I’d just unleashed something in Simon, his strikes now nothing but feral rage. Gone were the final vestiges of the calculated warrior. He was practically coming at me with teeth and fingernails.
He hurled me against the wall. His hand slammed against my throat, pinning it to stone.
I couldn’t see. Couldn’t feel anything but my grip around that hilt.
That was all I needed, anyway.
Because as his fingers tightened around my throat, as his blade drove into my flesh over and over again, I clutched that hilt with everything I had and pushed.
And pushed. And pushed.
The blade parted leather, muscle, organs.
He was so far gone that it took what felt like an eternity for the wound to catch up to him. Slowly, his eyes, bloodshot and frenzied, went distant.
At least, I thought to myself, I got to see what that looked like.
His arm faltered mid-swing. My strength gave out. My hand, blood-slicked, slipped from my sword, which was now lodged firmly into his torso.
I couldn’t reach for it again.
A sudden release of pressure, as someone grabbed Simon and yanked him off me.
The blurry image of Simon’s slackening face was replaced with Oraya’s.
Now that was a welcome trade. I tried to tell her so, but I couldn’t speak.
Her eyes were so wide and bright, like two silver coins. She said something I couldn’t hear over the rush of blood in my ears. She was shaking.
You don’t have to look so scared, princess, I tried to tell her. But when I attempted to straighten, I only fell to my knees.
And everything was dark.
73
ORAYA
“Raihn!”
I didn’t mean to scream his name. It ripped itself from my throat when he fell. I barely heard it so much as I felt it, a distillation of emotion too powerful to remain inside me.
I had run from those tunnels into the bowels of fucking hell.
The sight of it had shocked me, horrified me. The sky was dark with warriors tangled in combat, and the sandy ground of the ruins drenched with flower-bloom spatters of blood that rained from the bodies above. In the distance, beyond the rocks, our ground forces were locked in combat with the Bloodborn—human, Hiaj, Rishan, Bloodborn, all tearing each other apart.
No horror story could top this. No nightmare. Not even the prison of the gods could be worse than this.
And yet, none of it was as horrifying as seeing Raihn like this, a collection of broken tissue and tattered flesh, lying on the ground.
Suddenly I was on the grounds of the colosseum in the final trial. Suddenly I was losing him all over again.
“Raihn.” I grabbed him by the shredded leather of his armor and shook him, hard. “Get up. Get the fuck up.”
His head lolled. I expected a bleary blink, a half smile, a fuck you, too, princess.
What I got was nothing.
I pressed my hand to his chest. Or at least, I tried to, even though it required me to do the impossible—find an expanse of skin that wasn’t an open wound.
It rose and fell. So, so weakly.
He was alive. But I knew that wouldn’t last. I’d spent so much of my life sensing death looming over me. I knew what it felt like when it was near.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Simon stir. He was a monster at this point, a grotesque puppet of twisted flesh and gore. But that magic, that noxious, terrible magic, would keep him going.
I shook Raihn again. “Raihn. I forbid you to die on me. Do you understand? Get the fuck up. You swore to me—you swore—”
Never again, he’d promised me, in the springs. He swore to me that he would never betray me again.
And this—losing him—felt like the greatest betrayal.
No. No, I refused to let it happen.
I grabbed my blade and sliced my hand open again, squeezing the blood into Raihn’s parted lips. It pooled and dribbled out pathetically from the corner of his mouth, useless.
And still, he did not move.
Everything else in my mind simply shut down. Grief cracked open inside me, drowning me, uncontrollable.
Behind me, Simon twitched again, gurgling groans rising from his decimated body.
Above me, blood rained down from the heavens.
Around me, my people fell to the blades of my enemies.
Before me, my husband died.
And in my hand, clutched against burnt flesh, was a power strong enough to end it all.
All my life, I had wanted to be something to fear. It was my father’s dream, shouldered from the moment I could understand how to build the strength he expected of me and excise the weaknesses he disapproved of.
If I used the blood of a god, I would certainly become something to fear. I would be more terrifying than Simon was. I could destroy him. Septimus. The Bloodborn. I could kill every enemy and make sure no one ever would question or threaten me or my people ever again.