Chapter Thirty-Two #2
If Talon is right and there could be more than one of us left alive, then any of us remaining have to support that interpretation of the rule. Oona would never agree to let others live, but someone like Saraid…
Fierce, raw hope sears in my bones.
The rain pours down in sheets that turn the world to slate.
The roar of it threatens to drown out everything else.
Oona’s face is soaked with the spray of crimson, dark bursts of it all across her front.
A crumpled form in a dark cloak lies at the base of the castle behind her, but it’s raining too hard to make out who she is—Aisling or Saraid?
I stare at Oona, chest heaving.
She lunges.
Once, she might’ve caught me. But Finn spent years drilling me in back alleys, teaching me how to fight dirty. I dodge her attack and throw my weight onto her back. Shove her down to the soaking earth, and push her face into a puddle of mud and filth.
She rears backward, slamming her head into mine, and stars explode inside my head.
Shock slows me down, and she’s on top of me in an instant.
The blade flashes in her hand, and she stabs for my heart.
A scream rips in my throat. I shove one hand up, fist colliding with the empty socket of her dislocated shoulder, and she howls. Her face goes as gray as ash, and I twist my whole body, flipping her off me and pinning her in the mud.
“Yield!” I scream at her, not caring who hears me now.
Nothing but hate burns back at me in her eyes.
End it.
Wolf’s voice curls around my mind as if he’s speaking right over my shoulder.
Finn’s voice drowns his out.
One day, your life might depend on whether you’re willing to get your hands bloody.
My knees pin Oona to the soaking earth.
Every muscle in me trembles. My hands shriek, the palms burning raw from the rope and the climb down the turret.
Fury cranks up every one of my senses. Not just at her but at all of this.
At what this world is forcing us to be to survive.
I hear the ragged rage of her roar, see the terror flashing sudden and bright in her eyes.
She bucks, fighting ferociously—desperately—to throw me off her.
I grip my thighs, refusing to let her shift my weight, and reach to rip the blade from her hand.
She slashes for me, but I throw my weight and pin her arm down.
Dig my nails into her wrist again until her fist releases, and snatch the blade hilt.
Mine are too far to reach for, lying in the soaking mud.
Every human instinct in me fights back. I shove them down. Turn that part of me off, and heave it into the drowning dark well at the back of my mind.
This is what I need to do to survive.
To walk away from this and kill a king.
To make it back to my sister and the fight to save magic.
Oona shrieks, and I heave the blade into her chest. A scream tears my throat apart. Her whole body seizes. I strike like she’s the epitome of everything that’s been done to us.
This feeling—it’s vengeance, and it controls me.
My blood is ice, then fire.
There’s no control. No thinking. Nothing except the deafening thrum of my pulse until I taste the sharp bite of iron. Until I can’t even feel the hilt clutched in my white-knuckled grip.
Oona’s frozen, unseeing eyes stare back at me, and I can see myself reflected in them.
Wild—possessed.
Horror floods in, crashing over me, and I retch. My stomach heaves up bile.
Shadows shift at the edge of my vision in the slashing rain, and I stumble off the corpse beneath me and lift her blade with shaking hands.
Topaz cat eyes stare back at me.
Blood soaks the tangles of golden hair knotted in lank, wet braids.
My throat works, words fleeing from me. Does she know we could challenge the rule that only one survives? There’s a brutal gleam in her eyes—I can’t tell.
The crowd roars. A murderous, thunderous burst of energy crackles through the rain and the thickening mist blotting out everything beyond the stands. Fuck, how is it getting even thicker? My skin crawls.
Saraid circles me.
Her back is to the stands, and to anyone in the baying crowd, she must look like an animal about to go in for the kill. But I’m close enough to see the wariness in her eyes, the blood smeared in her hair.
“I don’t want to have to kill you.” Saraid drops her voice, battle-axe raised high at me. “Not when we could both rise and walk away from this.”
Rise.
I risk one half step closer to her, one eye glued on her axe.
“Why should I trust you?”
Saraid is working with the Whisperers, but what if this is a trap?
Low enough for only me to hear, she hisses a rough, rolling string of syllables—the same ones I sounded out from the edges of the book Wolf gave me, the same ones Talon told me mean that, maybe, not all of us have to die.
“Because we both know it doesn’t have to be this way,” she says, and those cat eyes are pools of pure, calculating menace. “Now drop your fucking blade, or I’ll have to explain to Wolf why I killed his little pet when he so nicely asked me not to.”
He what? “I’m not his pet.”
“Prove it.” Saraid cocks her head in challenge. “Yield and prove you’re worth the price of keeping you alive.” Her slash of a mouth twists up. “Or die on all fours like a dog with my axe in your chest.”
I don’t trust her. I can’t trust her, right? She’s a noble—everything I should hate, should want to tear apart.
But Wolf… he trusts her.
Rain hammers down, blurring everything in brutal streaks of slate and gray and black, and thunder erupts overhead. Lightning forks, and I smell it—the static charge of chaos sizzling all around us.
My heartbeat sounds like wings in my ears. And there’s no room for doubt or hesitation in the answer that crashes through me now.
I trust Wolf. Despite everything, I do.
So I trust her, too.
My fingers unclench, and the blade falls, smacking the mud.
Saraid tilts her head, rain streaking the blood in her golden braids to rivers clawing down her cheeks. She steps toward me, axe still high.
My heart seizes.
Then she turns to face the crowds and slides her axe into the holster at her hip.
There are no bodhran drums, no rising melody of pipes through the howling, ripping wind—nothing but static building and racing up my spine. The mist is so thick, the very vines in the garden seem to lose their color and shift deathly gray in the dark fog.
Saraid offers a hand to me, her eyes unreadable in the slashing rain.
I take it—and the crowd gasps.
“Two survivors?”
Another thunderclap.
The wingbeats of my heart only grow louder, louder.
The pressure in the air around us electrifies; my ears pop.
Angry voices, shouting now: “Cheaters! Traitors!”
Saraid tenses, her eyes flying to mine.
Just as a massive, swooping shadow drops low over the courtyard.