Page 73 of Sword & Sacrifice

He turned back to Berdine. Her lips moved and she took a shuddering breath.

“I’m so … I’m sorry,” Penn gasped. As the ice melted, more blood spilled from her wound. He tried to stanch the bleeding, but the hole was wider than his palm.

Berdine’s eyes slid shut and she went limp in Penn’s arms.

Behind him, Niall shuffled to his feet and grumbled complaints.

“You didn’t have to kill them.” Penn couldn’t take his eyes off Berdine’s face. There was no peaceful illusion of sleep. Blood splattered her cheeks and her mouth hung slightly open.

“They wouldn’t let us through,” Niall insisted.

“We could have left the carriage, walked across the border on foot.” Penn wanted to shout, to rage against Niall’s callousness, but his voice came out faint and dull.

A long silence followed before Niall said, “They were already suspicious. They could have alerted someone. The next shift maybe. You did well to remove them as a threat, Alistair.”

Penn squeezed his eyes shut. That was the truth he’d tried to block out. Unless Niall learned some new magic, he couldn’t manipulate ice. It wasn’t Niall who had killed the soldiers.

It was Alistair.

It was Valerian.

It was Penn.

Berdine and her partner had only died because Penn was protecting Valerian.

A gentle hand landed on Penn’s head, and he flinched away from it. “Don’t touch me.”

The hand hovered in the air for a moment, golden and familiar, except for the scars now covering every inch. “You’re upset.”

“Of course I’m fucking upset,” Penn snarled. “You killed people I knew. People I—” his voice choked off. He didn’t know the other soldier’s name, and he couldn’t really call Berdine ‘a friend.’ They only saw each other a few times a year, while he was passing through. They hadn’t trained together or grown up together, they had no other connection than the service to their country. It didn’t matter who they were to him, only that both soldiers had died because of him.

Feeling like he didn’t have the right to hold her, Penn slowly lowered Berdine to the ground. He made himself look at both soldiers, memorize the gaping wounds and the melting ice. He would remember exactly what Alistair had done to them.

“They shot at you—”

“For good fucking reason!” Penn lurched to his feet and grabbed the front of Alistair’s shirt, staining the linen with Berdine’s blood. “If you threaten someone, of course they’ll fight back! They were protecting their home! And you—”

Alistair cupped the back of Penn’s head, the fingers of his stolen hand tightening to hold him still. “Perhaps it’s better if you don’t remember this.”

Penn’s eyes widened. He pictured his steel mental shields, trying to reinforce them even as seams appeared in the metal. Fingers pressed through the gaps, long, thin, and ice white. He focused on melting the panels together, cutting up that invasive hand, mutilating it until it matched Valerian’s.

Nothing he did worked. The hand pressed inexorably forward through the mental shields. The fingers closed into a fist and something was ripped away from Penn.

His eyes closed and his whole body went limp. Before he fell into unconsciousness, he heard a soft, familiar voice whisper to him, “Things will be better when you wake.”

Chapter Thirty-Three

“I know it’s late,” Silas said as Mirinda entered the office, “so I appreciate you meeting with me.”

‘Late’ was an understatement, as he hadn’t sent for her until long after midnight, and it’d taken her almost an hour to answer the summons.

“Of course, Your Majesty,” she murmured, her voice raspy from interrupted sleep. She cleared her throat delicately and asked, “What’s happened?”

Even if he hadn’t called her in the middle of the night, there were obvious signs of trouble: Silas hurriedly returning to his office in the palace, despite the smoke still staining the walls; the two guards standing outside his office door, and another standing in the corner.

Does this look like an invasion to her? Thanks to Griselda’s quick orders, they’d suppressed any news about the body found in the Vault—and who it potentially belonged to—which meant people could already be coming up with all sorts of explanations for the increased number of soldiers swarming over the palace. Some may have been wearing Bellacostan blue, but twice as many were wearing Arnsveldian green.

“We opened the Vault today,” Silas said.