Dagny: An Inheritance Cycle Fanfiction.

18. A Conspiracy of Magicians

This chapter was a nightmare to write. Apologies if it's a little - or more like a lot - disjointed. I knew what I wanted to happen, but when I was writing I kept unintentionally wandering off on tangents and I had to do some pruning to get the chapter back on track.

Sarrin was the useless, gods-cursed bastard of a poxy slut. And a lot of other things besides, but Dagny was too tired to come up with anything more than the most basic of insults. Hell, she was too tired to even see straight. She felt drained, like she might after some stupidly extravagant feat of magic, like there was nothing left inside her but air. Like she was an empty sack, slowly collapsing in on itself.

What had that dog said? "Two flights up, the third set of doors on the left?" Well, she'd gone that way. She'd dragged herself from the cell the moment his smug, skinny little arse was out of sight. She'd limped down through dark, narrow corridors and up two flights of shallow stairs, leaning heavily on the walls and leaving scarlet blood tracked along the stone flags of the ground like a breadcrumb trail for any guards who might happen along. She could only imagine what Sverrir would say to this latest piece of idiocy. She had to imagine what Sverrir would say, since the damned poison was still clouding her mind, blocking off her magic and her connection to her dragon. She couldn't stop her mind going back, over and over, to that wounded place where her link to Sverrir should be. Like a dog worrying at a scratch. She couldn't stop thinking of it, of how worried he must be, how panicked, how afraid for her. She hoped to the gods he was watching Tornac. Gods only knew how much trouble that boy could get himself into, and it would be her fault. She was such a bloody fool.

She'd been wrong earlier. Her leg was definitely broken. That had become clear almost as soon as she tried to walk on it, her calf twisting, becoming more and more misshapen, until finally there was a length of snapped bone protruding just below her knee. Dagny was trying to keep her eyes away from it. Looking at the jag-ended, bleach-white spike made her stomach roil mutinously.

The torchlit hallways in front of her swayed and shifted dizzily as she lurched determinedly forward. Three doors, Sarrin had said. She could see the first of them ahead, broad, gilded wood, with a round knocker and no lock. She was more than half way there. There couldn't be far to go now. She was going to make it. She just had to keep moving, ignore the blazing scarlet agony that was eating up her mind from the inside out, and keep moving. Forward. Don't stop; if she rested even for a moment she would collapse, she would lie on the cold, stone ground until Rowan's thugs came to haul her back to that dark, filthy cell...

She made herself keep moving.

The second door. It was smaller, this one, a low, rounded slab of wood, but it was bolted shut. She wondered briefly where it led, then quickly decided she didn't care, she couldn't care less, she didn't care about anything but the pain. And the goal. She cared about the third door. She cared about getting to that meeting, that 'council' session and finding out...

Gods, she hurt.

She could see the third door now, and it was open. Unguarded. Someone had left the narrow wooden door half-ajar. The light from the hallway torches slid through the gap like a knife between ribs, vanishing away into shadow.

Move, Dagny ordered herself. Before someone comes.

She darted through the narrow defile, gritting her as the swift action sent shocks of pain through her leg. It hurt, but she couldn't afford to move slowly. She couldn't risk being seen; if they thought she knew anything, they might kill her on the spot. The prospect of torture she could face - just as long as she didn't dwell too much on it - but the thought of dying here, like this, cut off from Sverrir, without even speaking to him one last time - she regretted not flying with him last night. Bitterly. Especially since it might have been the last chance - but she couldn't afford to think like that. She had to focus.