Chapter 48
This floating feeling was too familiar. This quiet place where she didn’t think or see or feel. It was too easy to stay safe in the oblivion. It was, she recalled with sick amusement, very similar to dying.
Arla’s body rocked beneath her – was it perhaps a ship?
No, it wasn’t smooth enough for her to be travelling on water. Her eyes fluttered open, a dull ache thudding in her head along with her heart. Her face felt tight, crusted with … her own blood, probably.
The skin of her wrists and ankles had been rubbed raw, the ropes they’d bound her with so tight that they cut painfully into her. The earth passed her by in a smudge of green and brown, her stomach churning at the speed of the motion. Horseback – it came to her then; she was on horseback.
Slowly she pulled herself upright, wincing at the pounding in her head and the stiffness of her neck from hanging down beside the horse’s shoulder. Arla blinked, making out the two guards either side of her, both dressed in the black uniforms of Elrod’s dark army.
Gods, what had happened?
It came to her suddenly, with startling clarity, and her spine snapped upright as she remembered what had taken place in the mountains. How she’d agreed to hand herself over if it meant Elin could escape.
Arla didn’t even know if Orson had been true to his word…
‘Whore’s awake,’ she heard one of the soldiers grumble, and a dozen heads turned to look at her.
Arla committed every face to memory. It was carved as a promise in her heart that she’d hunt each and every one of them down and drag a blade across their throats.
Her blades…
Gone.
She wore nothing but the nightgown in which she’d fled Flambriar, the flimsy fabric torn and bloodstained as they continued on in a rhythmic trot.
She knew without looking at the bruise of a palace on the horizon where they were headed. She swallowed the fear that reared inside her at the sight of it.
But … perhaps that was better than the other fear currently strangling her. The fear that was enough to induce panic merely at the thought.
The thought that…
She couldn’t feel the bond.
Bile rose in her throat. She couldn’t feel the bond.
Where Thara had always lurked in Arla’s consciousness, there was now a gaping black hole that stretched so far and so wide that Arla wasn’t sure she would ever discover the edges of it.
She searched her mind, dug as deeply as she could for some inkling that her dragon was there, that she … that she was still alive.
When not so much as a sentient finger tapped along that pathway in her brain, Arla finally accepted her fate.
She was a prisoner and her dragon was dead.
Orson appearing in front of her was nothing in comparison to that sort of dread.
‘Finally awake, I see,’ he jeered.
She wished for nothing more than to kill him. She reached for the dragonhart brooch just to see if something would aid her.
That too, of course, was gone.
‘I’ll fucking kill you,’ she seethed, her voice croaky and dry.
Orson laughed – a harsh sound that sent spittle flying. ‘I look forward to it.’
He turned his horse away from her then, to face the looming iron gates of Larkire.
The party halted just outside, and she looked grimly at the King who stood there with a satisfied grin settling onto his roughened face.
He looked older than the last time Arla had seen him, as if the corrupt power he was stealing had found a way to drain every speck of life from him.
She was glad.
Arla was dragged off her horse and forced to her knees in front of the King, her blood already spilling from wounds that had reopened during her harsh handling.
‘Welcome back, assassin,’ the King said, gloating as he lifted her chin with the toe of his boot. She wanted to snap his ankle. ‘I’ve waited a long time to have you on your knees before me.’
Arla’s heart sank like a stone.
The things they could do to her here…
Well, it wasn’t worth thinking about. She only prayed Elin had made it to Flambriar in time to warn them.
‘Get her out of sight before someone sees her. The last thing we need is an uprising in the name of the bitch.’
Orson dragged her off the floor by her bound wrists, his sour scent washing over her and making her wretch. She could fight. She could kick and scream and attract the attention of those Elrod didn’t want knowing his business.
But there must have been a hundred soldiers lining these gates – more than she had ever seen before at Larkire Palace. To fight would mean her death.
She wasn’t quite ready for that yet.
And so she bowed her head and yielded. She bowed her head and let Orson lead her, bound and bleeding through the front gates of the palace, beneath a stone archway caressed by the flapping folds of a blood-red banner.
And past a silver dragon chained to the ground.