What in kingsteeth was he doing? I couldn’t tell whose side he was on anymore, what he was trying to do. But I didn’t have time to think about it. Now was my chance to leave while he had her distracted. I turned, ready to bolt up the stairs, but—
No. I couldn’t.
“Seren,” the bone-eater hissed. Instead of drawing back from the cell door, he threw it wide. The prison keys fell out of the lock and clattered onto the floor.
“I’m here,” he replied quietly. Like he had all those years ago, when Wen and the prince had once been his charges. I turned toward them both, drawing the iron knife out of my pocket. I had kept it close since we’d arrived in Voryn. It wouldn’t kill a bone-eater—but it didn’t need to.
I wouldn’t leave him again. If I had promised myself anything, it was that. No one was left. No one was forgotten.
Not again.
“I’m here,” he repeated as Anwen eased into his cell and picked herself up onto two legs.
I was quiet until the last possible moment as I crept toward the cell, my breath painfully loud in my ears. Then I raised my iron blade. I struck, sinking it deep into her back. She gave a cry and tried to grab for me, but I’d already let go of the knife. She screeched, trying to grab it out of her back, stumbling farther into the cell.
I didn’t waste time. I grabbed Seren by the arm and pulled him out of the cell with me, then slammed the door closed, trapping her inside.
36
The Shadows of the Heart
Fox
THE ANCIENTS HAD breached the gates, and the guards were barricading the fortress doors, not that it would stop them. Nothing would. Moss had found its way underneath the door, spreading across the marble floor, and with it came the Wilds. The ancients would find their way in however they could, no matter what the Grandmaster did to stop them. I sneaked out through a side gate that a bone-eater had broken through. The sooner I got out of here, the better off I’d be.
I knew the Wilds too well. I remembered the Wilds too well.
I remembered everything now. Though I wished I didn’t.
The wood was dark and smelled like freshly upturned earth, and I took a deep breath. I wasn’t one for fighting, anyway. I just had to ignore the screams of Voryn, ignore the fact that Daisy was still in there, somewhere.
I would only make things worse. I was a coward, a danger to everyone I cared about. She was better off without me. Tugging at the pack on my shoulder, I glanced behind me one last time, seeing only the top of the spoiled cake that was Voryn, when I heard a snarl in front of me—
And came face-to-face with an angry gray bear.
I swallowed the lump in my throat. “Uh, hello there . . . friend?”
Vala pulled back her lips to show me her very nice, very sharp teeth. I took a step back. No friend of mine.
“Now, I know what you’re thinking,” I began, “but it’s not—”
She snarled. You left her.
“It’s not like that.”
You left her, the bear repeated. She looked very angry, and that anger was directed at me, obviously for a multitude of reasons. You left her, and you are running away.
I set my jaw. “What else am I supposed to do? And if you care so much, why aren’t you in there helping her?” I stepped around her to keep on my forward trajectory out of imminent danger. “You go be her hero, bear. I can’t,” I said over my shoulder. “I don’t deserve it.”
She doesn’t need a hero, Lorne.
The sound of that name again stopped me in my tracks. I hadn’t heard it in so many years; that life felt like an odd half dream I’d almost lived.
She needs people who believe that she can be the hero.
“I’m not that person.”
Aren’t you?
I curled my fingers tightly into a fist. The wood had held the memory of what I’d done for eight years, and for eight years I’d evaded it by not being me. Prince Lorne died—he deserved nothing else. I deserved nothing else. I could still hear Seren screaming, and the ancient as it prowled around the hollowed-out log, and the sound of my fearful sobs in my throat, and I didn’t want to remember.
For years I had been oblivious. I hadn’t cared. I hadn’t known. I had watched Daisy live with the trauma of her memory, crying in the quiet of her room, missing her mother and . . . and me. And I had been right there the whole time.
I had been there, but gone. Because I had wanted to go.
I hurt her so badly that it hurt me in a place I didn’t know heartache could reach. I wanted to rip my heart out, I wanted to tear away my flesh, and I wanted to forget again. Things were so much easier, so much less painful, when I was forgotten, when I had forgot.
I couldn’t save anyone—not Seren, not my sister.
Not even Daisy.
But . . .
I did not lead you and the briar daughter here so that you could run away, Vala said, her fur bristling. I led her here to save us. And I led you here to help her.
There was a noise in the underbrush, and I ducked behind a tree and waited for whatever it was to pass. Vala hunkered down next to me. It sounded lighter than most ancients, so I peeked around the trunk of the tree to get a better look.
I wished I hadn’t. The bone-eater that was once a man was deathly pale, his gray hair matted with twigs and dirt, his clothes in shreds. A centipede crawled out of his ear and dived into a hole in his cheek. Even woodcursed, I recognized him. I recognized him because he looked so much like Daisy. He paused, as if he could sense me, and turned his head in my direction. I bristled. His eyes were gone, replaced by dark pits, red pinpricks at the center.
I quickly pulled myself behind the tree and pressed my back against it, praying he hadn’t seen me.
But he had.
I could hear him move with that that slow, prowling gait of predators. I knew it too well.
Shit. If I ran, the old man would run after me. If I was still a fox, I could slip through the underbrush and get lost, but I was too big for that, and too slow. Kingsteeth, think—
I squeezed my eyes closed.
Think, think.
Magic crackled again at my fingertips—
“Easy on the flames, son!” I heard my father laugh. We were on the training grounds aside from the barracks, two smoking dummies twenty feet in front of me. I had singed the tips of my fingers, and stuck them into my mouth to alleviate the pain. “Be gentle. Your magic is an extension of you—it can hurt you as well as help you, and if you use it all up, you’ll have nothing left for the crown.”
I gave a start. “The crown takes our magic? Why would I ever put it on, then?”
Father placed a hand on my head and said, as if it was a secret only for the two of us, “Because it’s the price we pay. The crown is alive. It needs nourishment like the rest of us, so we provide it with our magic. That’s why only we can wear the crown.”
“And if someone else does?”
“It will take them instead.” He had smiled, but it was tinged with sadness. All my life, I’d known him with circles under his eyes. He knelt down to me then, his hands tight on my shoulders. “We took something very precious from the Lady, and so we have to repay it with ourselves. A life for a life.”
A life for a life.
Oh, kingsteeth, why did his cryptic talks only make sense now? I pressed my back against the bark of the tree, relishing the thought of escaping. Of leaving. Of running as far as I could. But I couldn’t.