“What is wrong with him?” The question came from the tent entrance. Sharp. Imperious.
Aldric didn’t have the strength to lift his head, but he knew that voice. The witch.
The frightened woman hovering over him flinched. “He…he is feverish, Mistress. His wounds…the infection is spreading fast. I’ve done what I can, but—”
“Fix. Him.”
“Mistress, I don’t know if—”
“I said,fixhim,” the witch snarled, footsteps approaching the cot. “Do whatever you can. Burn the rot out if you must.” A pause. Then, a cold whisper floated over Aldric’s fever-bright mind. “He cannot die yet. If he dies, shewill never come.”
The darkness at the edges of Aldric’s vision began to creep inward again. The ringing in his ears swelled, drowning out the camp, the physician, the witch.
He felt himself slipping. Sliding back down into the pit.
No.
Panic flared in his gut. He couldn’t go back there. Not to the black sand. Not to the chains. Not to the voice that told him he belonged to it.
He squeezed his eyes shut, fighting the pull of unconsciousness, fighting the fever. He didn’t want to go.
Desperately, he scoured his mind, pushing away the image of his dead wife sprawled in the sand. He forced a new picture to the forefront of his thoughts.
Sera. Alive.
Sera, standing in the throne room at Goldreach, wreathed by sunlight, her smile reaching her eyes, that stubborn, beautiful chin lifted high. He branded the image into his mind’s eye.Thatwas his Sera. Not the corpse that haunted his dreams.
My Sera is alive.He clung to the hope like a drowning man to a rope as the darkness dragged him back down, swallowing him whole.
But this time, he took his kirei with him. Perhaps with her firmly fixed in his mind, the nightmare would not come.
Perhaps, just this once, he could simply dream of her.
Chapter sixty-two
Seraphina
The air in the deepest vaults of the Dawnspire tasted stale. Old. Here, far beneath the howling winds and the crowded great hall, the world truly did stand still.
Frozen in time.
Seraphina held the lantern high, the golden light pushing back the shadows that clung to the rows of dusty crates and weapon racks. Beside her, Reyla moved with a quiet, focused intensity, her fingers tracing the strange mechanisms laid out on the workbench.
“Well?” Seraphina asked, her voice echoing strangely in the cavernous space. “Can you make sense of it? Master Finch claimed these were merely ‘failed experiments’ from ‘a time long past,’ butthey look…” She tilted her head to the side, trying to understand what she was looking at. “Intriguing?”
Reyla didn’t look up. Her brow was furrowed in concentration, her gaze darting across the disassembled components of what looked to be a crossbow, though it was far too large and possessed a complex system of pulleys and levers Seraphina had never seen before.
Not even her cousins could guess what it was for. It had been Dame Florence who had suggested she let Reyla take a look.
After a moment, her sister-in-law took up her writing slate again. The scratch of chalk was sharp in the silence. She held it up.
It’s a tension multiplier for a crossbow. Not a failed experiment. Just unfinished.
Seraphina smiled, impressed but not surprised. Aldric had told her Reyla was immensely clever. Different, but certainly not less.
And in those quiet moments, picking through the secrets Dawnspire’s lowest depths held with her sister-in-law, she finally saw just why Aldric had risked his life by carrying a witchblade into her court—into her bedroom. Not for his own enjoyment nor his own gain, but all to savethiswoman. This brilliant soul. His little sister.
But then again, a part of her had always seen it. Had always understood. She had just been too wounded to see it in the heat of the moment during his confession.
