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My stomach churns with another wave of queasiness as I squeeze my hands. My magic reverberates through my limbs, offering its service—I can’t give in. I have to do this myself too.
I wrench and heave, and flesh tears. Fur and skin part; blood spurts onto the ground.
“For the All-Giver!” I rasp. “I run wild and show the animal I am for the All-Giver.”
The scourge sorcerers aren’t done yet. The voice echoes through the woods around me—or is it multiple voices now—in an emphatic chant?
“The right rulers should rise, and the wrong should fall!”
“The right rulers should rise, and the wrong should fall!” I repeat, restraining a shiver of horror. How exactly do they mean to see the “wrong” rulers removed?
And who do they think the right ones are? Does Ster. Torstem expect to take the throne?
I don’t know. I’m smeared with dirt and blood, and all I can do is play along.
Play along until I’ve tumbled far enough into this rabbit hole to see my way out again.
Twenty-One
Stavros
Ivy is stealthy, but I haven’t lost any of the hearing I honed in sparring rings and on battlefields. At the ever-so-faint click of the door to my quarters closing, my head snaps up.
I learned my lesson from last time. So my mind would stay alert, I sat myself in my bedroom’s armchair rather than on the bed and forced myself to track the periodic patrols of guards and the few students arriving late to the dorms.
I shouldn’t have fallen asleep before regardless. The tension coiled in my gut gives off constant pangs of uneasy adrenaline.
The problem is that tension I’m carrying hasn’t subsided since the moment I found out what our thief really is. For the past two weeks, I’ve only been sleeping in brief fragments, made even less restful by the nightmares I haven’t managed to shake.
The problem is I’m fucking exhausted.
But I’ve survived on stints of little sleep plenty of times in the midst of an ongoing skirmish or siege. I can hold myself and my blasted temper together.
I have to, because the chaotic and unnerving conflict I’ve found myself in the middle of is the closest thing to a war I’ll ever fight again. If I can’t defend my country from even that…
Rather than following the uncomfortable thought to its conclusion, I push myself from my chair and stalk over to the outer room.
Ivy is standing by the sofa, peeling off her cloak. Her hair falls loose across her shoulders, many of the strands clinging damply to her skin.
Did she stop at the bathing rooms on her way back?
Gods smite the flare of heat that idea sends to my groin.
She startles just slightly at my entrance. Something about the tensing of her stance, more nervous than boldly defensive, has me striding closer with a tick of my gaze to refocus it.
As I round the sofa and get a full look at her dress, my feet stall beneath me. I stare, with another twitch of my head and a lurch of my stomach.
Dark streaks stain the pewter gray silk of her gown all down the skirt. The bottom hem is tattered as if she ran it through a thresher. And a few of the stains, including a couple higher up on the bodice, have a ruddy hue I can make out even in the hazy light that creeps through the window.
I’m striding straight to her in the instant before I catch myself. I halt just a couple of paces away, my right hand clenching at my side.
My voice comes out harsher than I like. The idea that she might be injuredtormentsme more than I like. “Did they make you cut yourself again?”
Ivy lets out a laugh, ragged enough to pierce my heart. “No. Not me. Just a poor little bunny. Sorry I’m a mess. I kept my cloak over my gown on the way back and washed up as well as I could.”
Hearing her apologize sets me even more off-balance. How shaken is she that she’d act as though she needs to justify herself rather than brush me off with her usual banter?
“They asked you to kill a rabbit?”
