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)
Merc stares at me for the longest time, holding the reins to his steed in a brutal grip. Then he says, “I’m not the only one without a soul, Sorrel. You just don’t remember when you lost yours yet, but it’s coming. Your truth is stalking you and about to jump out of the shadows at you—and hate me all you like, just remember … I loved you even though I knew your whole story because who you are is so much more than the curse you carry.”
“Curse…?” I breathe.
Merc shakes his head again, and it’s as if he’s staring at an animal that is so wounded, it has to be put down. “Have you never wondered why you can’t see your own death, Sorrel? Before you condemn me, take a good look into your own eyes.”
With that he gallops off, disappearing into the tree line, leaving in his wake a kind of destruction that cannot be described, much less borne.
My own eyes?
My own … eyes.
On a strangled cry, I stumble over to the shoreline and fall to my knees into the water. Bending over, I stare at my reflection. The disruption in the surface prevents me from seeing anything at first, and surely there’s a compassion in that.
Soon enough, though, the pond’s surface stills and I stare into my own gaze, seeing only my reflection … of a freckled, white-haired young woman whose face is haunted with terror.
Covering my mouth with both hands, I hold in my scream.
So that is why I cannot see my own death.
I am … already dead.
Ninety-Two
The Real Battle Begins.
I stay where I am, in the pond, arms wrapped around myself, my eyes glossing over. I’m dimly aware of the sun sinking down even farther at the horizon, and the darkness prowling around me. I am immobile, numb, and strangely hot. Even with my clothes soaking up the cool water, I feel a burning deep inside me, and images of my village, smoking and ruined, take over my conscious thoughts.
My unconscious ones are too scattered and traumatic to catalogue.
It’s as though I’m a house burning to the ground, just like the ones I saw inside the wall, my outer layers eaten away, my interior supports gone, my personal articles obliterated. There are no more chairs or tables for me, no pegs on which to hang my cloak, no bed for me to sleep in or trunks for my storage. Never again will someone make a meal in this destroyed home of mine, and no footsteps will sound out, for I have no floors or stairs.
What I once was, what my purpose had been, what roof I’d had and windows I’d sported, gone, gone, gone.
And in its place … something I have been denying for so long …
The vengeance, that was always just underneath my consciousness, which I’ve always seen as this odd, foreign part of me, but which was, in reality, my true nature.
I am my father’s daughter.
And in the aftermath of this intractable realization, I discover a weakness within my heart that’s of cataclysmic implication if I’m not careful: Of all the brutal truths that have taken me down, it’s the one about Merc that I find the hardest to bear.
It should be the revelation of who my father is or the sense that my mother, in hiding me, also took things from me … things that I now recognize as skills I once had, experiences I enjoyed, places I lived. Things I did … of which some are intimate—because Merc was right. My first time having sex with him was not that of a virgin, and what does that mean? Did I have a lover, sometime long ago? A man I had deep feelings for … a husband? A family? Those headaches I always got if I looked too deeply into a shadowy feeling or passing inclination I now recognize were some kind of mental patch, obscuring whatever is beneath.
My father is evil, but my mother is the thief of me.
Plus I’ve just learned I am dead, which would explain why I’ve never had a cycle as women do.
And all of this informs my current destiny: I am going to face the Dark King this very eve. I am going to the altar on my own, before Julion arrives with his men, and I am going there with no weapons, no army, and no defenses, for a greeting which I may very well not survive.
So surely that, on top of all of my truths, should count most toward my internal devastation.
But no, none of that is the worst.
Merc’s betrayal, and all I did not see when it came to him, is the most painful part of this. And as if my mind is determined to punish me for the soppy emotions that helped with the eclipsing, I revisit snippets of him: His first arrival in the pub, the copper he tried to give me downstairs and then in the guest room he was given … him yelling at me in the tunnel and then riding the balas triumphantly out of the moat … I remember his thunderous ride to me when I was down on the bed of the Lake of Lost Souls, having tangled with the skystalker … and now he’s in that window seat at the Outpost, sketching in his journal, and glaring at Thale when he walked in on that man and me.