What Feasts at Night (Sworn Soldier, #2)

by T. Kingfisher

I had the unpleasant feeling that I was riding straight down a giant throat.

The country of my birth, such as it was. Riding down a road that made me feel as if I was being swallowed whole.

According to the doctor who told me the name of that ringing in my ears, a few hundred years ago they thought that it was caused by wind getting trapped in your ears. They used to treat it by drilling a hole in your skull to suck the trapped wind out. Now they just said, “Can’t help you, sorry,” and prescribed laudanum to help you sleep.

Armed with a candle, my first target was the little room where Codrin normally slept.

I pulled the blanket up to my chin and felt very small, like a mouse myself, listening while something huge walked overhead.

I heard another kachulkni, cawing off in the distance, and listened to the breeze sighing through the leaves. Hearing it felt almost like when my tinnitus fades away and all the sounds come creeping back together.

Come to think of it, the silence was a lot like tinnitus. It rang in my ears the same way, drowning out everything around it, and making my thoughts echo unpleasantly inside my skull, as if every word was being read out just a little too slowly.

What if it wasn’t the woods? What if it was me? Could this be some obnoxious new manifestation of my maladies—soldier’s heart and battle nerves and whatever had gone wrong in my ears, between the cannon fire and the gunshots and that time back when I was young and foolish and kept a gun under my pillow and it went off an inch from my ear? Christ’s blood, that was an unpleasant thought. I kept telling myself that we’d be back in Paris as soon as the snow came, since Miss Potter could hardly hunt for mushrooms under such conditions, but what if going back to Paris didn’t fix it? What if I ...

I would play chess for an hour. I never won a game, but at least he had to work to beat me.

A roar started in my ears, climbing to a high mosquito whine. It was all in my head, but it drove out the awful unfamiliar silence and replaced it with awful familiar noise.

I realized that the silence had returned and settled like an unwelcome guest.