Page 43 of Heart of the Desert

“You’ve failed me,” he said, his voice the oily rasp I had hoped I had forgotten, but it all came back to me so clearly.

“You’re dead,” I insisted, finally finding my ability to speak. Somehow, I sounded much smaller, like the young man I had been when he had first found me and brought me on the cursed journey.

“I am, and it’s your fault.” The words twisted like a knife in my chest, even as I shook my head against the guilt I had told myself again and again I did not deserve.

Alasdar gestured to the center of his chest, which still bore the wound that had killed him. Blood dripped down his stomach and stained the sand, but it didn’t offer me the same sense of quiet that feeding the desert once had. “You kill everybody that tries to help you.”

The knife twisted deeper into my chest.

“You didn’t help me,” I insisted through gritted teeth, but to my horror my voice shook and my eyes burned. “You tortured me.”

The lines on my back burned in memory, but bitterness coated my tongue and choked me as my recent self-inflicted injuries pulsed too—the almost healed wound on my thigh joined by more slashes and bruises across my arms and legs.

“And in my absence, you have to torture yourself,” Lord Alasdar sneered, as if he could read my mind. “How long until it isn’t enough and you have to inflict the pain you bear on others? You needed me to lead, and now I am gone because of you.” His voice was derisive and echoed painfully through my skull.

I grit my teeth. Keera had freed me of this snake, and I would not fall for his manipulations again. With a shout, I drew my sword and lunged forward, slashing viciously at the juncture between his neck and shoulder.

He didn’t even try to move out of the way, and blood sprayed across my face as I nearly severed his head from his body. I yanked my sword free of the corpse, but it wasn’t Lord Alasdar anymore.

Instead, my mother looked up at me with an expression of utmost betrayal as the light faded from her eyes. A choking tightness seized my chest.

“No!” I shouted, falling to my knees beside her, but it was too late.

“You’re the King now,” she mumbled, even more blood bubbling up between her lips as she let out a last shuddering breath.

A weight appeared on my head, and I reached up to find that I now wore a crown. I yanked it off. When I held it before my eyes, it wasn’t the simple golden band of the Champion’s Circlet I had placed on Keera’s head, though. Instead, it was a horrible thing made of bones. I didn’t want to look too closely at the twisted shapes, but they appeared to be human finger bones.

I threw it away from myself in horror, expecting it to thud into the sand. Instead, it shattered on a solid stone ground with a sharp clatter that had me jerking my head up to look around.

My mother’s body was gone, and I wasn’t in the open sands anymore, but in the room beneath Kelvadan—the solid stone square that haunted my nightmares.

I knew I couldn’t be there, but the solid gray walls around me looked so real. I reached out, halfway expecting it to be a trick of the mist, but my fingers met roughhewn stone. My breaths started coming faster.

I laid my hand flat on the stone and pushed, as if I could force it to admit it was only an illusion. Still, it held fast. I put my weight into it, before rearing back and slamming my shoulder into the wall. I hit it with bruising force that made spots dance in my vision, but it stood firm.

Remembering the sword in my hand, I began hacking at the stone, the horrible clangs of stone against steel drowned out by my scream of frustration.

This wasn’t going to do any good. I was going to break my sword—but I couldn’t make my muscles stop swinging.

Then, a scream in the distance caught my attention. Finally, I paused. I knew that voice like I knew my own mind.

“Erix!” Keera’s shout was muffled through the stone, but the pain and terror in her voice was unmistakable. She needed me, and I was trapped. Images of her burned and bloody, lying broken in Lord Alasdar’s tent, flashed behind my eyes.

I had failed her before, and I couldn’t fail her again.

I threw myself at the walls with renewed fervor, screaming myself hoarse as Keera’s shouts of distress grew more pained by the second.

Chapter fourteen

Keera

Iwas alone.

Even Daiti was gone, but I didn’t even remember dismounting. I hadn’t seen the mist before it swallowed us, and now it pushed in on all sides. It almost felt like hands running over both my body and my mind and making me feel horribly exposed. I drowned in the feeling of emptiness that came from being able to see or hear nothing around me.

“Keera!” A voice called out, something out of both a nightmare and a dream. I whirled toward it, only to find a darkened silhouette disappearing into the silvery fog.

“Wait!” I shouted, dashing after it. The figure was just a darkened silhouette in the fog, and although it didn’t appear to run, I never grew closer. I pumped my arms and churned my legs in the sand, trying to reach it until my lungs felt like they were about to burst.