Page 152 of Silk & Iron
I strip off all my clothes, leaving a trail of bloodied fabric on my way to the bathing chamber. I wash the emperor’s blood from myself as I stare into the mirror. I hardly recognize myself.What have I become? The emperor is dead. Isn’t that what I wanted?
But instead of preventing war, I might have brought it sooner.
I sit on the edge of the bathtub, the events of the last hour playing on a loop in my memory.
My mind catches on the emperor standing after he’d been killed. The vacant eyes, the strange sagging of his body. I see it over and over. He stands up, he moves, he loses his head, but his body remains upright until he’s knocked over.
A dark sensation slithers through my veins, like something is awakening. It feels like icy fingers trail over my skin. I look down and see new marks spiraling up my formerly bare arm in dark twisting tendrils.
More leaves appear, but they’re different from the other arm. While the previous vines have leaves, they’re in a simple shape that isn’t identifiable as a specific plant. That’s not the case on the new mark. I recognize these. They’re from a plant that grew in the mountains near my old village.
We called it Living Death, because if you touched it, that part of your skin would turn black and shrivel and die. But it only affected the place where you’d touched the plant. That little part of you would be dead, while the rest of you lived. It was necrotic.
I suck in a jagged breath as I picture the emperor rising again. Rising. Because it wasn’t his last stand. He was dead.
And I’d summoned him.
