Chapter 28 Ravana’s Armor #3
“Darling,” she murmured, limping in a slow circle around him.
“If you had told me this is how it’d end between the two of us, I would have thought you were crazy.
” Her voice hitched on that last word, her eyes glassy and distant.
They regained focus, however, when she stopped at his head.
“Would you prefer to bleed out? Or— Oh, this would be more suitably ironic.” She placed the tip of the blade against his throat.
“Morfran the Beheader, beheaded by his beloved wife.”
She raised the blade high over her head. He swallowed the blood in his mouth and shut his eyes before he could watch his end come swooping down.
Ravana let out a strangled choke. His eyes flew back open. The sword still hung up in the air like a flagless pole in her arms. But protruding out of her chest, right where her heart was, was the black tip of a dagger.
Whoever had stabbed her in the back wrenched it out, and Ravana fell, hitting the floorboards beside him. He saw her eyes flit to her killer, right before they fell back on him, and he saw, before she died, the gleam of a wicked smirk on her lips.
No.
With groaning pain, he rolled to his side, pushed up, half in panic, half in disbelief—
Bronwen stood over them. Her bindings gone. Her hands empty.
“Bron,” he murmured. How? How had she escaped? How had she killed Ravana with the hex?
She didn’t reply. Her eyes weren’t on him, but on some far-off thing in the room, and her breath was growing heavier, her chest heaving with increasingly greater pants. Her hands flew to her torso, her face twisting in pain.
“It hurts—” she choked out to no one, before her knees cracked against the floorboards.
“Bron—!” He coughed, dragging himself towards her.
There was blood blossoming through her armor, right where she’d stabbed Ravana.
She slumped to the ground. “What did you do?” His words came out in breathy stutters, his stomach wound stunting his breath.
“Why didn’t you stay put? You were supposed to stay out of the way! ”
“Morfran.” Her fingers found his. Her grip was weak, growing weaker by the second. “I think…that kiss…”
She didn’t get to finish. The light was bleeding out of her eyes. He forced himself to sitting position, with his back against an armchair, and held her in his lap. “Stay alive. Stay awake. Bron—please. We’ll get Drezella. She can heal you. She can—”
Her head fell against his chest. The last spark of light vanished from her eyes. She was dead. It was that quick.
“Bronwen?” He inhaled a frantic sob. No.
She wasn’t supposed to die. Someone good like her deserved to live.
She was supposed to find both him and Ravana dead, find relief and release in it, and walk out of the castle with a lighter heart.
She was supposed to go back to her garden, go back and join her father and brother, go back and celebrate this long fight against him with triumph.
She wasn’t supposed to die.
“You hate me, do you?” He forced back tears. As his body lay dying, he wasn’t inflamed in pain but felt himself growing cold, growing numb. “That’s fine. You can hate me all you want. But you have to hate me when you’re alive.” He buried his face in her hair. “Only alive.”
He pulled back. Started crawling across the room, towards the shelves of Ravana’s spoils of war.
He reached up towards a vase only to nearly black out.
With his foot he dragged the knife towards him, and using that extra reach, managed to knock the vase off the shelf.
The nightshade scattered like purple threads before him.
He gathered it, then dragged himself back to Bronwen’s body, feeling already weaker, like the energy was being sapped from his blood by a nasty illness, and all he needed to do was just sleep.
Taking her back in his arms, he pressed the nightshade against her heart, where Ravana’s magic had killed her.
He hesitated then. He hadn’t done this in many years.
His father had tried to teach him, out in the graveyard late at night, where none could see their actions.
Each time he’d brought the dead back wrong; they were mindless.
They bled. They decomposed. They were never the same as before, and it was because Morfran had always thought of his future boasts rather than the deed itself and the selflessness it required.
He wasn’t thinking about any of that now. He was thinking that she’d probably return to life only to quicken his death once she saw him.
Even then he pressed his fingers against her wound and muttered the ritual words in the old language, the language that still possessed a few traces of power if one spoke it aloud.
Please. His eyelids were dragging shut as he chanted.
He forced himself to stay upright. Just a few more seconds.
Just a few more. He was dying. The strength keeping his hand pressed against her chest faded.
He was slumping against the chair. Still, he forced his lips to say the words, to finish the incantation, to finish, to finish—
“Morfran?”
The voice speaking his name was muffled, like he was beneath water and it’d been said above the surface. The last thing he saw as he died was the shape of a turtle off in the distance, waddling ever so slowly towards him. If it reached him, he wasn’t there to find out.