Page 229 of A Kingdom of Wild and Power
Alina waited.
Part of her expected Hessa to appear beside the bed as she always had—the familiar phantom of warm brown skin and bright white eyes, smiling gently at her stubbornness.
But the hours stretched on in silence.
Hessa did not come.
Nor did Kai. Nor Dawn.
At last, Alina found the courage to look properly at her arm, at what little remained of it.
The sight struck her like a blow to the chest. For a moment it felt as though the air had been driven from her lungs entirely.
She needed to breathe.
Slowly, she pushed herself out of the bed, the room tilting faintly as her feet met the floor. Her legs trembled beneath her weight, but she steadied herself against the wall.
Across the room hung a small mirror.
It was hardly more than a shard of polished glass framed in wood, but it would serve.
Alina approached it cautiously, her heart beating faster with each step. She hesitated before it, her hand hovering over the bandages Mareena had so carefully wrapped around her face.
This might be a terrible idea.
Mareena had only just cleaned the wound. Only just bound it again. But it didn’t matter.
She needed to see.
It proved far more difficult than she expected. With only one hand, peeling the bandages away was slow and clumsy work. The cloth clung stubbornly to the dried blood beneath, and more than once she had to pause and steady her breathing before continuing.
But eventually the last strip fell away.
Alina lifted her gaze to the mirror.
The wound was long.
Ugly.
Raw flesh stretched across her face where skin had once been smooth—carved from the ruined socket of her right eye, slicing over the bridge of her nose and down across the curve of her left cheek.
And her eye…
White.
Sightless.
Useless.
She glanced upward to what remained of her horns, those that Hagan had severed long ago. Now Saren had taken even more from her.
It was difficult to keep looking.
Difficult to recognise the creature staring back.
Once, she had been the most beautiful drakonian alive.
Now…
