Page 79 of Winter Gods & Serpents

The girl had stilled, truly contemplating to take her offer. Though her shadows all in denial, she rose a trembling hand to the blade, and before I could step in the princess pulled it away. “Or you can let this all behind and know you never sullied your soul for a bastard that never deserved it in the first place. They never leave, nightmares, no matter what you do, no matter what you do to him.”

I hid my reaction and forbade myself from gaping at her. Did she know the comfort those words brought to the girl, how her shadows had thinned?

“He hurt me,” the girl sobbed.

“I know.”

She cried out, shaking her head. “He locked me.”

The princesses eyes dropped to her still bound wrists and ankles and she swallowed thickly before repeating, “I know.”

“He really, really…hurt me.” Tears had chased a stream down her face. “I don’t want to kill him.”

The princess nodded and walked back toward the man. Her sword drawn, and with one clean cut she severed both of his hands before piercing his heart with it. There had been no breath left for resistance or for pleas and whimpers of pain, the man had gone painfully.

His death gave my mouth a bitter taste of charcoal, a screech of protest on my ears. A claw dug at the side of my head and I shut my magic down to the slim of it, the furthest down I could, where I would not feel it this intensely.

“Cai,” she called to her friend while cleaning her sword. “Help the girl clean up and sort her bearings.”

He warily approached the princess, already done with her behaviour. “Who will help you out of your fathers wrath?”

“My handsome personality,” the princess playfully whispered to him.

I scoffed only a beat after him.

She turned to her soldiers and ordered, “I want a stake through and through him, at the top of his house till there is nothing for birds to pick on.” She halted and turned to them again. “Ah, his hands stringed around his neck.”

“Could you just not let it at that?” I asked, pointing to the man bleeding lifeless on the ground. Why did she have this fixation with stakes and severed limbs?

She glanced at the man almost confused. “He will be grateful I have accessorized him. Once crows pick his eyes out, what will go with his smile?”

A cord of nerves strung at her appetite for jokes. This damned woman. Now I really wanted to swing tuna in front of her face. “Why remind the girl of what she went through? To see that every day till he rots away, that image will embed in her head. Didn’t you tell her to forget?”

She headed toward the town stables. “The girl is not staying in this nightmare. When you free a bird you don’t just open the door. You rip the bars, blow the whole thing away and take the bird to a forest. Opening the door and giving a choice to leave to someone in a cage is locking them a second time. This time, inside their own head.” She halted, turning to face me. “I free the bird, the bird comes with me to a forest called Modr where my friend, Lady of Modr, will look after her in a nest for birds just like her. Those who have had their cages opened still afraid to flee.”

“Your metaphors are terrible.” Her actions not half as bad.

“Ah,” she said clutching her chest, “but you wound me, Adriatian.”

“Why do you care?”

She rose an amused brow. “I shouldn’t care?”

“Should you?”

She pursed her lips. “No, not really.”

“Why did you?”

She threw a look toward the bailiffs house. “I despise cages.”

A brawl had started where the bailiff’s body laid. Soldiers and what looked like a priest bickered back and forth over the bailiff’s body.

She stumbled a step back and then another before I took attention of her wide expression, and then of her stifled breaths.

“Princess?”

She did not answer, and she did not blink.