Page 114 of A Storm of Fire and Ash
A thin, gleaming needle appeared in her hand, the point catching the torchlight. She brought it up slowly—too slowly—and held it dangerously close to my eye. My breath hitched, every muscle locked. I could feel the cold bite of the metal hovering over the softest, most vulnerable part of me.
My brows pulled together. “No one. I was brought here by Fintan!”
Her smile curdled into something feral. “Liar.”
The needle slid forward, pricking into the corner of my eye—just enough to send a hot, tearing sting through my skull without blinding me. My body convulsed against the restraints, but she held me steady, savoring every flinch. Then she drew the needle back with a smirk and set it aside.
She didn’t reach for a blade. Instead, she took my left hand in hers with surprised gentleness—almost like shemeant to comfort me. Then her other hand came up, gripping a slim, curved set of pliers from the tray.
I jerked, but the barbed wire bit deep, holding me still.
The cold steel clamped over my fingernail. She twisted, once. Twice. My stomach lurched. Then she wrenched it up and away in a sharp, wet rip. Flame-red torment exploded through me. My scream was raw, the sound tearing out of my throat. Blood welled instantly, spilling down my fingers, hot against my skin.
“Who sent you?” she asked again, her tone like a lover coaxing a confession.
“No one!” My voice cracked. “My house burned down—Mother died—and I was brought here!”
Another nail was gone before I could draw another breath. The fresh wound throbbed with a sickening pulse, each heartbeat sending new flares of pain up my arm.
“Who sent you?” she asked again, this time taking the edge of the knife and sliding it under my thumbnail—slowly, deliberately—pressing until hot agony screamed through my nerves.
“I DON’T KNOW ANYTHING!” My voice broke into a ragged cry. “I’ve only just figured me out!”
The queen’s lips curved in dark amusement as she lifted the blade—and with a sharp, merciless motion, tore my thumbnail clean off.
I could barely see through the tears when she nodded toward the door. It opened, and a guard stepped inside—a man I didn’t recognize. He didn’t speak, just slipped a set ofsilver-coated brass knuckles over his hand. The sight alone made my stomach twist.
The punch came fast and hard. Silver met skin with a crack of bone and a bloom of white light behind my eyes. Pain splintered through my skull, and then the world bled away into darkness.
All I saw was black.
In the dark, a voice came. Deep. Resonant. Like it was vibrating through my very bones.
“We do not give up, Flameborn.”
“Misun…”My voice was nothing but thought, but he heard me.
“You can make it out.”
“But I don’t know how!”
Silence. Then the rumble of his breath, steady and sure.“You will. We will.”
The dream shifted, distant and weightless. Shadows bled into the light, and the world around me shimmered like a half-forgotten memory. Voices whispered in a language I almost understood, echoing from nowhere and everywhere at once. Colors swirled—gold, silver, and deep crimson—blurring the edges of reality. I reached for something, someone, but the air slipped through my fingers, dissolving into mist. The ground beneath me didn’t feel real, the sky above too vast, too strange. The air hummed with anunearthly vibration, pulling me forward even as it receded like a tide. Every step was like walking through a thought I couldn’t quite hold onto, a memory that belonged to someone else.
And then I saw it. My eyes. Exactly the same mismatched colors, but they didn’t feel like they were mine. They just looked right back at me.
Boiling heat crashed over me.
I gasped awake, the scream catching in my throat as scalding water poured down my shoulders, chest, and arms. The smell of my own skin cooking hit me before I could even register the pain. My flesh reddened, bubbled, split—raw and weeping.
I wasn’t healing as fast as I should be. Not with this silver around my neck. Not with the walls themselves pressing in, poisoning the air I breathed. The magic in my blood couldn’t knit my flesh back together—not here.
The burns throbbed in deep, jagged pulses. Each movement scraped blistered skin against the barbed wire, tearing it open again so fresh blood mingled with the scalds. The pain was a living thing, biting and clawing at me from the inside out, making my vision shudder at the edges.
Faylinn was there again, her shadow stretched long across the floor as steam curled from my scalded skin in thin, ghostly ribbons. She tilted her head, eyes glinting with cruel delight, and the corners of her mouth curled into a smile that made my stomach churn.
“You know,” she purred, her voice dripping with mock sympathy, “it was laughably easy. Killing your pathetic human lover and then Yara. They begged for theirlives.” Her smirk widened. “But your father—” she let the pause drag, savoring it. “he didn’t beg. He fought. Oh, and what a fight it was… before he broke.”
