The more unhinged Stig looked, the better. Fell’s appearance alone would do much to undermine him, and when Fell challenged Stig, it would seem logical—the honorable thing to do after Stig had abused me. Fell was simply protecting his wife.
“Stig,” Havard murmured, just his name softly spoken. No more than that. As though that were enough to call him back to himself. If only it was.
If only saying his name would break the horrible spell trapping him and bring back my childhood friend, the man who had claimed to love me … the man who, once upon a time, I had contemplated loving back.
Stig lifted his hand to strike me again, his eyes wild and bloodshot.
I held my ground and forced myself not to flinch.
After a moment, Stig’s hand lowered, arm falling listlessly to his side. His eyes appeared darker than I remembered, the light from them gone as he looked at me. Finally, he moved. Clearing his throat, he gave a single nod, as though indicating to Havard that he was now composed.
Stepping around his friend, Stig reached for my arm and clasped it, leading me away. I went. No sense fighting. Fell would join us soon. I knew he lived. He’d survived the harpies. I could still feel him alive and breathing in me. He would find me wherever I was.
I glanced over my shoulder in the direction I’d come, as though expecting to see Fell and Magnus emerge and put a stop to all of this. Another glance at the trees.
“In there with you.” Stig shoved me roughly toward a wagon I had not noticed before, but now I looked at it … and the large cage that occupied its frame.
“In there?” I queried, my throat tightening at the sight of the cage with its chalky-white bars. I peered closer at the strange contraption, noting the lack of uniformity in the bars. No two were alike. They almost resembled—
“Dragon bone,” I breathed, dread sliding through me.
A cage of dragon bone. There would be no slipping away under cover of night.
No escaping from this.
What if Fell did not come? What if something had happened to him? Not death, but something else to keep him from me.
I surged against Stig’s hold, trying to break free. I backed away warily, feeling myself going cold, the heat within me banked, my heart cracking like a great block of ice as I faced that cage.
“Please,” I murmured. “Don’t put me in there.” A box, much like Fell’s prison, from which I could never break free. He could keep me there forever if he liked, and the monster he had become would do just that.
I pressed a hand to my aching chest, to the heart galloping within. With a brutal squeeze of my arm, he gave me a shake hard enough to rattle my teeth. “You don’t like that, do you, hmm?” Hiseyes gleamed with satisfaction, and he nodded with a cruel twist of his lips, his mouth hot against my ear. “That’s because you’re a dragon.” I marveled that he had once kissed me with those lips. That he had wanted to—and that I had permitted it, liked it even. “I had it crafted especially for you. For when I found you. I knew I would. I knew you were not dead.” He frowned slightly and leaned forward to hiss into my ear. “Did you burn Dryhten with your fire or eat him?”
I gasped. Was he serious? Did he not recollect that Fell had saved me fromhimthat day in the woods? Why would I have killed him? Did he think that even as a dragon I lacked any sense of loyalty or conscience?
“Why would I kill my husband?” I boldly flung this in his face, my fear manifesting into a need to antagonize him. Then, knowing how these words would anger him, I added, “I love him. The Lord of the Borderlands is the best man I know.”
Stig’s nostrils flared. “I am Lord of the Borderlands now,” he growled, his white teeth flashing amid his close-cropped beard. “The north is mine now. The Borg is mine, your sweet Alise is mine, and you, you …” He looked me up and down, and for a moment there was something deep and needy in the brown depths. Just a flash of how he had once looked at me. It was like a window into a past you missed and mourned and could never get back. A trick of the light. No more. In a blink, it was gone. His eyes went back to being cesspools of hate.
“You,” he continued, “shall confess.”
Confess.Such a dirty word on his lips, in this context. As though I was guilty of a crime. And in his eyes, I was. My mere existence was a crime. An abomination. I no longer possessed a soul at all.
I was forced into the cage. It was a tight fit, impossible to stand or stretch my body out within. Several of the soldiers sent me pitying looks.
Lifting my chin, I tried to hold on to the fleeting scraps of my dignity as the wagon started rolling along the bumpy ground. I grasped the bars—the bones of my brethren. The echoes of theirstrength pulsed through me. I looked out at the press of woods surrounding me. It lived and breathed around us, and I understood better than these soldiers just how alive it was, that it possessed teeth ready to sink and tear and devour.
The distant mountains of the Crags rose up along one side of the woods, beckoning with both a sense of security and a threat as we progressed at a steady pace. That was the dual nature of the Crags. It was a beautifully dangerous place riddled with wild and deadly things. My heart thudded heavily in my aching chest.
I rubbed at the X in my palm, feeling the whisper of Fell there, and it was a comfort. He was still out there. Not dead. Close by.
Perhaps even closer than I realized.
The trees to our right stirred, leaves rustling from sudden movement.
The soldiers heard the noise, too. They shouted and turned, taking position facing the tree line and this possible threat, drawing their rapiers in a hissing song.
My grip tightened around my bone bars as I strained forward.
