A putrid smelling cloth is suddenly slammed over my nose and mouth. I sputter and cough, inhaling something sharp and bitter and consuming. It coats my tongue, sticks to my throat, burns my eyes, flares in my chest.
No, no, no!
Panic is a scream in my head, blaring through my ears, pounding through my veins. But with the blow to the head and this dizzying drug trapped against my face, I immediately slump, unable to hold my weight, unable to do anything.
I can’t move my legs. Can’t control my arms. My fisted hand tries and fails to get the gold to help. It slows and clogs against my palm like mud in a bog, too thick and gluey to move.
Someone catches me before I collapse, and it’s all I can do to hold up my head. It’s all I can do to keep my eyes open. It’s like looking through a vortex, everything moving, everything violent and blurred. The cloth is just thin enough to let me breathe in and out, but it’s forced and suffocating, making my heart race.
My mind, however, seems to be slowing down. So are my blinks. I’m trying to stay awake, trying to make sense of what’s happening. The gold is dripping off my hand like drying paint, just as drugged and paralyzed as I am, and it falls from my fingers in a useless drizzle onto the lush grass.
Rissa is struggling, muffled screams against the cloth, her terrified eyes locked on mine. And I have nothing. No other gold around to help us, my magic too tainted from this poison to use it even if there were and my body weren’t incapacitated.
And then two people walk forward. One of them is an unfamiliar man wearing a long white robe. A robe—and a large necklace hanging down with the emblem of Second Kingdom. My heart splits in fear, but then, my eyes fly to the second person moving out of the shadows.
Manu.
“It’s nothing personal, Doll,” he says quietly, dressed in blue so dark it’s nearly black, his arms bare, hair tied back tight. “But I am loyal to my sister.”
“And to the law of the Divine,” the robed man says.
Manu nods stiffly. “Let’s go. We can’t afford to be anywhere near here when Ravinger gets back.”
I try to scream against the cloth, but all that comes out is a blustering breath.
“What about this one?” someone asks—the man holding Rissa. “She’s just a saddle.”
It’s getting so hard to keep my eyes open. So hard to hold up my head. Rissa doesn’t look away from me, though. So I don’t look away from her either.
“Just knock her out and leave her,” Manu says.
Relief trickles through me, though the drug has even affected that, making it murky in its echoing gurgle.
But then the robed man shakes his head, and my entire body tightens. “No. We can’t afford loose ends. Kill her.”
My stomach roils. My lungs feel like they’re melting in my chest, continuing to pull in polluted air, but my bitter-stained tongue is too leaden to let out a cry of protest anyway.
When I see the man holding her start to plunge the dagger through her chest, time speeds up. Like it’s trying to get this over with, like my body and mind are far too slowed down for what’s happening.
I try to scream, but all I get out is the faintest of whimpers, and my vision starts to go black, my head pounding.
I watch as Rissa’s eyes flinch with pain and shock as she’s stabbed through.
Fast. Too fast I can’t stop it. Too fast that I can’t doanything.
The blade goes in, stuck through her body as easily as someone skewers a piece of meat. Her mouth parts in shock, gaze still locked on me, and then that shock turns to something else.
Something finite and fatal.
She slumps, and I slump with her.
Her body is tossed onto the garden grass with carelessness. There’s a bloodstain blooming amidst the flowers right there on her white dress, the blade still sticking up from her chest.
And it feels like a blade sticks right through my own heart, while a silent scream rends through my head.
Then, everything goes dark.
CHAPTER 59
