Aya blinked her eyes open. Fire and smoke filled the square, a putrid burning smell searing her nose and making tears blur her vision. The ground was littered with injured guards, their moans starting to break through the muffled silence in her head.
In the middle of the square was Tova, a shield of fire around her.
Four guards lay dead at her feet.
Their flesh was raw, sections of it charred completely, their faces contorted into screams of terror. Or pain. Or both.
Her friend scrambled back from their smoking bodies, her eyes wide with fear. Fear that did not leave her face as she gazed across the gore-splattered cobblestones to Aya. Tova’s shield was burning on and on, just like the flames that devoured the easels and carts and injured bodies throughout the market.
She was looking at Aya as ifAyahad …
No.
Aya didn’t have flame, and Tova had been fighting, and …
Flame wasn’t blinding like that.
Tova continued to stare at her, horror etched on her face as her shield of fire dropped.
Aya tore her gaze away from her friend and took in the moaning figures on the ground; the dead guards beyond them, no more than lumps of red and black. Cracks had formed in the cobblestones, spreading directly from where Aya lay on the ground, like roots growing from a tree.
You and I both know it’s not light that drives you.
A high-pitched ringing replaced the roaring in her ears. She recognized a hard clicking noise beneath it. She searched for it, eyes scanning the damaged market, before realizing it was coming from herself, from the way her trembling body made her teeth chatter.
She clenched her jaw, and it was silent again.
Will slowly pushed himself off her, his eyes fixed on the curling smoke as he stood. He was still for a heartbeat. But as the guards who had made it to the alleyways flooded back into the market, faces full of vengeance, he grabbed Aya, hauling her off the ground, his grip tight enough to hurt.
She didn’t care. A numbness settled in her, as if whatever had filled her moments ago had ripped all sense of feeling from her.
‘We had the wrong heretic,’ one of the guards sneered as she pulled Tova off the ground and her comrades rushed to help the injured members. Her gaze traced those cracks in the cobblestones that led straight to Aya. ‘I’ve never seen a Persi wield light.’
‘I say we slit both their throats for good measure,’ another hissed as he grabbed Aya from behind, yanking her away from Will, the edge of his sword kissing her neck. Before she could even flinch, Will’s knife was on the guard’s sword-hand, his vice grip still on her arm.
‘You move this hand, and so help me gods I will saw it from your arm slow enough that you feel every single sunder.’ His voice was low, and the guard loosened his grip slightly.But not enough. ‘She’s mine,’ Will snarled softly, violence flashing in his gray eyes.
The guard released her, backing away with his palms raised.
For a brief moment, hope flared in Aya’s chest.
Our oaths bind us. He’ll get us out. He won’t—
‘Fools,’ he called to the guards. ‘You kill them, and whatever information they have dies with them. They’re of better use to Her Majesty alive than dead.’ He watched them, as if waiting for someone to defy him.
No one did.
Finnias glared from where he’d emerged from the alleyway, but even he remained silent under the Enforcer’s stare. That flicker of hope vanished as Will turned his gaze to hers, coldness written in his face.
This. This was Dunmeaden’s Dark Prince. The Queen’s Enforcer. There would be no escaping this – no escapinghim.
Aya’s heart raced, something like panic threatening to obliterate her senses even though she couldn’t detect a whisper of his power.
I don’t need an affinity to inspire fear, Aya love.
Something flared in Will’s eyes then, as if he too was remembering the words he’d said to her mere days ago. His grip tightened on her arm. ‘We take them to the palace. Their fate rests with our queen.’
19
