AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Farin stops, and though I can’t turn to face him, I stop too.
“If I didn’t care,” he says, “I wouldn’t have wasted my energy. Believe it or not, it takes more effort to sever someone’s head from their body than it does to walk on by.”
I grit my teeth. “This isn’t a joke.”
“I’m not joking. Do you think I enjoyed that?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Did you, or did you not, once possess a magic that got high off the pain of others?”
Farin is so quiet, I can hardly tell that he’s breathing. “That man didn’t feel a thing. Didn’t even see it coming. I don’t know what more you would have had me do for him.”
I shake my head, placing my palm over my mouth, as if the man already has a stench that’s following me around.
Hero or villain?
Now that the man is dead, I think I know.
“You didn’t do it for him,” I say. “You did it for me, and I’d rather you not.”
He must think the disgust in my voice is directed at him, because he drops the bloodied dagger in the sand and walks on ahead.
He doesn’t stop to ask why I’d rather he not care about me.
Doesn’t stop to ask why I’m so distraught that we just killed my last chance of getting off this island.
My last chance, other than killing Farin himself.
Sand coats the spaces between my fingers as I retrieve the abandoned dagger from the sand.
CHAPTER 87
ELLIE
Cecilia wriggles in my arms as I stand on the castle portico overlooking Othian.
A mixture of feelings twinges at my heart. On one hand, sorrow fills me at the sight of our beautiful city, reduced to a fraction of what it once was.
On the other hand, I see the people, actually see them—their faces. For the first time in my life, it seems the people of Othian have put aside trying to become someone else.
Maybe it’s just that we’re all trying to survive, but I suppose that is part of it, isn’t it? Realizing the cosmetics and tricks used to hide ourselves were just weighing us down the whole time.
It hurts to look out on the crowd. At the children who gather in groups too large to all have the same parents—the ones who cling to each other because they have nowhere else to go. There are men and women wrapped in tattered mourning attire.
The crowd is a sea of sorrow.
It seems no one has been left unscathed by the pain of life taken too soon.
But when I look out into the crowd, I find something else too. A determination I didn’t realize was possible from a city I once considered so vain.
They wait, hushed voices echoing through the crowd.
And then the reason they’ve gathered arrives.
When the double doors open, and Evander steps out onto the balcony, a collective gasp ripples through the crowd.
Even I have to fight the one threatening to escape my lips.
I’ve gotten used to seeing Evander in royal attire. He was a prince, after all, when I met him. A lavish one at that.
