Total pages in book: 241
Estimated words: 229266 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1146(@200wpm)___ 917(@250wpm)___ 764(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 229266 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1146(@200wpm)___ 917(@250wpm)___ 764(@300wpm)
Still connected to him, I couldn’t imagine how that was possible. The agony that waited beneath the smirks and the teasing glances—under all his masks—was nearly unbearable. It threatened to drag me to the frozen ground. Being trampled by Setti was almost preferable to what festered from the wounds that couldn’t be seen. “Why wouldn’t you want that?”
“Because the pain is a reminder and a warning. One I plan to never forget.”
I severed the connection as nausea threatened to creep up my throat. “Did she…did she die because of the Ascended?”
“Everything that has rotted in my life has been tied to the Ascended,” he said, his hand returning to my hip.
“I’m tied to the Ascended,” I said before I could stop myself, before I could ignore the strange stinging.
Casteel didn’t respond. He didn’t say anything. Seconds ticked by and turned into minutes, and it felt as if there was a band tightening around my chest.
Staring straight ahead, I spent the next however many hours wondering how he could stand to even be near me—be close to someone tied to the Ascended as I was. They took his brother. They took the person he loved. They took his freedom. What else could they take from him?
His life?
A chill swept over my skin as I sat straight, my hands clutching the saddle. The idea of Casteel dying, of him no longer being there with those frustrating smirks and teasing glances, his quick-witted replies, and those damn, infuriating dimples? I couldn’t even consider it. He was too vivid, too bright to think of him no longer being there.
But he would be gone one day. When this was all over and we parted ways, he would be gone from my life. That was what I wanted—what I planned.
Then why did I suddenly feel like crying?
We camped out near the road, several hours after the sun had set. It was cold, but not nearly as cold as it had been in the Blood Forest. Casteel hadn’t spoken much beyond offering me food or asking if I needed a break, but as I lay there in the middle of the starless night, he returned to my side, stretching out behind me. I woke in his arms.
The next three days were just like that.
Casteel barely spoke. Whatever he felt, and I didn’t open myself up to him to truly know, was a shadow colder than the nights. So many times, I wanted to ask—I wanted to tell him that I knew about Shea. That I was sorry he’d lost her. I wanted to ask questions about her—about them. I wanted him to do what Alastir had said he hadn’t. I wanted him to talk, because I knew his silence fed his anguish. I said nothing, though, telling myself it wasn’t my place. That the less I knew, the better.
But he came to my side in the night, and he was there when a nightmare found me, waking me before I could give sound to the screams building inside me. He held me in silence, his hand stroking my back until I fell back to sleep.
The nightmares…they were different. Patchy, as if I were popping in and out of them instead of following the events of the night as before. They didn’t make any sense to me, either. Not the wounds on my mother, not the screams or the choking smoke. Not that creepy voice whispering about bleeding poppies. It was like the nightmares weren’t real anymore.
That was what I was thinking about as we saddled the horses and traveled the road to Spessa’s End on the fourth day. I had no idea how much time had passed when I saw something in the trees to my left. I couldn’t make out what it was, and just when I thought I was seeing things, I saw it again, several trees down the road.
It hung from a limb stripped of pine needles and bare of snow. A rope shaped into some kind of symbol—a circle. I twisted in my seat, but I couldn’t find where it had been in the mass of trees. The arm around my waist tightened, the first reaction from Casteel in days. I could feel the tension in his arm as I scanned the woods.
The shape tugged at the recesses of my memory. It looked like something I’d seen before. To the right, I saw it again—a brown rope hanging from another bare limb, fashioned almost like a noose, but with a stick or something crossing through the center.
I’d seen something similar in the Blood Forest. Except it had been created out of rocks and had reminded me of the Royal Crest. But now that I could see this one more clearly, I realized it was only like the Crest.
It wasn’t a straight line like an arrow, situated at a slant, but one that was slanted in the opposite direction. And that…that wasn’t a stick bound to the rope. It was too ashen in color, the ends knobby.