“I chain mail to return home and find my answer,” Victor said, gaze fixed on the man bounded by rope. “Who is the hunter, and who will be the hunted?”
Fresh bruises marred Ezran’s cheeks, evidence of his failed venture into the dungeons that led to his altercation. While he made noise through the rag stuffed in his mouth, far from his reach was a limp body that no longer moved. Amelia gasped, vision swimming with tears before her mind could process the sight. Lilith’s eyes were shut, her limbs tied by rope around the stake. Her skin, once golden, was as white as the pearls scattered near her feet. Splotches of red dried in the dead patch of grass where she hung. Ezran had only recently been caught, while it had been hours since they tied Lilith there.
Amelia lunged forward, but the rough arm of a soldier restrained her. A scream tore from her throat, so primal she couldn’t recognize the wail was her own. She clawed at chain mail as if she’d gone mad.
“They are traitors,” her father said. “Our blood and gold are so valued that we cannot trust those beyond borders and at home. I brought you here to understand the consequences of deception. It’s why we hunt: to show who has power and who is merely prey.”
Ezran continued thrashing against the rope, his yells muffled behind the rag stuffed in his mouth. The bruises on his face welled up, shiny and purple. No matter how severe his injuries were, he didn’t tire resisting. A soldier removed the cloth from Lilith’smouth, then Ezran’s. Lilith remained still while Ezran spat blood in front of their feet.
“I had higher expectations for you to at least commit to a public execution. But I suppose that would start a war with my father, and Gyldan’s not as powerful of a kingdom as you’d like to portray,” Ezran snarled, teeth gleaming red. “The only people who know of tonight are three of your most trusted soldiers, while you let the rest of the kingdom fill in the stories for themselves. So who shall take the blame in this story? A wicked queen, deemed at fault by status of being a common woman, while their king hides in cowardice?”
The muscles in Victor’s jaw tightened, yet he paid Ezran no response. Instead, he drew his bowstring taut. Ezran continued fighting his restraints, pushing his chest forward to put pressure on the bindings. Welts formed over his limbs from the friction of skin against rope. But brute strength wasn’t enough. Victor’s arrow already pointed directly at Ezran’s head.
It happened in a single breath. The exhale from Victor’s lips, the release of his fingers from the bow. Amelia leapt forward and shoved her father with her full body weight. The arrow took flight, direction askew, and hit Ezran’s arm. Rope splintered as his limbs pulled forward to break free. He tore the arrow from his flesh and stabbed the guard beside him in the eyes. The soldier reared backward, screaming in pain, as Ezran took his sword and thrust the blade into the soldier’s abdomen.
Amelia was on top of her father, his back flat on the ground. Her fists pounded against his chest. “I won’t let you kill them,” she cried. “Lilith wanted nothing but a better future for us. For Gyldan—”
Victor seized her by the wrists. “Do not defy me, Amelia. She betrayed Gyldan.”
Her tears blurred the sharpness of his face. He looked nothing more than a shadow to her, a vague entity, a monster.
“No. She betrayed you. But you do not represent Gyldan.”
She ripped herself away from his grip. Her heartbeats pounded like thunder. They ricochet across her veins. She burned hot, like she was on fire. It wasn’t panic that had overtaken her body. It was rage.
“Our bloodline is not why Gyldan prospers. It’s the hard work of people like Lilith who wanted to make it a better place. You never worked for anyone but yourself. There will be no heir to the throne, Father, because that ends with—!”
The force of Victor’s hands shoving her cut the air from Amelia’s lungs. She landed on the ground before a sword sliced her vision, blade sinking into flesh. Her father’s agonized cry pierced the air. Blood spread from his chest and soaked his shirt. Ezran drew his sword back, leaving a gaping wound where the king’s heart stopped beating.
Ezran retreated to unbind Lilith from the stake, while Amelia remained frozen, staring at the bleeding body before her. Her father had pushed her away from death, only to meet it himself.
There was something petrifying about seeing someone in death. She noticed details she hadn’t before. The grays of his hair, how he hadn’t trimmed his beard for so long that they overtook his face. The sagging skin beneath his eyes. The dimming blues of his irises, ready to erode. He was no longer a king. Only a father who protected his daughter.
She placed shaking hands over his wound, as if her palms could stop the soul from leaving his body. Blood soaked into the fabric of her dress and watered the soil beneath them, thick and foul with the smell of iron. She listened to his fading breaths before his eyes turned to glass. Once he was still, she scannedtheir surroundings and took in three more bodies splayed on the ground. The two guards that had accompanied them were dead. The third one had an arrow stuck to his eye and a deep slash in his abdomen. She vaguely recalled the sounds of fighting in the background, but the world had tilted its axis the moment she’d tackled her father and let rage blind her. Now, it was grief that turned her vision blurry, tears that clogged her throat and kept her from sobbing.
Ezran was on his knees with Lilith in a chokehold of an embrace. Pieces of rope scattered around them, limp as Lilith’s pale arms draped on the ground. Blood had long left her body from hours spent hanging at the stake. Ezran continued shaking her anyway, screaming her name until his voice turned hoarse and broken.
The sound rang hollow in Amelia’s ears like she was an empty shell. She could not believe the woman in front of them was dead. Lilith looked too cold, like the family portrait hung on the castle walls. Not the queen made of sunlight, whose skin smelled like old books and hands were always smeared with ink. Not her Lilith.
But it was Ezran who held her, not Amelia. It was Ezran who pressed a kiss to her lips, and when he pulled away, left her face damp with his tears. He rolled his head back and released a guttural scream to the sky. The sound was like thunder, raising bumps in Amelia’s flesh in its reverberating anguish. Grief mutated into rage, all-consuming, as he slowly turned to her. His eyes changed first, pupils dilating. A transformation from prince to madman.
Her blood ran cold as his grip twisted around the hilt of his sword. She scrambled to her feet before he lunged for her.
Perhaps it was her distance from him already, or perhaps it was quick thinking that helped her escape into the shadows of the woods. Amelia knew neither was true. She had only done what she knew best: running away.
CHAPTER 37
AFALLING STAR LANDED on the coast of Autumnland when Corin arrived. Her limbs had grown weak and tired from swimming, her lungs taking in desperate gasps of air as she crawled over the shore. The earthquake had spewed plumes of dust and debris into the air. She coughed violently, forcing her body forward. The woods swallowed her whole as she trudged through the path of trees and shouted for Malicine.
Her voice echoed through hollow trees and winding roads. Whispers of imagined voices scraped the leaves, urging for distraction, a lure to an offbeat path. Her skin prickled from the bitter cold, a familiar sensation. She remembered what she had seen the last time she was here: bloodstained pearl earrings, a dead king with antlers, trails of ants that crawled over Elly’s sunken face. A voice that said Briar, or Amelia, or maybe even Corin herself, would never be forgiven.
Surrounding trees morphed into screaming faces. The arrangement of bark twisted into familiar features belonging to Harlow, Maggie, Rowan, everyone she had lost. Cold breezes dissolved to whispers like their voices, pleading for her to look at them,remember the taste of death and regret. Corin shook her head, trying to ward off the memories. This wasn’t real, she kept telling herself. The island used her subconscious for tricks, reflecting the darkest of thoughts the deeper she crossed. As long as she remembered light existed too, she could escape the island with Malicine, both their minds intact.
Corin cupped her hands over her mouth and continued shouting the demon’s name until it strained her throat. The darkness was so vast that she couldn’t tell where they were or if they even heard her. Dead trees remained still, as if nothing changed. The wind howled mockingly, drowning her voice.
She took another step until the ground rumbled once again. Branches rattled like bones before the sound of split wood tore the sky. Violent tremors pushed rocks off a mountainside. She dodged the boulders, but mud gripped her ankles and pulled her down the landslide. The sudden descent was too familiar. It terrified her as the ground swallowed her whole.
Debris and snapped branches collapsed on her body, pinning her down the bottom of a hole. Mud slicked her clothes as cold air breathed into reopened wounds. There came the pain again, one she knew too well. It bloomed in the pit of her stomach and rolled waves of nausea across her skin.
