Page 130 of Forged in Fading

“Blood oath has broken,” Sten translated as he shoved her closer to the crowd. “Our alliance is no more. Those who came from lands of elves must leave by sundown tomorrow.”

A few cries of dissent punctured the taut silence.

His words were short, barbed spikes hammered into Alvara’s lungs, leaking all the air she required to breathe.

Chief Frigar was casting out his most powerful allies only weeks before the battle. Everything they had worked for…gone. What was he thinking? The humans would never survive King Einar’s attack on their own, even with the magic of the demi-elves who lived in Gosibik. And if the king won, who knew what would come next. How many lives would fade.

The chief⁠—

He wasn’t thinking.

She, an elf, had attacked and killed a human. One of his people. And not just that, his own brother, who had suffered for a decade under King Einar, leaving behind a heartbroken son who had become the chief’s son as well. Erun had only just returned to a brother who had thought him gone forever in the elven realm.

She had proven the chief’s worst fear, confirmed every doubt about her people and their intentions that had surely been simmering in the back of his mind since the day they arrived.

She had done this.

“Aren’t you going to lock me away?” Alvara asked as the crowd dispersed. Even the chief and his company of guards strode away from her filth.

Sten paused and spoke over his shoulder. “Erun is alive. We know what he did. His life debt repay yours. But oath made before gods cannot be broken without consequences. Decision of Chief Frigar is final.”

She hadn’t killed Erun? Yet she still couldn’t draw a breath. She needed to be punished, executed, anything to force some feeling back into her bones. But Sten left, along with the rest of the square, leaving Alvara utterly alone.

Alone.

For years, she had wanted to live life by herself without others to care for or lose, but now that she stood with hands still shaking from what she had done…all she could think about was Boden. She needed him next to her, his steady presence her tether to this world.

But she had lost him, along with everything else that mattered. Things that she somehow convinced herself meant nothing, she now saw were some of the most important in her life. What good was hiding in the past with faded souls when she would only miss every beautiful thing living and breathing in the present?

She needed a drink.

Maybe if she made her way to the market now, before news spread too far, she could get her hands on a bottle, or three, of alcohol and detach her mind from the rest of her body.

One bottle deep, Alvara wandered toward the house covered in Eloisa’s art. The vendor she bought the alcohol off must have seen the self-loathing in her eyes, because he had immediately handed her a taste of strong mead, even more potent than what she drank during the festival.

She must have gotten lost. The road that should have led to the smaller houses of the town had turned into a stretch of sand. Waves lapped rhythmically, while the smell of salt mixed with the sweet scent of the mead she carried.

The docks—Boden’s safe place. The person who had become her safe place.

Alvara uncorked another bottle and doused her throat, barely pausing to breathe in between blazing gulps.

Maybe this was the answer, drowning herself until she became nothing more than a walking corpse soaked in alcohol, no thoughts or feelings to call her own. She plopped herself into the sand and stared into the last bottle of mead she held.

“Alva.”

She knew who she wanted it to be. And who it wasn’t.

Pyry slid to the ground next to her and eyed the bottle in her hand. “As bad as the night of your mother’s mourning?”

She lifted it with a sour chuckle. “Worse. One bottle to go, and it still won’t be enough.”

“He did kill your father. But…”

“But?”

He reached his hand out for the mead, as he had done so many times in the days after her sister’s and mother’s fadings, before he had left. Alvara sighed and handed it over. She had probably had too much already.

“But,” Pyry said, pouring the amber liquid onto the sand, “you seemed happy, Alva. Not surviving, but living. For the first time in…”