Page 153 of A Reign of Roses
You will die today.
42
Arwen
I was a healer. Andfor the last five years of my life, my village had been war-torn. I’d seen death. So,somuch death. I’d built up a strong stomach, and kind eyes. A warm comforting voice, which I used often to sayI’m so sorryandNo, they didn’t feel any pain.
And yet every part of me that had learned to withstand the heartbreak, the devastation, of human loss disintegrated as I held Briar.
I could not quell my grief.
Not again. Not another—
Nor could I shake the images that kept scraping across my vision. My mother, lips pale and mouth coated in blood, telling my siblings and me goodbye. Dagan, gray and cold, the light I’d always found in his hooded eyes gone—
Suddenly my leathers and my boots and wool socks and gloves and fox fur weren’t enough to stave off the frigid winter chill. The sun was fading, nightfall beckoning to us. And with it, more carnage…
Briar’s slender chest shook with her uneven, labored breaths.Her blood soaked through the leather at my knees. Mari’s frantic breaths rang in my ears as she held the invisible ward around us, hidden in plain sight among the gnarled, snowcapped trees. Griffin was brushing his thumb over her hand so slowly I wondered if I’d imagined it.
Kane tried his best to stanch the bleeding, but his hands were coated in Briar’s blood. There was too much—
And the ice…The ice that Lazarus had shot through Briar’s chest had melted, and in its place gaped a ragged hole through her velvet bodice. Through her entire sternum. My lighte had just begun to pour out of shaking fingertips when Briar grasped my hand and breathed, “Stop.”
“Don’t stop,” Kane ordered, his hands pressed once more against Briar’s wound.
Fear—that was what laced his stern, unflinching words. For the loss of his friend, but also—
If we killed Lazarus but Briar didn’t survive…all of Lumera—millions—plunged into an eternal abyss of poison air, bestial creatures, and suffocating violence.
My lighte delved into her chest cavity, illuminating torn muscle and pulp and gore.
Briar winced, those violet eyes almost gray. “Stop,” she said again. A wet cough. “There is nothing to be done.”
“Why not?” Kane thundered through gritted teeth.
But I already knew, as did Briar. She’d been around long enough. She understood what my healing power told me back in that tent. The minute my lighte reached her ancient flesh, enchanted to appear supple and young.
“Her body is held together with a spell,” I murmured.
Mari’s gasp of horror finished the thought for me. She understood,too, what Aleksander had told me about Ethera—I couldn’t heal magic.
I could hardly think past the loss that ripped through me. Tears slid down my face and landed amid twigs and dirt in the blood-soaked snow. Griffin helped me prop Briar against the boulder’s surface. We had found a small, shadowed alcove between an outcropping of rocks and a handful of elm trees, the few Fae men who had run by looking for us rendered blind by Mari’s magic.
But with Briar’s impending death…the ward around the keep had evaporated. A spell Mari couldn’t do. Likely could never do.
I knew it had fallen as I heard Lazarus’s army converge on Shadowhold. Sickening sounds of slaughter rang out. Horses whinnying in agony, boys and men—
“Hey,” Kane hushed against my temple. “We’re going to—”
“We aren’t.” I wept, wrenching away from him. “It’sover.”
The reality had sunk in the moment our plot to trick Lazarus had failed. We’d been foolish—the answer staring us in the face, ever since Aleksander made his offer back in Revue.
My eyes dipped to Kane’s blood-soaked hands as another hot tear slipped down my cheek.
“Eardley,” I said quietly. “You need to get back to the keep. To the raven house. Can you do that?”
He knew what I meant. Could he make it therealive.
