The trees ahead of us flashed white as the sky did, showing the line of refuge only moments away. I reached toward them, expecting the thrill of calm that our destination promised, the relief of security. The moment my fingers made contact with the jagged edges of the tree’s bark, however, my magic pulled in the opposite direction.
An electric shock of heat snapped through my already tense muscles. Pressure swelled like a massive balloon, it pressed against my bones, against my lungs, through my skull. I gasped at the sensation, my body following the movement even though I took in no air. I gasped again as the pressure grew, even though my magic tried to fight against it, to stop whatever was happening to me. It was no use. I couldn’t focus beyond the tension. Beyond the pain.
Beyond the reality that I was not ready to face.
My eyes opened wide in horror as I stared at the dark, jagged lines that graced my skin. The marks that had been so commonplace for the last hundred years stood out like flames against my pale skin, flames that licked and moved against the skin.
Moved.
I kept the scream inside, kept my breath steady and fought against the pressure that consumed me, the pain that, try as it might, my magic couldn’t defeat.
I had felt fear before—fear when I was chained in the bowels of Imdalind, fear when I had worked as Ilyan’s liaison for two hundred years. Regardless, this fear … This fear was bound in agony and heartbreak. It rumbled through the earth with such supremacy that I was amazed I hadn’t felt it before, that I hadn’t understood. Sain hadn’t been speaking of the battle that was coming. He hadn’t been warning me of the camps that surrounded us.
He had been speaking of me.
I was almost out of time.
“If I can only bind the curse, not send it into Edmund, and I die before my father, then the curse will be unbound, and it will be unstoppable. Wynifred will die. To save her life, my father must die first.”
Thunder drowned out the whisper of my voice as I repeated the words that my darling brother had said so many centuries before, the day he had made the promise to keep me safe, the day Ilyan had made the promise to keep him safe.
Neither had happened.
Now Cail was dead. Dead before my father.
Dead before Ilyan could save him.
And the curse was unbound, and now I was to die like all the others.
But how?
I had killed my father, bound the stone into his belly, fused his throat shut, and thrown his body into the pit where I had lost the only man who had ever truly loved me. He should be dead. The curse should have unbound itself days ago. I should have been set free, which could only mean one thing.
Cail had been wrong.
Even if Timothy was the first to die, I would still die. The Zánik curse would always unbind itself, and I would be cursed to face the traitor’s death, the most painful demise that my kind offered. To literally be burned from the inside out.
The thought, the knowledge of what was about to happen to me, wound up my spine in a ribbon of horrific, agonizing fear that I didn’t want to accept, that I didn’t want to acknowledge.
I called out in a shadow of pain as I collapsed against the tree, my hands wrapping around the rough bark as I tried to support myself, my whole body seizing under the attempt.
Turning toward the old man, seeing his dark eyes, the sadness of what was going to happen, I froze, my eyes wide as I begged for an explanation I knew he couldn’t give me, help I knew he couldn’t offer.
He looked at me with sad eyes that echoed the truth I now understood. I was going to die. And, judging by the dark, hooded look he gave me, he had known all along.
“We are running out of time.”
“Sain?” My voice was a gasp as I reached toward him in a plea for help I knew he couldn’t give me.
My fingers were distorted and broken as the lines snaked over my skin in haunted movements, a heat that I hadn’t expected seeping from the waving lines, seeping into me.
We stood in an unmoving standoff as the answer neither of us wanted to accept passed between us. There was nothing he could do.
I felt it—the pain, the agony—as it dispersed over my body, the once bound curse seeping it’s toxin into me, slowly killing me with the curse that I had willingly carried around for centuries. I tried to fight it, to press my magic against it, but I already knew it was no use.
“Sain.” The word was a whimper, a plea, a promise. It was a sound ground in agony. The last word I would speak before the heat grew into an agonizing peril, before my legs gave out underneath me, and my vision faded to black.
I wasn’t sure if I had fallen. I wasn’t sure if he had caught me. For all I knew, I had fallen through the earth and was trapped between layers of rock and stone.
Within moments, the world around me had become nothing except pain and pressure. Heat wound its way through me like knives and rope. I couldn’t tell where I was. I couldn’t distinguish my body from the pain, my voice from the screams, my thoughts from the heat.
The curse had covered every part of me. It had taken me away until all that was left was the curse.
There was only heat.
There was only pain.
There was only death.
I was the curse. I was the pain. There wasn’t a me anymore.