What he has taken from you.
I cringed as the voice came again, strong and powerful, and my muscles twitched in fear and anger. My hands moved up to my ears in another desperate attempt to lock him out, but I knew it would only keep him in.
“Don’t listen to him, Ryland.”
Find her.
Kill her.
“Can’t,” I gasped, the word grinding behind clenched teeth. “Too loud.”
Before I knew what had happened, I was rocking again, the back of my head slamming into stone. The panicked whispers of the three people before me ground through the air as the bridge began to disintegrate underneath me. Planks and supports that had seemed so strong only moments before fell away into nothing.
I watched my hair bounce before my eyes, heard words repeat on my lips as they did in my mind, but all I felt was the rhythmic pounding of my back against stone and the hand that wrapped around mine.
The heat of an unfamiliar magic filling me.
I tried to pull away from the painful wave that sparked against my nerve endings and filled me with thousands of pin pricks, each one filled with heat and fire. They ran over my body like thousands of tiny knives, the pain only growing as the heat did, as the hand clung tighter, as I began to scream.
“No!” The word ripped from me as the scream did, as I writhed and tried to fight, but it was no use. The pain continued, the screams continued, the words ‘kill,’ ‘destroy,’ and ‘no’ mixed with my screams until it was nothing but noise. Nothing, but the gasps of those who sat before me, who held me.
And then there was only … nothing.
Nothing except heaving breaths and tense waiting.
My screams stopped as abruptly as they had begun, the voice in my mind silencing into nothing but a memory.
Silence I hadn’t heard for months. Silence that, in many ways, I hadn’t heard my entire life. He had always been there, whispering, criticizing, ripping me apart. Now, however, there was nothing.
Nothing but me.
My mind was clear.
Yes, the pain was still there. The painful fire wrapped around inside me as the hand clung to mine. However, compared to the freedom my mind now felt, the pain was bearable. The pain was unimportant.
My eyes snapped up in wonder, moving from the shadowed markings on the hand that held mine to the girl who leaned against Thom in such a weakened state she could barely keep her eyes open.
“Wyn?” I asked, the steadiness of my voice sounding unfamiliar to me.
“That’s how,” she breathed, the words taking far more effort than should be necessary.
Her eyes fluttered open from where she leaned against Thom, a playful smile dancing on her face at what she had accomplished, despite the fact that the risk and danger to her had been great.
“I used to do this to Cail,” she gasped, squeezing my hand. “Bind his heart with a shield. It kept Edmund out of the ?tít and his mind. It gave him freedom. You feel it, don’t you? Free?”
I could only nod. “A ?tít? Is that what he did to me?”
“No,” Sain answered, his voice sounding louder without the competition inside of me. “What he has done to you is much more dire. You are his son. You already have his blood, so he can control you without such complex methods. You will never escape what he has done to you. You must become stronger than it.”
My stomach dropped at the accusation, a million memories of what I’d had to endure as his son flooding me. Every beating, every snub, every moment I was ridiculed. Perhaps it was because I didn’t want it to be true. I didn’t want him to ‘own’ any more of me. I didn’t want Sain to be right.
Even though he was.
“But, right now … Everything is clear … like when we were in the waiting place.”
“Yes, but even in the waiting place you were plagued by the monsters Edmund placed inside your soul. Wyn has only shielded your soul from the monsters, but the memories and the emotions are still there. She has just made it easier to decipher them.”
I knew he was right. Even though the voice was gone, even though I felt more of what I used to be, I wasn’t whole. I still had the memories of Joclyn hunting and hurting me, memories of a distorted version of me that he had used against me from the moment he had broken my mind, when he had begun to take ‘me’ away.
Everything tensed as the memories began to grow, weighing me down until it was hard to breath.
As much as I didn’t want to admit it, I knew Sain was right. I had more to defeat than the voice. I had to rise above what Edmund had done to me from the beginning.
What he had created.
What I had become.
None of this was me.
I was dangerous.
My breath heaved with a shake as I let the shield cover me, savoring the freedom of my mind for as long as Wyn could give me the gift.