Page 100 of Bride of Ash & Dust

My fingers are still wrapped around the knife. I yank on it, but there’s some resistance, it’s stuck.

Stuck inside the body of a son of the king.

Panic screams inside my ears. I tug the blade back and forth until it comes loose, then stumble backward. Blood bursts out of the front of the prince’s body, rushing forward like it’s trying to reach me, trying to drown me.

Syvan stares at me like he’s not sure who I am. There’s more blood coming out of his mouth now, and my gods, the entire front of his body is dark with it. I gag as the smell hits me. How much blood does a prince have? Is it more than a regular person? Is it⁠—

“Fucking whore,” Syvan growls. It sounds like he’s speaking underwater.

He lurches forward, spraying blood on the ground like a monster. I pull back.

Shouldn’t I be trying to help him? Shouldn’t I⁠—

Syvan falls to his knees. He’s still growling, his eyes fixed on me with the sort of rage I thought only existed in stories. His face has gone very pale. Like a ghost. Or a demon.

I raise my hand to reach for him, because I should do something, right? I have to do something.

But the knife is still in my hand. And the knife is covered with blood.

I drop the blade. There’s a loud clang when the metal hits the stone beneath me. Surely it’s so loud that all of Syvan’s soldiers will hear it. I turn to the tunnel, waiting for the army to drag me away. Syvan makes another gurgling, gasping sort of sound. The smell of blood sticks to the inside of my throat.

Slowly, almost gracefully, the prince of Vsenrog falls forward onto his face. He hits the ground with a wet sort of thunk, and for just a moment, I can pretend that he must have tripped over something, that he has the wind knocked out of him, that the dark pool spreading across the hungry ground isn’t the blood of royalty spilling from the hole in his chest I just created.

And then I start sobbing. It sounds like screaming.

“Lilias.”

The sound is distant, like wind through the trees.

“Lilias. Listen to me.”

There’s something on my hands. I stare at them in the weird, shifting light of the torches as sobs tear the breath from my lungs. I dropped the blade, but there’s something dark spilled across my fingers that might never come off.

“I need you.”

I turn and stare at Zarek. A thin red line stretches from his chin to his collarbone. Dimly, I remember watching Syvan drag his knife across Zarek’s skin, making blood bloom in the darkness.

I swallow hard. One of Zarek’s eyes is swollen shut, his lip is split open, and his chest is a patchwork of bruises. Gods above, what have they done to him?

“What just happened,” Zarek says in a low voice, “we’ll have time to deal with. Later. Right now, I need you to help me.”

I nod, then wipe my hands on my skirt. It’s filthy anyway. Zarek tilts his head to the side.

“There’s a body over there,” he says. “In white robes. It’s got the key to these locks.”

He glances down. For the first time, I notice the silver cuffs around his wrists.

“Lilias,” he says, speaking slowly and softly. “I need you to find that key. It’s on a ring, and it’s in a pocket in those robes. Can you do that?”

I nod again. There’s a pile of white cloth on the floor of the mine that I thought was laundry, although why would anyone keep their laundry in a mine?

But it looks so very much like laundry, I tell myself as I step gently over the rocks. Like white sheets scrunched in a pile, stained with dirt and darker liquids.

Just laundry, I tell myself as I begin to sift through the folds of the fabric that used to be white. Laundry with a human hand attached.

“Does it help if I talk?” Zarek asks.

I make a strangled sort of sound in the back of my throat. I’m not even sure if I’m agreeing or not.