Page 5 of Sworn to the Shadow Throne

The words hit me harder than seeing him drowning in his own blood had. This wasn’t the first or the fifth time that question had been posed to me. I’d stopped counting.

I nodded. To prolong life or end it as a mercy were two sides of the same coin. Today, Fate had chosen an end for this man, just as she’d sent me to grant it for him.

After all, what was yet another crack in my shell when I was already a broken woman?

Warmth pooled in my palm where my hand clasped his. I guided threads of comfort woven together with my unique magic, slipping both up his arm and through his chest, leaving a trail of gentle heat behind. My unique specialty was called life-weaving because I had the ability to bind flesh, unlike other mage healers. Yet it came with a dark side only a few knew about.

Healing came at the cost of my sweat and stamina, but the darker side of my gift, the power to rend flesh, required no such effort. Where healing was a labor, rending was a reflex—a horrible destructive thing that cost me half the energy and a single thought to unleash.

I bowed my head and whispered, “Be at peace then, grandfather.”

That seemed to be the right thing to call him. A faint uplift graced the corners of his mouth.

Then, with a sharp tug, I yanked the threads of the magic I’d woven into his flesh, ripping a jagged hole in his fading heart.

The man’s last sigh misted into the morning air.

And then… And then there was only the sounds of my own hitched breathing, my pounding heart breaking, and the chill air filling my heaving lungs.

Not as unaffected as I thought.

A phantom ache pulsed like the ghost of a heartbeat in my palm where the threads of magic I’d held slowly dissipated. That was normal after rending flesh. What was not was the way every fine hair on my body stood on end at once, nor the faint, insistent pull in my chest like an unseen hand tugging at the core of my magic from far beyond my reach.

I struggled to make sense of it. But quickly realized that the sensation was nothing more than my emotions affecting me physically. I was exhausted and grieving.

But then a strange comfort washed over me, like someone draping a blanket across my shoulders on a cold night. I fought a full-bodied shudder. It had been an eternity since I’d felt that kind of contentment, since I’d felt anything so close to human warmth.

I exhaled a shaky breath through a tight throat, trying to force the sensation away. It had been nothing more than my mind’s attempt to shield me from the guilt of having taken yet another life. Because the alternative—that something or someone had reached out for me in this broken moment—was far too dangerous to believe. Sometimes, though, I couldn’t help but wonder what it would feel like to meet someone whose first instinct wasn’t hatred or fear. Someone who saw more in me than the legacy of my blood or the danger my magic presented. Despite fading, the feeling of comfort had left a faint but indelible impression. A reminder of something I couldn’t have.

I looked down at the man whose life I’d helped end and thought of the hearth I’d left smoldering, of Muffin curled in his little nest waiting for me to come home, and the children who’d suffer if I wasn’t there to heal their wounds. The innocent still needed me, even if all the rest rejected me.

My reasons for fighting to stay alive amidst the darkness that had befallen the borderlands felt shamefully small compared to what this man had lost. I pressed my trembling fingers to his bloodied chest, making the shape of a blessing my mother had once taught me, though I doubted any of the gods were still watching the border between Larethia and Gelida. Which was our fault. We’d abandoned the gods first, consigning their names to nothing but superstition and cursing.

In the silence created by my mourning for a life snuffed short and one I wasn’t living, a voice drawled behind me, “Bet you enjoyed that.”

I froze. Elbort again, Selmont’s only pig farmer, leaned on a broken spear. His gap-toothed smirk was an ugly for the hatred behind it. One of a thousand men guilty of mistaking hostility for a backbone because it saved him from having to develop one. The words hadn’t left his lips, but I heard them anyway—Fae-blooded bitch.

I almost laughed at the irony of what he’d suggested. Me, enjoying death. If only he knew how much it cost my soul every time I granted mercy. How it felt like my own heart ripped in two along with theirs. I rose slowly, wiping my hands on the ruined blankets beside a man who had deserved a gentler death than the world gave him.

Elbort stared at my ears.

I stared back. Threads of magic rose beneath the surface of my skin like a thousand needles, eager in a way that made my stomach turn. He always brought this out in me.

I felt a wild impulse to snarl at my neighbor. From a distance, I could weave threads of power into his throat so he couldn’t take another breath. It wouldn’t matter that the work was clumsy with my lack of contact. He’d wind up just as dead.

Like all bad ideas, the thought was satisfying but best left untested. So I swallowed the words and violent urges, because keeping one more body off my conscience mattered more than teaching a pig farmer manners. Even after all these years, with all my power, I still hadn’t found the courage to truly stand up for myself.

I left the dead man behind and spent the next hour opening every door searching for survivors. There were none. So I helped carry the children over to the pyre we created for the dead.

When one of them tried to toss a child onto the pyre beside a stranger, I caught his wrist.

He went still. But so did every man near us.

“With her mother,” I said.

He scoffed and mumbled, “Why does it matter?”

The question was so stupidly cruel I almost laughed. “Think back to being her age. Where did you want to be most?”