Page 98 of The Gilded Ones

Once again, I am betrayed. And just like before, it is by the boy I loved.

The captain looks down at me, considering. Then he turns to Keita. “If you try to help her escape, it’ll be your head,” he says.

“I know,” Keita says. “I know there’s no escape for her now except death. But she’s my partner, my responsibility, and only I know how to end it. Only I know her final death.”

Everything inside me is so dull now, I’m not shocked by his words. I can barely see anything any more, barely feel anything behind this deep, aching emptiness growing inside me.

Captain Kelechi looks up at the emperor, who has been watching the proceedings from his mammut. “Your Majesty?” he asks.

The emperor nods. “How will you do it, young lord of Gar Fatu?” he asks Keita.

Keita shrugs off the jatu holding him down and rises. “I’ll dismember her, Your Majesty,” he says.

I blink, confused. I can’t die from dismemberment, Keita knows that. He knows…

The breath strangles in my throat. Keita’s trying to save me. Trying to ensure that I survive by executing me before someone else does.

He ignores my muffled gasp as he continues: “It’s the only sure way to kill her.”

“How do you know?” the emperor asks.

Keita looks straight into my eyes. “She told me once. She told me the truth of her final death.”

Tears flood my eyes. He’s sacrificing himself for me, signing his own death warrant. If he dismembers me, I’ll go into the gilded sleep instead of the final death and then everyone will know him for a traitor. They’ll kill him then, and unlike me, he won’t come back.

He’ll never come back.

The thought sends my body jerking back to life. “No!” I shriek, the sound muffled by my gag. “NO, KEITA!”

Keita ignores me, turns to the emperor. “Your Majesty?”

The emperor nods. “Proceed.”

Keita walks over to me. “You shouldn’t have done it, Deka,” he says. “You shouldn’t have told me how to kill you.” There’s hope, determination in his voice. I struggle, try to shout so he can hear me, but he lifts his sword. It gleams in the early afternoon sunlight. “I’m sorry,” he says, bringing it down.

When my head separates from my body, my eyes catch his. They’re filled with tears. Keita’s eyes are filled with tears. He’s crying as he kills me.

He’s crying as he dooms himself.

It’s night when I wake again, and an itchy darkness surrounds me. Some sort of cloth is binding me in place. I try to turn my head to get away from it, and that’s when I stop, bewildered. I can’t turn my head. I can’t even turn my neck. There’s a searing pain somewhere between the two – a pain that splinters across my body in a strange, abrupt way, as if there are gaps. I try to lift my hands to feel my neck, but they won’t move. I can’t even feel them, actually. The only thing I feel is that pain, and an unnerving slithering feeling, as if parts of my body are…reaching for each other.

My body isn’t connected together. Alarm jolts me as I understand. The fibres are growing back into each other, the way they did back in the cellar in Irfut. Is this part of the emperor’s punishment? Have they already killed Keita? Please say Keita is all right. A low, keening wail builds in my throat.

“Deka?” Something rummages the cloth surrounding me, and light pierces into its darkness. “Deka, you can’t possibly be awake!”

I’m pulled up into the air, and the first thing I see is Keita’s face. Shock and bewilderment shine in his eyes. “Deka, how can you be awake?” he gasps. “You’re still healing!”

“Keita,” I sob, relieved tears running down my eyes. “You’re alive, you’re alive!”

“Of course I’m alive,” he says, frowning. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“But everyone saw you give me an almost-death, not a final one. They know you’re a traitor.”

Keita shakes his head. “No, they saw you bleed the blue of the final death. They thought you were dead.”

“Blue?” I ask, frowning. “How could I bleed blue if it wasn’t my final death?”

“It was Britta’s idea,” he answers. “She knew something like this would happen sooner or later, so she had Belcalis make a solution from some plants in the Warthu Bera. Apparently she has some experience with apothecaries?”

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