Whether he is aware of Draewulf overtaking him.
With that question comes an emotion I am not prepared to face, so I roll over and simply imagine I am dead. That my heart can’t feel, my chest can’t move, my mind can’t think past anything but the numb, numb, numb until the humming has created its own sort of buzzing silence. Except after a while it’s that silence that’s screaming the loudest. In my bones. My blood. In the not knowing if Eogan is dying in this second or the next or the next. Not knowing if he’s even aware, if he can feel what’s going on, or if he’s in pain. All I know is I can’t do a blasted thing at this moment, and it feels more fragile and vulnerable than I ever imagined.
How ironic considering a week ago I was more powerful than any of us could’ve imagined.
That realization alone should make me bitter-laugh, but instead my mind won’t stop replaying those moments at the Keep when I could’ve chosen differently. I could’ve anticipated Colin stepping in front of me. I could’ve forced Eogan to let me shield him until Draewulf was dead. Or I could’ve let Faelen get attacked longer and fought Draewulf myself.
And tonight . . .
Tonight I could’ve caught on quicker and reacted before Draewulf stole the one thing that has always been mine even when I detested it.
I roll over and listen to the ache and sputter of my heart beating the refrain that despite all the “could haves,” this world is a pit of hulls.
I scratch at my wrist.
It’s not until I scratch it again that I notice the old itch beneath my skin creeping in along my arm.
I scrub my fingernails over it, but no matter how hard I claw, the blasted feeling keeps coming back. Like this slow drip, drip, drip of poisonweed in my bones.
Until soon it won’t stop and it’s burning, scalding its way into my flesh with its hunger to carve an injury into my skin. Go away, go away, go away, I try to tell it, until I’m swearing and then I’m choking, and suddenly it’s like this dam inside me erupts through the hate and fury and fear, and brings with it a blasted hurricane of grief.
Abruptly there are tears. And they aren’t just clogging up my throat—they’re spilling onto my cheeks, dripping onto my arms and hands and down to soak into my blanket. And I’ve no idea what to do with them or how to stop them.
I just know that eventually, mercifully, I succumb to a measure of sleep.
I’m aware of this because when I wake, the room is considerably brighter and my body’s been sobbing long enough to become sore and empty except for that throbbing near my heart.
I sit up and find my way through the dim to my door and out to the hall where two Faelen guards jump to attention. Neither seems surprised at my emergence.
“The water closet?” I mutter.
One opens a door directly across from my room and positions himself in front of it once I’ve entered.
After I’ve used the bowl and finished washing my hands, I lean against the water basin and breathe in, and, after a minute, look up to find a tiny mirrored reflection of a girl with sunken eyes and a face so gray I barely recognize it.
Nice. Even my appearance looks lost.
I turn to go, but abruptly that thought hits and nearly splays me out against the wall.
I am lost.
I can’t remember anything about me. I can’t remember what I’m supposed to be aside from what Draewulf has taken.
I grip the bowl. Shaking. Horrified as the entirety of that realization sets in. I don’t know who I am.
I reach down and pull out one of my knives from its sheath. Desperate for some way to feel the burn deep enough to reach my soul and remind me of who I’m supposed to be. To erase that blasted itch that just won’t cease.
I rinse it off with soap and water and press it against my left arm, beneath the tattooed bluebird, and begin to create a short, shallow line meant to be a branch for it to land on. To find her feet on.
I wait for the pain. The relief.
But even my old habits betray me as a sick feeling settles in my stomach that there is no rush, no horror. I utter a gargled laugh. There’s nothing other than a few drops of blood and a dull sense of a scratched itch too easily appeased. I resheathe the blade and brace against the wall as the airship dips down. The nausea grows worse as the only emotion washing over me is a sense of gut-wrenching shame, that after all my newfound resolution two days ago, I have let myself down. Let Colin down. Eogan.
Litches. I blink hard and shut away the memory of his reaction the first time he saw me with a fresh self-inflicted wound.