For a moment, nothing.
Then—
Pain.
Subtle, at first. Just a needling pressure underneath my ribcage. Then it spreads wider, a jaw of jagged teeth yawning open before clamping down on my heart with a ferocity that nearly doubles me over.
“I have to go to her,” I hear myself say.
Kestrel's hand becomes a steel trap. “I'll send others to hunt for the dragon. Right now, we need to get you somewhere safe, and you need to stay there.”
A reply rips out of me, primal and bristling. “I'm not safe if Sesca isn't safe. Now take your hands off me.”
Her voice is just as savage. “Don't be an idiot.”
I yank free of her grip with a strength that doesn't feelentirely my own, even as somewhere, deep in my thoughts, a small voice wonders if she’s right to call me an idiot.
Then panic surges through the bond, more devastating even than the pain.
“She needs me,” I whisper, and there is nothing else except this thought in my head, and every other feeling scatters except the desperate urge torun.
Kestrel tries to grab for me again.
I duck her reach, turn, and break into a sprint.
The palace blurs past. I'm moving with speed I shouldn't,couldn'tpossess on my own, one that’s desperate and divine and barely directed, slowed only by the fact that I'm not overly familiar with this wing, and so I don't know where the nearest exit is.
For a flickering instant I considermakingan exit, driving myself through one of the rain-lashed windows, taking on the glass and the drop and whatever comes after without breaking stride. I don't care if it hurts.
I don't care about anything except getting to wherever Sesca is.
But some last fragment of human sense stops me. I find a staircase instead, taking it multiple steps at a time, and burst into the wide, grand entry hall at the bottom.
“Stop her!” I hear Kestrel shout from somewhere far above and behind me.
The guards lining the space look confused but follow the order, converging toward me from both sides.
The first one who reaches me suffers the full force of the primal creature I’ve become, catching me before I have a chance to rein myself in; I hit him with enough force to send him flying into the far wall.
As soon as I take my gaze off him, two more guards are already grabbing for me.
The first misses as I swerve right. I hook my fist into his stomach as I go by, flinging him down, sending a hairline crack splintering through the floor where he lands. The second starts to slow, reconsidering, eyes wide—but her arm is still outstretched, still reaching to block my path.
My hand moves without thought, grabbing and snapping bone as if it was nothing more than a tree branch.
The agonized cry that rises out of the guard is enough to turn my stomach, but I still don't stop.
Because the doors are right there.
And Sesca is somewhere beyond them.
“Owyn! Stop!” Briar's voice, ragged and barely recognizable through the roaring in my ears.
I don't look back.
I don't know how she manages to get in front of me. But she does, stepping into the doorway with one hand raised between us, her whole body shaking. “You can't go.” Her eyes cut briefly to the guards groaning in pain, then back to my face. “Youcan't. You aren't thinking clearly. Something is wrong with you.”
Wrong.
