Chapter 28
Twenty-Eight
Fear
As soon as she cried out, I’d already been moving.
I crossed the distance to her in two strides and caught her as her leg failed.
She was going down. A knife was in her thigh.
The blade had gone deep. Where had it come from?
There was no immediate enemy threat. The monster was dead. The passage was empty.
But we’d been herded down here for a reason. This was a trap, and fury licked at my chest, seeing her hurt. Whatever was coming to hurt Cara would find death.
Someone took the potion. My fingers had closed on nothing, the flap hanging loose from my belt. Someone had taken it deliberately. Someone who knew where I kept it and what the taking would mean.
I held that thought and set it aside. Later.
“Take it out,” she said.
“No.”
I was already moving, already carrying her, my assessment of the injury and the distance to the exit and the fastest route occurring simultaneously in the part of my mind that processed these things without needing direction. “You’ll bleed out faster. I need to get you to a healer.”
She didn’t argue. Cara, who argued with everything, said nothing.
I carried her through the labyrinth, deeply aware of her: the warm weight, the agony she bit down, her damp face sliding across the leather that covered my chest. I had carried her before, back in the barracks when she was exhausted, and I’d felt a flush of victory to be given her trust.
Around the knife in her thigh, blood welled and then spilled over, soaking her clothes and mine. Rubies and emeralds winked from the hilt. It was not the kitchen knife she’d first carried or the blade I’d replaced it with. Something else entirely, a blade I didn’t recognize.
Cara had no resources but me, my clan, and the allies she had made—actually, she had considerable resources she had knit from nothing. But still, this knife—clearly expensive—was a mystery.
The potion: gone from my belt. Part of the trap set for us down there. But where was the rest of that trap?
The knife: not one I had given her. Carried today, not yesterday or last week.
Her behavior this morning: avoiding me. After the queen.
I had misread her.
The startled realization settled over me, followed by cold, restless pain.
She had come into the Hunt today carrying a knife she’d acquired, and my healing potion was gone from my belt, and she had a wound in her thigh that hadn’t come from anywhere else.
She’d stabbed herself.
She had started looking away when she didn’t want me to read her—she knew how easily that came to me—and she was looking away now.
I shouldered open the door to the healers. There was someone in my way who dove to one side as I crossed the rest of the distance to one of the slabs. I set her on it carefully. Eased my shoulder out from under her. “Healer!”
She was bleeding from a wound that she had meant for me.
Siona ran to us. “What happened to her?”
She was already checking Cara over carefully.
“She was stabbed. As indicated by the knife sticking out of her leg.” I was out of patience.
“Take it out, please,” Cara moaned. Sweat beaded along her forehead; tears were still leaking from the corners of her eyes. “I’m going to—”
Siona’s gaze snapped up to one of the assistants who had just reached her. “Get her a sleep draught.”
“I need her awake.”
“She’s going to pass out anyway when I pull the knife. Mortals are weak,” Siona warned me.
“Not this one.” My voice came out hard. I had watched Cara fight fiercely, a mortal in the shadow of dragons, and no one would insult her.
Cara’s gaze flickered to mine. I put my palm on her forehead, smoothing back her sweat-dampened hair. “What danger is your family in, Cara?”
Her eyes widened at my understanding. Her voice was thready. “The queen intends to raise them. Unless I leave with them.”
“I told you she won’t.” My voice was rough. It startled me. I never heard myself sound like that, ragged and nearly out of control.
“She will!” She strained forward, her fingers going for the knife, as if she were going to wrench it out of her own leg so she could reach them.
Or so she could try again to bury it in my gut.
I gathered her wrists in mine, pinning her hands to her chest. “Stop struggling. Siona’s trying to save your life, and I will be very vexed if you die before we can discuss today in full.”
Her gaze narrowed at me, and I hadn’t seen such hate in her expression since I took Lidi’s magic.
“They. Will. Die. I have to save them.”
Understanding was beginning to crystalize for me, and every bit of it felt as if it were hardening in my chest. “You can’t save anyone, mortal. Rest.”
She started to say something else, and I cut her a warning look. Siona and her assistants surrounded us, and I would not tolerate exposing her secret to anyone.
Mortals rushed to the arena doors, hoping for the chance to be raised—though my mother would have chosen her most prized sycophants long ago for their usefulness—but Cara was already their rising goddess. She could mean more, offer more, be more than my mother.
But the story of how she had stabbed me would make it rather difficult to set up the happy ending where dragon shifters and mortals united to remake the world.
“Coming out,” Siona said, and the most terrible, animal sound was wrenched out of Cara’s body.
I gathered her in my arms, murmuring soothing nonsense into her ear. Nonsense she didn’t deserve and that might not even work because she had fooled me once. I had misread her, this tricky little mortal.
I was furious at my mistake. I shouldn’t be furious at her, shouldn’t feel this rage that sang hot through my blood even as I held her. If I were furious at her, then she had all the power over me.
I’d misread her. A mistake. My stupidity.
“Fear,” Shadowbane murmured in the back of my mind, and his gentle tone made me even more furious. “Even you can be betrayed. You can admit you wanted her to choose you; then you can understand why she did not.”
“Shut up.” I had no clever response to Shadowbane for once in my life.
She was still thrashing. I half-lifted her from the table, pulling her against my chest, her head under my jaw, so I could hold her still. “Do it.”
Siona still glared at me. “Get her under control or put her asleep!”
“No.” Cara grabbed my arm, her fingers twisting desperately into my flesh as she arched up to meet my gaze. Her eyes were wide, her pupils blown large by the pain, but she was still fighting. “I can’t sleep. Lidi. Tay. If I can bargain with the queen—”
“You’ll have to trust me.” The words came out flat and hard.
“Fear, please—”
My gaze flicked to Siona’s, and that was all she needed. One of her aides was at my side with a sleeping draught.
“The knife’s enchanted,” Siona said, indicating the wet red blade she had set on the slab. “Do you know how?”
“No.” If the blade had been poisoned with an enchantment, that narrowed down the list of where Cara might have obtained it.
“There’s something wrong with the wound. It won’t stop bleeding. We need to know what enchantment is on the blade to save her.”
They did not need to know if I got the unmaking knife from Ander. I could cut away whatever the queen had intended for me.
“Give the draught to her.” I kept Cara’s hands still pinned to her stomach and her back against my chest so there was nowhere for her to go as she fought.
“No. Fear, please—” She sounded desperate, raw, in a way that once would’ve triggered my need to care for the little cur.
“I’ll take care of them. You can’t be trusted to take care of yourself.” My other hand caught her chin, forcing her head up against my chest. “Rest.”
The aide poured the draught down her throat. Cara fought it, some of it leaking from the corners of her mouth. I thought she was going to arch up and spit it all out, but she had been growing weaker all the time she struggled, and now she slumped back in my arms.
I carefully lowered my would-be murderer to the slab.
Once she was down, I ran.
I plunged into the labyrinth.
Because Cara was right to suspect me in one way. Her family was not my first priority.
She was.
For her own sake? For Lightbringer’s?
I had never been good at mathematics. I wasn’t going to trouble myself with those calculations.
A Casque came around the bend ahead of me.
They looked like an enormous roach. One of my mother’s favorites because fighting it felt gruesome, horrifying, and a bit undignified.
I didn’t break stride.
The sword came to my hand. The fight was both brief and far longer than I had patience for. The monster went down, and I leapt over it and kept running.
She wasn’t going to die like this, with my mother’s blade poisoning her wound, my mother’s victory poisoning her heart.
It was Anayla and Kiegan I found first. Anayla stabbed one monster as another dragged itself forward from another tunnel; she leaned into the blade still buried in one chest to stabilize herself as she kicked the other monster in the chest, and it flew toward Kiegan, who was ready with his own sword.
Kiegan drew the sword loose from the monster, ichor splattering in luminescent streaks across the floor.
“I need you to get to Ander,” I ordered without preamble. Kiegan’s head snapped up, his eyes wide. “Cara’s under an enchantment. I need the unmaking knife Ander has. Now.”
“Where is she?” Kiegan asked.
“With the healers.”
Kiegan’s brows drew together. “Is she all right?”
“If you get that knife, she will be.” I turned.
“Where are you going?” Anayla demanded.
“She needs me to fetch something else.” I turned back and kept walking backward. “If Cara wakes, tell her I’ve already gone. That I keep my vows.”
She gave me a dangerous look. “Tell me what’s happening, Fear.”
“I’ve no time.” And no inclination.
I turned and ran. Anayla and Kiegan were the right people to watch over Cara in my absence.
Now I needed Asrael and Dairen.
Then the Nightwalkers.
“Save her,” Shadowbane urged, as if I could have done anything else, no matter how much rage coiled within my chest.
“I’m keeping her alive,” I reminded him.
“That’s not enough.”