Page 66 of The Flame and the Forsaken

“She promised to stop! Your Grace, she promised to stop. You can’t?—”

Hamish and Samuel each took an arm, but Erran wrenched away and shoved his way through the crowd. No one moved, and he couldn’t move them. He felt like he was crashing into boulders.

“Have you any final words, brigand? Or shall we call you the Flame?”

“Call me whatever pleases you,” Mariel cried. “For I am who I am and without regret!”

“Mariel!” Erran screamed, shoving and clawing to get to her, but with every step, he seemed to move farther away. “Mariel, tell them you?—”

Hamish hooked an arm around his neck. “Do ye want them to kill ye too?”

“If they kill her, they’ve already killed me,” Erran hissed and squirmed out of his grasp, only to look up and see the noose being placed over Mariel’s neck. “Mariel, this is a mistake. Tell them what you promised me!”

But she couldn’t hear him. The king had forgotten him. The crowd was chanting for her neck, their bloodlust becoming louder and louder.

Mariel lifted her head high, closed her eyes, and started to speak again, but the trapdoor was opened and she crashed through, squirming as the rope stole her life away. They hadn’t even had the decency to hood her, and Erran could only watch, in utter horror, as the whites of her eyes filled with blood. Panic and regret splashed across her reddened face. Her legs kicked, swinging her aimlessly around. She would die the hard way because they’d left her rope too short on purpose. Of course it was on purpose. They wanted her to suffer, and she was.

The crowd suddenly opened up, all of them looking his way as they made a path for him. Erran’s entire chest was on fire. Tears blinded his eyes. It seemed the day had robbed the air from his very lungs. But as he neared her, her struggling stopped. She met his gaze with what he could only describe as a soul-deep apology.

By the time he reached her, she was gone.

He used his sword to cut the rope, and she landed in his arms, limp and already turning blue. His hands were wracked with tremors, the pain?—

Erran shuddered awake, drenched in sweat. He stared at his arms in a panic, remembering how she’d felt, her indelible warmth slowly draining into the ether.

But his arms were empty. And Mariel was fast asleep on the cot beside him.

He tilted his head back for air, filling himself with reality to shed the horrible dream. Except it had been soreal.Most of his dreams were an amalgamation of experiences and observations, nonsensical vignettes, but not this one. This one had felt prophetic, like he was seeing exactly what would happen if he failed to protect her.

Erran breathed out and nestled back onto the cot, wrapping around her from behind.Mariel.The past two weeks had been dreamlike as well, but that dream he had no interest in waking from. It startled him to realize he no longer evenwantedto be rescued. He could see himself perfectly content with the simple life they were making together.

He buried his face in her hair and inhaled, tethering himself to her scent, which reminded him of sandalwood. Of warm nights and comfort.Real. This is what’s real. She is what’s real.

Your nightmares can be just as real,a voice reminded him.It won’t be enough for you to protect her from the world.

First, you’ll have to protect her from herself.

Chapter14

A Choice Is a Choice

Samuel was not a man who forgot his facts or figures. Even with Hamish’s fine navigating, he was sure they’d visited the same two islands seven times. Each time, Destin and Hamish squabbled over whether that was true, but Samuel knew. There were six islands. Two on the eastern side of the shelf; four on the other. He also knew which two they’d revisited, no matter how much Hamish insisted the trees were leafier each time, or Destin confidently countered that they were not, in fact, leafier but the very same leaves.

It had taken three days even to get clearance to sail and then another five of advancing and receding on their route, as storm after storm overtook the Gold Coast. There’d been no signs of Erran, Mariel, or her ship in the open sea—and no reports from the other ships recently ported of seeing them at all—and it had been Destin’s suggestion they try the outer islands.

It was during their second week at sea when Samuel recalled a fact about the Eastern Shelf. The mysterious region threw navigators off course and was said to confuse their instruments, sending them in circles until they either surrendered or found themselves in trouble. Hamish then boldly declared that they would have to sail against the wind if they wanted to visit the western side of the shelf, which sounded like a surefire death sentence to Samuel, but he could conjure no better option, and he wasn’t ready to give up on his friend. Erran was a mariner, a man of the sea. Mariel was tough and had learned how to survive through genuine trials, something Samuel had discovered from Destin, over one of their many cold meals aboard Hamish’s monstrous ship,Bella Yanna. He’d learned a lot about the Ashdowns’ upbringing. The more he listened to Destin recount the things they had to do to survive, to ensure the survival of others, the less sure he was that Obsidian Sky had been committing actual crimes.

He’d grown to like Destin, because though he was unpolished, he had a fresh-faced innocence that both explained him and made him an enigma all at once. He thought of him asthe kid,even though he was older than all of them.

Unlike in the imaginative books his sister, Artesia, liked to read, where the heroes’ struggles were milked for all the writer could give, they did not have to search every island before they finally spotted the wreckage of theMistwitch. It was, in fact, the first island they found when they crossed into the western stretch of the Eastern Shelf.

They dropped anchor and rowed to shore.

“GONE INLAND. E+M,” Hamish read slowly, his annunciation so slow and ridiculous, he lost his accent altogether. “Bloody hell. They were here.” He clapped his hands and jumped in the sand. “Aye, they were here!”

Destin fell to his knees and sobbed.

Samuel gave his shoulder a squeeze as he passed him and joined Hamish near the exposed hull of the ship. “What do you reckon, mate?”

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