The Unwilling - Kelly Braffet Page 0,233

once the skin-tearing feeling was gone. In its place was something as cold and clean as the tear she’d wiped from Gavin’s skin. Her body still hurt. The fingers still grabbed. Theron was still dead. To Gavin, she said, “What about Elly?”

She no longer needed to touch him to hear his response. Seneschal will send her back to Tiernan. Nothing to gain by killing her.

“Take the knife.” The magus sounded oddly kind. “It’s your path. You were made for this.”

The voices in her head screamed, grabbed. She leaned down and kissed Gavin’s unmoving lips. I’m sorry, she told him. Tell Elly I love her. Then she stood up.

“I’ll pass,” she said, and took a step backward, toward the gap in the tower.

Gavin made a strangled noise. The magus stared at him for an uncomprehending moment and then went pale. “No,” he said. “Judah. No.”

“You can’t stop me,” she said.

She felt his control over Gavin snap, like the air breaking in half, and suddenly Gavin was on his feet hurtling toward her. The magus was, too. Both of them. Reaching to grab her, just like the voices inside her head grabbed her. To restrain her, just like she had always been restrained. She took a giant step back, a mighty leap. And for a moment she felt held in kind hands, suspended in the air like she belonged there. The empty sky stretching wide and open above her, around her, inside her. The Wall a toy, to be stepped over and left behind. Cold. Terror. Exhilaration. All things: possible.

Then she fell.

Chapter Twenty-One

Nathaniel Clare woke into a world that smelled of leather and smoke. His face hurt, as did his chest and gut and legs, in a dozen different places. His eyes were difficult to open and when he licked his lips with a dry tongue he found them crusted with blood. These sensations were all so familiar as to be almost comforting and his first conscious thought was that Derie had beaten him.

His second conscious thought was that Derie was dead. When Judah jumped, he’d felt his old teacher ripped away from life like a climbing vine from a tree, and though there were torn, painful places in him where her tendrils had worked their way in, it was a clean pain, a relief-pain; both a she-will-never-beat-me-again pain and a loss pain, because he’d loved Derie, in his way. He’d had no choice but to love her, since so much of his life hinged on her approval. The contradiction didn’t trouble him. Humans were complicated and pain was complicated and love was the most complicated thing of all, and also any rawness left in him by Derie’s abrupt removal paled in comparison to the searing horror of losing Caterina.

He had felt her go, too. Not a vine on a tree, but a piece of whole cloth, brutally sundered; not raw places left by invading tendrils but great swaths of what Nate thought of as himself. An agonizing emptiness. His mother was gone. His mother was no more. There was no place where his mother was. He was Caterina-less, void of Caterina. The fabric of his world was a pile of tatters on a dirty floor and it was unbearable, he could not live inside himself. He forced his eyes open.

That hurt, too. He found himself in front of a fire: not a roaring fire, just an ordinary flickering fire in a fireplace. A figure sat on a chair across from him. As the world around him came into focus he came to the dull realization that the figure in the chair was the Seneschal, holding a glass of wine.

Judah had jumped. The boy had lived. Nate had failed. Derie was supposed to kill him now, but Derie herself was dead.

But the Seneschal said, “Hello, Nathaniel Clare,” and Nate had spent too long at the beck and call of Derie’s cruelty not to hear the threat in his voice. Like a dog called by its master, he came the rest of the way awake. Painfully, he pushed himself up to sitting.

“You’re in Elban’s study,” the Seneschal said. “They had you in Eleanor’s room. I was always told never to move an unconscious man, but I took the risk of having you brought here, anyway. I think Gavin was determined to beat you to death, a little at a time.”

Yes. He remembered that: sudden bursts of pain in the dark, exploding like skyrockets before fading into nothing. He wished the boy had succeeded.

Something

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