I glanced side to side and over my shoulder. We’d maintained the same order since leaving the dormitory—Nash, the doe-eyed girl, Nimra, me, Rilk, Garrick, and Alize.
None of us moved toward the ladder. The priestess looked up and down our line, but she offered no final prayers or hints about what awaited us atop the wall of ice.
“Surviving supplicants should proceed to the Justice Gate,” she instructed. “Begin.”
The acolytes moved swiftly, forming a pathway around us, their green robes lining either side. At the end, the rope ladder swayed in the breeze. It was not even affixed to the wall. Fuck. This was going to hurt.
Nash threw a malicious grin over his shoulder and started climbing. I counted under my breath as he rose, rung over rung. He never paused to catch his breath, and he did not slip. The highest rungs were difficult for even me to see, but as he climbed over the top of the wall, his pace remained steady. He’d reached the top without injury.
But instead of disappearing over the edge, he reached into his cloak, withdrawing something in his hand. Then he crouched down and cut the rope ladder loose from the wall of ice.
So much for mercy.
CHAPTER 15
The ladderwasanchored—atthe halfway point. Maybe it was Seraxa intervening, but the first twenty-five feet of the rope ladder remained intact. But the final stretch was nothing but bare ice.
The girl at the front of the line turned. We all did, finding the dark-haired priestess behind us. She stood between the last set of acolytes, closing the channel they’d formed with their green robes. Behind her, the armed guards from inside the temple stepped into place.
We were trapped. The only way out was up.
Tears broke free from the girl’s round eyes, spilling in rapid streams down her sunken cheeks. I did not need the Dark God’s gifts to see her hands shake as she reached for the ladder.
She was petite, which gave her less weight to haul up using her non-existent muscles. I cursed the hearty meal I’d eaten the night before. I wouldn’t have that advantage.
But too soon she reached the midpoint, where the severed ropes fell away to dangle uselessly. We all watched in agonizing silence as she remained frozen.
“Begin.”
Again, we turned as one to look at the priestess. Everyone except Garrick. When I turned, he was looking straight at me. His unsettling turquoise eyes made no effort to pretend otherwise. But like nearly every time before, they were inscrutable in everything but their intensity.
I forced myself to look past him. Whatever he did or thought now, whatever attraction I’d felt for him, they were distractions that would get me killed.
The priestess stared back, her expression completely unchanged—brow smooth, eyes expectant, and a menacing guard at each shoulder.
The gods will have their due.
“Please start moving,” Nimra said under her breath as she stepped up to the ladder.
She began to climb, but slowly. Slower than her healthy body should have allowed, slow enough to give the petrified girl a chance to get herself off the ladder and up the wall—before Nimra reached her and was forced to choose.
An act of mercy.
Nimra could have overtaken the girl easily. But she moved up the ladder with purposeful slowness.
Would I have given the girl the same chance? My throat tightened. That heart that Garrick thought still worked said yes. But the determination to return to my coven, to save myself and Kyrelle… I did not have an answer.
Something that couldn’t have been relief seeped into my chest cavity as the girl reached up past the end of the ladder, found a handhold in the ice, and pulled herself up. She was painfully slow, but by the time Nimra reached the midpoint of the wall, the young girl was well out of reach.
Nimra did not hesitate, finding her own path and starting up the ice wall with impressive speed, given her humanity. I stepped forward, expecting the priestess to direct me to beginimmediately. But she remained silent. Nimra reached the top. The girl was still only three-quarters of the way up and barely moving.
“Begin.”
The climb was every bit as torturous as I’d expected. My own body worked against me, the thickness of my thighs painfully apparent as I dragged them up rung after rung. My weight had often been a hindrance in a world built to honor waifish figures. But for centuries I’d had my power to bolster me. I’d become dependent on it, and it was too fucking late to do anything about it. My biceps and thighs screamed, and I hadn’t even reached the midpoint.
I cannot die here.
Not alone, without my coven sisters. Not so pitifully close to the beginning, as useless as Kyrelle had accused me of being.
