Chapter 11 The Escape
THE ESCAPE
His magic forced me to run.
My legs jerked as it hooked into my muscles. I could scream, but I couldn’t stop walking. Every stride felt stolen, my body moving while my mind stayed in the throne room, with the bodies and blood.
The executioner encountered guards. He slashed throats with waves of his hand. More death. A spray of red hit the wall beside my head, and I flinched.
We stormed outside. Ice crusted the hedges in perfect spirals, a beauty only runes could maintain. Snow blanketed the roses but not the rune-marked paths, steam rising where snowflakes landed. Through the mist, statues loomed like frozen sentinels.
The crimson barrier swirled around me—some sort of defensive magic that moved when I did, keeping pace like a cage made of light. Was it to keep others out, or me in?
The executioner strode into the watery sunlight, drawing his broadsword.
Gods, what now?
He’d slaughtered the entire court. I replayed the carnage over and over. Blood. Screams. The wet thud of bodies collapsing.
My teeth chattered as the cold bit into my ruined hand. Scorched skin. Blackened veins spiderwebbed up my arm. My stomach lurched, bile burning my throat. My knuckles had turned an ugly shade of purple, and where my fingers curled toward my palm, blisters swelled. Some had already ruptured.
A whimper escaped my lips.
The executioner stopped dead.
In two strides, he was at my side. His gaze flicked to my trembling hand. He grabbed my wrist, turning it gently.
I hissed, jerking back. “Don’t.”
“I won’t allow you to lose a hand.”
Why not? He’d just killed dozens of people.
I shook my head violently, pulling against his grip. “I don’t want your magic anywhere near me.”
“Be still.”
Darkness threaded through his words.
I wanted to rip away, but I froze as his hand hovered over mine. Red light spread from his wrist, and I braced for him to peel me apart.
The light traveled like a slow-burning ember until it pooled in his fingertips. Heat radiated from him, not searing but wrong. It crawled inside me, burrowing too deep.
I shuddered. “What are you—?”
It was like sunlight melting through frost, surging through every shattered nerve.
“Almost done,” he muttered.
Then the pain faded.
I inhaled sharply as the blackened veins receded. The injured flesh knitted together, and my fingers uncurled. A faint pink line traced up my wrist, but the damage was gone.
I flexed my hand. The skin was raw and tender but healed.
“How did you do this?” My voice cracked.
He clutched my elbow. “Healing rune. We need to move.”
“No, please…just let me go!”
He yanked me forward.
I thrashed, but it was no use. His strength swallowed mine effortlessly as he steered me through the palace gardens. A distant bell tolled, and he quickened his pace.
We reached the garden’s edge. Ahead loomed a maze-like structure, its footpath carved with runes. I squinted at them, my breath misting.
“What is that?”
He glanced at me. “A passageway meant for the royal family and their most trusted advisors in the event of an attack.”
“Where does it go?”
“Out.”
That could mean anything. A cell in another court. A battlefield. The bottom of a ravine.
He pushed me into the maze, and the runes in the stone flared. Soft white light pulsed beneath our feet, moving like veins under skin. The hedges were massive, woven so tightly I couldn’t see through them.
As we neared the center, the ground fell away, and the hedges shifted into a new path. After a few turns, we stumbled out.
I braced myself against the numbing wind and clutched my throbbing hand.
Giant evergreens lined a sprawling forest. I looked around. Skalgard was a smudge of rock in the distance, the city barely visible against the snow-blanketed landscape. My entire life had been spent within those walls.
Twenty-five years. I’d never been outside them. The sky felt too big, the horizon too far. Wrong. All of it wrong. My entire world was in that city. Rheya. Kavi. The infirmary. Every street and hiding place.
I was out here. Free.
But Rheya wasn’t.
My chest tightened. “How did we get all the way here?”
“Portal,” he muttered.
“A rune can transport people this far?”
“The magic required is enormous,” he admitted, glancing at the distant city. “The runes have to be fed staggering amounts of power to work.”
“And you happened to know the location of this one?”
He grunted. “I’ve had a century to prepare for this day.”
“I need to go back. My sister—”
He planted himself in front of me. “No. You’ll die before you take ten steps past the gate.”
“I have to look for her.”
“And how will you do that? They’ll skewer you on sight, human.”
I ran around him, but I bumped into a wall of muscle. His arm shot out, catching me before I hit the ground. The heat of him burned through the thin fabric of my dress and a horrible dread spread through me. I could feel the raw strength coiling in his grasp.
I seethed. “Let. Me. Go.”
“No.”
My stomach dropped.
I shoved against him with my good hand, but he didn’t budge.
“Listen to me, human. We’re fugitives. They’ll scour this land for us.” He leaned in close, his face inches from mine. “They will mount our heads on spikes outside the palace gates.”
A pang stabbed in my chest. “What about my sister? She doesn’t have anyone but me!”
“Dead martyrs help no one.”
The vision of Rheya chained in some dungeon cleaved straight through my rage. He was right. I couldn’t help her if I was dead.
His grip eased. “Come.”
We walked for an hour.
The forest swallowed us, shadows pooling thicker at the base of each trunk. My legs ached, but the executioner’s pace never faltered, those broad shoulders cutting through the biting wind.
We finally stopped at a stagnant pool filmed with green scum. Something had died in it, and it reeked. The smell was worse than the plague pits they'd dug outside Skalgard two winters back.
The executioner studied the pool. Then he looked at me.
“In,” he said.
I blinked. “What?”
“Get in the water.”
I peered into the pool, which was too still and dark.
The executioner sighed. “This is the way out.”
“You’re insane if you think I’m going in there.”
His glove gripped my shoulder, and then he shoved me into the water.
I gasped as I plunged down. I kicked, struggling to find the bottom, but my feet only met more pond scum. Gods, it was freezing.
I broke through the surface, gasping.
The executioner knelt at the edge, watching me thrash. Slowly, he slid into the water with barely a ripple. The water came up to his chest, slipping off his steel. His arm curved around my waist.
I screamed as he pulled me underwater.