His chest was caving in. His lungs were collapsing and he would never breathe again. Gods. There was no time.
Tristan’s voice was harsh in his ear, pulling him back from the dark tunnel he’d been sliding down. “No, Val, it’s a good thing. We need them to move her.”
“What the actual fuck, Tristan? They’re going to execute her. At noon! How can that possibly be a good thing?”
“Listen to me. We can’t get Alanna out of the tower, but if they move her, we’ve got an idea. And the Hawks want to help.”
Val tried to get his breathing under control and think. Slow breaths in and out while the others watched him with wide eyes, no doubt waiting for him to lose his mind completely.
He didn’t care what they thought of him. He cared that they were fucking sitting around eating breakfast when Alanna was about to be hanged.
With iron self-control, he reeled in his rage. Killing someone was not going to benefit anyone. Not yet, anyway.
Eventually he was able to grit his teeth and ask, “What kind of idea?”
Chapter Five
Alanna saton the cot with her back wedged into the corner of the room, arms wrapped around her bent knees, and tried to ignore the vicious cold seeping through the rough stone walls—and the relentless burn from the seeping wounds on her back.
Thank the Bard they’d left her in what she’d been wearing when Keely and Nim escaped. Leather breeches and vest covered by a heavy black mourning dress. It was ironic, really, to be hanged in mourning clothes, but at least she wouldn’t die of exposure during the night.
Also ironic, when she thought about it.
What had Val felt like, in these very cells, night after night, stripped to nothing? Bleeding and hurting and alone. She shuddered, and not from the cold. He would never have known how she and Keely had tried to reach him, or her relentless demands that he should see a justice. All he knew, as he suffered, was that he had been abandoned by everyone.
At least he was finally free. Grendel was dead, and Val had escaped with his family. And she would soon be punished for her part in the tragedy that led them both to this.
What would his life be like, now that she was out of it? Immeasurably better, there was no doubt. She imagined him wrapping his strong arms around a pretty, smiling woman, dropping kisses to her forehead as they watched a bevy of black-haired, blue-eyed children with silver-gray wings.
Bard. Maybe it was better that she would be dead first.
She wrapped her fingers around her throat and tightened them, feeling the instinctual rise of panic, the desperation for air, wondering what it would be like as the rope buried itself into her skin; as she took her last breaths, twitching and gasping for the amusement of the crowd.
She let her fingers drop away and leaned her forehead on her knees. No more tears. She’d promised herself.
The night passed agonizingly slowly and strangely unreal. The guards calling their rounds, the occasional groans and rustling from the opposite cell, even the gentle sloshing of the water in the moat outside—all seemed to be happening far away, to someone else. As if she was looking down at her own body from above.
She must have slept. From time to time she jerked awake from strange and unsettling dreams. Keely singing as she laid a fire, not noticing the flames flickering up her wrists until they consumed her and she fell away, screaming in agony. Val picking snowdrops that dissolved into blood in his hands. He didn’t notice, simply added the bloody pulp to the basket and picked another. She tried to warn him. Warn them both. But her voice refused to work, and she woke up sobbing uncontrollably, confused and disoriented.
Eventually she gave up. She wiped her eyes on her sleeves and forced her half-numb feet to the floor to stand unsteadily. She rolled her shoulders back, stretching her achingly stiff neck, and started to walk once more.
Four paces along the bars. Five to the back wall. Three to the cot. Five back to the bars.
And again.
The sun had been up for hours, a misty shaft of autumn light spearing in through the high, barred window in her cell, when a guard arrived with water and cold porridge. He shoved it through the low slot between the bars with an unintelligible grunt before walking away.
She looked at it for a long time. Was there even any point?
“I’ll have it.” The deep voice startled her.
She looked up at the imprisoned guard standing against the bars in the cell opposite hers, looking at her food with interest.
She lifted an eyebrow, annoyed that now he was bothered to notice her. “I don’t even know your name.”
“Dornar.” He nodded toward the bowl and then gave her an appraising look. “If you don’t want it, give it to me. It’s not as if you need it anyway.”
She drew herself upright and gave him a withering look. “With your chivalrous attitude, I’m surprised you’re not more highly regarded by our king. We all know how considerateheis.”
