Her heartbeat tells me she’s terrified, but it’s the compassion in her eyes that tears me apart.
“Then takemylife,” she whispers, her face pale, her heart a slow, heavy beat. “Take my life in front of your people so theycan be done with their vengeance. Let your justice end with me. Not with these children.”
My shoulders slump. She has offered me her life and given me what I need to keep her alive.
At my command, she will fight the monsters that rise in the wasteland and make herself indispensable to the humans. I will give her Malak’s tools for this task. She will wield his hammer and all his terrible power. She will defend the humans and they will need her even if they hate her.
One day, I will find a way to secure her freedom.
Until then, she is mine to command.
Quietly, I say, “I accept.”
Part Two
The Wolf in the Flames
PRESENT DAY
Chapter 43
PRESENT DAY
My back is broken.
I’m lying on my side in a circular clearing that, until minutes ago, was covered in snow. Dragon fire has turned the snow into a wash of melting ice that now laps at my body, freezing and hot in turns.
Thecrackmy spine made when I hit the ground echoes through me, along with the shriek of searing flames that raged after us, the popping of leaves on the lone tree nearby as they burst into flames, and the hiss of burning sap within the tree’s bark.
Asha created that tree.
She knelt in the snow, touched the darkness, and turned it into something beautiful and alive.
Now, there’s silence around me.
A thick, unnatural silence that tells me my hearing is dangerously impaired. My right ear is underwater, but the intense pain in my neck is stopping me from lifting my head.
My left ear…
I sense warm blood trickling from it and sliding down my jaw. That was the side where the dragon’s paw hit me when he knocked us to the ground.
Agony thrums through my head and down the top of my spine, but it stops at my shoulder blades. It’s the complete absence of feeling below that point, the nothingness where I know I should be able to feel my arms and legs, that concerns me.
My spine must be broken in multiple places.
Panic pushes at me.
Without my hearing, I can’t sense Asha.
Without my legs, I can’t run to her.
My deep light is no longer available to me to help heal myself.
All I can see is the side of the clearing I’m facing, and she isn’t within my field of view. We’re high up in the mountains and there’s nothing but sharp drops on every side of this clearing except the one in the direction of my feet, where a forest extends back across the mountain range.
It took us five days to reach this clearing in our search for Milena Ironmeld, the lost sister of Malak Ironmeld, whose thirty-year reign over the humans in the south brought terror to their lives and mine.
We thought our search would begin here, in the west, at a supposed outpost belonging to the human army with which Milena is aligned.
