He doesn’t respond, instead reaching for my hand where it’s pinned against the ground. I fight to keep my fingers clenched, but he straightens them easily, yanking off my glove and reaching for the first stake. “I take no pleasure in this.”
The lie is written across his face, in the faint curve of his lip as he presses my wrist down, in the hitch of his breathing. I recognize his excitement all too well.
He stretches out my fingers before lifting the stake. I barely take a breath before the thud registers.
The pain follows. A sharp, shocking, immediate wave of agony that rattles down my arm and out through my gritted teeth as he buries the stake directly through the middle of my palm and into the ground. My back bows, my air cut off by the band of light pushing my neck into the snow, pinning me down.
The second is almost easy in comparison. I’m too busy focusing on swallowing down the vomit constricting my airway to fight Cindral when he tears off my glove, too busy keeping the pain inside to much care when he adds to it, the second thud somehow, impossibly, deeper than the first.
“It’s done.” Cindral rises to his feet, looking over his handiwork before he turns his attention to my face. “They won’t be long. The scout said a few hours at most.”
Assuming they don’t stop to rest. Or find a different path. Or animals don’t find me first. It almost sounds like he’s trying to reassure me, and the laugh cracks against my split lip. “Can’t wait.”
“Be grateful,” he snaps. “If we were back in Solvandyr, you’d be staked against the Glass Dune for this, with no healer to help you.”
Just a normal day, then.
But the pain in my hands keeps me silent. I focus on keeping my breathing steady, small clouds of white puffing into the air above me as Cindral leans in once more. “Perhaps we’ll see each other again. If you make it through, we’ll know. Your orders stand.”
If I make it through, he’s a dead man.
But he’s gone. In the distance, I hear the barked orders, the sound of footsteps and horses whinnying.
And then the fading sound of hooves, as they leave me behind. Staked to the ground in front of a burning village.
The band of luminth holding my neck down fades, and I twist to the side, taking in what’s left of the village. It’s already beginning to burn down to embers, leaving little behind. But enough to see the bodies dotting the ground. I look away from those.
Tears and ash sting my eyes, blurring the flames.
They killed a village to set me up for this mission. Hunted children through the trees, killed their parents in front of them.
An excuse.
It feels like a punishment. A warning, from my father.
I begin to feel lightheaded, the cold soaking through my cloak and into my spine as I close my eyes and fight to stay awake. It’s the only excuse I have for not hearing the footsteps, the tread of boots against icy ground.
The blade drives into my gut with deliberate venom, twisting. My eyes fly open, a scream ripping from my lips as I lock eyes with Iliria. The blade vanishes as quickly as it appeared, and she comes into clearer focus as my blood spills out, rapidly soaking the ground with glimmering gold.
I know what I have survived. What Icansurvive.
But unless that healer is very, very close, this is a mortal wound.
Her lip curls up into a feral smile. “That was for Garrun.”
And then she’s gone, too.
I stare at the sky for long minutes, fighting to breathe. Air bubbles in my lungs.
Stay alive, Lyra.
It sounds like Reena. Fierce, and commanding, and someone who actually gives a shit.
I’m trying, but it’s socold. Even the pain ebbs away as I lay there, my body shaking badly.
Eventually, the cold disappears too. So does the shaking.
And then I feel nothing at all.
