Chapter 26
twenty-six
Aelen had tried to comfort me. When we slammed into the cottage, and I fell to the floorboards screaming, he attempted to pull me to his chest—to stroke my hair, my tear-streaked cheeks, anything he could. But I fought tooth and nail to suffer alone.
I'd doomed my people, and I didn’t deserve comfort.
Only when my cries became howls did he force me into his arms and carry my shaking body to the lounge. And there I shook, and screamed, and cried. As long as I wept, he held me and wouldn’t let go, but one thing rang in my head, as loud and cyclical as their cries must have been.
I have to go back.
I never slept, but sometime in the night I quieted, settled on silent sobbing. He stroked my hair, rubbed my back, but never said a word. When I could shut my lids without being haunted by their faces, my mind began to wander. To plan.
My return couldn't wait another day, or even until twilight. Whenever the sun rose to illuminate the ghastly cottage, I’d rush to Mourn, and explain to him where we would go. What my plan was. How we would kill Arthvur.
Then I’d tell Aelen. I wasn’t certain he’d listen, but it didn’t matter. He deserved a goodbye, and he saw what I did. He'd glimpsed their mutilated faced and he'd go to his father on my behalf—or he wouldn’t, and I’d visit Maelindiir myself and beg on my hands and knees.
I’d shred my pride, tearing it to pieces if it meant I could return, stop this bastard, and cease this carnage.
Tears trickled down my cheeks before the sun did. And when it came, there was no warmth, only more coldness.
Aelen had disappeared to somewhere in the cottage. When I found him bent over the hearth fire, with frazzled locks, mindlessly stirring a pot, I made an excuse about going for a walk, and he’d merely nodded.
“I’ll find you later.” He didn’t want me to leave, but we had some silent understanding that I needed the space. Really, a part of me did need to be alone to process. To know. To remember.
So I ran out into the forest, following the familiar road—until the noise, singing, and clatter of swords came from the direction of the stables.
My heart skipped a beat—I’d forgotten my bracelet.
I bolted back to the cottage, grabbed the enchanted jewelry, and hurried, only draping it around my wrist once I was well into the forest paths.
My skin chilled beneath the ominous gray clouds, but I chanted my prepared speech silently.
I need you to take me to Elatria. We will kill my father together.
I hurried to the stables, and wound myself through the blocks until I was at the very back, right where Mourn was. I was half worried he wouldn’t be here, since the last time I’d seen him was when I crashed into the forest floor. But when I slid the wooden door aside, there he was.
But for some reason, when I stepped closer, he snarled.
“Mourn, it’s just me,” I said, holding up my hands and heading to inspect the chains. Maybe they were too tight or hurting him.
A low growl rolled across his chest, halting me in my tracks. “Mourn, what’s gotten into you?”
He followed every footstep and scraped his claws against the wood. A threat.
The promise of violence if I continued.
But he could be hurting, be in pain. I needed to push past whatever had gotten into him, and get his shackles off.
“Are your chains hurting you? I can loosen them or take them off—”
As I said it and made for his shackle, he bolted forward with a flash of teeth. I jumped back, only missing them by a few fingertips. I crashed to the ground. While I tried to catch my breath, he began humming a sound that rolled across the vaulted ceiling. Beneath me, a rune formed.
It twisted with blue ice, crackling and crawling up the wooden walls, seething.
My heart raced as I rolled toward Mourn into a haybale.
A second after I made it off the rune, it exploded outward, embedding vicious shards of ice in the rafters—and one in the slat inches from my head.
Small chunks pelted my hand as I protected my face, turning to the long mirrored slab.
I glimpsed my reflection in the perfectly smooth ice: an I’phri woman cowering beneath a dragon, dripping blood.
The bracelet—he didn’t recognize me.
But there was no time to react or remove it. Mourn reared, ready to crush me beneath his talons.
I screamed, retreating, but his claw caught my boot and wrenched it away. Pain shot across my ankle. To match my scream, a thunderous roar rolled across his chest, so deafening it shook the very foundation of the stable.
Why couldn’t he see my soul? What magic was this?
He ripped at the chains, the horrible sound of bending metal grating on my ears. The horrifying realization churned my guts, spreading a sickening chill down my spine.
Those chains were never meant to restrain the dragons. They were nothing more than a deterrent. He'd shatter the metal, and I would die.
Why did I think metal could hold back a dragon's unbridled wrath?
I crawled back and hooked my hand beneath the bracelet to rip the chain clean away. Even quicker, I threw it into the corner as hard as I could before the irons shattered and my entrails colored the hay.
The chains slackened as Mourn retreated, huffing and scraping against the floor. I'd escaped death, but pissed him off in the process. My heart ached that he'd never forgive me.
“I’m sorry, Mourn.”
He huffed an angry greeting, his steam crackling in the cold. Yet the tightness in my chest remained.
As I pulled myself to my feet and put my boot back on with trembling hands, Mourn groaned at me. My ankle had taken on sickening shades of violet and green, at best bruised and at worst broken. I forced my weight onto it anyway.
When I brushed the hay from my leathers, the door crashed open, hanging off the hinge into the stable.
“What’s going on in here?” Nenlyn yelled. “I heard roars and screaming.” But when his gaze fell on me, the color drained from his face before it changed to vermilion, just like Aelen's had. His brows drew, and his hand shot to his blade.
And I wasn't wearing my bracelet.
“Nenlyn, it’s me… Lorelana,” I said, trying to keep my voice from cracking. I had a knife at my side, but nothing more, and didn’t want to pull out a blade if we could solve this with words.
He grimaced. “So you lied to me, to Lilara, and Teryn? Haven’t you done enough?” he spat. “Haven’t your people taken enough from us without deceiving us too, just like your bastard king?”
“I didn’t do anything!”
He unsheathed the blade, now brimming with tears and rattling with rage.
“Yes, you have! I was there when the king stormed our land and slaughtered our people. I was there when they killed Teryn’s bonded, and slit Lilara’s children’s throats.
They were children,” he screamed. “Children he butchered.”
My heart shattered. I felt it shred into a million pieces, and no matter how long I tried, I’d never put them back together. I'd never be the same.
He encroached, and I retreated, grappling for my small knife.
Then, like he’d been struck with lightning, he froze. “Your face—I recognize you. You were in the city! You were…” He inhaled. “He’s your father.”
“He tried to kill me too. And I watched him slaughter my brother," I said, putting as much distance between us as the wooden walls allowed. "You and I are the same, we've both suffered immensely at his hands. I would never have let him do that to your people."
He laughed a cruel sound. “Do you think I care? I don’t care what you’ve been through!"
"Of course I do! You're my friend, and I care about the I'phri!"
"You're no friend of mine. If you cared, you'd part your throat as penance for his crimes.
But you're weak, just like him." He inched closer, kicking up filthy hay. "Your pitiful words don't bring back Teryn or Lilara’s bonded. It doesn’t burn those images from our minds, and it does nothing for the pain. You deserve a fate worse than theirs.”
"I'm not like him!"
"You humans are all the same!" He took another step, tears streaming down his face. “What you deserve is to be strung up in our square, to watch as Ovatar eats our forests for all of eternity.”
The shadows around us shuddered, shooting to the darkest corners, and I yanked out my blade. But he didn’t flinch.
He ran straight for me.
I only managed to graze his arm as he pummeled me into the wooden wall, the planks groaning at the attack. His hand grappled for my knife, and try as I might, within a moment he snatched it away.
I tried to fight for Mourn to look, to notice, but he scraped and shifted. Still unsettled. Still angry. At me.
Nenlyn’s forearm pressed against my neck, painting stars at the edge of my vision and stealing my breath. He raised the blade until it was level with my iris. “Why don’t we start with your eyes?”
My mind filled with a rage and fear I’d never known before. My foot shot out, knocking him to his back. He skidded to a stop in the hay, and I bellowed as he jumped back up and slammed into my abdomen. He crushed me, and I screamed.
I forced him forward as the blade pierced the flesh of my thigh. Pain. Raw, shooting pain. And then he shoved me—hard. I fell against the stable, and he twisted me, choking me with an arm and forcing me against the wall until the rusted nails pressed into my cheek.
His elbow tightened, and my windpipe clenched and then closed. I tried to scream, to make any sound. But nothing came up, and no air went down. His weight squeezed me against the wall until every part of me ached.
“This is how it goes. How you die, and bleed for your sins.” He released just enough that I could gasp in a breath, but then his leaden weight continued, closing my airways once again. “Breathe—prolong this. I want you to suffer.”
He was toying with me.
When my lungs burned again, this time a fire in my chest, he didn’t release me. With no reprieve, stars shot across my vision, blinding me. I grappled at the wall, blindly searching for something, anything to not die.
Magic, magic.
But I couldn’t feel the thrum in my chest, not against the burning. I couldn’t feel anything besides the life slipping from me. The ache turned to a shriek for air, as my vision faded into shades of snow and then a welcoming void as the stable slipped away.
Death, death.
Coming in fast. I couldn’t stop it, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think.
Life, I want life.
My hands ran down my body as I pressed my weight into him.
I found the knife’s handle sticking from leg.
I couldn’t feel it against the screaming in my chest for air.
In one last bitter attempt, I wrenched it from my flesh, and shot my hand back with every remaining bit of strength.
The blade found purchase. The arm around me loosened.
I gasped in a breath, and with it returned my vision, the pain, and the world.
Nenyln stumbled back with a scream, and I spun to see the blade sticking out from his arm.
“You bitch,” he spat. “Unrepentant bloody human bitch.” He stumbled and swayed, holding his maimed limb, but I wouldn’t let him pin me again.
I found Mourn’s eyes, and the rage that roamed there, no longer for me. He scraped and huffed. He was waiting.
I wouldn’t make him wait a second longer.
I began a quick song, not even a melody, only a few sonnets, of ice, of walls, and of pain.
Mourn’s blue rune skated along the floor finding Nenlyn’s feet.
Before he could react, the rune flashed bright and filled with ice.
It crawled up over itself, and a thick, giant icicle shot from the floor.
Nenyn jumped back, just in time, the blade still hanging from him.
But he was off guard. An opportunity I wouldn’t waste.
I skidded around the icicle and threw my weight on him until he fell to his back, screaming. I pushed, forcing him down by his shoulders. He screamed again and thrashed as I ripped the blade from his arm and pressed it to his neck.
I didn’t want to kill him. I didn’t want to kill anyone. This would be my first murder. The very first taking of a life and a soul, but it was his or mine. And I wasn’t going to die.
“I’m sorry,” I cried, pressing the blade in. “I’ll be quick.”
But right as I went to slice, he kicked me square in the chest. I flew backward and slammed into the icicle, dazed.
He took off, running through the wide doors.
I scrambled to a stand, trying to keep on his heels as he shouted for his friends and help.
The snow caught in my hair with the brutal wind as I pummeled through the muddy path.
Right as rounded the corner, I slammed into someone's chest.
I gazed up to Aelen, who looked just as startled at me.
“What’s going on? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” His gaze flicked across me until it found my weeping leg. “Singers, what’s happened?”
“Nenlyn, he’s going to get the others—I have to stop him.”
His body held, spine straightening. “He saw you? He stabbed you?” But he shook it away, with a quick pat on my shoulder. “Meet me at your cottage, I’ll deal with it,” he deadpanned as he started to jog away.
“I can deal with it,” I pressed.
“No, you’re bleeding and limping. Go to the cottage, I’ll be there shortly.”
He ran off down the alley of stables and out of sight.
I wanted to follow, but he’d been right too many times, and frankly, it was time to trust his judgement.
If he played his cards right, he might have a chance of smoothing this over with his fellow riders, more than if I loomed over him. I need to trust him for once.
Yet my heart still thundered as I headed back toward the cottage, with the pain rapidly growing from an ache to agony.