mind paralyzed with fear, her throat swallowing the Deys’voshk as she’d been conditioned.
Something splashed on her face. At first, Ana thought she was crying, but as another drop landed on her face, then another, she realized that it was raining.
The sky lit up with a streak of lightning, and thunder clapped as rain began to pour. A cold wind tore at her hair, urging her in angry whispers. She was not in a dungeon, this was not Sadov, and she was not the helpless, frightened girl she’d been.
And she had developed a tolerance to the Deys’voshk.
Blackbeard tossed his vial onto the grass. Lightning flashed, reflecting off the glass, an arm’s length from Ana. “Still feeling powerful, you witch?” he hissed in her ear. “I don’t have a particular preference for your type, but I know some people who do.” He gripped her chin hard enough to bruise. Ana forced her eyes to remain on Blackbeard as her hand snaked out along the grass. “Lots’ve things one could do to a pretty face like yours. Lots’ve goldleaves one could pay.” His grin widened, and his hand wandered to his belt. “But first, I’ll have to try it out for myself—”
Ana’s hand closed around the glass vial. With all her strength, she smashed it into his face.
The shards pierced her palm, sending sharp streaks of pain up her arm, but Ana only felt grim satisfaction as the man howled, clutching his face. Blood ran down his cheeks, and when he removed his hand, Ana saw that a shard of glass had lodged itself in his right eye.
She lashed out. Her Affinity was still there, still strong despite the mist of Deys’voshk that had started creeping across her senses. She locked on the blood dripping down Blackbeard’s face, seizing that and the bonds inside his body and giving it all a single, vicious tug.
It was like uncorking a bottle of wine; blood spilled from Blackbeard’s mouth at her coaxing, running through the grass in rivulets with rainwater.
Die, Ana thought, fury coiling around her, white-hot. What he had wanted to do to her, what he’d probably done to dozens of other powerless Affinites—she would make sure he was never able to do any of it again.
Die.
Lightning lit up Blackbeard’s bloodied face, and for a moment, Ana saw the face of the broker who had stolen May, his pale-ice eyes boring into hers.
Wrath burned through her veins; she gave a violent pull. There was the wet sound of flesh ripping. Blackbeard made a choking sound as his chest tore open; for a moment he hung suspended in time, mouth agape, eyes wide, droplets of his blood glistening like rubies in the rain.
Then his eyes shuttered, and he keeled over on the grass with a dead thud.
Exhaustion smothered Ana, so suddenly that her vision blurred around the edges. Her limbs were leaden; she felt as though she were sinking into the mud. She could no longer tell whether the dizziness was from the Deys’voshk working its poisonous effect in her system or from overexertion. Perhaps it was both.
“What the—”
Twenty paces away, the second mercenary—Stanys—had dismounted. He stared at his leader in disbelief before his eyes landed on Ana. “What the hell did you do, you deimhov?”
Her head swam as she pushed herself to her feet. Blackbeard’s dagger lay in the mud next to his body, discarded, but she didn’t think she’d have the strength to pick it up. “Leave, or I’ll kill you, too.” Her voice barely carried over the rushing sound of rain.
Stanys palmed his dagger. There was a challenge in his eyes as he took a step forward. Then another. And another.
He was testing the waters, seeing how close he could get before she used her Affinity. Seeing if she still could.
Ana’s legs trembled with the effort of standing. The world swayed as she grasped for her Affinity. Please. She’d hated her Affinity, the thought of using it…but now she needed it. There was nothing else standing between her and the blade in Stanys’s hand.
Her head split with pain. Ana dropped to her knees. As she lifted her head to look at Stanys, she realized that her Affinity had reached its limit. She might as well have been trying to grasp empty air, the twisting wind.
No, she thought, shaking, her head pounding with each footfall of the approaching man.
Stanys’s shadow fell over her; she could see the fur of his boots from where she knelt, the curve of his blackstone-steel blade