Page 142 of Thorn Season
Someone in the crowd threw up. Someone else was screaming. But the sympathizers only watched in sickened silence as their friend was skinned alive at the Opal.
The minutes spiraled into eternity. His screams grew savage, his sobs breaking. Pinprick flies roved around the open mess of his body. The nobles had pressed their hands to their ears, and Father was crying quietly beside me.
And I knew a single, biting truth: Nobody would save this man.
A numbness spread over me as my specter breached the surface. Distantly, as if through the waterlogged air of a dream, I fed a tendril toward the man. I shuddered when I reached his bloodied skin.
As I looped my specter like a noose around his neck, he squinted into the distance and mouthed the question, “Lilliana?”
Tears misted my vision. I drew a deep breath and tasted the rose stench, mixed with the metallic reek of blood. And though my bones wanted to crack under the weight of the task, I tightened the noose.
The man’s next scream broke off with a gasp.
In my periphery, I glimpsed a blur of indigo movement: King Erik stiffening, his face tilting toward the crowd.
But I didn’t loosen my hold, even as the man’s pulse thundered undermy specter. Even as his body convulsed, fighting for air he couldn’t inhale.
Ten seconds passed. Twenty. Sweat dripped into my lashes, stinging my eyes. His pulse slowed—the final dregs of his life laboring against my power.
Then his body went limp. His gaze stilled on that point in the distance.
My face was wet. Perhaps I’d been bleeding, too.
I reeled my specter back, but it didn’t feel the same inside me. It felt dirty. Tainted.
“His heart gave out,” a guard said, his voice far away.
The king waved a dismissive hand as if this entire scene bored him, and he ordered the body burned for all to witness.
I’d killed a man. The fact that it had been a mercy didn’t make it any less awful.
I wiped my hands down my dress as if to clean them from the deed. The deed I could never share with anyone, not even my father. The deed that had dimmed something inside me.
The flames consumed the man’s body before anyone made out the red marks around his throat.
41
The first thing I noticed was the wrongness inside me. The second was the ice-hard surface under my ribs. My hair hung loose, grazing a sore spot at my nape. I couldn’t remember taking out the hairpins.
I opened my eyes, and the darkness stole my breath. My chambers were never this dark. It took several attempts to push into a sitting position. As my shoes skimmed the surface beneath me, I realized the pointed heels had been snapped off. I reached to inspect them, and my bracelets jangled.
I paused. These were too heavy to be my bracelets.
I grasped my wrist and found the weighted iron of manacles. I tugged, and the chains rattled again—not running between my wrists but connecting to a shadowy place behind me. I blinked frantically, willing my vision to adjust.
What had happened?
I’d been killing Garret.HadI killed him? Raw panic surged within me at the thought, but—
No. He’d collapsed, coughing, as the room had dissolved. Because Briar had been reproducing the copycats’ canisters. As I inhaled the bitter stench of dullroot clinging in my hair, I remembered why Ihadn’t cared about killing Garret. Why I still shouldn’t care.
Briar had killed my father. And Garret had known.
My fury rekindled, and I yanked on my specter to wrench away the manacles.
And the wrongness finally made sense.
That dullroot fog had been a mere echo, like the scent of wine before the first heady sip. Because now, the poison wasin my blood—throbbing like mercury, sticky and heavy and sickening. My specter bounded around my body, unable to break the skin.
