Too many. I look away before my brain can turn it into numbers.
But it’s the thin red thread tangled in her white hair that undoes me. Cursed, just like me.
Two daughters. Same blood. Same curse. Our pain is matched now.
Mael’s smug face floats through my mind. He did this to her to get to me. But why? What would hurting me, removing me from the Trial do for him?
I crouch beside Peonica’s bed, pressing my hands to her frail body. The last remnants of Blood magic left in me surge forward, drawn to her pain, flooding into her flesh.
But my magic is spent before I can finish, and two long scars remain—almost symmetrical, spreading wide across the shoulder blades and tapering inward at the ends, one slightly shorter than the other.
Peonica sleeps on. And I’m empty.
“How long will she sleep?” I ask, surprised by the thinness of myown voice. Like something vital has been drained from me, more than just magic.
“Till tomorrow, most likely,” Micheline replies. She steps into my view, arms crossed, forcing me to lift my head. Slowly, I drag my gaze up to meet hers. “What will you do with the survivors?” she asks.
A harsh chuckle bursts out of me. “What willIdo?” I spit the word. TheIis thick with contempt. All I’ve done is make things worse with every step I take. I caused all of this. “I’m the last person anyone should rely on. All I can do is rot and destroy.”
Kaelzar’s voice cuts through my spiral of self-pity. “You’re this realm’s future, Raylane.”
The sound of my name from his lips hits me harder than the memory of torn limbs and blood. Has he ever said it before with such tenderness? I blink at him, stunned.
“The Crimson Tether may have been thrust upon your people as an undeserved vendetta,” he continues, “but for the first time in centuries, there’s hope. Hope that those who’ve suffered under it might not only survive, but live. Thrive. You bring trouble, yes, but only to those who deserve it.”
He speaks with so much force, so much conviction, it steals the breath from my lungs.
“Fighting by your side made me realize that maybe I was wrong,” he says. “That maybe running away with a small group I care about, as I’ve planned, wasn’t the right thing to do. I wasn’t thinking about the others. I thought survival meant escape,” he says. “You taught me it means staying. Fixing it. For all of them.”
He takes a step closer. “And as I’ve sworn to you many times: I’ll do anything to make sure you survive this Trial. So you can give your people the future you promised them.”
With every word, the desperation bleeding out of me is replaced by admiration.
“That’s not what you swore,” I say weakly, a faint smile tugging at my lips. “You swore to do anything to make mewinthis Trial. My survival didn’t seem to be much of a priority before.”
He flinches. Just barely, but I catch it. As if my acknowledgment ofthe subtle difference of his words strikes a nerve he wasn’t prepared to expose. And then, with a small nod, resolve settles across his face.
I catch myself staring, drinking him in. Admiring the sharp angles of his face, the way the lines deepen when he’s thinking. He closes his eyes for a moment, then opens them and meets my gaze.
“Give me your hand,” he says, extending his palm toward me. I’m startled again by how large his hands are, but it’s the scars on them that hold my attention. For the first time, I think of them as beautiful. As something unique and fierce and entirely him. I suddenly want to trace each one, to learn their shapes and commit them to memory.
He opens his fingers wider, an invitation for me to place my hand in his.
I hesitate. Just for a breath. Because something about the way he’s looking at me makes my pulse stutter. Then, mechanically, I place my right hand into his left.
He pulls me to my feet, and just as I rise, a sharp sound cuts through the air. A shadowed blade extends in his other hand.
“Trust me,” he says, then waits.
I nod instinctively, unsure of what he means but finding myself trusting him completely. Then the blade moves.
Before I can react, he slices at his shadow. The blade severs a piece of it, and the second it separates, Kaelzar tenses so violently I think I hear his teeth grind. The veins on his forearm bulge with effort, and yet, the hand holding mine remains gentle.
The cut shadow writhes, snaking its way up his sword, disappearing into his right hand… and then reappearing from his left, the one gripping mine.
I flinch, instinctively pulling away as the shadow crawls toward my skin. But Kaelzar doesn’t let go, not rough, just firm enough to make sure our hands have contact.
The moment his shadow meets my skin, it sinks in. Dissolves into me.
