Total pages in book: 129
Estimated words: 123190 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 616(@200wpm)___ 493(@250wpm)___ 411(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 123190 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 616(@200wpm)___ 493(@250wpm)___ 411(@300wpm)
“You have something to gain. That’s how we’re going to find this sword, right? Follow the path to Mordeus?”
“Indeed, but if I’m right and he’s not really back, I suspect there’s someone pretending to be him.”
“Like a shifter?”
“A very good shifter,” he says. “And, whoever he is, he’d be using his position to gather all of Mordeus’s resources.”
When I heard those males talking last night, I was sure Mordeus was back, but Kendrick’s theory has me questioning again. Conflicting emotions twist inside me—relief that the male I fear most might still be dead, and regret that I won’t get the only revenge that might heal this gaping hole in my chest.
Kendrick glances over his shoulder. “Natan! What can you tell us about the faceless plague?”
“What do you want to know?”
“Are Mordeus’s followers falling more than others?” Kendrick asks.
Natan rubs the back of his neck. “I don’t know, but I can find out for you. I’ll ask Shae when we see him tonight. If he doesn’t know, he’ll know who to ask.”
“Thank you,” I say softly. I try to shift my thoughts to something else but can’t. “I just don’t understand it. They all seemed perfectly healthy last night.”
“Are you so unhappy that their lives were cut short?” Kendrick asks.
“No, but . . .” I chew on my lip for a beat, trying to understand my own feelings on this. “The dungeons left me hard, taught me to hate like I never had before. In some ways, that makes me stronger, but I don’t want to be someone who wishes death on swaths of my enemies.” I don’t want to be someone who relishes torture and death and power. I don’t want to be him. “Perhaps the realm is better without them, and perhaps my sister’s claim on the throne is more secure but . . .” But I’m afraid of what their deaths might mean. I’m afraid of who I’m becoming with this ring and even more afraid of giving it up.
“I won’t judge you for having complicated feelings about it, Jas,” Kendrick says, “if that’s what you’re worried about.”
I bite the inside of my cheek until the pain makes the image of those bodies fade from my mind. “I don’t know what I fear more. Being the naïve child I was before Mordeus destroyed that part of me or being so cold and callous that I never again see the humanity of my enemies.”
Or maybe my fear is that I’ve already become the second—that I don’t need the ring to be cold and callous, but that I already was. Mordeus changed something intrinsic in me during my weeks in his dungeon, or I never would’ve sought out the ring to begin with.
“Humanity would imply they’re human,” Kendrick says softly.
“They had families. They had people who loved them. It’s easy to forget that when they’re drunkards raging against the queen.”
“Maybe there’s a little of both in all of us—naïve child and callous enemy,” he says, fingers stroking along my bare side in comforting circles. “And maybe the key is in never losing sight of either. We can have mercy without being naïve, and we can be judicious while seeing our enemies as whole people.”
I focus on the pleasant cadence of our horses’ footfalls. “Do you ever worry that you tell yourself that you’re those things—that you’ve struck the balance—but you’re really fooling yourself? Do you ever worry that, at the end of the day, you’re no better than them?”
“Yes,” he rasps. He buries his nose in my hair and breathes in, as if my scent is the cleansing tonic he needs. “And I cling to that worry because it’s exactly what separates us from them. The world isn’t black and white, and when we fight evil, when we work for the common good, sometimes we find ourselves doing things that feel too much like the acts of our enemies. I wish it weren’t so, but I find it’s more often true than not.”
“If we have to act like them, then how do we keep from becoming them?”
“We remember who we are and what we’re fighting for. We put our cause before ourselves.”
“Remind me what our cause is again?”
His chuckle is dry, as if he’s not so much amused as trying to lift my spirits. “Elora. The future of Elora and the end of the ugliness and inequities there.”
I nod, and for the first time, I realize maybe I need to care about this mission Kendrick’s brought me on. Maybe the best thing I can do is make it my own, so I don’t become like the faeries in Mordeus’s dungeons. So I don’t become the very thing I’ve traded my immortal life and every day after my eighteenth birthday for the chance to hunt.
Chapter Thirteen
Felicity
SHE JERKS AWAKE TO A bright light coming into her cell. A knife clatters to the floor between her and Crissa.