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The guard in my hold let out a rough breath when more of my blood dribbled down his chest.
“Keep steady, Frey,” Stieg told the man in my grasp.
I was no longer listening. With a quick motion, I flipped the knife to grab the hilt and leveled the blade at the guard’s throat. Blood fell onto his skin from my slashed fingers. He winced, straining to keep a distance from the poison, but I only tightened my arm around his upper body, keeping him close.
Tait struggled against his guard. One boot slammed into the warrior’s knees. The man cried out, yet managed to keep a hold on my cousin’s arm until a second guard came to aid him.
“Go,” Tait snapped, teeth bared. “You leave me, Erik, and go to the tides.”
Dammit. After all he’d done, the last thing I wanted to do was leave Tait in the hands of the earth fae, but . . . I would. I would not hesitate. If the choice was to escape to the ship, to find Livia, but leave Tait as a captive—he would need to wait his ass in a cell until we could return with my queen at my damn side.
If Livia’s folk would spend days plotting how to slip through the Chasm, if they would not put aside my sins and their hatred to save her, then I would go at it alone.
I’d already wasted enough time in a futile attempt to join forces.
The guard in my bloody grasp panted and coughed as I scuffled us toward one of the windows, him as my shield.
My head spun with the impossibility of the escape, but the need to reach the sea blotted out any reason.
“Erik, there is no way out,” Stieg insisted. “Don’t run again. We will help.”
“You are not helping!” I shouted.
My voice drew the doors to the hall open. In the doorway, the Night Folk king was joined by more half-familiar faces I thought I might’ve seen on a battlefield as a boy.
“I will kill you if you spill another drop of our blood,” Valen said without unclenching his teeth.
“Kill me,” I roared back. I shoved the guard away from me once I reached the window. “If I do not find her, I’ll offer my throat for you to slit.” With the hilt of the bloodied knife, I shattered the glass at my back. “What do you not understand? I care nothing for my life if she is not in it.”
The ground shifted and rolled much like stone had turned to a stormy sea. I stumbled and used the wall to brace.
“No! Godsdammit!” Behind me, in the broken window, a thick, root-ridden mound erupted from the soil and blocked my foolhardy escape.
Valen glared at me from where he crouched on the floor, hand splayed over the stone tiles.
“A bit of soil is not enough to stop me, Earth Bender.” I opened my palms at my sides.
The way I’d pulled water into the lungs of the assassin in the garden, I summoned the same of the flesh from the guards. It was a silent song, a gods-gift my father exploited. An ability to speak to blood and water inside a body with my voice was a weapon in his heir he’d planned to use against any who stood at odds with the king.
The pull was weaker here in the earth realms than back home, but soon enough, warriors in the corridor coughed. A few grabbed at their throats, water trickling from the corners of their mouths.
Valen watched in a wild stun as his men stumbled to their knees, drowning on the sudden fluid in their bodies.
Moments. Mere breaths. That was all the time I had to find a new window, slip over jagged glass in the window frame, pray I didn’t shatter my leg a second time on the impact of my fall, then manage to outrun earth fae arrows and spears until I reached the sea.
With a limp.
With no weapon but a simple knife.
Holes punctured every step of my feckless plan, but my thoughts were too lost in a panicked need to act. I stepped over them.
Halfway down the new corridor, a fierce biting heat split through my chest. “Dammit.”
I groaned and doubled over.
“Erik!” Tait shouted.
I hardly heard anything around me. The agony was bone deep, as though someone had cracked through my ribs, peeled out the marrow, then replaced it with molten ore. I could not draw a deep enough breath. Dark spots clouded my sight. My knees struck the stone floor.
