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Fadey took in the onslaught, his face cut in rage. For a moment, a breathless instant, we locked gazes. Then, we both lunged—Fadey to his sword and me to him. He reached his blade in the same moment that I swung my own. He held steady against my sword for a few paces, but his fight was outmatched in skill and steel.

Fadey roared his anger and rushed for me, eyes flashing in hatred. I met his pace. No hesitation, no second thoughts.

The rest of the field fell away.

With a strangled cry, I landed a blow against the edge of Fadey’s blade. A quick strike, one that tossed us apart nearly as fast. We circled each other. The vibration of the steel prickled up my arms.

The melder’s eyes flashed. “We are not them. We do not fight like them.”

“Afraid a woman will slaughter you?”

Fadey yanked something pale and narrow from the pocket on his gambeson. “No. I have already won.”

Pain unlike I’d known lanced across my middle. A bone. Fadey threw a bone shard against me. Burning craft spiraled around the piece. Threads of dark gold I was certain only I could see rose from the piece and pierced through my leather jerkin, my tunic. They were digging into my skin, drawing the point of the bone into my belly.

I screamed and stumbled backward. Another shard struck my arm. Fadey was melding knife-sharp, jagged bones to my body. Slowly stabbing and shredding my skin. I saw Roark shoving through men, desperate to reach me.

There wasn’t time.

I had only one idea how to unfasten the shards of bone melding into my body. Take me to you! I screamed over and over in my head.

A tug, like a hook on a reel, snatched hold of my chest. Faster than ever before, I was flung into the murky shadows of the mirror.

“Melder!” Skul Drek hissed near my ear, his frigid hands touching the glow of the cruel shards slowly stitching into me. “Make it stop.”

I gripped his hand but looked over his misty shoulder. Surrounded by the blinding glow from endless souls, warriors, wolves, and fallen souls striding toward the distant gates of Salur, Fadey staggered to his feet.

“What have you done, Lyra?” He inspected the dark glow of his palms.

We had no time. I kept one hand on the bone shard half melded to my middle and rose to my feet. “Hold him!”

Fadey’s snarl deepened, and he crouched like he might be readying to strike, but in the next heartbeat he grunted and fell back. Dark, slithering shadows pulled taut over Fadey’s wrists and throat. He bucked and thrashed, but Skul Drek only tightened his darkness around the melder.

“You think you have me?” Despite the shadows on his wrists, Fadey balled one hand into a tight fist.

I shrieked against the shock of fire burning across my middle. Without his even touching me, the bone shards dug deeper into my flesh, my soul.

Skul Drek shouted for his melder. Demanded I keep my soul bright. “Release the bones, Melder,” he hissed. “Release the bones.”

Fadey was powerful. Never did I anticipate his ability of flinging bones like knives with hardly a flinch. He still controlled the threads of his weapons even here. I had to unstitch them.

Hand trembling, I looked down at the bone digging into my stomach. Like serpents the threads wriggled, dragging the point of the bone deeper, deeper. The glow of my body flickered.

Skul Drek hissed and clacked his teeth, and he moved like he was going to abandon the tethers he was keeping around Fadey.

“Hold him,” I pleaded, my voice soft.

Those copper red eyes flashed. But in another moment, heat flooded my chest. The glistening threads of our soul bond ignited into an inferno. By the gods, he was offering me his strength through our connection.

I touched one thread of a bone shard and ripped it out of my body. Fire scorched my soul where it severed, like plucking out small, narrow bones, and the pain was blinding. It was no wonder Kael opted to be dosed with heavy sleeping herbs when I unmelded his soul bones.

This was like the cut of a thousand knives.

Still, hand trembling, I reached for the next thread and yanked it free.

Fadey’s lip curled. He bucked his hips, watching me unstitch every damn thread of his deadly bone shards.

When the glow of the piece fell into the mists of the ground, I rose, quivering against the pain of the shard in my shoulder, but with a restored, wicked bloodlust flooding through my soul.