Chapter 35 #4
Something inside my chest split open. “I hate you,” I sobbed, the sound ugly and raw, my vision blurring until his face doubled.
“Do you understand that? I hate you.” I shook my head, breath hitching hard.
“You betrayed me. You handed me to her. I spent every night telling myself there was still something human left in you, and you let me believe it.” I laughed once, broken.
“I hate you so much I could freeze your heart in your chest and sleep better afterward.”
“Good,” he said quietly. “Hold onto that.” His eyes flicked past me, measuring time, distance, death. “We’re even now.”
The words landed wrong. Familiar. A ghost of a joke from another lifetime, back when saving each other had been accidental, reluctant, inevitable. My throat closed.
“Now crawl,” he added.
“I am not a dog,” I snapped, even as my knees trembled, even as tears spilled down my face and froze against my skin.
Rhydian stepped closer, his voice dropping into something lethal, something that left no room for pride.
“Elara.” He caught my face, hard enough to anchor me.
“If you do not go now, they will chain you back to that platform, and the queen will rip your bones from your body in front of her people.” His grip tightened.
“She will do it slowly. She will do it smiling.”
His forehead rested briefly against mine, just for a breath. “Live,” he said. “That’s the debt.”
Then he released me.
My breath hitched.
I took one staggering step toward the gate.
Then another.
The cold on the other side looked darker. Meaner. Like the world outside the walls had no interest in pretending to be civilized.
Behind us, the first soldier rounded the corner.
He saw Rhydian at the crank, saw me at the gate, and his expression shifted into something sickeningly gleeful.
“Traitor!” he roared.
Rhydian didn’t even turn.
“Go,” he snarled at me. “Now.”
I dropped to my knees, breath heaving, and shoved myself forward.
The iron scraped my back as I slid under it. Snow soaked into my dress instantly. My arms burned behind me. My face hit cold ground, and for one humiliating second, I was nothing but a starving woman crawling through a gap like a rat fleeing a burning house.
Then I was out.
I rolled onto my side in the snow, chest heaving, staring back through the narrow opening at Rhydian still holding the crank with one hand, sword in the other, fighting to keep the gate lifted as soldiers descended on him.
For a heartbeat, the world went silent in my ears.
And then I saw him turn fully, blade raised, shoulders squared, and he looked like every myth men wrote about themselves to feel clean in their own sins.
I pushed myself up, shaking violently, and my voice tore out of me like a confession.
“Rhydian!” I screamed.
His eyes met mine through the gridded bars of the gate.
And for a single breath, he looked almost young.
Almost human.
Then he said, so softly I nearly didn’t hear it over the chaos, “Run.”
I ran until my lungs turned to knives and my bare feet stopped feeling like feet at all, just raw nerves striking the frost like a punishment I couldn’t pay off.
The snow in no man’s land wasn’t soft, not the innocent kind that belonged on windowsills and children’s mittens.
It was packed hard and sharp as ground glass, crusted over by wind that never rested.
Each step sent pain up my legs in bright, vicious jolts, but my body kept moving anyway because the part of me that wanted to live had stopped negotiating.
Survival did not care that I had accepted death last night.
Survival didn’t honor resignation. It only recognized motion.
Behind me, the portcullis groaned.
The sound dragged across the air like something enormous waking up, iron teeth grinding against stone, and I knew exactly what it meant without needing to see it. The gate was dropping.
I slowed, just for a breath, not because I was tired but because the instinct to look back was older than fear.
Older than logic. It was the same instinct that makes you turn toward the sound of your own name, even when you know the voice calling it will be the thing that ruins you.
I spun half a step, chain clinking behind my back, chest heaving, and stared.
Rhydian had dropped the crank.
The moment I cleared the threshold, the gate ceased to matter. He was already moving, sprinting for it, sword in hand, armor flashing dully in the morning haze as he tried to follow the path he’d shoved me onto. He was fast, disciplined, lethal in a way that should have made him untouchable.
But the soldiers were faster today because they weren’t just guards anymore.
They were a net.
They were prepared.
They were waiting for the exact second he would choose me over the queen.
A spear took him first, not through the heart, not merciful, not clean.
It drove into his side beneath his arm where his plate didn’t fully cover, and Rhydian jerked like the world had been yanked sideways.
He still kept moving. Still swung his blade.
Still cut a man down in front of him like spite could stitch him back together.
Then another soldier slammed into him, and another, and suddenly there were too many bodies, too many hands, too many blades trying to make him stop being a person and become a lesson.
For a heartbeat, I saw him through the bars, half-kneeling in the snow, his sword still raised, his head lifted like he refused to bow even now.
Another blade slid between his ribs, and Rhydian made a sound I felt more than heard, like the last breath of something proud being forced out.
His gaze snapped up again, not to the soldiers, not to the wall, not even to his gods, but outward.
To me.
Straight through iron.
Straight through distance.
And then the weight of bodies swallowed him.
My stomach turned so hard I nearly retched. The sickness wasn’t grief. Grief implied something pure. This was worse. This was the nausea of watching a man finally do one good thing with his life and pay for it in the only currency Icespire accepted. Blood. Loyalty. Meat.
I forced my head forward again. Because staying to witness it would not bring him back.
And because if I gave Icespire even one more second of my attention, it would take the rest of me as payment.
I ran. Arrows flew past me from the top of the wall.
The air ahead of me opened wide, a blank stretch of white leading toward the jagged tree line of the forest, and I could see shapes moving out there, too organized to be animals.
Dark figures half-hidden between trunks.
The waiting army. A second death dressed up as strategy.
My chest tightened with the brutal irony of it, because of course my escape led directly into another trap.
Of course the only road out of one execution was a sprint toward the next.
A crack split the air behind me.