Page 134 of The Lure of Wolves and Whispers

Oona.

My hands grasp for the sheaths at my waist—thank the fucking Old Ones that whoever grabbed me didn’t take my blades.

The High Queen really does want my death to be a spectacle—a display of the noble daughters triumphing over me, a peasant.

Proof for this entire fucking court that even with a blade, I could never best them.

Fury ripples in a sizzling flame down my spine.

Watch me.

Oona digs her blade in against my throat, and I freeze. Her hand roams along my sheaths, plucking the blades and the short sword and dropping them in the mud.

She wrenches my chin up with the flat edge of her knife.

While she can’t be any taller than I am, her grip is pure iron.

A dull roar rises over the din of the rain and the wind as Oona holds me out to face the nobles. Hundreds of them, thronging in the stands in their finery from the masked ball beneath banners snapping in the wind. The gardens and castle walls are maybe two hundred feet away, blurring in the growing barrage of rain and that beating rising louder in my ears.

All it will take is an inch, and her knife will sink into the thrumming pulse beneath my jaw. I’ll bleed out right here in the dirt, just like so many other Quaysiders.

I won’t let them see me cower. I won’t beg Oona to spare me.

“Tell me,” I gasp out. “How’s it feel to give up everything and know you’re still only as good as apeasant?”

A hot line of pain bites where her right hand scrapes the blade against my flesh.

I struggle against her, try to pull back from the long daggeran inch below my pulse, but she steps back with me and keeps the blade locked at my throat. “You peasants are all the same. Doesn’t matter how many tricks you pull to get here. You’ll never understand how the real world works. What it takes to deserve power.”

Her grip tightens on the hilt of the blade, and I know.

This is it.

“I knowexactlywhat you deserve,” I hiss, and pour every bit of grit and strength and rage into my muscles. I claw my nails into the tendons on the back of her blade hand so hard that her hot blood trickles down my neck.

Oona snarls.

Her blade twitches at my neck, drawing a fierce line of pain across the skin there. Desperation surges in me, and I use my grip to wrench her wrist down and away from my throat. In the same breath, I rip my elbow back to duck under her blade arm, and crank my grip on her wrist, jerking the lowered arm up viciously behind her back. I throw my entire weight into the wrenching movement, keeping her blade arm twisted behind her, and slam the joint forward.

Her shoulder dislocates with a horrific crack, and Oona shrieks.

My breath burns in my chest.

Her arm hangs uselessly out of the socket, and her eyes are wild with pain. But she doesn’t let go of the blade. She just switches it to her other hand and pants, eyes fixed on me and burning with lethal hate.

It all comes down to this.

Oona will never yield—not to apeasant.

If Talon is right and there could be more than one of us leftalive, then any of us remaining have to support that interpretation of the rule. Oona would never agree to let others live, but someone like Saraid…

Fierce, raw hope sears in my bones.

The rain pours down in sheets that turn the world to slate. The roar of it threatens to drown out everything else. Oona’s face is soaked with the spray of crimson, dark bursts of it all across her front. A crumpled form in a dark cloak lies at the base of the castle behind her, but it’s raining too hard to make out who she is—Aisling or Saraid?

I stare at Oona, chest heaving.

She lunges.