Page 83 of The Curse of Golden Blood
He studied me for a moment longer, then nodded. "Alright. Let's get you back to your chambers. You need rest."
"No. I need to get to the library. "
His eyes narrowed, but he didn't argue. "Then I'll escort you."
"Do I get a say in the matter?"
"No."
I smirked at him. "You are quite a pain."
He rolled his eyes, a faint smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. "It's part of my charm."
I laughed. "Oh, yes, it certainly is."
It didn't occur to me until a few moments later that we had been flirting. It felt strange. Wrong, somehow. Not because Tomos and I had once been together. It felt strange because while I laughed, the thought of him, my Warlord, had never left my mind.
My mind couldn't stop going over the moments from the previous night, as if I was trying to convince myself that it had truly happened. That he had been the one who had touched my face and wiped away my tears, the one who had kissed me gently and whispered all the words I never thought I'd hear come out of his mouth, the one who turned me into an inferno of heat and want.
It was so outside of everything I thought I knew about him and the fae, that I couldn't help but doubt. To second guess. Even though it was the very same man who now held my life in his hands. The same man who could take everything from me with a single word or glance, if he so chose.
But he didn't choose to. And that alone was enough to leave me shaken.
twenty-two
Abomination
Zydar
Ihadn’tsteppedintothat room again. But the memories hadn't faded. If anything, they'd grown stronger. And now, every time I passed the threshold, I thought of the way Mira's mouth had curled against mine. How she tasted on my tongue. How her teeth bit down on my shoulder and her hands tangled in my feathers. It was enough to drive me mad.
I could not look at her now. Not like this. The drowsiness crept through her like a fog that refused to lift, blurring the edges of her words, dulling the spark that had once set entire rooms alight. I told myself it was the healers and their measures, that it would pass, that the color would return to her cheeks with rest and broth and time. The lie tasted like old iron on my tongue and still I swallowed it.
So I chose not to see it. I chose steel over skin and storm over scent. I filled my nights with councils and drills andmaps, with the ugly comfort of strategy that asks nothing of the heart. When court candles guttered and captains dragged themselves to bed, I went to the grounds where no one could follow. The mountain kept its own counsel, and I let it take mine.
The arena woke as I crossed the threshold. The floor mirrored the sky, a sheet of dark glass slick with a sheen of rain. Weapons climbed out of light. A spear with a head like a shard of moon. A hooked blade that had once belonged to a rain court duelist I had put in the ground. A broad sword cut in the old style, heavy enough to break a back on the lift. I let them hover at the edge of reach, then drew none of them. The arena did not care which of its toys I played with. Only that I chose.
Choose, or the darkness eats you alive.I could almost hear my father hiss into the quiet. He did not haunt me, but his lessons did. The lessons of the dead always do. They have nothing else to leave.
I took a deep breath. Let the mountain's breath fill my lungs. Here, there were no questions. No politics or power plays or treaties to break. Here, I could be exactly what I was, what I had been made into by war and time and blood. What I had always been.
But tonight had different plans. It made that clear by the scream that tore through the silence, shattering it like a hammer to a mirror. I tensed. That sound did not belong here. It was not a sound of the mountain, but of the man, and it came from somewhere deep inside the castle.
It came from the south yard where the mortal quarters huddled beneath the lee of the training terraces, a cluster of roofs and lanterns that never stopped creaking in the wind. Another scream followed it and cut off with a sound that belonged in a charnel house. I had heard enough death to know what it was.
My wings stretched out behind me. A single stroke of them carried me from the arena and sent me soaring into the dark. When I broke into the open the wind hit like a slap and the scent hit harder. Rot was always a taste for me before it was a smell, a film on the teeth, a sour that sat behind the tongue and roughened speech. This carried a second note, bright and metallic, like gold melted and poured into a wound. It made me want to spit.
The second scream was already dying when I landed on the edge of the roof and peered into the courtyard below. It was a narrow, cramped space, with the wall of the training terrace on one side and the back of the barracks on the other. In the far corner was a door that led into the servant's wing, a door that was currently hanging off its hinges and smoking faintly.
Two figures lay motionless in front of the door. They were both fae, and from the way they were dressed, they were guards. Their bodies were mangled, twisted at impossible angles, and their skin was a sickly shade of gray.
Lanterns swung wild on their chains as the yard below bucked with motion. A dome I knew well had cracked along its seam, panes pushed outward, ribs bent as if a fist had punched up from the floor. Mortals spilled into the open in torn shifts and bare feet, half falling, half pulled, the way a tide drags anything not nailed down.
Healers shouted orders that broke into jagged bits and scattered on the flagstones, and guards tried to form ranks where there was no space to stand still. In the center of that chaos, a shape crouched in a crater full of shattered tile and rain.
It should have been a girl. The height was right. The curve of the shoulders was right. Even the fall of hair at the nape might have fooled the eye for a heartbeat, pale and fine and clotted with wet. Everything else belonged to a nightmare thathad decided to wear a memory for skin. The spine was wrong, arched and ridged, knobs pushing through flesh like a row of stones under thin ice.
The arms were too long by a hand and a half, one elbow backward, one forward, wrists swollen where veins tried to hold light they were never meant to carry. The face did not have eyes, only sockets packed with gold that seeped and smoked, running down the cheeks in slow threads that bit the air. Wings had torn their way out through the back, thin as parchment.
