Goose bumps rose all over my body. I breathed in, the air so thick I thought I might suffocate.
“Keep going,” I said, and my voice came out strong, the words crystal clear.
The look in his eyes shifted once more.
“I do,” he said again, this time with much more force.
Lyall no longer begged me.
The seer turned to me, though I wasn’t sure how I even knew, when I couldn’t see her. “And do you give your will freely? Do you accept the unbinding?”
Speaking again was like breaking through a fucking mountain. “I do.”
The seer moved, stood up with the gracefulness of a young woman, her dress moving about her like it, too, felt whatever made the water and the golden thread move.
“By choice freely given and claim freely released, the bond is broken. May your paths now part or cross again by fate alone,” the seer said, and the heat in the air turned up.
The heat in my veins did the same.
Fear and panic suddenly fell over me like rain. I couldn’t look away from Lyall at all, like he was still holding my gaze locked on his on purpose—or maybe it was just the ritual. My mouth opened to scream because my body knew what was coming even if I didn’t, but no sound left me.
Something crawled under my skin, something powerful and fast andforeign.Something that didn’t belong to me—norinme.
Then came the pain slicing through my chest, and a scream filled my ears, but it wasn’t my own.
It came from the seer.
She’d wrapped her fingers around the golden thread and I only saw it from my peripheral. She let it go again and began to whisper other words, harsher ones that I didn’t understand. She uttered them fast, each word slurred together as the pain in my chest intensified, and I couldn’t even look down at myself to see if I was bleeding.
I could only look at Lyall and see the pain reflecting inhiseyes, too. He felt all of it together with me.
And just when I thought this was going to last forever, the golden thread between our shaking hands began to burn from the middle outwards, and fast.
The ashes fell into the shallow pool between us.
The water sizzled, hissed, turned warmer against my skin, and then all reflection on it vanished.
The scream finally ripped out of my lips.
My God, it hadn’t felt like breaking a bond at all. It felt like something being ripped apart from me, from my insides instead—and not the part that was new, that felt foreign, no. Not the cold, but thewarmth!
The warmth that I’d once felt comfort in had frozen over the moment that thread had burned.
Everything in me cracked.A pressure I hadn’t even realized had been holding me together released. I gasped when no more voice came out of me, stumbling as something invisible continued to tear from my chest, leaving a void behind so cold it burned.
Someone called my name. The room tilted, my vision pulsed with light and dark and then light again.
My knees buckled and I fell forward, feeling my heart freeze over all the way. Within seconds, I was gone.
forty-five
The first thingI felt when I came to was the cold—soft and biting my skin at the same time. My clothes were wet, at least on one side, but I wasn’t lying in the water. I was lying on hard marble instead—and the shallow pool I’d been standing in what felt like moments ago was just within my reach.
My God, it was so goddamncoldinside me. My limbs ached. My chest felt hollow. Empty without the heat I apparently was so used to having there under my skin.
Funny how I never really realized it.
I sat up too fast. The world spun once, twice, and steadied. I opened my mouth to call for Lyall, but I never got the chance.