A hand gripped my face so hard the groaning of my bones jolted me awake.
“Look who we found,” a cold male voice drawled.
I knew that face—the red hair, the pale skin, the smirk. Knew the faces of the other two males in the cave, a snarling Lucien pinned beneath them.
His brothers.
CHAPTER
12
“Father,” the one now holding a knife to my throat said to Lucien, “is rather put out that you didn’t stop by to say hello.”
“We’re on an errand and can’t be delayed,” Lucien answered smoothly, mastering himself.
That knife pressed a fraction harder into my skin as he let out a humorless laugh. “Right. Rumor has it you two have run off together, cuckolding Tamlin.” His grin widened. “I didn’t think you had it in you, little brother.”
“He had it in her, it seems,” one of the others sniggered.
I slid my gaze to the male above me. “You will release us.”
“Our esteemed father wishes to see you,” he said with a snake’s smile. The knife didn’t waver. “So you will come with us to his home.”
“Eris,” Lucien warned.
The name clanged through me. Above me, mere inches away … Mor’s former betrothed. The male who had abandoned her when he found her brutalized body on the border. The High Lord’s heir.
I could have sworn phantom talons bit into my palms.
A day or two more, and I might have been able to slash them across his throat.
But I didn’t have that time. I only had now. I had to make it count.
Eris merely said to me, cold and bored, “Get up.”
I felt it then—stirring awake as if some stick had poked it. As if being here, in this territory, amongst its blooded royals, had somehow sparked it to life, boiling past that poison. Turning that poison to steam.
With his knife still angled against my neck, I let Eris haul me to my feet, the other two dragging Lucien before he could stand on his own.
Make it count. Use my surroundings.
I caught Lucien’s eye.
And he saw the sweat beading on my temple, my upper lip, as my blood heated.
A slight bob of his chin was his only sign of understanding.
Eris would bring us to Beron, and the High Lord would either kill us for sport, sell us to the highest bidder, or hold us indefinitely. And after what they had done to Lucien’s lover, what they’d done to Mor …
“After you,” Eris said smoothly, lowering that knife at last. He shoved me a step.
I’d been waiting. Balance, Cassian had taught me, was crucial to winning a fight.
And as Eris’s shove caused him to get on uneven footing, I turned my propelled step on him.
Twisting, so fast he didn’t see me get into his open guard, I drove my elbow into his nose.
Eris stumbled back.
Flame slammed into the other two, and Lucien hurtled out of the way as they shouted and fell deeper into the cave.
I unleashed every drop of the flame in me, a wall of it between us and them. Sealing his brothers inside the cave.
“Run,” I gasped out, but Lucien was already at my side, a steadying hand under my arm as I burned that flame hotter and hotter. It wouldn’t keep them contained for long, and I could indeed feel someone’s power rising to challenge mine.
But there was another force to wield.
Lucien understood the same moment I did.
Sweat simmered on Lucien’s brow as a pulse of flame-licked power slammed into the stones just above us. Dust and debris rained down.
I threw any trickle of magic into Lucien’s next blow.
His next.
As Eris’s livid face emerged from my net of flame, glowing like a new-forged god of wrath, Lucien and I brought down the cave ceiling.
Fire burst through the small cracks like a thousand flaming serpents’ tongues—but the cave-in did not so much as tremble.
“Hurry,” Lucien panted, and I didn’t waste breath agreeing as we staggered into the night.
Our packs, our weapons, our food … all inside that cave.
I had two daggers on me, Lucien one. I’d been wearing my cloak, but … he’d indeed given me his. He shivered against the cold as we dragged and clawed our way up the mountain slope, and did not dare stop.
Had I still remained human, I would have been dead.
The cold was bone-deep, the screaming wind lashing us like burning whips. My teeth clacked against each other, my fingers so stiff I could scarcely grapple onto the icy granite with each mile we staggered through the mountains. Perhaps both of us were spared from an icy death by the kernel of flame that had just barely kindled inside our veins.
We didn’t pause once, an unspoken fear that if we did, the cold would leech any lingering warmth and we’d never again move. Or Lucien’s brothers would gain ground.
I tried, over and over, to shout down the bond to Rhys. To winnow. To grow wings and attempt to fly us out of the mountain pass we trudged through, the snow waist-deep and so densely packed in places we had to crawl over it, our skin scraped raw from the ice.
But the faebane’s stifling grip still held the majority of my power in check.
We had to be close to the Winter Court border, I told myself as we squinted against a blast of icy wind through the other end of the narrow mountain pass. Close—and once we were over it, Eris and the others wouldn’t dare set foot into another court’s territory.
My muscles screamed with every step, my boots soaked through with snow, my feet perilously numb. I’d spent enough human winters in the forest to know the dangers of exposure—the threat of cold and wet.
Lucien, a step behind me, panted hard as the walls of rock and snow parted to reveal a bitter, star-flecked night—and more mountains beyond. I almost whimpered.
“We’ve got to keep going,” he said, snow crusting the stray strands of his hair, and I wondered if the sound had indeed left me.
Ice tickled my frozen nostrils. “We can’t last long—we need to get warm and rest.”
“My brothers—”
“We will die if we continue.” Or lose fingers and toes at the best. I pointed to the mountain slope ahead, a hazardous plunge down. “We can’t risk that at night. We need to find a cave and try to make a fire.”
“With what?” he snapped. “Do you see any wood?”