It holds. For half a second.
Then it shatters inward.
The sound is thunder. Steel rips like paper. Bricks explode. One guard screams as he’s thrown back ten feet. Another opens fire—too late. I backhand him into the stone.
River sprints past me.
“Go!” I shout.
She grabs my wrist, hauls me behind her. We run through the breach, out into the dark fields beyond.
Behind us, horns blow.
But ahead—trees.
Moonlight on leaves.
Freedom.
And for the first time in years, I don’t feel like a weapon.
I feel like something worse.
I feel like myself.
The trees rise like teeth, jagged and ancient, cutting the moonlight into slivers. I don’t slow down. River clings to me with arms tight around my neck, her breathing shallow, lips pressed into my collarbone. I can smell the blood before I feel it soaking through her cloak.
“What hit you?” I growl, the rage already buzzing in my jaw.
“Arrow,” she says, barely more than a whisper. “Back there. I didn’t want to slow you down.”
“Where?”
“My thigh.”
“Shit.”
I slide to a stop just past the treeline, easing her down onto a moss-covered rock. The smell hits me full force now—iron and something sweeter, wronger. Poison. I snarl low in my chest, peel her cloak away, and see the shaft sticking out just above her knee. Black wood. Barbed tip. Glint of dark green along the metal.
Laertiez’s fucking poisoners.
River’s pale, but her eyes are sharp. “Just pull it out,” she says through clenched teeth.
“You’ll bleed out.”
“Kragna. Now.”
I brace one hand above the wound, grip the arrow with the other, and yank.
She screams, fist slamming into the ground hard enough to leave a crater. Blood wells up fast, thick and dark. But the worst part’s the stink of it—sweet and sharp and wrong.
“Fuck,” I mutter. “It’s envenomed.”
“No shit,” she gasps, sweat beading along her hairline. “Just cauterize it.”
“Not enough. It'll spread. I need to draw it out.”
“You’re not?—”
