Page 32 of A Dagger of Ice and Intrigue
All of them fallen.
All of them dead.
My legs stung as I stretched them to their limits to keep myself low and not touch the bodies.
I didn’t dare look at their faces.
I couldn’t face them.
Not now.
Just as my heart–even as cold as I forced it to be now–couldn’t take anymore, I heard whimpers.
Near.
Nearer.
I flexed my legs and rushed forward, feeling like a spider rushing away from the wave of arrows.
A cry almost tore from my throat as I turned the corner and sawThantoMano huddled low, his arms circled around Violetta,TantheIssa’s granddaughter, who was crying her eyes out.
They’re alive.
Good gods, they’re alive.
“Mano,” I whisper-yelled past the snap of the arrows all around us.
His gaze slashed toward me and instantly softened, relieved, when he saw me. As if I could pluck us all out of this massacre through sheer will alone. As if he no longer had to be the strong one, because I was here.
And I couldn’t disappoint.
“First Daughter, you’ve found us,” he said reverently, as if praying. “We’re stuck, we can’t–”
“Keep low to the ground. Crawl, don’t hunch,” I said in that unflinching Huntress voice they were expecting, even as I quaked inside. “Take two lefts, then a right, go left at the rose bush and keep going forward and reach the castle terrace. Tellevery survivor you meet to do the same. Protectorate, Serpent, it doesn’t matter. You don’t stop foranything.”
This was not the time to play Clan favorites with people’s lives.
We would hash out our issues in throne rooms and negotiations.
“My grandmother,” Violetta cried out, looking for sympathy and reassurance that I could not give her right now. “We got separated when we ran, I don’t know where she is, she can’t run–”
“Go.” I met Mano’s stare head-on, unwavering. “That is an order.”
He nodded solemnly and gently coaxed Violetta to move. She gave me a bewildered stare with too much disappointment to bear.
But bear I did.
I was not the shoulder to cry on now.
I was the heir to the Protectorate throne protecting her people.
Let her think me unfeeling and have her survive than devastate her with her grandmother’s death now and jeopardize her safe passage to the castle.
Better a cold Huntress than another warm corpse.
I’d carry the weight of it until we were all safe.
Gods forgive me.
