We glance down at my arms, wrapped in vines and my remaining four tattoos. My Reign debt.
“You have to keep going,” I say.
“How?” Her voice cracks. “You suggested the Desert Walk!”
“To buy you all more time to find proof.”
“What is time without you?” She looks to me, her pretty blue eyes filling with tears.
“What is liberation, if not for all?”
“I am heir now. I could’ve protected you.”
“So protect the others, for we are not done fighting.Iam not done fighting for my life and my loved ones and my people.”
My mistress looks away.
“Kass,” I say again. “You are stronger than him. Whether it’s because he’s a halfling doesn’t matter. What matters is thatyoucan bend the hardest gem on this earth to your will—and no one else.”
We stare at each other, at the roots holding me in place. Kassandra tilts her head.
“He’s noticed the Illusion.” She holds out her hand, the daggerflying into her palm. She lays the dagger along my wrist, tucking the handle into my grasp.
“What are you doing?” I ask. “You’re not allowed to give me anything for the Walk.”
“Come back to me,” she says.
“Kassandra, I—”
“Like I said, you’re hard to replace.”
I stare into her face, pinched in pain, and I understand, with a striking clarity, that it is over me. She weeps for me, my mistress. She has maimed and killed—we have maimed and killed together, all to be free, and I am not done sacrificing and neither is she. But feeling her fingers grip mine, eyes pleading for me, for another way, I wonder if, in another life, we could have been something different, something more. Something like the soft shape of companionship.
“I await your return.” She clutches my hands. “I will always wait for you, Avery. I promise.”
It is a promise I know she will keep. But can I keep mine?
I swallow. “You…you are—”
Kassandra jerks backward, Reign magic depositing her onto the steps.
The king maneuvers around her form, gesturing for the executioner. The pair steps forward, blocking Kass from view. The executioner reaches out a gloved hand, the hand of Death that took my friend. My heart picks up. I am afraid. The cool leather of the glove rests on my forehead, and I feel what Jeremee felt.
“Good luck,” the executioner says. I pay him no mind. Instead, I raise my chin and stare, unblinking, at the king.
Rotten thing,others have called me.
They were right.
I think of my friends, my family, the king who could change it all, who has known the pain of death and lashings of the Golden Whip, who knows the depravity the Houses dole out, the debt that strangles, the babies maimed, the lives that are lost, taken, ruined. All to feed their insatiable desire to hoard so that otherscannot have. A king who refuses change for the sake of convenience, who heads this monstrous system, this kingdom of killers. I think of it all, and then I let my emotions fill in my eyes, let my hatred putrefy the plane around us. And itreeks.
The king’s face falters before smoothing out once more.
“Your death does not change my plans,” Maxian says. “I will just find another one.”
A female attendant to incubate his children, for the fae have become weak with incest.
“You truly are your father’s son,” I reply. “Death hunted him down in the end, and now it’s hunting you.”
