Page 51 of Bonded By Stone & Blood

My chest heaves.

The breath comes out ragged. My sternum is pulling apart — that violent, ancient instinct screaming at me to take, keep, claim, protect — and I am fighting it with every muscle, every inch of will I have left.

My talons scrape down the bark.

I retract them.

The sound they make withdrawing is obscene. The cold floods back into my hands where the stone skin cracks alongmy knuckles—hairline fractures across my forearms, running up toward my elbows, the physical cost of holding myself back from my own power. I feel each one like a lit match pressed to the surface.

I step back.

The cold air rushes into the space between us and it feels like an amputation.

"I—" My voice is gravel and broken glass. I can't look at her face. I stare at the frost instead. At my own footprint in it. "I almost?—"

"But you didn't." Her voice is soft but not relieved.

I drop my head.

"They will destroy your alliance." She says it gently, like she's apologizing for it. "Every general who is left. Tharros will use me to take everything from you, and you know it. My being here?—"

"Don't tell me what your being here costs me." My voice breaks on the last word in a way I will not forgive myself for. "I have counted it. I have counted it every hour since you woke up in that cave, and I?—"

I stop.

"I am more afraid," I say, "of what I just nearly did to you than I have ever been of losing my throne." I finally look at her. It takes everything I have. "I buried people who loved me. I watched it happen and I could not stop it. And I swore I would not become the thing that cages whoever is left."

Sabine's face moves through complicated and lands on devastating. She reaches out and her fingers close around mine — gently, like she is handling glass — and she squeezes once.

Then she steps back.

"I can’t stay Tovian," she says, pulling her hand away, tears brimming in her eyes. “You’re better off without me.”

I watch her go.

I watch Leif fall into step beside her on the trail, his patched coat dark against the snow. I watch Velka's scouts fold around them both, torches lit, moving through the frozen dark. I watch the outline of her—bandaged arm, crooked pack, stubborn square of her shoulders—grow smaller and smaller until the mountain fog swallows it whole.

I stand with my wings half-furled and my cracked knuckles slowly sealing over, stone closing the gaps like scar tissue, and I let the freezing wind drive itself against my chest.

There is nothing in the mountain air. No warmth. No scent of her. No sound of her heartbeat giving the dark a rhythm I can track.

Just the hollow, enormous silence of a mountain that belongs to me and means nothing.

27

SABINE

Istare at the canvas ceiling and count the stitches.

My ribs ache. The claw wounds along my left side are crusted and hot beneath the linen wrappings, and every time I inhale too deeply, pain flares sharp enough to make my vision blur at the edges. I have been lying here since before dawn. I am not sure if I slept. I am not sure I tried.

It has been roughly ten days since I left. I keep replaying the moment I walked away from him.

The look on his face before he stopped himself. The way his hands dropped open at his sides—massive, still, like weapons laid down on a table. He chose restraint. He chose me over his own instinct and I left anyway, and somewhere in the mountain above this valley, he is alone with that knowledge.

The tent flap opens. Cold air rushes in and Velka drops into the camp stool beside me like she's been dragging herself uphill all morning, which she probably has.

"You look terrible," she says.