I stagger back, blinking down at the hilt of a dinner knife lodged just beneath my ribs. I lift my eyes to Ronin’s face.
“What are you doing?” I stammer, wincing through the ache.
His jaw clenches. “Stabbing you. Obviously.”
With infuriating calm, he withdraws the blade and tosses it onto the table with a dull clink.
“I didn’t know who you were. Had to be ready.” His gaze flicks to the wound. “You can heal that, right?”
I grit my teeth. It’s nothing, barely a flesh wound. It was only a dull knife after all, but I am in no mood. I press my hand to my stomach, emerald light flooding under my fingers, sealing flesh in a heartbeat. I need pain to heal, and there’s enough sorrow burning through me right now to heal an army.
He mumbles something, but I don’t care. I push him aside as my gaze darts to the crib. My daughter reaches up with tiny hands, blinking at me with her father’s eyes.
She’s safe. That knowledge alone is enough to steady me.
“Daed is in danger,” I tell him, breath catching as I swallow my sobs. “I need to go to him. You have to stay here with her.”
Ronin bristles. “When did I become the damned wet nurse? I am a warrior. I command the Legion of Saints.”
“Perhaps in the Sundered Kingdom,” I snap. “But here, in this cabin, you’re just the idiot who stabbed me with cutlery, and right now, I need you to protect my child.”
He doesn’t budge. That scowl stays iron-flat.
I roll my eyes. “You’re the only one who can,” I bite out.
That does it. His face changes immediately, smugness blooming like a weed.
“Well, why didn’t you lead with that?”
Souls. Male pride. So easily stroked, so pathetically delicate. For all their boasts of strength, I’ve never known creatures more desperate to be needed.
“You will take Ashen then?” he asks. “Did my eyes deceive me? There were two of them out there?”
My lips tremble as I struggle to find the words I need, but before I can speak, Ronin yells.
“Behind you!”
It’s too late. I see the reflection first, the blur of motion in his wide, panicked eyes. A shadow moves behind me, and something heavy cracks across the back of my skull.
The world fractures. My legs give out, and the last thing I see is the wooden floor as I fall.
Chapter 32
Daed
The stone is cold as ice beneath my cheek, drenched with rain that pelts down like it means to drown the world. I lie sprawled on my stomach, hands bound tight behind my back, face turned just enough to catch a glimpse of the brilliant, full moon burning in the storm-wracked sky.
We’re in the sparring courtyard. I’d know this stone anywhere, by its sharp edges, by the hollow sound of water striking its surface like a drumbeat of memory.
Boots march past my face, splashing in puddles gone black with blood. I track one pair, sluggishly, until my gaze finds Reon collapsed to my left, his mouth slack against the stone, unmoving. Orios lies next to him, then Solena. All of them soaked through. All of them bloody. Faces swollen and half-unrecognizable from the beating.
“Brother,” Zyphoro murmurs, her voice raw beside me.
I force my head to turn. Even that small movement grinds pain through my skull. Look what they’ve done to her. Raven hair plastered to her face, soaked in blood. Her hands are bound like mine, the ropes biting into her wrists. Through the curtain of rain and the blur of my bruised, half-shut eye, I can barely see her.
“Can you hear me?” she asks.
I nod, or try to. “Do not show them fear. That’s what they want.”
