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I can’t leave him here to die because of me. I can’t. Iwon’t.
“Leave the gate open!” My voice is no longer suave and syrupy sweet. The scream reverberates through me, shaking the very ground.
The drawbridge falls back into place just as Alrion crosses it. More arrows fly our way, but we race as fast as we can. One hits Shoal’s leg, but if the brave, beautiful beast protests, he doesn’t slow down.
“Alrion. Talk to me,” I call, my heart beating fast.
He’s slumping forward on Shoal’s back. “I’ll live,” he grunts.
His voice is weaker than I’ve never known it.
“You will,” I command. “You’renotallowed to die.”
He huffs, then groan. “Don’t make me laugh, please. They punctured a lung.”
Shit.
“Are we far enough? We need to take care of that arrow.” Our horses are faster than any in the tower. They won’t catch up with us if we take a moment to bind his wound.
He shakes his head. “I need a healer. If we pull the arrow out, I’ll bleed out, fast.”
Shit.
“Where should I head?”
“It doesn’t matter, so long as it’s away from the Tower. Doryn can track your anklets.”
Grateful to those damnable devices I hated and feared last week, I urge Folia to go faster, my eyes fixed on my stupid, beautiful friend.
Without him, I’d be right back in the tower, at the Kind King’s mercy, broken, unable to fight. He has to make it. He must.
We’re racing through the fields when, though we’re in the middle of the night, impossibly bright daylight rises behind us, more blinding than midday in the summer. I twist to look behind me, horrified to watch the brightness crawl to us.
It’s him. His power—the one he’s stolen by sacrificing thousands of innocents last night. Somehow, Doplov—Alev of Xion—has managed to make himself the equal of Mara-Rhea the bright; or at least, claimed a power she alone used to wield. I can tell this daylight means death, as surely as Doryn’s shadows. And it’s approaching us so fast.
Folia doesn’t need my urging to push her muscles as much as she can, and Shoal’s already racing ahead, even swifter. He might make it, even if I don’t. That’s a relief. He deserves to live more than I do. What have I ever done, other than support a mad king’s destruction?
Wisps of light hit Folia’s back, and the poor beast topples down, taking me with her. We crash, hard. The pain doesn’t even register in the face of the fear crippling my core as I watch the light snake toward me. Then I’m engulfed in darkness.
48
RHEA
I expected emptiness. The void is supposed to be nothing at all, right? Instead I find myself looking at the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
But it’s cold. Ever so cold.
What have we here, a voice whispers in the emptiness.
No, not a voice. A song, an echo.
A power.
A nothing. If it’s here, it’s nothing. Or it will be, soon enough.
So very cold. My fingers are ice, as I float toward nothing at all, pain forgotten.
I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s meant to stay.
