All I can do is gape at her.
She watches me as if she expects me to reply. When I don’t, she prompts, “Well? Did you or did you not trick and steal and kill, Lady Cheat?”
“I guess that’s the reason I was drugged and kidnapped, right?” I retort. “For me to go on trial and be asked that very question?”
Her fractured eyes glitter. “Indeed.”
I drag myself up to a crouch, my trembling muscles nearly giving out as I force my body to stand. Splatters of gold stain the room, the shallow puddles already starting to dry. It’s left splotches all over the men’s pants and boots, none of the gold responding, just as limp and wrung out as I feel as it lies on the floor in useless strips.
“Come with me now, unless you’d like to try to use your stolen magic again?” she asks amicably, her pale lips reminding me of the white sands of this kingdom’s shore. “Oreans who relinquish themselves to the Conflux are forbidden from using power.”
Wincing, I sit up straighter. “Well, I didn’t relinquish myself, so you can fuck off with that rule, and I won’t be going anywhere.”
This time when she pinches her fingers together, it feels like my skull is being flattened. I scream, falling over with my hands against my head, my eyes feeling like they’re about to burst like grapes. Agony ripples through me until I’m sure my skull is going to crack and my brain turn to mush.
It’s only once I feel blood leaking from my nose that the pain ends.
Slumped against the wall, I glare at this woman with so much hatred through my blurred eyes I’m surprised she doesn’t catch flame. My body feels destroyed, like I’ve been shoved in a shrinking room while the walls closed in on me, crushing me in its claustrophobic hold.
But I bleed gold. Cry gold. So I use my tears and my blood and try to move it, try to shrink them to pins so I can stab her through her horrible fingers and needle through her throat, but she presses again, cutting me off before I can do a single thing with that either.
“I can do this all day, Lady Cheat.”
I snap my eyes up at her, tears of pain bunching up my lashes. “Then do it,” I challenge. “Because I do not relinquish myself to the Conflux. So you can suck my gold and go to hell.”
For the first time since she came in here, the woman’s spurious smile falters. The men behind her shift their feet. When she brings her hands in front of her chest, I flinch, thinking she’s about to use her awful magic on me again, but instead, she laces her fingers together and bows her head. “Great Divine gods, I beseech you to purge these blasphemous words from our ears and redeem our spirits’ light.”
In unison, the guards behind her murmur, “Purge the world of darkness.”
“And illuminate our purest selves,” she finishes.
A chill goes down my spine.
“So you can torture someone with pain power, but you think it’s a sin to say the world hell?” I spit out mockingly.
She drops her arms and looks at me, a hard glint in her fragmented eye. “The afterlife is not for you to speak of. I have visible proof now you indeed stole the Golden King’s magic.”
“I never stole it,” I snarl. “This magic was always mine. He used me. He was the thief, and I’m glad he’s dead.”
There’s a small intake of breath through her lips. “We can add liar to your name as well. Thieves and cheats do not have the right to reference a spirit’s hereafter, and certainly not liars and murderers.”
“But you have the right to torture and hold me captive?” I retort.
She straightens her shoulders, looks down the thin bridge of her nose at me. “I am Isolte Merewen, Queen of Second Kingdom and First Matron of the Gathering of Temperance. The gods bestowed this power of pain on me so I may exact punishment on immoral souls. It is no sin, my lady. It is my duty as a patron of sanctity.”
My lips press into a thin line. Everyone in Orea knows that Second Kingdom holds very strict factions of religions. The more famous offshoot, however, are the Deify. They live in the Mirrored Sahara with their silence, tongues cut from mouths like tumors off a limb and discarded, as if their speech was an abscessed infection sacrificed to the gods. The Temperance I’ve heard of too, but barely. I certainly didn’t know this plain woman was the queen, leading the whole kingdom and this sect of puritanical doctrine.
“You will come now for Cleansing.”
I lift my chin. “I will not.”
I brace myself for the pain to hit, but this time, she simply nods at the men. I kick out as they come for me, but my movements are slow, ineffective. Like a kitten swiping uselessly in the air. With one on either side of me, they haul me up between them and start towing me from the room, gold smearing beneath my dragging slippers as the queen leads the way, as if she’s so unthreatened by me that she’s unafraid to show me her back.