she was hesitant to bring Owen to Snow’s attention. There was no help for it. Ordering the woman to stay put would only have drawn more attention to him.
It wasn’t that she disliked Snow. But she didn’t know her.
“Owen.” Rune leaned over the side of the cart and peered down at him. “Are you feeling any better?”
“A little,” he said, trying to sit up.
“Help him up,” Rune told Olson, but regretted her order when the guard grabbed Owen’s upper arm and hauled him into a sitting position.
Owen groaned. “Easy, man. Fuck.”
Rune glowered at the big guard.
“Sorry,” he said.
“My hat,” Owen said.
Rune snagged his hat off the cart floor but before she could give it to him, Snow spoke.
“Oh,” she said, her voice softly horrified, even though surely, as the witch’s daughter, she’d seen every horror ever imagined. “Oh.”
There was no mistaking the terrible shape he was in. He still hadn’t been dressed, and his torn, broken body wasn’t hidden by the blanket across his lap.
At Snow’s voice, he snapped his head around. “No,” he said. Then, “I thought you were gone for good.”
Rune wouldn’t have thought it possible but Snow’s face paled further. “Five,” she whispered, and put the back of her hand to her mouth. “Five?”
A spark of jealousy lit Rune’s inside on fire, for a second.
For just a second.
But Owen was not hers.
Not really.
Still, that jealousy lingered.
“I take it you two know each other.”
Snow turned toward Rune, slowly. “He belonged to my mother—to my household—once upon a time. I had no idea what had become of him until much later when he turned up in Flesh Shimmer.
“While I was growing up, he kept me safe, as much as he could.” Then she put the blue fire of her stare back on Owen. “He was all I had, and he left without a single word, goodbye, or twinge of guilt. These are the monsters. For what they are and what they’ve done over the centuries, I will be haunted forever. But his betrayal of me…that is what I hold Five accountable for.”
Rune frowned and pushed her fist into her stake wounds. “What are they?”
Snow just gazed at Owen, and though he had no eyes, it seemed like Owen stared back at Snow.
“What are they?” Rune asked again, her voice harsher, impatient. “They?”
“Don’t,” Owen whispered.
Snow answered anyway, but slowly, her horrified stare on Owen’s body. On his empty eyes sockets. “What did you call him? Owen?” She nodded as though Rune answered her. “Here he is known as Five. He is the fifth in a series of hums. Two of them live still, though I use the word live loosely. Owen is the very best of them. The most…human. The most adaptable. Brasque Dray tortured Four to death. It appears as though he was nearly there with Five.”
She turned once more to Rune. “You interfered with his death.”
“Yeah, I interfered. I stopped the sadistic bastard from torturing him further.”
“Brasque took its eyes,” Snow murmured.
“It,” Rune said. “It.”
Snow shrugged. “His, then.” Then she reached over the edge of the cart and took Owen’s bent fingers in hers. “Five could not be forced to obey, not even by my mother.” She smiled, slightly. “He never was controllable.”
Owen didn’t try to pull away from her.
“When you left there was no one to stand between me and Damascus. No one to cleverly divert her attention, or to warn me when I should hide for a few days.”
The distance in her voice was matched by the distance in her eyes, and Rune knew that for that moment of past memories, Snow was back in the castle with the witch.
“I can’t really blame him for leaving,” she said, dragging her stare from Owen and planting it on Rune. “When my mother discovered our bond, she would torture him if I displeased her. And I displeased her a lot. I was nothing. Nothing. And that…that made her ashamed. Made her angry. Hurt, even. But it wasn’t my fault that I wasn’t born to be spectacular.”
“Like Rune,” Owen said.
“Yes,” Snow snapped, then she visibly calmed herself. “But the fault is my mother’s. Not Rune’s. I used to hate you,” she told Rune.
“Why?” Rune asked, and her voice was husky.
“Because you escaped. Not just her, but this world she rules. You had people who cared so much for you, so much for your future, that they spirited you all the way to a different world. People who believed in you.”
Rune said nothing, but pity made her stomach tighten when