Chapter
Thirty-Six
Malyr Past, Tidestone
y lungs ached as I sprinted through the dense copse of trees, their gnarled trunks blurring together in my frantic flight. Each gasp I took was like swallowing shards of glass when theM frigid air collided with my heated, rattling chest. Fever… it must have been a fever.
At my next step, a hidden root snared around my foot, ripping at old cuts and infected wounds. I stumbled, unable to catch my footing. The world tilted, and my shoulder slammed into the hard ground. My head collided with the spongy remnants of a fallen trunk, and pain exploded in white-hot flashes across my skull.
“Malyr!” Lorn stepped up beside me, groaning as she bent over, one hand placed on her swollen belly, the other reaching for my arm, shaking me. “Get up! We have to—” A howl had her gaze snap back toward where we’d come from. “They’re chasing the hounds after us. We have to make it to the top of the cliff, Malyr. Now!”
Despite the nausea, despite the chills that incessantly bit at my sweaty skin, I forced myself to rise, brushing away the disorientation and pain. Yes, we had to make it to the highest part of the cliff and jump. Emaciated as we were, it was our only chance at a shift. Our only chance at death should it
fail, the thought of my body shattering on the rocks almost comforting.
Another howl.
Panic threaded through every sinew as we kept running, the salty taste of freedom so near, yet tinged with the acrid fear of recapture. My heart hammered in my chest, oddly out-of-tune, setting a frantic tempo that echoed in my ears and reverberated through my brittle bones, my once sturdy frame worn down to nothing but gaunt remnants.
When Lorn fell behind, I took her hand, but pulling her with me at a faster pace wasn’t possible.
Not with how one arm cradled that filthy unborn half-blood they’d fucked into her, her other arm fighting for balance whenever she struggled over trunks, through vines, and around boulders. It
wouldn’t be an issue much longer.
If we hit the rocks, it would die.
If she shifted in her state, it would die.
And there would never be another… Laughter, bright and carefree, drifted up from the bay below—a sound I’d all but forgotten after all this time in the harrowing silence of the dungeons. It felt like an assault to my senses, an affront to my panic… until it eased said panic away. My desperate pace came to a complete stop, my gaze drawn to the spectacle unfolding below as Lorn’s hand slipped from mine.
Down on the beach, bathed in the late afternoon glimmer of the setting sun, a girl spun along the white ripples of waves, her bare feet kicking up sprays of sand while some woman frantically ran behind her. My breath hitched at the sight, at the girl’s bright blonde tresses that whipped around her face at each spin, a strange pull tugging beneath my ribs.
“Malyr…” Lorn waited several feet ahead of me, desperation written across her bruised face as she waved me toward her. “What are you doing? You have to run!”
Yes, I had to run.
I should have never stopped.
My eyes went back to the girl as my mind blurred and my upper body swayed. I watched as she pirouetted through a flock of gulls, her light spirit a stark contrast with the heavy, gnawing darkness lodged within me. The sight of her childish innocence felt like a slap to my sunken-in face, the echo of her laughter a cruel reminder of everything that had been ripped from me by her kind. She was one of
them.
Human.
I wanted to forgive her even that.
Because she was beautiful beyond words, rousing a reaction in my body that made me feel dirty, filthy, reminding me of how tainted I was. So unlike her. She was but a child, flat-chested and scrawny, not a single sway of a feminine curve in sight. So why did I keep staring?
“Oh child, what are you doing? Your hair. Your hair!” the woman chasing after her shouted, trying to grab the girl but failing each time she slinked away. “Put those ribbons back in this instance!”
“No! I hate it pinned back and want it open! Look, Risa! Up there!” She pointed at a bird soaring in the sky above her, its flight seeming to mirror the girl’s dance. “You see how fast that white seagull is?”
My ears pricked at something in the tone of her voice, and I looked up and over at the sky that hung over the bay. Not a seagull… a white dove.
Like her.
“Oh, child, if you as much as cut your toe on a seashell, your mother will get a megrim over it.
Back to the castle with you, right—oh no, don’t you go running away from me! Your mother does not
permit you to run!” The woman struggled behind the girl toward the rocky path that led up here.
“Galantia!”
That name wafted upward from the beach, searing into my consciousness like a branding iron, burning through it like a fever dream, the four syllables a death knell to the strange enchantment that
had ensnared me.
Galantia.
Brisden’s daughter.
I’d heard her name in the dungeons, and that realization crashed into me like a tidal wave, the icy shock of it stealing my breath, replacing the odd heat with a raw, scraping coldness. The dichotomy was jarring, a violent clash between the serene vision of her and the nightmarish echo of her name.
How could the goddess show me such a mesmerizing creature bearing the name of my personal
demon?
She’s a Brisden.
The moment shattered at the mere thought of that name, the shards of a broken illusion biting deep, sowing the seeds of an ire that quickly bloomed into ferocious loathing. A hate I hadn’t known before ignited within me, fueling my loathing for this girl. For how she had frolicked and thrived mere feet from me while I had repeatedly been used, spoiled, broken beyond repair.
My gaze followed Galantia’s sprightly figure as she danced away from the lapping waves, taking a meandering path that led her straight toward me. My pulse thrummed with predatory anticipation.
With hope that the girl might wander close enough for me to act on the icy fury that gnawed at my heart.
“Malyr, we need to go.” Lorn’s voice was a desperate whisper, but her plea fell on deaf ears.
“Someone’s coming.”
Yes.
She was coming.
To me.
The world around me narrowed down to the singular path Galantia seemed to be drawn toward, a little white dove for prey that was growing closer with every blissfully ignorant step she took. I could almost feel the fragile weight of her skull in my hands, the imagined snap a cathartic symphony
playing in my tormented mind.
I wanted to kill her!
A dark satisfaction stirred within me as I nestled deeper into the underbrush, pressing my sweat- damp body barely covered in rags against the trunk of a birch, whispering to myself, “Come to me… Just one more step, and I’ll break your fucking neck, little white dove.”
I stood quietly, poised on the knife’s edge, the girl’s life hanging by a thread, my hands aching to sever it where my shadows had grown too weak to do it. The sweetness of her laughter rang through the air, a bitter taunt in my ears, fueling the consuming need for revenge. Galantia of House Brisden would pay for the sins of her father. A Khysal would be her demise.
The world seemed to slow, suspended in a paradoxical moment where time was both irrelevant and everything. Galantia was close, so close I could reach out and touch her if I chose to. I could hear her breathing, feel the vibrations of her joy as they seeped into the ground beneath my feet.
My arm stretched out.
My balance shifted.
“Oh,” she said and knelt by a patch of clover, her back now turned on me, plucking a lonely white flower. “A pretty daisy like you shouldn’t be all alone out here. You’ll like my room.”
“Galantia!” the woman shouted from somewhere nearby, fueling my hate. “The hounds are out. We have to get back before your father finds us here!”
Oh, he would find his daughter… Would find her little body unmoving on the ground, her head
strangely angled, her eyes desolate.
I leaned forward.
I lifted my arm.
A strange force wrapped tightly around my chest, squeezing it painfully. My hand shook, sweat dampened my forehead, the underbrush blurred. Only the fever. Nothing but the fever.
Do it.
Kill her!
I reached for her neck, only for my finger to sink lower. My digit brushed over a tousled nest of blonde strands, too gentle for her to notice. It was so soft, so bright. Goddess help me, why was she
so beautiful?
My hand shook harder.
My muscles locked.
A silent roar of frustration tore through me. I wanted to kill her; I did! But I couldn’t do it, and I couldn’t do it, and I couldn’t fucking do it!
And I hated her all the more for it.
With a primal growl ripping from my chest that had her turn, fall, and scramble away with kicking legs, I tore away back toward the cliffs. My heart pounded violently against my ribs as if trying to escape the cage of my chest, mimicking my desperate need for escape from this place, this memory, this… girl.
“Lorn!” I reached out for her, finding Lorn’s hand in the obscurity of panic. Her grasp was icy, yet it was the only source of reality that seemed to make sense in the chaos. “Don’t let go of my hand, you hear me?” I said, our fingers intertwining tightly. “Do not let go.”
With a final glance back toward Galantia, who’d been smart enough to run back to the beach, I turned toward the yawning expanse of the cliff, the drop a void of nothingness that promised freedom
or death or both.
And then, we jumped.
The salty spray of the waves beneath bit at the wounds on my soles. A shout ripped from my throat, part terror and part exhilaration. The shift came as naturally as breathing. My skin gave way to sleek black feathers, my body distorting and reshaping until, in a burst of black shadows, my
unkindness cawed.
Lorn’s ravens flew right beside us.
Together, we beat our wings, our croaks merging with the rumble of the waves. That, and the echo of laughter, a haunting melody that would forever remind me of the girl who should have died at my hands.
