Page 106 of Her Cruel Redemption

A blade flashed in the dim light. I caught the wrist before it could reach me. Twisted. The knife clattered to the deck, and I drove my knee into the traitor’s gut, throwing him aside like a rag doll. Swept my gaze round the others. Several members of the Morwarian crew, though Kestrel hung at the back with his hands pressed to his mouth, indicating they weren’t acting in isolation. There was a moment of hesitation, uncertainty flickering across faces.

Good. Let them doubt. Let them fear.

‘Pathetic,’ I spat, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. ‘This is your grand betrayal?’

The hesitation lasted only a second before they came at me all at once. Someone caught my arm, another drove a fist into my ribs. Pain burst through me, white-hot, but I shoved it aside, snarling as I threw my head back into a nose, feeling the wet snap of cartilage.

More hands. More weight. My body slammed into the mast, and the breath left my lungs in a sharp gasp. Someone grabbed my hair, yanking my head back, exposing my throat. A blade pressed against it.

I stilled.

A ragged silence filled the deck, the only sound was my harsh breathing and the rush of the waves below. Blood dripped from my split lip onto the wood.

The man holding the knife hesitated.

‘Do it,’ I sneered, voice low and dark, ‘before I make you wish you had.’

He wavered. Just a flicker. Just enough.

I struck.

My head snapped forward, smashing into his face. He stumbled, the knife wavering. I tore my arm free, seized the blade, turned it back on him—

Agony.

Something heavy slammed into my back. A boot to my spine. A sharp, blinding pain in my ribs as I went down hard, face striking the deck. Hands pinned me, pressing my cheek against the rough wood.

The knife was wrenched from my grip.

A boot pressed down on my shoulder, keeping me there. The sharp prick of a blade at my back.

Breathless, aching, I let out a short, bitter laugh, tasting blood in my mouth. ‘You’ve been wanting to kill me for a long time, haven’t you, Khatar?’ I spat. ‘But you can’t tell your chiefs you killed me unarmed in the middle of the night, nine against one. So dishonourable. What lies will you spin instead?’

Khatar squatted down beside me, tilting his head to make eye contact, mouth stretched in a cold smile. ‘I’m not going to kill you. The king of Oceatold is going to want that privilege.’

A sharp blow to the back of my head. My vision burst in a flare of red. Then darkness.

Chapter Fifty

‘You’re getting stronger,’ Daethie said, skating her fingers over my scalp, persistent in her attempts to heal me and undo the damage I’d done to myself. ‘Some of the inflammation is moving.’

‘Do you think it’ll heal?’ I’d begun to hear voices in my head sometimes, hissing and urging me to do things I couldn’t and shouldn’t. And sometimes, my vision seemed to slip. I would see faces in the walls, or the stone floors would slither like snakes. It seemed to be slowly getting better, but it was unnerving.

‘Perhaps.’ She crossed the room, appearing before me to stand by a low counter where she’d been crushing together another of her noxious concoctions to fortify my organs. ‘But not if you keep using magic.’

She must have repeated this to me several times every healing session, and I’d had several days’ worth of them now. She turned back with a cup of something that greatly resembled swamp water. I pinched my nose against the foul taste and swallowed it without complaint. Not that anything she gave me seemed to alleviate the perpetual weight on my shoulders, my chest. My heart. If she could fix that, I would have gladly swallowed all the swamp water she could make.

‘Goras is getting stronger,’ Daethie said as she collected the cup and turned back to the bench. ‘The time between attacks seems to be getting longer.’

Immediately, I was plunged into the depths of guilt. I hadn’t seen Goras since I’d struck him. He had refused to see me. Daethie fed me tidbits of news about his recovery, which she always seemed to do right after she’d delivered me a warning about using magic. He’d been gripped with random attacks of debilitating pain since the strike. I didn’t understand why the two of them hadn’t revealed what had happened at the harbour to everyone else. It made me feel like I was living with a sword poised above my head, ready to drop.

‘But he still can’t access his magic,’ she continued. ‘He can’t even feel it anymore. I’m beginning to think he never will again.’

I slumped, the guilt intensifying. She had tried to explain what I‘d done to him. My lightning hadn’t just struck him down but had severed his magic from his control, leaving him vulnerable in a way I hadn't even considered. The same technique the druthi used to strip their captives of power, to render them helpless for harvest. I swallowed hard, shame curdling in my stomach. I hadn’t meant to do that to him. Hadn’t meant to take something so vital, so intrinsic, and rip it away like it was nothing.

‘I hope he gets better,’ I murmured, but the words felt hollow. A meaningless offering against the damage I had done.

’Would you like me to tell him you asked after him?’

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