Avrin crouched before me again, whispering, “Time to get up, Princess.”
I couldn’t imagine doing any such thing.
The pain was so absolute, so endlessly depthless, I closed my eyes against it and silently pleaded for unconsciousness to take me again.
Avrin released a tormented-sounding groan, and I felt him move to my side.
A scream scraped my raw throat as he carefully hauled me into a sitting position. He may as well have forced me up by my hair. I wouldn’t have felt anything but the torrential ripple of flames engulfing my torso.
I hunched over, bile rising. Nothing left my mouth. There was nothing left within me to evict. Still, I heaved and whimpered and swayed.
Avrin took my wrists. Something heavy and scalding was fastened around them. Then he said, his voice a little hoarse, “We need to go.”
“Fuck you,” I mumbled absently, staring at the dried patches of crimson upon the mesh-like fabric beneath my hanging feet. Blood dribbled down my legs, catching between my toes.
A soft huff, and then he pulled on my bound wrists. “If I help you stand, it will only hurt you more. Better to do it yourself.”
“More,” I said, laughing then groaning when I lifted my head. Tears fell as I pushed off the metal to my feet. They were numb. My legs wobbled, and I gripped the bench. A cry parted my lips but created no sound.
I made it into the hall filled with guards before my knees buckled.
One of them laughed, but he fell quiet when Avrin bent low to maneuver me over his shoulder like a sack of rain-ruined grain.
My eyes closed, each step Avrin took sending flares of fresh pain throughout my entire body. If they were going to kill me, then I silently prayed to Mythayla that they would hurry up and do it. I wouldn’t survive another round of their torture.
I had a feeling I wouldn’t want to.
Minutes that felt like decades later, cool air hit my cheeks and stirred my hair. My head turned at Avrin’s upper back. A procession of guards trailed us—spread themselves along the drive as we left the stone terrace.
“I’ve done all I can,” Avrin said, barely a whisper. “This is it.”
I was set down on my bare feet.
Not wanting to but unable to help it, I clung to Avrin’s tunic as my legs failed me. He let me until the king made his presence known by barking, “Open the gates.”
Then Avrin gripped my upper arm, and I was delivered through the gates to the awaiting road and bridge beyond. Across it, the royal city of Bellebon shone beneath the late afternoon sky. Civilians and buildings dotted the river like stones against sand.
The breeze grazed my butchered skin. It was then I finally had enough awareness, and the ability to feel more than pain, to realize I was still naked.
There was little point in trying to shield myself against the eyes behind me and what awaited in the city outskirts ahead. So much of me had already been seen by too many, and it was the least of my concerns.
Avrin gently pushed me toward the bridge.
Agony raged through my limbs from the battlefield made of my back.
A guard stood waiting before the curving mixture of wood and sandstone granting passage over the river. He came forward to meet me as I concentrated only on placing one foot in front of the other.
If I thought of anything else—if I stopped—then I would crumple like wet parchment.
“Let it be known that not even blood can save a traitor, and Florian’s supposed wife means nothing to us,” Molkan boomed from atop a guard tower, his shadow cast across the sandy ground absorbing my trail of blood. “His capture and corruption and defiling of this creature were in vain.”
I didn’t turn to take one last look at the home I’d always longed for—nor the parent I’d been so eager to meet.
I walked on as the gates closed behind me with a blood-chilling creak.
Left with no choice, I followed the guard across the slow arching bridge.
On the other side, more people in the streets ceased their afternoon activity.
They began to flock to the river’s edge as I stumbled down the crest of the bridge and into the city encircling the palace in the shape of a sun-bright horseshoe.
I expected to be paraded through the streets naked and bearing the sign of a traitor before I was beaten by my own people and left for dead. I hadn’t expected the guard to spit at my feet before turning on his heel to cross back to the palace.
There was no relief. I would still need to walk through the city naked and bloody and marked. A mark I would forever wear due to the wounds being iron-infused.
The brand of a traitor. A traitor to the people surrounding me.
Vultures to a carcass, they glared and murmured. Some turned their younglings’ curious gazes away. Others studied me with a mixture of disgust, awe, and horror.
The world became too bright. Too loud.
There would be no horses to save me from a humiliation that somehow felt worse than any encounter with death.
Eyes were akin to needles upon my exposed skin—hundreds of prodding iron pokers.
Iron.
As the voices of the gathering crowds grew louder, my thoughts quietened. I looked at my bound hands but didn’t dare look back to the palace gates. Beyond them was my father’s loyal adviser who’d chained my wrists in iron.
The golden-eyed male who’d told me this was all he could do.
For although my hands were shackled, the heavy manacles were not locked.
Perhaps Avrin had saved me. If that were true, then I shouldn’t have felt as if I’d indeed been damned instead. As if flames fell from my scorched back to lick at my feet, and I would feel their burn for all eternity.
The warmth of the sun was too hot. Sweat misted my raw skin. I stopped when my feet met cobblestone, then closed my eyes over a fresh wave of tears when someone shouted, “She bears the mark!”
Behind my closed eyelids, midnight-blue eyes found me again.
Distance and energy are no match for desperation.
Something hard, perhaps a stone, slammed into my shoulder. It forced my eyes open as I stumbled back a step. Tears were now free to stream down my face.
Murmurings of “Florian’s whore” and “winter king’s wife” reached my ears.
Birds screeched overhead. Gasps mingled with laughter and insults. Horses whinnied and hounds barked while I just stood there, surrounded by hatred and frozen with fear and unending pain and unable to make it stop. Unable to do anything.
Someone lobbed another object at me. It splattered over my chest, the scent of a tomato following.
I barely felt it.
I barely felt anything as the crowds grew into something monstrous, and I began surrendering to the helplessness I’d been forced to face. Deep within me, that dark pit of despair and heartbreak opened.
Distance and energy are no match for desperation.
I pushed the darkness wider. Shook and shoved the iron cuffs from my wrists.
They clanked to the cobblestone as I welcomed the rapid fleeing of my breath. As I begged the rifts, the mother—whoever was responsible for such an ability’s existence—to take me the fuck away from this nightmare-ridden land I never should have stepped foot in.
Butterflies circled and tickled my cheeks. The breeze stirred granules of dirt around my feet and ankles.
“She’s materializing,” someone yelled.
“Return to your wretched husband,” another hollered and laughed. “Not even he will have you now.”