Page 149 of Promise of Darkness
“Send someone to fetch them. If they don’t return unharmed, then I’ll do unto you what is done to them.”
“So bold,” she taunts. “I wonder…, could it be the prince’s wife? They say he’ll eat a thousand souls before he lets her go, but will she return the favor? Will she risk her own life for his when she can barely remember him?”
“I don’t know.” My grip in her hair tightens. “But I’m fairly certain I’ll risk yours. Send someone to fetch him.”
The bitch smiles and pushes into the blade. Blood weeps down her throat as my knife digs into her skin. “Do you know the problem with your little declaration?”
“What?”
“I’ve already walked in the shadows of the Gray. You can’t kill me,” she snarls, then drives her elbow back toward my face.
I turn at the last second and take the blow on my cheek instead of my nose. Pain ricochets through my face, but it’s not the blinding pain it could have been.
The floor rises up to meet me, and the breath slams from my lungs as I slide across the polished stone of the dais.
Blaedwyn stalks toward me, the hem of her cloak rasping along the floor. She reaches for the sword in her sheath, and then pauses as her hand finds nothing.
“Missing something?” I demand, crawling inelegantly to my feet. Casting my cloak out of the way, I reveal the sword strapped to my hip.
Pure, utter coldness turns her eyes dark. Her lip curls in a sneer. “You little fool. Go ahead. Draw it against me. No hand can touch it but mine, though I’ll enjoy watching your suffering.”
There is no going back. Only forward. I have no other chance than this.
Grabbing hold of the hilt, I draw the Sword of Mourning with a steely rasp. The second the last inch of iron clears the sheathe, the rasp turns into a high-pitched squeal and the weight of the sword drives the tip of it toward the cold slate floors.
The sound of that ringing is like a knife straight to the brain. All around me, the rest of Blaedwyn’s court stagger to their knees, their hands clapped over their ears, but I don’t dare take my hands off it.
I can’t anyway.
Pain roars through me, cleaving straight through my soul. I see armies rise and fall. I see throats cut and bodies dancing in the breeze as they jerk in the gibbet. I see Unseelie capering, their bodies fucking and grinding, and through it all, right back through a thousand flashing images of death, I see the shock of betrayal on a man’s snarling face as my hand drives the sword through his chest, and I sob out a whispered, “I’m sorry.”
It’s not me.
Nor do I recognize the stranger who falls, his enormous body slamming back onto the tiles of the Hallow, his blood spraying the stones.
The room explodes around me as power surges through me. I can hear the grumble of the ley line far, far beneath me.
Someone is screaming.
I think, perhaps, it might be me.
But images are flashing past my eyes. I see the creature fall a thousand times, his eyes wounded and surprisingly fae, as the woman whispers again and again, “I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry.”
We weep a thousand tears, and I fear I’ll never escape the weight of the sword.
Then darkness encroaches.
A woman walks out of the darkness, garbed in an endless black cloak. She shifts the cowl back from her face, her midnight-dark eyes warming as she beholds me.
“Ah,” she whispers as she closes my fingers around the Sword of Mourning, “There you are.”
The pain vanishes.
The knife is yanked from my brain.
