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“Silence.” The Queen Regent stepped forward. Cold and imperious. Her face was anything but, however. Rage creased her beautiful features.
“When is this going to end?” Rychel demanded, her voice low and intense.
“I suppose that depends on who wins,” Sephone answered smoothly.
“Spiteful bitch. Cruel queen. You might have ended all of this. There were other ways.”
A look of disdain crossed Sephone’s face. “Not Siabra ways.”
“Fucking Siabra,” Rychel cursed again. A glob of spit landed on the shoulder of Sephone’s glistening silk gown.
Rychel whirled around and slammed through the doors of the gallery, shoving them open so hard one cracked.
Beside me, Odessa, Hawl, Crescent, and Javer stood very still, watching the queen.
They would not leave. Though they likely longed to turn away from this horror as much as I did, they would not leave Draven.
And neither would I.
I watched as Erion’s little sister was dragged across the gallery.
More guards had entered. They held back her struggling parents.
The girl’s mother finally escaped the guards’ cruel grasp as she sank to the floor, sobbing in unspeakable pain.
In the cavern below, Erion stood waiting, his face blank as his sacrifice was delivered as easily as Selwyn’s verdantail had been.
Except this was a girl. A Siabra girl.
I wondered if Draven could see what was happening here in the room behind him. Was he beating his fists against the stone wall even now as he realized Erion was going to comply with the mirror’s horrific demand?
Or was he lying prone on the ground, his blood flowing out of him as he took his last breaths?
“He could have said ‘no,’” I said to no one in particular. “Why didn’t he say ‘no’?”
Javer stepped up beside me, squeezing his slender frame in between myself and Odessa.
I knew I could have turned him away, demanded he be ostracized from our group. But the funny thing was? I didn’t have the heart for anymore unnecessary cruelty.
“Most men are cowards beneath it all,” Javer said simply. “Erion accepted his cowardice quite early on, I believe.”
“When he left Malkah, you mean?”
Javer nodded. “Under tests such as this, friendship either frays or fortifies.”
My heart leaped. Where would that leave Draven? He had helped so many others. But most were dead now. Except for Lyrastra and Selwyn.
On the other side of the mirror would loyalties remain or would they dissolve as easily as Erion’s ties to his family had? Given up for a ruthless shot at personal survival?
I cheated.
As the guards shoved Erion’s sobbing sister across the room and he caught her up against his chest with the desperate eagerness of a rabid, starving animal and then stepped into the mirror, I closed my eyes for a brief moment.
