Page 140 of A Throne of Blood and Ice

But the coward in me is grateful. She’s right. I don’t want to know who I would have chosen. I don’t want to know what having that kind of choice placed before me would have revealed about myself.

Our conversation hadn’t gone as I intended. I’m not sure exactly what I’d been planning, but it hadn’t been to blow up on Blaise. It hadn’t been to strike at the bruise that already blackened her heart.

But Ihadplanned to hurt her, just in a different way.

I knew what I had to do the moment I found the blotchy servant girl roaming the halls. Her name is Sylvia, and she’s always been terrified of me.

She should be. Her skin shows evidence of blood like none I’ve ever seen, but I’ve never laid a hand on her.

She was coming out of the South Wing when I found her. I’m not sure why, but something about that seemed strange, hollowed a pit in my stomach. Abra should have known better than to send a human servant so close to where we were keeping Blaise.

In fact, I was sure Abra knew better.

So I’d questioned the girl and discovered quickly that she’d brought a tray to Blaise. That she’d let Blaise out.

Sylvia’s eyes were still hazy, so it didn’t take much guessing to surmise what had happened. Why Sylvia had let Blaise out.

At first I’d been thrilled—not that Abra had obviously sent a human in Blaise’s path to cause her to fall, probably in some sick, twisted attempt to make me despise Blaise, to make me see in her what I detest within myself—but that it hadn’t worked. Temptation had been dangled in front of Blaise—a willing victim, entranced underneath the compulsion of Blaise’s bloodlust.

Yet Blaise had endured.

The elation, the pride, was quickly crippled by dread, however.

Because if Blaise can control herself, that means she’s ready to go out on her own.

She doesn’t need me anymore.

I suppose it should have been a happy thing. In another world, it would have been.

But I am a fool, and Blaise isn’t the only one of us who’s lied to the other.

She thinks there’s a chance I’ll be able to leave someday. She thinks if the queen was willing to make a bargain with me about the parasite, surely she’d make another. Perhaps if we found another trace of the Old Magic, the queen will free Zora, then I can leave with them.

Blaise is wrong.

She doesn’t know what I’ve done. The bargain I struck as she slept.

It’s not that I doubt Blaise would stay with me. That she’d shackle herself to my Fate and live out the rest of her days as a prisoner to the queen, just to be with me.

It’s that I know she would.

She proved as much when she let me perform the ritual on her, thinking it would kill her, just so I could have my sister back.

Blaise will ruin herself for me if I let her; and I simply can’t let her.

And if Blaise needs to hate me to gain her freedom, then I can live with that.

CHAPTER46

BLAISE

It’s still daylight. I know because I peeled back a thick curtain just far enough to scald my finger.

The queen might have released me, but there’s no getting out of here until nightfall.

I’m still wiping the stinging tears from my cheeks, replaying Nox’s words in my mind, when the guards find me wandering the halls.

They bring me a letter, sealed in wax the color of blood that drips across the parchment, not yet entirely dried.

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