Ting.
I lie on my bed with the shades closed and lights out, hurling my knives into the metal ceiling above me, then waiting to catch them when they drop. Focusing my senses to know when they’ll fall and my reflexes to grab their handles midair once they do. It’s a game Colin and I played sometimes in the corner of Adora’s barn in between our training sessions. Except I could only do it one-handed then.
With my gimpy fingers now straightened, I play it with thin stockings wrapped around both palms.
Ting. The blade sticks.
Thump, it drops toward me as hard and sharp as the look on Rasha’s face before the guards confined us to our rooms. “I didn’t mean to hurt him,” I murmur again to the ceiling.
Why couldn’t Sir Gowon have simply told me on his own?
I grab the knife handle and quietly, methodically, toss it up again. Ting.
Thump.
As if what he said made sense anyway. It’s been six hours since I met with him and got confined in here, and I’ve spent every minute of it trying to sort through Sir Gowon’s words. “When shadows are sown to sinew and bone, let storms collide, Elisedd’s hope arise, before the beast forces fate’s hand.”
I assume it’s speaking of Draewulf, but what did Eogan mean by saying it’s begun?
What’s begun? The beast forcing fate’s hand? To do what exactly?
That seems to be the question it all comes back to. What are you up to, Draewulf? What do you want?
And somehow, destroying the world seems too simple an answer.
“From one it came and to five was entrusted, to only one it can go, to rule or to seek justice. If his demise is to be Elemental, interrupt the blood of kings in each land.”
If Draewulf’s demise is to be Elemental—does that mean an Elemental will kill him? I wonder if that’s why he eliminated the Elementals in the first place. Isn’t that what he said in the hallway when we first arrived?
But then why is the beast keeping me alive?
“What in litches is it all supposed to mean?” I yell at the air for the hundredth time.
The muttering voices of the Faelen delegates beyond the wall beside me merely continue without a lull. About an hour ago, they all converged in Lady Gwen’s room. I can hear them talking but not enough to dissect what they’re saying. I didn’t have the heart to go argue with the guards to let me in on it too.
More accurately, I haven’t the slightest interest in whatever it is the delegates have been discussing, especially since it’d require walking by those wraiths in the hall. Their noise is a dull thrum through my head, like words blending into hollow humming. “Come to us, come to usss, come with ussssss,” I swear they’re saying.
“Go to hulls, go to hulls, go to hullsssss,” I mutter back, in case they can hear me. I flex my wrist and dig my nails into my bandaged flesh, but the dark hunger beneath my skin only makes their hideous thrumming louder.
Ting.
Thump.
Ting. Thump.
Five more minutes of me ignoring them, and then there’s a new commotion of voices outside. The delegates perhaps? No. They’re still murmuring on the other side of my wall. Myles? I sit up in the dim just as something heavy hits my bedroom door, followed by a scuffle and deep cursing.
Silence falls.
I lift a knife.
A thin filter of light slices the gloomy room as the door softly opens and footsteps pad toward me. A black mask looms from the shadows. I thrust my blade out only to hear a small sound to my left just before a pillow is shoved over my face, slamming me down into the bed.
I slash with both knives and am rewarded with one connecting into muscle. It’s met with a cry before both blades are wrenched from my wrists by reflexes better trained than mine.
I kick. I scream, but no noise escapes beyond a muffled gagging as the air empties from my lungs until I can no longer breathe.
I stop moving.
“You’ve been requested,” a panting voice says so close to my ear that my neck tingles.
The hands pinning the pillow over my face ease off, letting it slip aside, and pull me to my feet at the same time they’re slipping my blades back into my makeshift ankle sheath.
I blink to focus but the intruder is already pushing me to the door. When I step out into the light, it’s into the arms of two more masked soldiers, part of Lady Isobel’s personal Mortisfaire guard. The Bron soldiers are sprawled out on the ground. They look stunned, not dead, and behind them five or six wraiths are lurking in those gray rags that barely cover their body parts sewn together with bolcrane pieces or panther-monkeys. I shudder. What in litches?
Before I can pull back, the masked soldiers grab my arms.