Page 333 of Commanding Scythe and Sky

Marley waved him away like an irksome fly. “I’m training El this afternoon. It will have to wait.”

“General Everhart, Your Highness.” Marley straightened, her eyes thinning to slits. Smith dipped his chin, averting his gaze as he explained, “He’s been recovered.”

SIXTY-SIX

BAIT

BLYTHE

166 days…

3,001; 3,002; 3,003.

The birds were raising a righteous cacophony, as if they knew I was at my breaking point and wanted to kick me right over it. I didn’t bother to look up. It would be the same as every other day—gray skies, a green expanse before obsidian cliffs, and countless little black-and-white birds enjoying their freedom with absolutely no appreciation for the air beneath their feathers.

So, I wove.

He already knew what I was. What did it matter anymore? After the ball, my odds of surviving this place had dwindled to nothing.

Might as well help someone I’d grown to love before the monsters decided they were better off without me.

Within the ice, the fear of that inevitable sentencing dimmed.

Within the ice, the songs of the ancients still sang; my blood their strings, my soul their keys. The melody of my ancestors lulled me into complacent silence, and I wove.

Gold over red, I pulled the ropes of fate one after another, winding them across the loom and watching them glitter as my magic sealed each into place.

I barely had a clue what I was doing, but talking to Jason helped. He’d never bothered to weave a loom. Considered interfering with fate sacrilegious.

I had no such qualms.

Just two souls in eternal agony I refused to abandon, even if it was the only thing I accomplished before I met the gods. I had a sinking suspicion there wouldn’t be much of a world to return to when I fell into the after. What happened to our kind when their purgatory was gone? Questions no soul could answer, I feared.

And so, I wove.

And wove.

And wove.

Until my fingers burned like I’d spent the entire day healing. Until my hands demanded reprieve.

Only then did I stand and stretch my creaking joints before locking the loom away within Rhiannon’s passage. I wandered to his window, where I’d managed to arrange a tiny new altar, peering out at the unchanging view save for the days growing ominously shorter.

Winter was coming.

And I was still rotting.

Alvara was no doubt still being twisted until not even August or Aren would recognize her. And I had failed—made everything worse in my foolish attempt to play monster when, at heart, I was forever a healer.

I wrapped my arms around myself and watched the birds dive and swoop, their voices raised. What I wouldn’t give to be one of them—to feel the wind on my face, even if it was frigid. I closed my eyes, pulling at the memory of air against my cheeks as I flew down a barrel. The elation of a ride that could’ve broken me wholly.

The waves were a relatively peaceful way to go, it turned out.

Moros enjoyed holding his executions on the lawn, within view of this very window.

They’d burned the insurgents alive after whipping them to the bone.

Apparently, the answer to noncompliance was a torturous death. Their heads had been shaved, their bodies bare, their screams eternal.