitely were not. I proved that true with hardly any effort at all. Do you know how incredibly easy it was for me to murder the real Tomrick Gill and assume his identity for the past eight years, so the clueless High Cliff king would personally place the crown on my head instead, giving me the rule of Lowden? It was so easy, Quilla. So fucking easy.”
Wait. Was he saying he’d been impersonating Tomrick Gill the entire time Gill had been the King of Lowden? For eight full years?
Impossible. He’d have to be—
“Now, I know what you’re thinking,” he went on. “How is this possible? A glamour could never hold that well after so long. But not even my mother—the great mistress of disguise herself and the most powerful glamour artist the Outer Realms has ever seen—can hold a candle to my abilities. I’m a blood-born Graykey after all. She is not. In fact, I bet Melaina could stand in front of me in my Tomrick Gill skin and look me straight in the eye, and she still wouldn’t be able to see my true form.
Dear God. This was not good.
“No one’s even once suspected I’m not the real Tomrick Gill,” Qualmer announced. “Not even the poor lout’s wife, and I fuck her quite often.” He gave a low, sadistic chuckle. “The bitch queen would probably drop dead from horror if she knew she’d been spreading her legs for a Graykey all these years. From the way she talks about us, damn, even mentioning the word Graykey gives her the vapors.” He sighed as if refreshed. “I say it’s sweet revenge that she’s the whore who bore my children. Of course, I had to steal them away at birth so she wouldn’t catch on to the truth. Glamoured them all so it’d look like they were stillborn deaths to her, and then I held her and stroked her hair in sympathy while she mourned them. Best act of my life, I tell you. But then, maybe not; she’s quite possibly the most gullible person I’ve ever met, too.”
I heard scuffling and a clunk as he did something near the doorway. “But it works out better for me this way. With the kids hidden away from her and being raised by a trusted source, I can bring them up in the true way of the Graykey.”
The true way of a Graykey? I had no idea what that even meant. But coming from Qualmer, I didn’t figure it was pleasant.
“I mean, they’d need to be trained from an early age to rely heavily on their magicks and prove themselves worthy so I can know which one is the most powerful, and therefore which one to keep alive, don’t they?”
I was beginning to think that being saved by him was going to be a worse fate than if I’d just stayed here with Everett.
His footsteps came my way again, and I tensed with no idea what he had planned. When a lit torch appeared under me, I gasped, fearing death by fire.
“Oh, calm down,” Qualmer muttered impatiently. “This is for the map. Not you.”
And he set the blazing torch against the edge of the enchanted parchment, where his attempts to destroy it finally saw fruition. The sheet began to blacken and crinkle as the fire took hold and burned through it, incinerating all proof of where the remaining Graykeys lived.
But then it began to burn me too. Heat lanced my front as if I was being roasted over an open flame, and smoke filled my nostrils. I sputtered and coughed, my eyes filling with stinging tears.
Finally realizing he was cooking me along with the damn map, Qualmer muttered, “Whoops, shit,” and he stomped out the flames with his boot until only black charred remains of the map were left. “Don’t want to kill you there. I still have need of you.”
Yeah, that did not sound promising.
“Now how the fuck do we get you out of this damn thing?”
He inspected the extractor for a few minutes before growling, “You know, a little helpful advice would be nice. You want out of this thing, don’t you?” He nudged my leg. “What’re you just lying there like a damn mute for? I remember when you were a child; we couldn’t get you to shut up. It was annoying as hell.”
I squeezed my eyes closed, wishing I could tell him exactly why I couldn’t talk.
And so he spent another five minutes cursing as he studied the extractor before grumbling, “Fuck it.”
He kicked the remains of the map out of his way, and he started unbolting the clamp on my wrists.
With my strength completely zapped, my arms simply sagged down toward the ground once each was freed. Qualmer jerked a step back after the first dramatic arm-drop. “Damn. You’re not dead already, are you?” He nudged me, then pinched my arm, finally getting me to jolt in response.”
“Nope. Still breathing,” he decided.
He freed my ankles next, then the brace over my hips, and my head after that, so he could save the one across my chest for last. When I fell to the ground, utterly unable to catch myself, I landed with a jarring splat that knocked me unconscious.
When I came to, Qualmer was rolling me over onto my back.
“Mother of God,” he gasped, lurching away as he gaped at me. “You look like hell, my dear.” Then he inched closer again to cringe and inspect every bruise and swollen laceration on me. After a dry, unamused laugh, he shook his head. “And they call us the monsters. Jesus. No wonder why you couldn’t answer me or even use your powers to save yourself.”
Wait. He still thought I had my abilities? Strange. I’d been without them for so long it seemed like everyone should know I no longer bore any magic.
The retractor was jerked from my mouth. I sobbed from the pain but also the relief that followed. My body shook from the intense reaction, just like it did every time my jaws were freed from their unrelenting clamp.
“Seriously, how the hell am I supposed to get you to Lowden alive while you’re in this condition? You could die just lying here.”
He fetched a cup of water and tried to pour it between my lips, but I was used to sucking my water from a rag, so what portions didn’t spill out the sides of my mouth pretty much tried to drown me instead, and Qualmer had to roll me onto my side to keep me from choking further.
“Christ, you’re almost not worth the effort. But I can’t leave you here to die; they’d probably find a way to use the blood left in your corpse to make a new tracking map. And I honestly think the two of us are the only Graykeys left in the Outer Realms—besides my children—so I urgently need your reproductive plumbing to help me start my new generation.”
Say what now?
“After I find a man willing to fuck you and get you with child—thrice, of course—I’ll merge your three offspring together with my remaining one, and we’ll raise the next wave of Graykeys to take back this world, ruling it like we were always meant to.”