Page 161 of A Promise of Peridot
“Kane—”
“I saiddo not. We’ll stay here until they’re gone.”
Arwen’s face was hardening. Along with her resolve. “He knows we’re here. He won’t stop until he finds us. Until he finds me.”
My heart was pounding too loudly to think straight. This couldn’t happen. I would never let this happen. I had told her asmuch. “We’ll bide our time until I regain my strength and then weaken him just enough to make it back to Shadowhold. Rally the army.”
Arwen stood, now in plain sight of any prisoners who were hunting us down, and moved backward for the edge of the platform. “We’ll never beat him.”
I stood, too, reaching for her. “It’s the only—”
“Kane.” Arwen took my hand in hers, her thumb brushing my knuckle slowly. Soothingly.
I could hardly breathe. “Arwen, I will not let you—”
“I don’t want to run anymore. Buy time so that tens of thousands can lose their lives in a war? Citrine won’t fight alongside us. Peridot’s been pillaged. It’s not a war we can win. But I’m here now. With the blade. Lazarus is flying below us, and for once, somehow, we have the advantage. I can end thisright now.” Arwen held my hand firmly and I already knew what her next words would be. “And I’m going to.”
Grief, incomprehensiblegriefripped my heart in two. “What about the White Crow? I can still take your place.”
Arwen’s face nearly crumpled, the first ounce of emotion slipping through her mask of still, unwavering strength.
“Your sacrifice would be worse than death for me. Condemning me to live without you? Knowing you had died in my place? Don’t do that to me. Please, don’t do that to me.”
Beth’s words rang in my head.“It’s possible, but the cost will be greater to her than her own life.”I gripped her arm. “I cannot live without you.”
“You’ll survive. I know you will.” Arwen took my face in her hands. Her eyes held nothing but uncompromising will, though they brimmed with tears. “I wouldn’t have changed a single thing.”
“No,” I roared. I didn’t care if the entire island heard me. I wrapped my hands around her arms.
“Kane—”
My chest. I couldn’tbreathe.“No.” I held her tighter. “You need tolistento me.” It could not end like this. “Listen to me,please, Arwen—”
“I love you,” she said, hands soft against my jaw. “This is how it has to be. I could never outrun my fate. And I don’t want to anymore. But you have to live. Be brave. Forgive yourself. Do that for me.Live, for me.”
And before I could say another word, stronger than she had ever been—strongerthan me—she jerked free from my grasp and leapt off the platform, graceful as a dove.
46
arwen
The wind whipped my hair into my face, stinging my eyelids and cheekbones and the skin of my lips. The blade’s power thrummed through me, rising in my heart and pounding in my head. Igniting my lighte, which seeped through my blood, and sang in my soul like a songbird.
Salty tears ran up my face as I fell, but I was... calm.
This was right.
The blade and I were one. And everyone’s pain, everyone’s suffering, would all be over soon.
My final moments were with Kane. That was a luxury. A blessing. I only hoped—I onlyprayed—that he could find some happiness when of all this was finished. That one day he would wake in the mornings without blaming himself for my death or anyone else’s.
As I fell past leaves and branches and dark trunks of wood, it was the last thought in my mind.
And then I landed with a grunt on the sharp, scaled back of Lazarus.
He jolted with surprise, a roar ripping from his reptilian maw—
His elongated, elegant neck swiveling to find me crouched along his spine.
