The trial starts again, the soldiers clearly still enjoying firing at me, even though I’m hardly an impressive target at this point. I stagger forward with everything I have left, even though I know it won’t be enough.
Duck, says a sudden, whispery voice in my mind.
My gaze jerks toward Blight, certain I’m imagining things.
Duck, she says again.
“What are you?—”
Gareth strikes before I get the words out. His sword catches my wounded hip this time. Dizzying pain overwhelms me, and I’m rolling across the ground an instant later. I come to a stop curled up on my side, pressing a hand to that bleeding hip.
I told you to duck, comes the dragon’s voice, a hint of smugness in it.
“How…” I groan.
His movements are very predictable, if you pay attention. You could count the number of arrows that are fired between his strikes. You could see the twitch in his step, the way he?—
“No, how did you, how are you…” I press my lips together as bile rises in the back of my throat, a response to the pain wracking through my entire body.
Gareth is standing over me again. His face is spinning—everything is spinning—but I think I see confusion in his eyes.
“She…spoke to me,” I mumble.
He stares for several seconds before the meaning of my words seems to hit him. His gaze lifts to Blight, then settles back on me.
“…On your feet, then. It seems we’re close to a breakthrough.”
I sit up. That’s as far as I can go before the nausea threatens to overtake me again. The arena churns around me, and I feel it creeping in again—the urge to give up. To lay down and close my eyes until the spinning stops. Untileverythingstops. Maybe we’re close to a breakthrough, but all I feel is thebreaking.
This is too much.
It’s all too much.
Stand up, says Blight.
I level my gaze in her direction. I want to be angry at her for trying to push me. Anger is easier. Fury has always been what I reach for in these desperate moments when I feel like I don’t have it in me to take another step.
But fury is a fuel that burns terribly bright and wickedlyquick. Too quickly to sustain me in this sprawling palace of horrors, to carry me all the way through this nightmare I’ve found myself in.
So this time, I push it down. I let something else rise in its place, even though I don’t yet understand what that something else is.
I stand up, one last time.
And just before I break into another run, I glance over my shoulder to find Blight watching, her golden eyes locked on me.
She doesn’t speak again. Doesn’t warn me when to dodge, when to move faster or slower. But I feel pressure building in my skull, pushing out the pain in my head, bringing warm clarity, and I realize…
She’s trying to show me.
My entire world fractures at the thought.
For a disorienting heartbeat, I'm in two places at once: stumbling through the sand, bleeding and broken, while also perched on a platform twenty feet away, studying my own battered body from afar.
Then the two perspectives slam together.
And I cansee.
Not just with my left eye. With botheyes—and with a sharpness unlike anything I’ve ever had, before or since Emberfall.
