There was no point in fighting them. Her hands were bound in stardust steel, and she wasn’t a fighter. But she fought anyway, digging her heels in, and when that didn’t work, dropped to her knees. They threw her inside easily, and locked the cage behind her.
Safire would have lasted longer, thought Eris miserably, staring out at them between the bars.Safire would have taken a few of them down before they overcame her.
But Safire wasn’t here. Safire was long gone—or so she hoped.
Most of all: she needed to stop thinking about Safire.
The cage lifted off the floor as the soldiers heaved on the chain, pulling it up toward the ceiling. It swung back and forth as it rose, spinning and spinning, making her dizzy. Between the spinning and the increasing distance to the churning water below, Eris had to shut her eyes, feeling nauseous.
It was only when the cage stopped rising that she opened them. Other cages—all of them empty—hung aloft around her. Beyond them, slender shafts of light sifted in through narrow windows high up on the walls.
Looking out between her bars, Eris found the platform impossibly far below and the soldiers filing out—all except two, who now stood guard. As if they expected her to make an escape attempt.
The door slammed.
Sitting now, Eris slumped forward, letting her forehead restagainst the bars of this cage, waiting for it to stop spinning. An eternity seemed to pass before it slowed. When it finally did, she opened her eyes...
And found herself staring into a woman’s face.
Eris shot upright.
The other prisoner sat across from her, locked inside her own cage, bathed in a beam of silvery light. Into the silence, the woman said, “Dear child. Why have they brought you here?”
“I...” Eris looked around them, but all of the other cages were empty. “Who are you?”
She looked back to the prisoner, and her gaze caught on the woman’s hands. Or rather, the place her hands would have been, if she’d had any. The fact that she didn’t, that her slender arms stopped just above her wrists, told Eris what she needed to know.
This woman was a traitor. An enemy of the Skyweaver.
Eris looked from the stumps of her arms up to the woman’s face.
And that was when her breath caught.
The woman’s eyes were pale green, like a meadow in late summer, and set too far apart—one of them looking in the wrong direction. Her body was knobby in places, as if she’d been assembled differently than other people.
Her presence wasn’t the startling thing, though. The startling thing was that Eris knew her.
Thiswas the woman from the tapestry at the foot of her bed. The one Day made her.
“My name is Skye,” said the woman, studying Eris back. “What’s yours?”
Sacrifice
Another contraction made Skyweaver cry out. Pushing away from the empress’s table, she rose to her feet, stumbling. Leandra turned to look and saw what Skyweaver had worked so hard to keep hidden: a belly swollen with child.
Accusation darkened her eyes.
Skyweaver fled, needing to escape her true enemy.
Needing to set the Shadow God free.
Her servant, Day, helped her climb the steps of her tower. But halfway to her weaving room, Skyweaver collapsed in the pains of labor. She could go no farther. So Day lifted her into his arms and carried her.
Inside the weaving room, he set her down and barred the door, trapping them both inside.
The baby came, wailing and beating its fists. As it did, Skyweaver gave it what was left of her immortality.
In the world beyond, the wind rose. The rain pummeled the panes. The sea raged.
