Page 15 of The Nightblood Prince

He is a demon.Words whispered behind cupped hands when Lan Yexue had first come to court two years ago.

I tried to laugh. He was lying. He had to be. “Oh, and how many men were there?” I asked, as if I were in on the joke.

“Twenty-seven.”

I rolled my eyes. “That’s not possible. You can’t have killed twenty-seven men by yourself.”

“I can take you to see their corpses if you don’t mind venturing down the mountain again.”

Did he think I was born yesterday? As stifling as the palace was, I didn’t grow up under a rock. “If you want to lie, you should pick a realistic number. Like five, or—”

The familiar tingle prickled between my brows. Flashing fangs andtalons, long like ivory blades, lunging from the shadows, in a motion to slash open Prince Yexue’s throat like he was made of wax.

The blade!my better judgment screamed, but my body didn’t listen.

“Run!” I cried, and pushed Yexue out of the way just as the tiger pounced from the trees.

I rolled back: a futile attempt to buy myself a few rapid heartbeats of time as I grappled for a weapon. My fingers grasped the hilt of the blade Fangyun had given me in the same moment that icy claws slashed down at me, tearing open my clothes and flesh. Pain exploded, and I heard a cry.

The sort of cry I had heard only in my nightmares, torn from the throats of humans thrown from city walls, plunged into infernos, or slashed open by some cruel soldier.

Focus.

The tiger raised its giant paw again to draw another lash across my body. This time, without the padding of my winter coat, the blow would be even deadlier than the last.

I pulled Fangyun’s blade from its sheath. When the tiger brought down its claws, I thrust the blade into its eye.

A mighty roar, enough to make the trees shiver in fear.

I pushed the blade deeper and deeper, until my hand was hot with blood, until the tiger fell into a convulsing heap next to me.

I let out a wheezing exhale.

“Fei!” Prince Yexue cried, his hands grasping at my now ruined robe, trying to cover me for modesty’s sake.

I laughed, or I wanted to. I couldn’t breathe. There was no air in my lungs. Blood gushed out into the snow, fast like a fountain, leaving crimson stains on his silk robes.

He had lied. There was no way he could kill twenty-seven people without getting a drop of blood on his hands.

It had been maybe a handful of heartbeats since the tiger’s claws raked over me, and already blood soaked my clothes an impossible shade of red. Even in my visions, I had never seen so much red.

Luckily, everything was so cold I barely felt the pain.

Your plan is not going to work.Fangyun’s words echoed.

I wished she were here to tell meI told you so.

You were right, sister. The plan didn’t work.

At least I took a Beiying tiger with me. At least I didn’t die for nothing. With me gone, Rong would stop waging war in the name of my prophecy and Siwang’s supposed destiny of becoming the emperor of all emperors.

Yexue stripped off his robe and pressed it to my wounds to stop the bleeding the way I had done for him mere minutes ago.?????, I guessed.Good deeds really do come back around.

Empires rise, empires fall.I just didn’t expect it to happen so fast.

The gash in his leg was a lot easier to bandage than my mutilated body. If I were him, I wouldn’t even know where to start.

“I’m…going…die.”

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