THE AMBER SOLDIERS’ ENCAMPMENT MADE OUR THREE TENTS LOOK LIKE
—well, three lone tents.
I tried to hold my chin up as Halden’s officer led me past the sentries stationed at the wood-crafted fortress gates, but I knew. I knew this was the end. I was amazed none of them had killed me already. Wasn’t I all that stood in the way of their leader’s eternal reign?
Halden guided us along a wide dirt path. His hair was shorter now. Cropped and clean-cut, but still that pale, yellow blond. His expression was stern, his armor adorned with more gold, more filigree, but he was the same boy I’d caught toads with in Abbington. The first boy I kissed.
The same one who told his king where Kane and I would be. Who brought the armies and fire-breathing creatures to Siren’s Cove. Who ensured the death of men, women, children—
My mother.
Soldiers around us sharpened swords and carried stacks of shields and helmets, insulated by canvas tents and burning hearths. We passed a crude stable, too large for mere steeds, and the smoke billowing in bursts from the open roof told me it was filled with salamanders. Their ashy scent and guttural snarls sent cold dread swirling in me like a dark tide pool.
I hoped at least my death would be swift. A beheading, maybe. The slashing of my throat. Stabbing was painful, but if deep enough, wouldn’t last long. Just not burned alive by salamanders. Or drowned. Or eaten by something rabid and snarling.
Please, not that one.
I had hardly gotten a look at the hog roasting over the massive spit or the horses decked in familiar Amber caparisons before Halden ordered me into a khaki tent and observed as his soldier tied me to the pole at its center. I grunted as my arms were angled behind me and twisted around the splintering wood.
“Hold still,” Halden said, his expression as hard and cold as steel. “You’ll only hurt yourself.”
A bitter laugh bent from my lips.
“Leave us,” he said to his underling.
Halden’s modest tent clearly belonged to some kind of low-ranking general: a stark desk with a map of Evendell and an ornate paperweight, a small hearth emitting a low heat, and a pallet with matted furs and an out- of-shape pillow. Halden sat on the chest at the foot of his makeshift bed and stared at me.
“Someone got a promotion.” He looked tired. “Mhm.”
I let my disgust show plainly on my face before the question blurted from me. “When did you realize what I was?”
“After we were conscripted, Ryder and I got blind drunk. He said you had some magical healing ability. I never thought of it again until Gareth told me what I was to do.”
“Murder Fae.”
His eyes flicked to mine, and he bit at his nail in thought. “Right.”
Revolting prick.
“I saw the way Kane protected you,” he continued. “And I took a chance. Told Gareth what I knew of your abilities. Of the way the king of Onyx was keeping you in his home like his own little prize. And then we sailed for Peridot.”
A long-familiar guilt screwed itself deeper into my heart.
I had been the one to doom Siren’s Cove. By telling Halden of Peridot and Onyx’s alliance.
“You killed people. Innocent people, Halden.”
“Lazarus is going to take Evendell whether we like it or not. He’s more powerful than anyone, even your Fae prince.”
“Kane is a king.”
“He’s the son of a king,” Halden bit out. “You’ll never find the blade, and that’s the only way to kill him. There are only two people who can speak truths such as this prophecy: the seer who decreed it, and her daughter. Their words are binding with greater magic than anything you could possibly understand. And even if somehow you do find the blade, you’ll never beat Lazarus in battle. Don’t forget how well I know you, Arwen. The look on your face tells me you know I’m right.”
I strained my face into neutrality. Did he realize what he’d just told me?
There was another seer?
“I chose to align with the winning side,” he continued. “In the new world, when Lazarus rules both realms and uses all the lighte he’s mined to make Evendell worlds beyond what we can even imagine, I’ll be spared. So will my family, and anyone else I care about.”
“Like Ryder?”
A glint of emotion in his brown eyes. “I hope he’ll see reason and join us, yes.”
“The Halden I knew never could have stomached any of this. It would have kept him up every night, all night, sick with guilt.”
The look that flashed across his face told me I wasn’t completely off base.
“If you’re going to kill me, just do it already.”
“Where’s that Arwen optimism? My orders are to bring you back to Lazarus in one piece.” I didn’t have time to catch a relieved breath as he said, “But first, I need to know if you did indeed find the blade.”
“You must know I can’t tell you that.”
His jaw tightened. “And you must know we have other ways of getting information out of people.”
A quiet dread rippled through me. “You wouldn’t,” I breathed.
“I don’t want to, but I’ll do what I have to do to heed his orders. Now tell me—where is the blade?”
I couldn’t tell him we hadn’t found it and give up the only leverage we might have. I couldn’t lie and tell him we had it and send his men after all the people I cared about. The reality of what might come next had been soaking in for a minute now, and I steeled myself. “Do what you have to do.”
He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it before he tried again. “Arwen . . .”
But I held my tongue.
Halden strode behind me, and I could only feel his fingers along my spine as he unclasped my bodice and let it fall limply to the floor. Revulsion wasn’t all that coursed through me. Shock, too—shock at feeling his strangely familiar hands in such an intimate place.
He came to stand before me and lifted the hem of my blouse. I squirmed away from his touch as he raised the fabric up and tucked it gingerly, chastely, underneath my breasts.
Relief but also panic sang in my blood as he moved for the hearth and picked up the metal poker that had been resting beside it, weighing its heft in his hands. I fished for my powers, like tiny little buds not quite ready to bloom. I had used so much lighte to save Mari and myself, I had almost nothing left.
Come on, I urged my body. Fight.
He let the poker heat in the fire while I struggled, apparently not concerned that I might escape. When the rod was white-hot, he pointed it at me, hovering the metal right in front of my exposed skin.
Angry heat radiated off it in licks.
“Aren’t you afraid of me?” It was all that might persuade him now. “Of what I can do to you?”
“Come on, Arwen.” He laughed. “Heal me to death?”
I shook my head. “They didn’t tell you what I did at Siren’s Bay.”
“You mean what your Fae prince did? You’re trying to take credit for that? To scare me?”
I couldn’t tell if it was brilliant or senseless. Lazarus, in all his pride, did not want anyone to know just how much power I held.
“Just tell me,” he said. “Where is the blade?”
But I stayed quiet, unable to think of anything to save myself.
“I’m sorry.” He winced before pressing the scalding iron against my stomach.
Pain like nothing I had ever felt before splintered through me as the poker shrieked against the skin of my abdomen. I cried out before biting my tongue until blood pooled in my mouth.
The more relentless the pain, the more I reined in my sobs. He would not earn the satisfaction of my screams.
“This hurts me more than it hurts you.”
“I hope that’s true,” I said through my teeth. “Where is the Stones-damned Blade?”
He removed the brand, taking my melted flesh with it, only to place it back into the crackling flames. The tent smelled like cooked meat, and I gagged and spat blood on the ground. The burning wound blistering above my navel stung worse than any lash Powell had ever landed on me. I could not endure another brand.
“Don’t make me do it again,” Halden said, as if he had heard my very thoughts. His voice was like sandpaper.
But something was bubbling beneath my heart. In my bones. My lighte was coming back, I could feel it. Maybe it was spurred on by the pain and the urgency of my predicament, as it had been in the tunnels hours before. I just needed a little more time. Mere moments.
Tears burned my eyes as he lifted the hot poker and brought the glowing end closer. But he hesitated. “Please,” he begged. “Just tell me where it is. I don’t want to hurt you again.”
“Do it, you coward.”
The agony this time was blinding. I recoiled from the iron but had nowhere to go, and couldn’t hold in the scream that erupted from my throat. I thrashed against my bindings, the burning pressure and searing pain ratcheting up my spine, down to the arches of my feet, through my lungs—
Focus, Arwen. Pull from the atmosphere.
“Tell me where it is and let this end for both of us!” Halden roared, withdrawing the sizzling brand from my stomach and tearing my shirt up to press it into the top of my breast.
I moaned in agony, the skin too sensitive, too thin. Blinding, endless pain, my toes curling, my head swimming with it, but—
But it was enough.
Enough to resurrect my power, and energy coursed through me, drawn in from the very air in his tent. The lighte sputtered outward from my hands, disintegrating the rope around my wrists into ash.
With free arms, I shoved the poker off my breast and punched Halden as hard as I could in the jaw.
“What the—”
Only momentarily stunned, he lunged for me, but sheer fury coursed through my heart, along my skin, and out of my palms. My lighte, an explosion of bright, white energy, spun out, engulfing Halden and the entire tent in ferocious golden flame.
I could feel my body lifting. The weightlessness, the heat, the wind—
More ropes of white fire sprayed from my fingers as I roared at Halden, who fell to the dirt floor, bellowing in agony. He screamed and screamed, and the scent of his burning flesh seared my nostrils.
Good, I thought. Burn.
I wasted no time watching him writhe around on the pallet in anguish, as flames licked the bed, the furs, the canvas of the tent. I bolted through the opening as smoke billowed out behind me, and I emerged to a cool jungle dusk and a camp that was, for the moment, unaware of my escape. I ran for the crude wooden barriers.
The makeshift fence was tall, but I could make it. I jumped up and latched on to the beams, just as I heard voices spot the fire and then call for my capture.
My nails dug so deeply into the wood that splinters crammed underneath the nail bed. But the pain in my stomach, my chest, the burns being stretched as I climbed up, up, up—that pain was beyond anything . . .
My lungs were raw from screaming by the time I toppled over and down the other side.
There was no time for triumph—the voices were rising to a pitch and making their way to the fence behind me. They’d never stop coming after me. I’d have to run all night. As if the sky were a mirror to my mood, my fury, my urgency, a clap of thunder snapped through the trees above, bathing the rain forest in its namesake.
I sloshed through mud in the sudden downpour, pressing my palm to the burns under my blouse. The lighte I had left sputtered and fizzled against my skin. Not enough to heal the blistered flesh. I wouldn’t have anything left to repair myself for some time.
The thunder was a roar in my ears, rain dripping into my eyes and over my lips. I was so tired, so flooded with aching and exhaustion. The endless downpour trickled through the palm fronds and over my body until I collapsed and coiled in a heap. I couldn’t tell the droplets from my own tears, but I knew that I was crying.
And shivering, though it wasn’t cold.
The sounds of sloshing footsteps in the mud behind me should have spurred me up, up and off the ground. Into another sprint. But I had nothing left. I folded even farther in on myself and braced to be dragged back to the encampment and tortured again.
“Arwen!” Kane’s voice cut through my despair like a single ray of resplendent sunlight.
I opened my eyes and took in his soaking form, his raven-dark hair swept back with rain, and his face.
His murderous, livid face. Inconsolable, incomprehensible, bewildered rage. I had never seen such fury glow in his eyes in all the time I’d known him. It rippled off him in waves.
How could he possibly— Did he know what had been done to me? He knelt to my tangled form and scooped me up and into his arms.
I winced as my burns folded in on themselves. “How are you here?” My voice sounded like I had come back from the dead. I wasn’t even sure what I was asking.
“I never should have left you.” He held my head against his own. “It hurts,” I admitted, grasping at my stomach.
“I know,” he said, voice like gravel. “But you’re safe now.”
He stood and carried me all the way back to our camp, the insistent rain an urging at our backs.
