“They are creatures without reason,” he sneered. “No different from a donkey or a horse.”
She jumped back as his blade came down, just missing her shoulder by a hair. Harlow grinned like a child as he paced forward, revitalized by the near miss.
“That’s your problem,” Sofia said, clenching her jaw tight as the next collision of their swords rattled through her bones. “You keep underestimating us. You see us as less than even as you fear us. And you don’t even see the contradiction.”
“I fear you the same way I fear fire,” he said. “Unthinking and unwieldy in your destruction. You are nothing. Anyone who looks at those beasts and sees anything but the wild creatures they are doesn’t deserve the power they can bring.”
Sofia pushed forward with her sword, slashing down toward his side, but Harlow countered, throwing her momentum to the left as he brought his sword back down to the right. It sliced into her hip. She felt the impact a moment before the burning hot pain. Blood splattered the ground between them as she lurched back. Her leg gave out, and she fell to her knees, trying to catch her breath.
Above her, Chalia bellowed, and Harlow’s eyes lit with glee—so happy to see her brought low.
She’d heal. She knew that now. But the pain still radiated through her body, and her sword had fallen from her grasp at the strike.
“You are nothing,” Harlow said. “You’ve always been nothing and no one.”
“You keep saying that,” she said between gritted teeth. Her skin itched as it pulled back together, but the ache of the wound ran deep. “If I were nothing, you wouldn’t be spending so much energy trying to kill me.”
Even as she said the words, she realized the truth of them for the first time.
He didn’t just hate her. Hefearedher. He feared the power she held—that the dragons and the Dragonborn held.
“You hate that the dragons are more powerful than you. You hate that the Dragonborn have power that you’ve not specifically granted because you are nothing. You are the one who’s powerless. You are the one who is nothing.”
“I will not let this country be destroyed by a useless little rat!” he screamed.
Above them, Eha roared, and Harlow’s shoulders shifted in the smallest flinch. Sofia’s eyes flickered up just fast enough to see Eha thrown back with a sharp gust of wind from Chalia. Harlow’s eyes had shifted up, too, the briefest moment of distraction.
Sofia kicked out, sending her boot into Harlow’s shin. In the moment he stumbled back to regain his footing, she was up, sword in hand and swinging. She didn’t bother trying to overpower him. He was bigger than her—she wouldn’t win that way. But she moved swiftly, her swings coming down on him in quick succession, forcing him to focus on her and her alone. His pants grew heavy, his strikes getting weaker by the second as the battle in the sky between the dragons intensified, his mind stretched thin between the two.
“You are nothing,” she said, punctuating the words with each swing of her blade. “You are no one.”
She pulled her dagger out with her left hand, sword in her right. His blade came down, the swing slow and half-wild as Eha roared in the sky. She caught it with her dagger. In the same breath, she stabbed forward with her sword, piercing Harlow’s shoulder just beneath the leather of his vest.
He stumbled back, eyes going wide, and fell to his knees. Sofia felt the weight of decades of grief lift the smallest fraction from her chest asshe saw him, kneeling in the mud. His face creased with age, dark circles beneath his eyes. He looked so very human and so very small. Blood stained his shirt, and sweat dripped down his face. The setting sun set the entire clearing on fire, painting them in pink and red, like the blood staining him—staining the ground around him.
He smiled. Not a resigned or regretful smile, but one full of triumph. And his eyes flickered to the side.
Sofia didn’t want to get distracted. She didn’t want to play into his game, but she looked, unable to stop herself as she saw the flicker of blond hair out of the corner of her eye.
Fox hadn’t retreated like she’d told him to. He was only a few yards away, locked in a battle with another soldier. He was holding his ground, too, but Sofia could see the tremble in his arms as he brought his sword down again and again.
He couldn’t have seen the second soldier in black coming up behind him, sword raised.
Sofia screamed—not using words—but Fox understood nonetheless. He turned just in time to block the blow, but he fell back, unsteady on his feet. Both soldiers advanced on him, sending him teetering backward—toward Harlow and Sofia.
Harlow moved with a speed that shouldn’t have been possible for an injured man, but then he was there, his dagger out and pressed against Fox’s throat, pulling him back farther.
He was grinning as he twisted Fox to face Sofia.
She’d taken two paces forward, but she stopped when she saw the look in Harlow’s eyes and the place where the blade met Fox’s skin. There was already a thin trickle of blood tracing down the length of his neck, red on white.
“You can kill me,” he said. “Take out your impotent rage. But if I die, so does your precious Fox.”
Her heart pounded in her chest and her body was on fire. She couldn’t look away from Fox’s pulse point, thrumming against the blade on his throat.
The two soldiers had fallen back. They watched with their swords out, ready for theirorders.
Sofia couldn’t do it, and Harlow knew, the triumph clear in his eyes. After sun cycles of hunting and planning, she finally had the chance to strike him down, and she wouldn’t do it. Her sword was already hanging limply in her hand, forgotten. After everything, Harlow had won.
