CHAPTER 18
The guards secured the struggling and cursing prisoner to the towering column, a cloth sack covering his head. A chain shackled his wrists around its circumference, and his cheek pressed into the cold marble as he threatened the four junior knights from the garrison.
“Leave us,” Kasta ordered when they were done. The rest she could do on her own, and there were things that still needed to be said—without others listening.
“But our orders were—”
“My orders are from the king, and I’m your senior officer,” Kasta answered. “I said leave now and speak of this to no one.”
They shuffled back a few steps and retreated, not just because she was their senior officer but because there was something wild in her expression.
Kasta turned and faced Kierus. He was quiet now, the only sound his labored breaths.
She stepped forward and yanked the sack from his head.
A strand of hair hung over his brow, a strand she might have once smoothed back with her fingers.
His dark eyes drilled into hers, eyes that had always made her weak.
Even now, they wrenched something inside her.
“You can’t do this, Kasta,” he pleaded. “You can’t. We have too much—”
“Stop!” she ordered. “I let you go once, Kierus. I let you go, and you betrayed me.”
“I didn’t tell anyone what you did. No one knows—”
She shook her head. “You still don’t understand! I disobeyed orders! You didn’t leave as you promised. I trusted you, and you turned around and stabbed Tygh. You made me complicit. It may as well have been me who plunged that knife in his gut. Can’t you see that?”
“I swear we were about to leave. But—”
“I’ve had to live with my decision. It eats away at me. Every single day. I loved you, Kierus. I loved you so much that I let you go. I wanted you to be happy, even if you couldn’t be happy with me.”
He winced at the truth that he could never bring himself to say. “I always cared about you, Kasta. You know that. What we had together was good. It just wasn’t the same as—”
“As with her.” Her eyes welled. “I could have been a monster. Is that how your tastes run, Kierus?”
“Please, Kasta, these are Tyghan’s orders. Not yours. Don’t do this.”
She smiled and a puddle in her eye spilled over, trickling down her cheek. “Because of Bristol, he took mercy on you and only ordered a month of imprisonment. It could cost him his crown.”
Kierus’s mouth opened, his misery replaced with surprise.
“But Judge’s Walk is always a thousand years. It gives the worst of the worst time to contemplate their choices. It’s what the council ordered, and it’s what I’ll give you. I’m fixing the terrible mistake I made, right now.”
Kierus strained against the chains, his wrists bleeding as he screamed at her. “No! Kasta! I beg you! You can’t do this! Please!”
She pulled the dropper from the bottle and put four drops on the column and whispered, “Eda laespi mil fidan. He is yours for a thousand years.”
The drops began smoking, spreading over the column toward Kierus, like the liquid was tracking his scent.
When the first drop reached his arm, his skin began cracking, turning to stone the same color as the column.
It spread up his arm to his shoulder, toward his face.
A hoarse sound jumped from this throat as he struggled to get away.
The other columns down the line shivered and whined, waking from their stupors, sensing that another soul was being added to their ranks, reminding them of their own crimes and despair. A dark magic crackled between them, searching for power they no longer had.
Kasta watched as Kierus twisted and screamed in a futile attempt to evade the creeping curse, until his screams were finally muffled by the stone inching up his neck, and the column slowly absorbed his body.
The agonized sounds stopped as his head was pulled into the column along with everything else, except for the chains around his wrists.
They dropped to the ground with a loud clatter, and then there was only silence and the tick of time inside Kasta’s head. The time she had wasted. The time Tyghan had lost. The time Kierus had stolen from them all. The time he would now give back, always remembering his last moments with her.
“Now I will be your monster,” she whispered.