Page 73 of Fractured
I would never hold it against her, just like I would never admit to her face that I preferred solitude.
Faces vanished behind curtains when I looked. I passed a wide well in the center of these tall buildings, the most space between a group I’d come across so far. It wasn’t filled with water as I’d thought, though, but instead with something black and thick that could have been tar if not for the heavy smell of magic clinging to it.
It had been a full day since the last time I’d had water. Both bottles I’d taken with from the Mercove were empty, but I was not about to stop and try to buy some from a sorcerer. Not in Mysthaven.
This was not a place that tolerated visitors unless there was nothing any of them could do about it. For that, I thanked the power of my magic, but even I knew that I couldn’t come back the same way. There was only so much taunting the sorcerers would allow—and my presence here, not hiding in any way but riding slowly among them? They would undoubtedly believe that I wasasking for it.
It didn’t matter, though. I didn’t plan to stay.
Nilah wasnotin Mysthaven, and to admit that without unleashing every bit of madness that I was barely containing inside me was difficult, but I focused on the horse whenever I could. The Seelie stallion I’d taken fromthe soldiers who’d come to raid the fucking mountain where we’d been hiding.
Someone told.
Thatmade me want to rage even more. I had checked the magic, had tested it with my shadows, and the cave underneath that mountain we’d been in had indeed been impossible to find with any kind of tracking magic.
Which meant someone from the Broken Crown had told Lyall exactly where we were while we’d been asleep. Possibly in hopes of getting a pardon, being allowed back into the Seelie Court?
But they didn’t know who Lyall truly was. Whoever betrayed Merenith, they died. All her friends died that morning in the forest when Nilah’s magic erupted—not fromit, but from the soldiers. Only Hessa, Merenith, Ergen and the dogs survived, though all of them wounded.
And me.
I woke up from what I initially thought was frostbut wasn’t, to find Nilah gone. Just…disappeared.
I thought it was the soldiers who got her, who took her back to the Seelie Court, to Lyall—but they didn’t. I saw them. I sawhim.
My magic had wrapped around the necks of each and every soldier who’d come for us all the way to the other side of the mountain. I went all the way to where Lyall lay near his horse, covered in white magic, motionless, eyes half open, staring at the sky.
It was him, I knew it was. And even though part of me had insisted that I kill every single one of them right that second, crush their throats while they were still unconscious, I hadn’t. Because Lyall was unable to defend himself, and I would not take a life in a way that would make mea coward.
That, and the idea of his death was something that made my own body turn against me still, even if I didn’t understand it.
Once again, I closed my eyes, breathed in deeply, tried to smell Nilah’s scent or feel the special brand of her magic. I kept my focus on my senses, on my magic, even knowing it wouldn’t get me anywhere. And it didn’t.
So, I drove my heel against the horse’s side to tell him to keep moving.
The sorcerers watched from a distance still and the sky turned darker with each moment.
Something about Lyall’s death.
It wasn’t something I’d ever cared to try to explain before, or even understand, but it was there all the same. This gnawing ache in the middle of my chest that seemed to come alive when I imagined him dead.
It had happened first when he was poisoned, had held me captive every single day since. Deep down,itwas the reason why I’d gone after Helid and the royal guard when they went to search for the human in Nerith—not just my sense of debt toward Lyall. Not half of it was that, if we wanted to be honest. Just the ache that came with the thought of Lyall being no more.
I’d never cared to understand it simply because it made no sense, but now thatnothingdid—now I wanted to understand everything. Now I wanted to know howthatpart tied to the rest of my reality in which Nilah had burst into all that magic—so much, so intense, so fucking powerful. I wanted to know how she could have disappeared into thin air, leaving no trace behind—only me to search for her while I fought not to lose my mind.
Yes, now I wanted to know everything. The wholetruth exactly as it was. As it had been kept from me since I was a boy with the very ink that still marked my skin.
I wanted to know if Nilah was right, if I was a fool to have started to believe it myself—that I hadn’t killed the Ice Queen. I would have never. I did not like death, even when I served it.
That was still not going to stop me from killing anything that stood in my way of Nilah, but I did not like it. I wouldn’t have killed a woman, queen or no queen, just because.
I wouldn’t have—this much I knew. Only, before Nilah, I hadn’t had the desire to want to go against the whole world when it insisted on something. I’d felt too weak, too powerless.
But the anger had swallowed all of that down now.
Blackwater.She could be in Blackwater, I thought, maybe on her way to Raja’s home. Whatever had happened, she knew how to get there, had been there twice, and maybe that was her destination. That was where I would find her, if I only made it there in time.
You’re a fool,Hessa had told me—nothing new. She’d been calling us fools since she was a girl, and back then I had been. I might even be one now, bigger than before, but it didn’t mean I was going to stop.
