Page 111 of Iridian

They stopped.

Don’t come near me. Get back!

They did.

Meanwhile my heart all but beat out of my chest.

I somehow managed to fall back and sit on the hardwood floor, press my back against the wall, wrap my arms around my knees, pull them to my chest. I was shaking, though I was too shocked to cry.

I was shaking because I remembered, because I knew exactly what the hell was going on.

A promise. I’d made a promise.

An arrangement,said the voice in my head—a single voice that belonged to them. To all of them.

My eyes closed and it was so difficult to let go of this breath. So difficult to allow my muscles to relax. So difficult to allow myself tofeel.

All of them. Sixty-one souls, their light as bright as it had been in that darkness. Eleven of them alive. Around me. Four in my room, another seven outside in the hallway. Just behind that door.

And they were connected to me. They were mylimbs.My thoughts.

My…responsibility.

“An arrangement,”I whispered because it was too scary tothinkthe words and know that they heard them. Too scary still to talk to them without making a single sound.

An arrangement. You promised to find a way to set us free without condemning us to destruction, in exchange for our service until the day that you do,said the voice.Oursilentservice.

Silent,he said—or was it they? Same difference, I thought. But he was right, it was silent in my head. It hadn’t been, not when I was in that dark. It had been so, so loud…all those screams and those pleadings, all the cries and the stories and the images…

It was silent now in my head.

For as long as it took the sun to set behind the horizon, I just sat there and looked at nothing and I tried to process what had happened.

Taland. The fight. The Council. The look in Helen Paine’s eyes. The rage in Radock’s. The blood on Taland. His screams—my screams.

The way those lights had faded from existence, swallowed by that dark forever.

Fifty-nine souls lost as if they’d never existed. I mourned them, Goddess help me, as if they’d always been mine. Imourned them and I felt the void their destruction had left in me as clearly as I felt the cold wall I leaned on. It was a trap indeed, that curse, in every sense of the word. There was no way out of it, unless you ceased to exist. Both the master and the soldiers.

“I made you a promise,” I said to the room. “I will keep it. I will set you free as you deserve, or I will die trying.” My voice shook, but I thought the words, too, and so I knew they all heard them. I knew they would all know that I meant them with my whole being.

These men had not only endured the unbearable, but they’d come back and had helped us defeat the Council, without any of us meeting our end. Not a single civilian or soldier. No deaths but theirs.None.

The cruelty of a man had brought them here, but I had faith that there was a way around it. I had faith that I would find it, and I had no doubt that Taland would help.

So, I stood up. The wall held me, offered its support like an old friend. My legs shook until I made it to my bed, to the red satin robe that I always kept there. I put it on, not because I was embarrassed or shy. These men had seen my soul, had seen me naked in the full sense of the word.

“Who healed us?” I asked, thinking they’d tell me it was them.

Madeline Rogan, the Mistress’s grandmother,they said instead.

And that certainly surprised me. “She’s here?”

Yes, Mistress. Waiting. She healed you, then we brought you to your safety, as requested.

Except I didn’t request shit. This room was the only place I really knew, but that’s what they’d seen. The image of it—that’s what they’d seen in my mind.

“Can you not call me that?” I said, because that name made me feel like I wasn’t…me.“And what about Taland?”

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