“Go!” I yell, motioning for him to get to safety. I’ll be fine.
I watch as Taran finally convinces him to head to the exit, then I make my way to the nearest tunnel out of the arena. The crowd is half gone now, just as the amplified voice of GrandVizier Cyrus urges them to calm down and not to push, assuring them there’s no danger.
I’m not sure I believe him. I didn’t see if the guards managed to get Calliope, but she certainly wasn’t working alone.
I’m nearly at the tunnel when I see movement to my right, and I just glimpse the guard’s charging figure before he knocks me to the ground.
“Wait! I’m trying to—”
I feel the heel of his blade impact my skull, and everything goes black.
I wake in a carriage. It’s enclosed, like the carriages we use in Nithyria, but there are bars on the windows.
“Go back to hell, Nithyrian cunt,” the same guard as before spits at me, and then I’m under again.
I wake again in a jail cell.
The stone floor is cold and hard beneath me, and my head and body are in agony. Based on the way the pain radiates along the side of me that’s on the ground, they threw me in here.
The cell reeks of blood and shit and vomit. I nearly vomit myself as I pull myself upright, my arm screaming in pain when I put weight on it.
What the fuck is happening?
“There you are, Nithyria,” says a woman’s voice from beyond the bars. It’s dark in the cell, but that’s not what’s making it hard for me to see. The guard must have hit my head pretty hard.“I’d keep my mouth shut if I were you. They think we’re in it together.”
That accent. I recognize it.
“Calliope?”
I pull myself up using the bars and peek through a gap.
It’s her, alright. She’s in a cell across from mine, slouched against the wall.
“No talking,” says a guard. He raps my fingers with his sword where they’re clutching the bars.
The impact stings. I pull back, but I lose my balance and fall to the shit-stained floor.
“You heard the man, Nithyria,” says Calliope.
The guard rattles his keys. “Speak again, and I’m coming in there.”
It takes a minute for my thoughts to collect themselves over the pain in my head.
They think I did this.
They think Calliope and I planned this together, both of us shadow-born, that we were all working together with the assassin who went for Ronan. That has to be the reason I’m in here.
Fuck. What am I going to do?
I was there with her on the floor. I shot an arrow in the royal box, right next to Ronan.
I’m from fuckingNithyria.Of course they think I was trying to kill him.Heprobably thinks I was trying to kill him.
How can I possibly prove that I wasn’t?
There’s only one tiny speck of relief in the shitstorm of my panic.
Ronan is alive.
