Night Spinner (Night Spinner #1) - Addie Thorley Page 0,2

the hole, hold my breath against the pain, and heave myself up. Between my ruined arm and wounded leg, it’s difficult to get a firm hold on the ledge, and while I hang there, grunting and wriggling like a marmot, Orbai dives past me. The tips of her feathers tickle my cheek.

What’s taking so long? she seems to say.

“Impatient eagle.” I shake my head at her. “Not all of us have wings.”

Eventually I swing my leg over the edge and roll onto the roof. The ceramic tiles are cold and wet through my cloak, but I hardly notice the chill. I’m too consumed by the towering ebony swells crashing over my body like waves.

The sky doesn’t care that I am wicked and ugly. The clouds never rain down judgment for my crimes, and the moon shines without flinching on my injured limbs and scarred face. The majority of Ashkar may despise me, but the heavens will always embrace me in arms of frost and wrap me in a blanket of starlight. In the eyes of the Lady of the Sky and Father Guzan, I am accepted.

Wanted.

The king can decree all he likes about the First Gods being dead, but I refuse to believe it. I cannot believe it. Not when I feel the Lady and Father thrumming in every wisp of blackness.

The hours fly like minutes, and too soon the first rays of pink kiss the horizon, cutting like a saber through the gray. Stay. Just a little while longer, I beg. But as the treacherous sun creeps higher, the spools of night slip through my fingers like tadpoles. Abandoning me, yet again. My lungs heave against my too-tight rib cage as I watch the darkness race frantically toward the east. Toward the shadow of the Ondor Mountains in the distance. The last place the light will touch.

I would give anything to leave the monastery so easily.

It has been two long years since the king banished me to this holy prison. “A sanctuary,” he said. “Be grateful,” he said. “It is more than you deserve.”

But what does a criminal like me truly deserve?

Sighing, I slump down hard on the tiles and stare out at the hazy landscape. I can see everything from up here: the outer wall of the monastery compound, white with twisting iron spires; the endless frost-tipped plains I used to gallop across in full armor, the grass rolling beneath me like a great green sea; and far, far in the distance, the capital city, Sagaan, where Serik and I dueled in the streets with sabers made of sticks, and lay beneath the larch trees, imagining what our Kalima powers might be, telling stories of how we’d ride into battle side by side.

That part, at least, came true. We’re together.

I don’t know if that makes it better or worse.

I sit there, fingers pressed against my eyelids, wishing I could turn back time, until the shuffle of slippered feet rips me from my desolation. In perfect harmony with the rising sun, the monks emerge from the dormitories in lines of two. Their crimson robes look like a gash against the silver-white snow, and they spread like a slow-moving stain toward the prayer temples.

Toward me.

Blazing skies! I always return to my chamber long before they can spot me up here, committing treason. If I’m caught, I’m certain my punishment will be worse than the twenty lashes and fifty serenity prayers I’m assigned each time I skip midday supplication.

They could alert Ghoa.

Or the king.

I scramble to my feet and duck behind one of the snarling stone gargoyles perched on the corner of the rooftop. The statues are meant to ward off evil spirits—that’s why they look so fearsome—and with the three jagged scars marring the left side of my face, marking me as an imperial traitor, I fit right in.

The king made the cuts himself, slashing his keris dagger alongside my nose, through my eyelid, and over my cheekbone. The wounds bled and festered for weeks—healers weren’t permitted to clean or dress the cuts—so I suppose I should be grateful I didn’t die of infection or lose my eye. Many criminals do.

I hold my breath as the abba shuffles into the prayer temple. A brass censer swings from his sunspotted fingers and he chants the Song of the Sky King in his dissonant voice. The other senior brethren follow him without a glance in my direction. As the highest-ranking monks at Ikh Zuree, with secured seats on the Council of Elders,