Текст книги "A vow of blood and tears"

Автор книги: Cate Corvin

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Текущая страница: 29 (всего у книги 41 страниц)

Miro folded it in half, handing it back to me. I tucked it in my pocket again, his eyes on every movement as I smoothed it flat, adjusted my bag, straightened the bloodrose tucked behind my ear.

I made a common gesture that amounted to ‘get out of my way’, but Miro remained in place, leaning on the stall door and blocking my exit.

He smiled. “So you finally see. They’re the same.”

I shook my head, not bothering to sign. He wasn’t worth the words, and Bane needed to know I cared. He couldn’t drive me away with a few snarls and roars.

“Well, I’m glad you’re here. It makes my life so simple. I’m going to give you one chance, Cirrien.” Miro’s smile had faded a fraction, and though his lips were still curled up, the look in his eyes was completely serious and cold. “One chance to leave with me peacefully while your husband is dealing with the hindrance I sent him. If you fight, you lose.”

I tilted my head, looking up at him quizzically, his statement not making any sense at first.

The two seconds it took to make sense of his words was two seconds too long.

Miro reached for my arm, and I struck at him, clawing with my nails. A scratch opened on his hand, blood welling, but Miro was quicker, stronger, faster.

“A fight it is, then.”

He twisted my arm behind my back, forcing me back into the empty stall.

“Feisty,” he muttered, pushing my chest and stomach to the rear stone wall and keeping me pinned there. “You’re such a little mouse, I didn’t think you had it in you.”

His weight forced the air from my lungs, and even if I could have screamed, there was no air to scream with.

He was fumbling with something with his other hand, and an awful thought struck, that he would rape me right here in the stables and no one would know until it was over.

I kicked, raising my heel, but Miro drove his knee into the back of my thigh, sending a sharp jolt of pain through my entire leg before the muscle went dead. Dark splotches spread across my vision, painting patterns like bloodstains across the wall. By the Light, I needed air...

“You fought and you lost, no great surprise,” he said, his other arm snaking around me. “By this time tomorrow, we’ll be in Foria. Good night, Lady Silence.”

He pressed a cloth over my face, smothering close, covering my mouth and nose. Despite my thrashing, it didn’t dislodge.

Most of his weight drew back and my lungs filled against my will, desperate for air, but the sweet, acrid stench of the cloth burned down my throat instead.

The dark splotches grew. Blossomed into shadows, the imaginary bloodstains becoming bloodroses. I heaved against Miro one last time, but I could no longer feel him, even as he dragged me across the stable.

He laid me on a saddle blanket, lowering the rear hatch of a supply wagon. I could no longer feel my own limbs. I was floating, the shadows deepening, my mind numb.

The bloodroses flowered into an endless night.

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Chapter 38 Bane

Gods. I had screamed at her.

I had bared my claws, my fangs, showing the truth of what lived under my skin to the one I loved the most in this world.

My Cirri, my lover. She had run from me.

I curled in on myself, covering my face with my bloody hands.

Now she knew the truth, that there was nothing good inside me. Everything I had been, everything I once was… was now subsumed by the beast in my heart and mind. The creature that drove me to violence, that begged and fought for blood, that had no remorse and no care for life itself.

I was evil, and now she had seen it, in its most raw and open form.

The body was cooling. I smelled its thick, meaty stench in the air, the iron tang of blood, now congealing.

I could have offered a trial. Judgment by those who might have heard her out, rather than a death sentence at my hands. From the moment she had walked in through that door, that damning letter in Visca’s hand, she had been doomed.

But I didn’t regret what I’d done.

That was the worst part. Knowing that Cirri was right to fear me, because I had torn apart a woman she knew without an ounce of remorse. What was one woman after the hundreds that had come before?

Perhaps I had been a fool to think this would work in the end. To promise that I’d give her my blood, keep her by my side forever.

What kind of life would that be? To be trapped in the cage of a vicious fiend, afraid enough to run, yet too terrified to leave?

And still, even with that knowledge, I wouldn’t release her. I would give her my blood and keep her, evil or not. Brutal or not. As terrible as I was, I belonged to her, and she to me.

And of course I believed that, because I was evil.

I drew my hands away and looked at them, really looked at them.

The blood had dried to a glaze on my fingers, sunk into the lines on my palm, pooled around my claws.

These were the hands that touched Cirri every night. They were the hands that could reach into a chest, break through ribs like twigs, and tear a still-beating heart out.

Those two things did not belong together, but I would keep her nonetheless.

She couldn’t really believe that I was no better than a warg, though she knew the truth now. Her love for me, her demand to stay with me, denied that.

I exhaled, wishing the blood didn’t smell so delicious, wishing I hadn’t done it in the tower where I’d recently found such happiness.

Moving slowly, I picked up the slashed portraits. I touched Cirri’s face, torn through and gouged open, wishing I hadn’t ruined hers. This one was the only one that mattered.

I would have Miro paint a new one. The shredded one I would keep as a reminder to myself, that I was evil and I must never, ever turn that wicked gaze upon Cirri.

She could be so easily torn apart. Like the portrait, like the once-living girl cooling on the floor.

I propped it up among the other paintings, and looked at Ellena.

She looked so young in death, her eyes still shocked and open. And as much as I didn’t regret it, I wished I had done it away from Cirri’s eyes.

I picked her up, lip curling at the heavy ragdoll feeling of her body in my hands. Humans weighed so much more in death, like sacks of sand, nothing but dead weight to carry around.

I brought her down. Down beneath the keep, through the secret door that even Cirri hadn’t tried to open. There was no glory down here in the dungeon, no swooping buttresses, no marble floors. It was all stone, cold and unforgiving, the cells lined with iron bars. The air stank of moss and fungus, the eye-watering reek of piss, the curdled taste of old blood.

I brought Ellena to a long, wide room, where drifts of ash fetched up against the walls.

There was one Ark in here. One remaining out of ten, the others long since rusted shut or fallen apart. An old remnant from the days when humans rose up and killed their vampire overlords.

They had staked them with silver, shoved rowan down their throats, and that had killed many of them. But in their frenzy for revenge, the human rebels had created the Arks: oversized ovens, where the vampires stunned with silver and poison had been piled in heaps, and locked inside with the flames.

All of these Arks had once been maintained, their fires kept burning day and night, but eventually only one had been tended. It had been decades since a bloodwitch had been locked inside; now only corpses were burned there.

I laid Ellena aside, and began to shovel coal into the Ark’s grated bottom. When that was full, I laid wood atop it, building a pyre in silence.

No, I didn’t regret this, but for Cirri’s sake I would give Ellena a proper funeral. No rotting in a pit for this traitor, no.

I laid her atop the pyre, and shoved a bit of kindling under the grates piled with coal and wood, striking sparks off a flint and steel until it caught.

And when the flames began to climb hungrily, crackling through the wood and licking at Ellena’s cold flesh, I shut the iron door and barred it.

There. It was done; the traitor had paid in full. For every life taken, she received a hungry flame—but if I didn’t regret it, why did I have to keep telling myself I didn’t?

I crouched on all fours, the air around the Ark shimmering with the growing heat, watching through the bars as Ellena’s body was slowly consumed. It took several long hours before the blackened char consumed her outer shell, and I spent those hours with my thoughts running in circles of shame and guilt.

Cirri had witnessed it. She deserved an apology for my brutal behavior. I would tell her I should have given Ellena a trial… but that I didn’t regret it.

I left the Ark burning, the wood inside popping and crackling, the thick scent of ash and charred flesh coating my nostrils and throat.

Cirri would not be in the Tower of Winter. Not after she’d run. I went to the library, but the air carried no fresh scent I could pick up through the ash; it was silent, feeling strangely lonely. The golems were the only living things in there, standing at a window with their backs to me.

In the Tower of Spring, the air was even staler, no signs of life to be found.

Wyn was working alone; Brother Glyn was in the Tower of Summer, and he told me with pleasure that he had our next lesson worked out.

But by the time I was done searching the four towers, there was an odd sensation in my chest.

I went to the ballroom, retracing the steps of Bloodrain to the balcony, which was empty; I prowled the servants quarters, tearing through the kitchens and upsetting Cook. I breathed deeply, searching for her scent, but all I could smell was ash and burning blood.

By the time I had circled around to the keep’s entrance, that odd sensation had blossomed into a feeling I was almost entirely unfamiliar with, a cold spill down my spine, emanating into my guts and limbs and gnawing at my heart: fear.

She was nowhere.

She had run away from me and vanished.

I paused in the doorway of the keep’s entrance, and Koryek gave me an odd look as he passed.

“My Lord,” he said politely, keeping a wary distance.

I nodded, amazed at how suffocating such a thing as true terror felt; gods, was there anything else like it?

This was because of what I’d done. I was merely… not myself. She was here, she simply didn’t wish to see me.

Well, that was it. I could give her breathing room, let her come to terms with the facts of the matter: that she was trapped here, married to a murderous brute.

And yet.

Walking on hands and feet, forgetting the civilized walk of a man, I found myself once more lurking outside the Tower of Spring.

Surely she was in the upper tower with the door locked, biding her time before she had to face me and my bloodstained hands again.

I crouched outside her door, clearing my throat, and debated what to say.

My mind was blank, still glazed with the odd terror that she would never want to see me again. She would shut her door to me forever.

But she hadn’t locked this one.

I fumbled the latch in my haste to be inside, creeping in on silent feet.

“Cirri?” I asked, my voice hoarse. “Cirri, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have taken it out on you…”

There was no answer. Twilight had fallen, the sky outside the windows studded with stars and a column of black smoke—the Ark, sending Ellena’s final remnants into the open air.

I frowned at them, creeping in further, and saw what I had missed in my first chaotic search.

Her dresser’s mirror reflected an empty expanse of wood. The velvet-lined boxes containing her jewels were gone; her wardrobe door was askew, several dresses torn down and puddled on the floor.

I inhaled sharply, still smelling nothing but ash, and tasting the sharp terror that built in me.

“Where?” I breathed, my eyes grazing her desk and seeing nothing. Would she really leave without a word? With nothing to say?

But the jewels were gone, her cloak was gone…

I turned blindly, striding until I reached the Tower of Winter, and my first footstep was onto paper.

A single page of it, slid under the door.

Fear was a tight restriction in my throat, an ache in my gums; the ungodly taste sickening in my mouth as I bent to pick it up.

It was her writing, her lovely, neat hand.

Fiends and wargs come from the same dark place, she had written, and beneath it was her letter.

I cannot live here another moment. You are just the same as them—a monster. I refuse to live on your leash. I’d rather be dead than the wife of a warg. 

Let me go. If you really love me, don’t come after me.

Cirrien lai Darran

The ice in my spine hardened, crystallizing into something new and awful.

The terrible sensation that I had been hollowed out, that an unseen hand had reached inside me and ripped all the color out of the world.

There was only silence, the chill crawling over my skin, the sucking abyss in the center of my being.

I had done this. I was a terrible thing, something that shouldn’t exist, and I had driven the warmth and light out of my world.

I couldn’t tear my eyes from the letter, from the words of her soul, openly condemning me.

To become a fiend is a dark and twisted thing…

I’d rather be dead. 

Had she been coming to tell me that she was leaving, that this was a cage she couldn’t abide? My love, a leash she was desperate to slip?

Of course she had been. I should never have told her of the ritual.

I would rather she had told me herself. Said goodbye so I could look into her eyes one last time and fully understand that I was the one who had done this. I had made this happen.

I exhaled, wanting to tear the letter to pieces and throw them in the Ark, unable to so much as pierce it with my claws.

My love’s last words to me. This was all I had left. This, and the portrait I’d torn apart in front of her.

She’d watched me rend her face in effigy. That would be her last memory of me, destroying her, shouting at her.

I had broken… everything.

As night fell, I remained in the darkness, holding her final words to me close. Smelling the reek of blood from above. Listening to the change of guards, the soft call that all was well, and not hearing anything at all. Eyes unseeing, the words on the page becoming a blur.

Sometime later, beyond my reckoning, there was a soft knock on the door. The light of dawn was coming through the window; Cirri was gone.

I had obeyed her last wishes. I would let her go.

Visca stepped in, her face hard and frowning, her nostrils flaring as she smelled the blood.

“Good ancestors, Bane, what are you doing, crouching in here like that?” She wrinkled her nose. “Didn’t you let someone in to clean the body up? We’ve got warg-sign in the southwest, and as I was planning to pay a visit to Coran regardless, I’m going to direct two of the legions to the south. We’re riding out today.”

I blinked, the words swimming back into focus.

I imagined eyes like the deep forest, but hard and cold. Her hands forming irrevocable words: You are just the same as them. Monster. 

“Bane?” Visca’s voice, growing sharper. “What is it? Where’s Cirri?”

Wroth had been right. My brother had told me… and I had not listened.

I shook my head, wondering how I could ache inside when I was hollowed out into nothing.

Strange, how calm I sounded. A far cry from the fiend screaming inside my head. “My wife has… Cirri has left me. She’s gone.”

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Chapter 39 Cirri

The world was swaying. My bed was not the warm, deep softness I’d grown accustomed to but a bundle of hard sticks, jabbing into my shoulder, side, and hips.

A headache gnawed at my temples as I cracked my eyelids open. They felt dry and gummy, my mouth sour, and the swaying of my bed made my stomach churn.

I expected to see Bane, or the inside of a carriage I’d inadvertently fallen asleep in, not a wall of wood. I squinted at the boards, picking out a whorl in the grain, several sharp splinters jutting precariously close to my eye.

With an internal groan, I shifted in place, wondering where Bane had put me. What was this? The sticks were iron hard, poking into sore muscles.

There was a canvas tarp above me, lashed down tight to the wooden wall. I frowned at it, then shifted again, alarm replacing my sleepy confusion.

I’d been laying on another canvas. Craning my head, I followed my line of sight upwards, finding a bundle of spearpoints poking from beneath the canvas bedding, and… velvet boxes. Blinking, I lifted a shaking hand to pry a lid open. The gleam of jewelry, dull in the half-light, met my eyes.

The world lurched and swayed, making my bed of spears and canvas rattle, and I heard a soft voice call out. A male voice.

Miro’s voice.

I licked my cotton-dry lips, pulling a memory from the vague recesses of my mind. Bane, warped into a form more hideous than I’d ever imagined. Ellena, her eyes scarlet with burst veins. Miro… pulling the note from my hand, crushing a reeking cloth to my face.

Breathing rapidly, I took stock of my current situation: I recognized the inside of one of the supply wagons, and all I could see of it beyond the jewelry boxes above my head was several crates stacked to my right, and the spears beneath me. My leather bag had been tossed in carelessly, and I sorted through it. My journal, the ritual book, a pen… the hunting knife was gone.

But the pen might work. I held it up, testing the metal of the barrel. It was solid, sturdy… not as good as the knife, but any port in a storm.

There was no way of telling where we were, particularly under the canvas, but if I could slip out of the wagon and into the wilds of the Rift, there was a decent chance I’d come across a legion. I would have to be swift, silent, and hope I found the vampires before the wargs found me.

I swallowed hard, looping my bag’s strap over my shoulders and scooting down to the end of the wagon as quietly as possible—difficult to do with limp, weak muscles. My breathing was shallow, as though inflating my own lungs was too difficult.

The spears rattled against each other and I froze, holding my breath, waiting for Miro to speak.

But the wagon bumped on, swaying on an uneven road, and I tucked myself up against the rear hatch.

The quickest way to escape was directly through the canvas. Even if I’d had my knife, it would take too long to saw through the ropes holding the canvas down. I ran a finger along the oiled fabric, stretched taut.

Easier to slice through, considering I was using a fairly blunt instrument.

My hands were weak, refusing to grip the pen with my usual strength. Whatever Miro had used, it left me feeling feeble and shaky, the headache growing in strength as though my wakefulness had summoned it to life. Tears pricked the corners of my eyes as the muted crush of pain crept towards the back of my skull.

What had he drugged me with? I’d never felt so ill in my life, and all I could do was hope it would wear off eventually . But that was a fear for later.

Now I was struggling to fight the fear of what Miro intended, why he’d poisoned me and dropped me in the back of a supply wagon, and where we could possibly be.

I swallowed again, thirstier than I’d ever been in my life, and angled the pen’s tip against the canvas.

I’d have to do it quickly, then. Climb out and run for the deepest part of the forest. I could retrace my steps once Miro gave up… if he gave up.

Save the pessimism for later. Just get out first and figure the rest out as you go. 

“Go,” I thought, and pushed all my weight into the pen, dragging it through the canvas, hearing the rip of cloth—

Shaking, sweat beading my temples, I looked up at the two-inch long tear. Pale dawn light stabbed through it, mocking me, driving nails of pain through my eyes.

The wagon lurched to a halt.

“I hear you, sleeping beauty.”

Goosebumps broke out over my arms. I gripped the pen as tight as I could, nearly fumbling it, flooded with despair.

How had he taken me from the keep? How did I manage to get here?

Where was Bane?

Footsteps crunched outside the wagon, rounding to my left. There was the soft sound of hands tugging at the ropes, Miro humming cheerfully to himself, and he finally tore a corner of the canvas free, lifting it back to expose me crouched there like a rodent, pen in hand to stab.

I tried, swinging as hard and fast as I could, but my limbs were weighed down by the drug, like bricks were tied to my hands. Miro caught my wrist easily, plucking the pen from my loose grip and sliding it into the breast pocket of his waistcoat.

“Perfect timing, Lady Silence.” He grinned down at me. “I was about to get you up anyway. We’re at the first stop.”

I blinked owlishly at the misty world beyond the wagon, and for a moment relief swamped me at the sight of the crowns of pine trees surrounding us. We were still in the Rift. There was still hope.

“Come on out.”

I had to cling to the hatch of the wagon to pull myself upright, and Miro took me under the arms, hauling me over the side. I landed on the gravelly path, swaying in place, and as soon as he removed his hands I ran for it, dashing towards the trees.

And almost over the edge of a cliff. The road butted right up to the edge, only feet away; the trees on the other side of the gully gave the illusion of solid ground between them and the road.

If Miro wasn’t a step behind me, I would’ve gone over the edge. As it was, I had a good view of the steep drop, a hundred feet of jagged layers of shale to the rocky banks of a creek below, and then Miro’s hand tangled in the laces of my bodice, ripping me backwards onto solid ground.

He dropped me with a heavy thump, and I curled up on the stony ground, fighting the urge to throw up from the pounding headache and the wave of vertigo, my hands curling around stones too small to do any damage against him.

“Let’s not do that again.” He crouched next to me. “You’re far too valuable to actually kill. Here’s what’s going to happen: I’m tying you up for now. Good behavior earns you rewards. But as I said before, if you fight me, you’ll lose. Are you going to make this hard?”

I squeezed my eyes tightly shut for a moment, then shook my head. I knew when to be realistic. Miro got up, rustling in the wagon, and I coughed. And coughed again, spattering saliva on the ground.

For now, I was too slow and shaky to run. Too weak to fight.

But I could leave a scent trail so strong that Bane would smell me from miles away.

I ran a trembling hand through my hair, rubbing my aching scalp, and felt the bloodrose still tangled behind my ear. Squinting up, I saw Miro’s back turned.

Moving as fast as I could, I raked my nails over my head, getting a handful of petals and several loose hairs. I shoved them into the pine needles at the edge of the road, and struggled upright as Miro turned around.

“There we go, lay back down for a moment,” he said soothingly, and forced me down to my stomach, clasping my arms behind my back. He hogtied me, wrists to ankles, and rolled me onto my side, leaving me like a trussed pig in the road. “This is only for a moment. Just a little taste of what could happen if you want to play stupid games.”

He winked and got up again. I hissed between my teeth, the ropes just tight enough that I couldn’t wriggle my way out. But even if I couldn’t get loose, I could move my fingers.

I ran my fingers over the stones behind my back, trying to spread my scent as far and wide as possible while I watched Miro.

He’d stopped the wagon sideways on the road. He unhitched the horse from the wagon, and led it to a stump, draping its reins over a knot of wood. With enviable ease, he untied the canvas cover, extricating the jewel boxes and shoving their contents by the handful into the horse’s saddlebags.

Then he got behind the wagon and pushed.

Several eternal minutes later, sweating, the veins bulging out in his neck and forehead, Miro pushed the front wheels over the edge of the cliff. There was a screech, a harsh scraping as the wagon tipped under its own weight, and I wriggled desperately in the road as the crash filled the quiet forest.

Miro looked over the edge, raised his brows, and glanced back at me. “Can’t bring that where we’re going. This far north, the trails are risky.”

Hell. Instead of spreading my scent, I wish I could’ve shoved him off the side with it; but with my luck, and the dizziness brought on by his poison, I probably would’ve sent both of us over the edge, and I didn’t want to die.

It was bad enough to be caught like this. Between the corset and my hogtie, breathing was becoming difficult; I stole shallow sips of air, leaking tears from the growing ache.

He returned to me, seeing the tangled mess of my hair and skirts, and I glared back defiantly.

To my surprise, he laughed, genuine good humor in his voice.

“I can’t fault how determined you are,” he said, picking up a few of the blood petals, one of my hairs looped around his fingers. “Sure, he would smell it. But he’s never going to come this way. He’s never going to look for you at all.”

I watched as he twiddled his fingers, sending petals and hair flying into the middle of the path while he smiled.

“You can spit on every tree from here to Foria if you’d like. It doesn’t matter.” He loosed the knot, releasing my aching wrists from my ankles, and hauled me to my feet. Another bolt of pain went through my temple. “You gave me the perfect gift to make sure of it.”

I stood there unmoving, simply glad to have my body no longer painfully twisted, and he led the horse over.

Never had I felt more powerless, more invisible, than I did now. Like a saddlebag to be packed up and slung over the horse’s back. I desperately wanted to know what he meant, and couldn’t ask. My pen glinted in his pocket, teasing me with how near it was, and yet so far away.

Because I could do nothing else, I raised my chin and stared at Miro.

“So.” He cocked his head, examining me. “I used corpseflower root powder. Right now you must feel like hell, but it’ll wear off soon enough, and you’ll be feeling good as new. You might even feel inclined to make a play for freedom, and I’ll tell you why that’s a bad idea.”

Miro held up the rope still tied to my right ankle, and showed those white teeth.

“The thing is, I wasn’t always the court artist. I had to work for a living. I slaved away in the stableyard for years working for your leech husband. I can tie up a pissed-off, wriggling pig faster than you can blink, and believe me, you are nothing compared to that. If you get any ideas about gutting me or running off on your own, I want you to think long and hard about what it would feel like to stay in that position for days without reprieve. Because if I have to waste my precious time to stop and do it, I won’t be letting you free again. I will hogtie you, and throw you on this horse however I please, and if you think you hurt now, I assure you, that’s nothing compared to what it could be.”

His eyes were a pale, icy jade in the daylight. So cold, I couldn’t believe I’d ever thought them pretty. Everything about him was repulsive, from the smug set of his mouth to the smell of his sweat and cologne.

I needed to outlast him. If I couldn’t run now, I could escape later. I just needed to keep myself in a position to regain my strength and find my opening.

“But, as I said, you’re valuable. I want you to come to terms with the fact that we’ll be together from here on out, and I’m willing to show kindness if you’re willing to behave. So—are you going to give me a reason to use this?”

Together? A chill ran down my spine, but I met those cold eyes squarely and shook my head.

“If you’re very good, I’ll let you have your pen back.” He tied the end of my leash to the saddle horn, giving me only about ten feet of leeway—not nearly enough to make a run for it. I gritted my teeth as Miro mounted the horse, holding out a hand to me. “Come on up.”

I could imagine him kicking the horse into a gallop, the rope between my ankle and the saddle snapping taut…

I took his hand.

He hauled me up, settling me in his lap sidesaddle. Too close, one arm around my waist, the other gripping the reins, and the feeling of his breath stirring my hair made me want to claw at his face.

If there was one thing I’d learned in life, it was patience. This was not my moment.

But when that moment came, it would be very satisfying. I would make sure of it.

He clicked his tongue, nudging the horse into a trot. We were moving east, the rising sun piercing my aching eyes, the mountains looming before us.

I pulled my journal out, balancing it on my knee. Then I turned my head, giving Miro a sidelong look under my lashes, glancing pointedly at my pen.

He smirked, that cocky look that made me want to kill him, and pulled it free. “It’ll cost you later, but I’m feeling generous. I can afford to be, now.”

What makes you think Bane isn’t coming after us? I asked. Deliberately using ‘us’, a subtle manipulation, hoping with enough time he would come to believe us on the same team, and slowly drop his guard.

Miro peered over my shoulder at the question, and laughed. “Here, give me the pen. You’ll love this.”

I handed it to him, and he shifted the reins to his left hand, the pen to his right, and reached around my waist to write in the journal on my lap. It was a bit shaky, given the horse beneath us, but I found myself breathless, a terrible blend of fury and despair filling me as my own handwriting filled the page.

Because he has a letter from your own hand telling him you’ve gone. You hate him. You never want to see him again. 

My mind splintered in a thousand directions. Miro had perfectly imitated my writing. If I hadn’t watched him write it himself, I could’ve easily believed I had done it.

“He believes I didn’t inherit my mother’s memory. It’s been a very useful little secret worth keeping. I can imitate anything I’ve seen on paper,” he said smugly, tucking the pen back in my hand. “Any image, any writing. I had yours perfectly worked out in a few days. Ellena’s took a little longer, but she was always writing letters to the Sisterhood, and all I had to do was pretend to be sympathetic to the cause. It made it so much easier to get word to my people, pretending to be her.”

Chills ran down my spine, and I closed my eyes for a moment, putting it together. Ellena had been innocent, a victim of Miro’s game.