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The Grandmaster locked gazes with him. “Such a shame this is goodbye.”
My paralysis shattered. “Wendel!”
Wendel looked into my eyes, his own so vivid with the clarity of pain that I didn’t think I would ever forget them.
He tried to speak. I thought he said, “Ardis.”
The Grandmaster dragged him to the broken window and threw him into the night.
I ran to the window and clung to the edge, the shattered glass cutting into my hands, the wind flinging my hair into my eyes.
I watched Wendel fall.
Six stories down, where he landed on the rocks below.
A wave curled onto the island and washed over Wendel. When it retreated, he was gone. Dragged into the dark water.
A scream tore from my throat and left it raw. “Wendel!”
The Grandmaster held my sword out to me. For a moment, I thought he was giving it back to me, but he dropped it out the window. Chun Yi plummeted down to the ground and clattered on the dark rocks.
My heartbeat sounded distant in my ears. My body belonged to someone else.
“Go,” said the Grandmaster. “Return when you are ready, my daughter.”
I ran downstairs, my feet flying. As I spiraled down the Serpent’s Tower, I stumbled over the bodies of the mercenaries we had killed, the undead men that Wendel had commanded. They lay like discarded dolls, no longer controlled by necromancy. Outside the windows, there was the incessant cacophony of crows.
The crows. They would find Wendel.
I fled from the Serpent’s Tower. No assassins or mercenaries stood in my way.
I ran faster, gasping for breath, and zigzagged along the island until I found a murder of crows perched at the edge of the water. Their hoarse cawing seesawed through the dank air. Crows gathered on the ground in a mass of black. They scattered into flight as I approached, and revealed a man on the rocks.
Wendel.
He was face down, one arm flung forward. I knelt beside him and grabbed his arm, grimacing at his sleeve soaked in blood. When I rolled him over, he stared past me at the sky, and his eyes reflected the stars.
He did not blink.
“Wendel?”
My voice sounded harsh in my ears. I wiped my bloody hand on my knee.
“No,” I said. “You can’t. You—you’re a necromancer. You’re the Prince of the Undying.”
Our words from the first day we met echoed in my head.
“When a necromancer dies, does he die like a normal man?”
“God,” he said, “I hope so.”
My heart crumpled. His wish had been fulfilled.
I could barely find the strength to breathe. I couldn’t look at him any longer, but I was terrified to look away. It was as if he might vanish, as if I might have never met him, as if I might have never fallen for him.
“Wendel,” I sobbed. “I love you.”
I hadn’t said it until tonight, the only night it didn’t matter.
