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I will kill you.
Panic rose, pulling every tendon in my body tight as I curbed my shadows, wrestling them back into the confinement of my chest. I couldn’t kill him. Couldn’t risk it.
Harlen’s stare widened as he watched my shadows retreat. He lifted his head and looked at me. Through the sharp bite of the whip gnawing at his back, he looked at me, showing me every shade of disappointment and contempt in his brown eyes.
He lifted his empty hand toward the jailor. At the next, he stabbed a shadowy dagger into the man’s groin, pulling himself up on it. He pulled out the dagger, letting crimson drip off the shadows before he plunged it into where the man’s neck should have been.
The big man let out a scream before his knees hit the ground, pressing both hands to the wound where Harlen’s shadows dissolved. “Guards! To hel—”
Harlen stabbed another shadow into the jailor’s chest, shoving him to fall on his back before he knelt beside the writhing, groaning body. “Malyr! The keys! My hands are slippery.”
Frozen, paralyzed, I stared at Harlen’s blood-soaked fingers where they pulled on the iron ring attached to the man’s trousers.
“Malyr!”
With a start, I stumbled forward. Keys. Yes, I had to get the keys and open the door!
“Someone might have heard him. We have to hurry.” Harlen reached me the clanking iron ring. “It’s the big rusty one.”
I fought past the violent shake in my fingers, letting the key stutter along the rusty lock for endless seconds before it finally slipped into the hole. At its turn, the lock sprung and hinges once more squeaked as the door opened.
“Hurry, Malyr. Hurry!”
Exhaustion gnawed on my legs at each step, making them want to cave, but I followed Harlen along the damp corridor. Empty cells lined our left, and oil lamps hung from iron hooks to the right. What if we couldn’t shift? Where would we even—
Footsteps.
Just as Harlen approached the spindling stone stairs, a guard appeared from a corridor to the right. He stormed at my brother, slamming Harlen against the wall just as his hand reached for the pommel of his sheathed sword.
“Alert!” he shouted and pulled his sword out, letting the blade hum its treacherous melody. “The Ravens are—”
On instinct, I grabbed his throat, watching my fingers go from filthy to pitch-black in the blink of an eye. My gift streamed out of me, painfully so, webbing across his face, seeping into his skin until it wrinkled like a rotting prune. Then, with a silent jerk, the guard collapsed at my feet, dead.
That heaviness in my chest intensified.
I’d killed him.
“Malyr,” Harlen’s voice echoed. “Hurry!”
I looked up, watching Harlen’s foot disappear from sight as he made his way up the stairs. “Wait for me!”
The moment I lifted my foot to step over the corpse, something hit the side of my head. Pain exploded above my ear, rippling through my skull. Everything around me spun. Stone. Fire. Blood. Stone. Fire.
Blood.
Blood running down the jailor’s chest where a wound gaped and glistened behind a punctured shirt. His grin was the last thing I saw before his fist hit me straight in the face.
Bone cracked.
Tears welled.
My feet pulled out from underneath me as searing pain spread into my brain.
What happened? Where was Harlen?
“Catch the pathfinder!” The jailor’s shout mixed with the sound of my body dragging over the ground. Stone pulled on my hair. Something gripped my ankle. “Mmm, I knew you were a deathweaver. Felt it in my bones. You, boy, won me three silver coins.”
I fought to keep my eyes open, fading in and out of consciousness. “Harlen?”
