Page 4 of Sworn to the Shadow Throne

The gods, too, if the silence was anything to go by. They’d been remarkably consistent in their absence—the only thing they offered us anymore.

A vein-streaked hand stuck out of a golden pile beside the community well, its rigid fingers stretching out as if reaching for water even after death. Another body lay two paces away—an old woman, sprawled half-buried, eyes and mouth choked with the ashes of her neighbors’ houses. The wind caught a lock of her gray hair, making it dance grotesquely in the breeze.

Men from my village sifted through the wreckage, stooping to remove belts, pry off rings, and pull boots from the legs of the dead. Elbort, average in every way except for the deep scar across his temple and his commitment to making everything around him worse, wrestled a cloak free of a corpse, cursing when the blood-stiff fabric resisted him. He laughed as the seam tore, making the body hit the ground with a soft thud.

Of course he’d laughed. Elbort laughed at funerals, at injuries, at anything difficult to think through. I hated him for the sound and hated myself more for still flinching at it. Worst of all, I knew he’d find a way to make an ugly joke about the dead again before the sun set.

Today the men had turned grief into a contest of who could laugh first. It was worse when their simmering fear curdled into cruelty. I’d seen the pattern often enough to recognize the symptoms for both. And this man in particular was stupid enough to mistake cruelty for strength.

“We’d already be back in Selmont if you weren’t spending so much time laughing,” I said. Normally, I was adept at biting my tongue, but the sight and smell of so much blood had loosened the hold I had on my temper.

A sneer flashed across Elbort’s face before he thought better of it and resumed his work.

My morality, it turned out, was flexible, but not infinitely stretchable. I still had standards. I was complicit in robbing the dead, but I would never stoop to degrading them.

Cold bastards.

Our village had thrived while others faltered, in part because we scavenged the remnants left behind by raiders. We’d learned to profit from their destruction, bartering a raider’s axe for grain in market towns, a scorched cloak cut into squares for a quilt and sold for a touch of secondhand warmth. It was ugly commerce, but it would keep the children fed this winter.

Though naming it survival didn’t make it feel any better.

To the east, rugged mountains clawed at the sky, casting deep shadows over the winding track that led home. If these raids ever stopped, I might be able to leave Selmont behind with a clear conscience, hide my ears with creative hairstyles, and go somewhere my life wasn’t carved out of other people’s ruin. Somewhere that didn’t carry my history with these people. Where people didn’t look at my ears and see a pariah. Somewhere I could be foolish enough to trust and maybe one day fall in love.

The faintest moan pulled me toward a small hut.Lichen clung to the wood-shingled roof and weathered logs that formed the walls. It was likely a replica of the house that had been its neighbor, but that one had perished in the fires that had consumed most of the wooden buildings in the settlement.

My magic stirred unprompted as I crossed the square, a tiny, restless flicker that felt like the brush of a stranger’s hand against my arm. Strange, but I told myself it was from nothing more than anticipation at what I would find. Even as I stepped around the old woman’s body near the well, my heart beat harder, and hope bloomed where only despair had been. Grasping the crude handle, I wrenched the door open.

A gray-haired man lay sprawled in his bed, pained gasps rattling his torso. A worn knife lay on the floor beside him.

He tried to fight.

The walls of his tiny home were adorned with knickknacks that could only have been crafted by a child’s hands—lopsided clay figurines and scraps of wood decorated with charcoal faces. Someone had loved him. Probably many someones.

Tears pressed at the corners of my eyes as my imagination painted the scene of sacrifice in the name of love. Now blood stained the front of this man’s shirt, and one side of his chest didn’t rise at all.

Gods above and below.

The raiders had aimed for his heart and missed.

The man’s pleading gaze followed me as I approached. I knelt beside his simple bed, brushing soot from his weathered face—ash that had slipped through the cracked door and windows.

“I’m a healer, but I can’t heal this,” I whispered, though my magic begged me to try anyway, foolish thing that it was. If wanting were enough, I’d have saved half the borderlands by now.

The truth stung, but the pain wasn’t as sharp as it used to be. Part of me had become numb to death, even as every fiber of my being sought to delay that inevitability when I could.

Something in his eyes told me he understood. Still, he wanted something from me.

I picked up his cold, trembling hand. His grip was featherlight, breaths shallow as he stood at death’s doorway. Then his attention shifted, focusing on the points of my ears. As shock washed over his face, his fingers went limp.

I wasn’t supposed to exist.

“You don’t have to fight anymore,” I told him, trying to ignore the fear in his cloudy gaze. This moment wasn’t about me or my feelings; it was about making certain he wasn’t alone. “Your family is already at peace. If you want, I’ll stay with you until you’re ready to meet them again.”

Where our hands clasped, I allowed a thread of my magic to flow into him. I hoped the warmth would distract from his pain and quiet some of the panic I saw in his eyes. “I’m Lunette.”

I’d expected his eyes to shutter in relief, but they narrowed then fixed on mine, that same pleading from earlier now turned cold as a grave.

A whisper, barely a breath, slipped from his lips. “End it, please,” I might’ve missed it had my hearing not been so keen.