Total pages in book: 204
Estimated words: 193124 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 966(@200wpm)___ 772(@250wpm)___ 644(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 193124 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 966(@200wpm)___ 772(@250wpm)___ 644(@300wpm)
At least I’m no longer worried he will leave me. We’re in this together.
Whatever it may be.
Whatever may come.
Eighty-Eight
Whereupon Losses Are Tallied.
“You cannot go to Prosperitus.”
As Merc speaks, I close my eyes and still see everything that’s around us, all the death and destruction. Like my lids are nothing but windowpanes.
“I know,” I whisper. “After they did this, how can I fight alongside them. But what choice do I have—”
“You cannot fight, Sorrel.”
Frowning, I wipe my tears and straighten my spine. “After everything we have been through, how can you say that.”
“The Dark King is inescapable.” He glances around. “Look at the power he has. It’s all around you now, and not just about the demons. He infects people … takes their souls through the fear and hatred and vengeance he spawns. You need to leave, and I can help you. We can find a place where you’ll be safe, away from all this.”
Hide.
I see the face emerging from the Fulcrum, looking at me … and I’m chilled to the soul. I was terrified by the implications, but in truth, the entity wasn’t threatening toward me.
No, my father is beckoning me.
He’s inviting me to join him.
Merc’s voice weaves in between my thoughts: “Do not even attempt a fight. He’ll get into your brain, and he’ll see your deepest fears and your deepest desires. Your safety is in disappearing. You have to trust me.”
“It’s not about trust, Merc.” I motion to a burned skeleton a mere length away. “You’re right. The Dark King’s demons didn’t do this, but his presence caused everything that happened here—people losing their humanity because of their fear of him, doing horrible things out of superstition.”
I go over to those charred remains of someone I undoubtedly knew and want to weep all over again. “And that’s before he gets free and claims us all. If we don’t fight, we lose not just our lands, not just even ourselves … we lose every future generation and all their freedom, too. The only thing to do is defend Anathos—and if the great warrior queen won’t join us, then we do it without her.”
“So that’s why you went to the Kingdom of the South.”
“For all the good it did.” I look to the sky and see only the smoke that rises from everything I once knew. Well, that … and that fates-forsaken star. “And now Prosperitus attacks my own village. If I hadn’t wasted that effort going down there, maybe I could have stopped this.”
“No,” he says with finality. “You’d have been part of it. You would have been claimed, too.”
Helplessly, I cling to his eyes and cannot speak what I know of my truth. Besides, once again, it all seems too unbelievable.
“If we go now,” I counter, “Prosperitus is but a three-hour ride. We can get there before dark.”
And courtesy of Mare’s coins, I know that Julion is not just any aristocrat—and I have something he wants. Desperately.
Maybe the hard things he doesn’t want to do without his true love are about the Dark King and the army of demons.
Merc shakes his head. “I don’t know what you hope to accomplish there.”
“The prince, Julion, he asked a favor of me, back in that wooded glen. Remember?”
“You want to go to him even if you think he did this?”
“But maybe it was by townspeople from the city. Maybe this wasn’t a royal decree—”
“You’re one of these villagers. You go to that royal court and say you’re from here, and they’ll have to kill you.”
“They don’t know who I am—”
“That golden knight does. He got you out of the goddamn moat as you were escaping a mob that was already after you. Besides…” Merc lowers his voice. “You say the nobleman came to you for a favor? What’s a member of a royal court doing showing up to a village this far out of his city, looking for a ‘favor’ from a civilian woman. Tell me what I’m missing here.”
I open my mouth. Close it.
After a moment, he says, “I saw what you did with the fire, Sorrel. When we were chased out of those passes by those ogres. And before that, I was there when you met that maid for the first time—and then asked me to kill the cook who was beating her. That compass? That’s not right, what happens when that instrument sits in your palm. I took it out myself when you were sleeping. It won’t even open for me.”
His black and white eyes travel around the smoldering ruination of my village. Then return to my own gaze. “I meant what I said. This world is better with you in it and I can keep you safe. But we need to get up north, way up north. Where I can keep you hidden.”
As I exhale, my breath leaves my lungs on a curse. “If you say Anathos is better with me in it, how does that work if I’m not fighting for her, fighting for her people? To protect them, and keep them safe.”