Chapter 35 #3
I tried to stand, but my legs shook, my body weak from hunger, from beatings, from the whiplash of power returning. The cold beneath me was brutal, but it could not numb what I had just seen.
Evadne was dead.
Gone.
She sacrificed herself for me.
I pushed up anyway, palms burning against the snow, eyes stinging.
Then movement flashed to my left.
A figure launched off the platform above and landed on the ice slope I had made, sliding down with the same lethal control he always carried, as if even gravity answered him out of habit.
Rhydian.
He descended fast, cloak snapping behind him, boots carving shallow lines in the frost. He hit the bottom near me and came up smoothly, sword half-drawn, eyes already scanning, calculating, hunting. More soldiers followed after him. I was about to be surrounded. My brief escape was short-lived.
I looked at his face and something broke loose in my chest that sounded too much like laughter and not enough like sanity.
“She just killed her daughter,” I said, voice raw, disbelieving. “She snapped her neck like she was breaking kindling.”
Rhydian’s jaw tightened. His gaze flicked to Evadne’s body. For a fraction of a second, something flashed in his eyes. Not grief. Not horror. Recognition. As if this was the true face of the queen, and he had been pretending for years that it was something else.
His voice dropped low, rougher than I had ever heard it. “Elara.”
“What?” I snapped, shaking, trying to stand upright, trying to be a person instead of a carcass clawing through snow. “Is this your honor? Is this your sacred Icespire devotion?”
His eyes cut to mine, sharp and urgent.
“Get up,” he said.
I stared at him, disbelief boiling into rage. “Are you still going to drag me back to her?”
His throat bobbed once.
He looked up toward the platform where Marisella stood, her silhouette perfectly still, perfectly certain, as if she were already bored of this delay. Then he looked at the approaching soldiers with defeat.
The queen lifted her hand again, and the soldiers surged forward like a tide.
Rhydian stepped closer to me, voice so quiet only I could hear it beneath the chaos.
“No,” he said. “Not this time.”
Rhydian’s hand closed around my arm, hard enough to bruise, and yanked me upright like I weighed nothing more than the rags hanging off my bones.
Pain sparked through my shoulder, but I barely felt it over the roar of the courtyard and the sickening certainty that the entire castle had turned its face toward me like a mouth opening.
Soldiers poured down the stairs from the wall, steel flashing, boots carving trenches into the snow, faces rigid with duty they did not understand and fear they would never admit.
I saw the way their eyes kept flicking up toward the sky, toward the horizon beyond the wall, toward the invisible thing stalking them.
Not just my trial. Not just my execution.
This was a ritual with a second purpose, and every man in the courtyard knew it even if no one had said it aloud.
“Move,” Rhydian ordered, and his voice was not gentle. It was sharp enough to cut through my shock. “Now.”
I stumbled, chains clinking behind my back, my feet slipping on ice and packed snow. I was barefoot, half-starved, half-shaking, and still my magic buzzed under my skin like a living thing that wanted out, frantic and furious and too big for the frail body it had been shoved into.
“Rhydian,” I gasped, breath tearing in my throat.
“Move!” his voice boomed, echoweaving sending his command like a weapon toward the approaching soldiers, forcing them back as if an explosion had gone off.
He shoved me forward, and I nearly fell again.
Someone shouted, “Seize her!”
Another voice snapped, “The queen wants her alive!” Alive. Like that was mercy. Like it mattered what condition they kept me in as long as my heart still beat long enough to serve their plan.
“They’re coming!” I screamed.
Rhydian shoved me toward a narrow passage between stone buildings where the wind cut less sharply. “Stop talking,” he snapped. “Run.”
“I cannot run,” I hissed back, trying not to trip, trying not to sob, trying not to be the thing I refused to become. “My hands are chained behind me.”
His eyes flicked to the iron. His mouth tightened with something that looked dangerously close to regret.
“I know,” he said. Then, lower, more urgent, “Just keep moving.”
A soldier lunged for me from the right.
Rhydian pivoted and struck first.
There was no flourish. No heroic spectacle.
He moved like a man who had ended arguments with steel for most of his life and did not need to convince anyone of his skill.
His blade flashed, a quick diagonal cut that sent the soldier stumbling backward, blood staining the snow in a bright line that looked obscene against all that white.
Another soldier raised his spear.
Rhydian slammed his shoulder into him, driving him into the stone wall hard enough that the man’s helmet rang like a bell. The spear clattered to the ground. Rhydian’s sword came up again, swift and merciless, and the soldier dropped.
I stood there for half a heartbeat, staring, frozen in disbelief that this was happening at all, that Rhydian Veyne was cutting through his own people because I was on the wrong side of a queen’s anger.
“What are you doing?” I demanded, voice shaking. “What is this?”
His gaze snapped to mine, furious in a way I had never seen turned inward. “I am dying on my own terms.”
My throat closed around something sharp.
Another wave of guards surged toward us.
Rhydian shoved me forward again. “Elara, if you stop moving, I will have to carry you, and I do not have time to drag your stubborn corpse through a war.”
“Charming,” I spat, stumbling hard, my feet numb and useless.
“Stay angry,” he said tightly. “It will keep you alive.”
We burst out of the narrow passage into another open stretch of the inner courtyard, closer to the outer gate, and the cold hit me like a slap.
Wind tore across the stone, carrying the scent of smoke and oil, of metal and fear.
I saw more soldiers rushing from every direction, drawn by the queen’s command like moths to fire.
I saw banners snapping wildly, their symbols stiff with frost. I saw the execution platform above us, and I did not look at it long because Evadne’s broken body was still on the ground behind us, and my mind could not afford to touch that horror again.
Queen Marisella’s voice rang out from above, carrying unnaturally far. It rolled over the courtyard like judgment.
“Bring them back to me now!”
Her words turned the guards into a single hungry organism. A pack. A net tightening.
Rhydian yanked on the chain between my wrists, then shoved me forward, forcing me into a run I could barely manage. My lungs burned. My bare feet scraped against ice crust and stone. My dress clung to my legs like wet paper.
I did not know how far the gate was, only that it existed somewhere ahead, and it was the only line between me and the blade they had sharpened for my throat.
We reached the base of the outer gate tower, and for the first time, I understood exactly how hopeless this would have been without him.
The gate was not a door. It was a beast of iron and wood, a portcullis thick enough to stop an army, built into the stone like part of the castle itself.
A massive crank sat on the left side of it, attached to heavy gears that looked ancient and unkind.
It would take two men, maybe three, to lift it quickly.
The kind of mechanism designed to make escape impossible even if someone reached it.
Rhydian shoved me toward the wall, pressing my shoulder into the stone with his body shielding me from arrows and sightlines.
“Do not move,” he said.
“I cannot move,” I muttered, teeth chattering. “I am chained and half-dead, remember?”
His eyes flashed. “Do not be clever now.”
I laughed once, short and ugly. “When do you want me to be clever, Rhydian? When I am bleeding out on your snow?”
He turned away before I could see what that did to him.
Then he went to the crank.
His hands closed around the handle, and he began to spin it, muscles in his arms tightening, shoulders flexing under his armor. The mechanism groaned in protest, gears grinding as if they resented being asked to do anything for someone like me.
The portcullis lifted an inch.
Then two.
Then three.
Not fast enough.
The soldiers were already closing in.
“Rhydian!” I hissed, panic crawling up my spine. “They are coming.”
“I know,” he snapped, spinning harder.
I stared at the gate, at the widening sliver of space beneath it, and realized the queen had engineered this too.
Of course she had. She had built her castle like a trap, designed every exit like a test. If I escaped, she could still control the shape of my escape.
Control where I ran. Control what waited for me beyond the wall.
Because beyond the wall was no man’s land.
And beyond that was the forest with a waiting army.
And the dragon they were hunting.
I was not just running from death.
I was running toward it.
The sound of approaching armor swelled, loud and relentless.
Rhydian’s breath was becoming harsher now. He was lifting the gate by himself, forcing the gears to obey through pure strength and rage. The gap beneath it was wide enough now that a woman could crawl through.
Barely.
He looked over his shoulder at me, eyes sharp and furious.
“Go,” he ordered.
I stared at him like he had gone insane.
“I am not leaving you,” I said, the words tearing out of me, my voice already breaking.
His mouth curved, sharp and humorless. “You are not staying for me.”