She nodded, those silent tears still slipping down her cheeks.
“We’re so happy you’re back. Why don’t you take her upstairs, Cyph?” I offered.
Vale didn’t need a healer. No one but time and perhaps the man who held her could mend the wound to her soul.
Cypherion nodded. “Let’s go, Stargirl.”
As they left, Barrett came back downstairs with a list of things Mila requested. Malakai’s blood was smeared across his clothes, dampening the dark fabric. Lyria helped him, disappearing upstairs, arms laden with shredded stretchesof linen, a bowl of water, and whatever ointments Rina recommended for later.
Celissia turned to Santorina, her eggplant-colored gown torn around the hem. “Can I help with anything?”
“What do you know of healing?” Rina asked, not unkindly.
The Engrossian queen-to-be fidgeted with the hatchet at her waist. “My family has a rich healing practice. I’ve inherited much and studied at our citadel.”
It wasn’t the magic of the Bodymelders or the fae, but it was expertise. Santorina visibly sagged at the offer. “I’d love help monitoring Mora.” Celissia nodded, following Rina’s muttered directions in the corner of the room.
My head swam, but I clenched my eyes for a moment and fought to hold it all together. Mora, Lancaster, Malakai. Vale—Titus.
Another dead chancellor. Another possibly fractured alliance. Wounded warriors and fae in my own team, new scars on our souls to recover from. And a mounting burst of power within my own veins that I didn’t know how to trust.
After a deep breath, I turned to Dax. “What happened?”
He recounted how the Engrossian dinner with Titus had been interrupted when the chancellor learned Malakai and Mila had infiltrated his manor. That they wereescortedby Starsearcher guards to a seeing chamber. That they didn’t know exactly what had happened to Vale before, but she’d been seemingly unconscious upon the floor, and Celissia had woken her while everyone else was distracted.
“He did what?” I asked, voice barely more than a whisper, when Dax got to the part where Malakai had volunteered to take the punishment for the others. The air in my lungs compressed, so much pressure squeezing and trying to pop them.
He’d been tortured for two years. He’d been whipped and burned and taunted. And yet, when the people he loved wereshoved to the end of that leather strap, he kneeled before it. Bile stung the back of my throat at the thought.
There had been so much blood on him. So much lost.
“We need to set up a guard tonight,” I forced through a thick throat. “In case someone comes looking for us after Titus.”
At the hoarseness in my voice, Dax asked, “Ophelia?”
The shrieks of the dead warriors pressed down on me, the ghostly drafts of their spirits burning to ash warring in the air.
“And we have to get out of this territory as quickly as possible. Once everyone is healed, we can’t waste any time.”
I was tired of us losing. Of innocent people being tormented for this sick game among the Angels.
“Alabath,” Tolek said softly.
“I need a minute,” I said, striding from the inn with as sure a step as I could muster before anyone could follow—though I knew one person would.
I wound down the path leading toward the vineyard, leaving behind the room I’d been grateful to see earlier but that now reeked of blood. Leaving behind the memories of tattered and torn flesh, of mangled screams from withered corpses frozen in the last, desperate moments of life.
Or at least, I tried.
With each blink, they followed. With each inhale, the stains clouded the air. With each step, a dozen charged after me, chains chiming around their bones. The ones that had locked them in that prison beneath the earth and the ones figuratively capturing their souls.
I walked all the way down the path surrounding this edge of Valyn until I reached the line of willowing branches that opened onto bare grapevines.
“Alabath,” Tolek finally said when I showed no sign of stopping.
“Need air,” I clipped.
His hand—so warm and steady and full of life—gripped my arm, gently tugging me to a stop in the shadows of a cypher. “We can get air right here.”
