“Release her.” Someone else had spoken, the words a feral growl. Linn searched along the hall until she found the speaker.Ana.A faint sense of relief calmed Linn. Ana was all right. She was alive. She had pushed herself to her feet, Ramson supporting her, her forehead slick with sweat. “Release her, or I’ll…I’ll—”
Kerlan’s smile looked more like a mad grimace. “Or you’ll what?” he crooned, then turned to the remaining Affinites in the hall, scattered throughout. “If anyone tries to hurt me, I will fling her off. All it will take is a little, tiny…tip,” he said, and held up her broken arm. Pain seared across Linn’s awareness again. “A broken warrior…why, she’ll hit the rocks below like a ton of bricks.”
A broken warrior.
Somehow, those words hurt more than the thought of dying.
“Call off the Bregonian Navy,” Kerlan ordered, and he reached back and gripped a fistful of Linn’s hair, jerking her head up and baring her throat. “Or, would you prefer to see her pretty face smashed bloody on the rocks below?”
Ana’s expression tightened. She gave another snarl but remained where she was.
“What are you waiting for, Blood Witch?” Kerlan said. There was a mad glint to his eyes. “The choice is yours. Call off the Navy, or she dies. I won’t ask again.”
Linn’s head spun. In the span of a single night, Kerlan had murdered nearly half the entire leadership of Bregon, and he would continue to take the kingdom for Morganya if he wasn’tstopped.
He had to be stopped.
She dangled at the edge of the drop. She imagined the sea roiling below, waves clawing at the cliffs and receding over sharp rocks. Once, a long time ago—alifetimeago—she might have reveled at the sight, with the winds at her back and her chi strapped to her arms.
Now, she could only look down, watching her arm hang loose beneath her, blood running in rivulets down her skin.
A wingless bird.
Tears blurred her vision. If she fell now, she wouldn’t survive. She could barely move with her wound, and the smallest shift of her arm felt as though she were being pricked with a thousand hot needles. She didn’t know if she had the strength to even summon her Affinity.
She took in the scene around Godhallem. There were bodies and blood everywhere, but the Affinites she and Kaïs had rescued remained standing. Ana, Ramson, and Kaïs were alive. And the Bregonian Navy was on their way.
They were so, so close.
Ana was shouting something at Kerlan, her face twisted in fury and anguish, but Linn was no longer listening. A faint wind blew in from the outside. Linn looked to the sky. The storm had broken; the stars were out, the silver of their light tinting the black expanse of night. She closed her eyes briefly, thinking of how her mother had said once that no matter where one was in the world, they looked at the same moon and stars.
Linn drew a breath. She knew what she had to do.
“Kill him,” she said, her voice a wisp of air. And then, stronger:“Kill him!”
Kerlan’s blow came out of nowhere. It left her reeling.
“Shut up,” he roared, and then he hit her again. Linn tasted blood. “You think I’ve done all I can do to you? I can break you over and over again, an infinite number of times for my own pleasure.”
His voice, the pain, they fell away from her. Tears warmed her cheeks, but Linn focused on the brush of wind against her face, the susurrus of the ocean below that seemed to open its arms to her, wrapping around her like a mother’s embrace.
My daughter,they whispered.Choose…to be brave.
Linn reached deep into the hollow cave of her chest, and found the last of her voice there, still fighting. The last drops of water in an emptying river. “Ana,” she gasped. “Kaïs.”Louder.She spoke so that her voice echoed in the halls, high and thin, but powerful nevertheless. “Kill him and end it. I’d rather die than let him live.”
Ana’s eyes shimmered behind her tears. Kaïs’s eyes were clouds of grief as he raised his swords.
Linn held Kaïs’s gaze and nodded. One life, in exchange for thousands of others, was a small price to pay. She would use her life to buy safety for those she loved. For in her final moments, it wasn’t hate or anger that filled Linn’s thoughts.
It was love.
Love, in Ama-ka’s midnight-black eyes, in Enn’s laughter that echoed between vast, empty mountains, in the gift of a life she had been given, however brief.
Linn only wished she had just a little more time.
But she would face death as a warrior, as a windsailer. She would be brave.
Linn turned to Alaric Kerlan.
