It wasn’t until she touched his outstretched hand that the fog within her disappeared. Confusion settled, unsure of where she was and how she got there.
It was then we started to question if my illness was hereditary. Thatperhaps I was unlucky it had presented itself so early on in life. Starting with daydreaming. Pulled into a distant thought that sometimes I and my parents couldn’t get myself out of. The shakes in my fingers, which eventually took over my entire body. Fragments of words, of colors, of sounds and images. It could be disastrous if the dreams struck while I was doing something that required my full attention. Like swimming. Or tending the oven.
But where my mother described nightmares in her flashes, I saw light. I called them“glimmers”. Because they were lovely—nothing of what my mother had described. She would see death and carnage, rotting flowers and blood.
And me?
I would see lush gardens. Birds flitting through the trees, and the warmth of sunlight on my cheeks. A river snaking lazily through a forest. The flipping of pages, with a neatly curved handwriting filling the paper.
But every time those glimmers visited me, it would drain me. To the point I would collapse and sometimes not wake for another day. My hands would shake, and we began to question if my fragility was from a lack of nutrition or something else entirely.
A shadow shifts out along the exterior of the castle, and I fling up, reaching for the window latch as Marcella scales the side of the walls to my room. As I open the window, a fresh waft of chilled air greets me. Once she’s close enough, I reach out for her, and she takes my hand before dipping down into my room.
As soon as she is on her feet, I close the window halfway to keep the room warm. “No bedsheet this time?”
She brushes down her gown. “No, I didn’t need the extra support. I figured I could make it here without it.” When she straightens, she asks, “Have you given my proposal any more thought?”
Devin’s warning rings in my mind.“She’s a snake, Lyra. She cannot be trusted. She will twist everything in her power to achieve her ends.”Then Aelia’s questioning of whether Marcella had threatened or influenced me.
“How do I know I can trust your word?” I whisper.
She scowls like she’s insulted. “You do realize out of everyone here, I might be the one you can trust the most?”
“And you say that because…?”
“Because, as I told you last night, I have no intention to marry Cyrus.And if you really don’t believe me…” she reaches down beneath her skirts and withdraws a blade that shines in the moonlight behind her.
I fumble backward, holding my hands out between us. “What, you’ll kill me?”
“No, you fool,” she hisses and opens her hand, the dagger lying flat in her palm. “If you don’t trust my word, that’s alright. Because I don’t trust your word either. Which is why we’d do a blood oath. We won’t have enough time to naturally trust each other. So if we make a blood oath, we'll be bound by more than just our words.”
“And if I refuse?” I ask quietly, looking down to the blade in her hand. “Then what? You’ll kill me? You’ll…undermine me in the trials so I’ll fail?”
She works over her bottom lip, shaking her head slowly. “I want you to make the choice because the pros of binding yourself to the oath outweigh the cons of not making it. It’s immoral to force someone into a magical blood oath. That much I hope you can trust.”
I search her eyes. Wanting to find the right answer there. Her brother’s reputation terrified me for years. Even if I refuse and no ill will is held against me by her—willIregret not making it? As much as I love Aelia and the rest of the women I’ve befriended here, I imagine as time goes on and the competition dwindles, it may turn friend into foe. At least this way, I know for certain if Marcella and I were the last two standing, she’d surrender her position to me.
And seeing her in the trial—her skills are unmatched.
Besides, can I really trust Devin? I know nothing of the man—other than the fact he’s harboring the secret of my illness. From theking.
“If we commit to a blood oath—” I clear my throat, and the tension tightens it. “You’ll protect me and help me through the trials?”
Her eyes flick back and forth between mine. “Yes, and once you win the hand of Cyrus, you will pardon my brother.”
“You do see how that’s problematic, right? He’s a murder?—”
“It was revenge!” she snaps. “No one bothered to explain that the priest tortured Connor’s lover to the point of death before him, while also imprisoning and torturing him foreightdays, Lyra. Eight!”
She shakes her head to wave off the heavy breaths lifting her chest. Quieter, she continues, “You pardon him, and I’ll see to it that I guard him for the rest of his life, if that’s what it takes to help you sleep easier at night. I promise.”
Sucking a breath into my lungs, I hold it and nod, holding my hand out to her. “Alright. I’ll do it.”
She flicks a look from my open hand to my eyes, then hands me her dagger.
I rest the pointed tip on my palm, fighting against my instinct not to spill my own blood. The pounding in my head returns, slow and a pulse at first, until it’s caught in a rhythm. My hands shake, lightly then more furiously as I try to drag it a half inch. But I can’t budge.
“Here,” she mutters after a few silent moments. She wraps her hand gently around mine, pushes down, then drags the blade two inches across my skin. Leaving a bloody trail in its wake.
