Palace of Silver (The Nissera Chronicles #3) - Hannah West Page 0,55

of the first words I’d learned in lessons: please. I’d heard it only in the context of mundane, polite exchanges, such as Please pass the tea.

“Kill me, if those are your orders,” I managed to croak through the grief that clamped around my throat. “But spare your princess.”

I closed my eyes and waited in darkness for the brief, horrible pain, and the peace that I hoped would follow after.

The huntsman roared, but the strike didn’t come. I dared open my eyes and saw him stab his deadly blade into a mound of mossy soil.

Navara expelled a gasp of relief.

The huntsman raked stiff fingers through his hair. “She wants proof,” he said. “She will kill my family if I don’t deliver it by nightfall.”

“What kind of proof?” I asked in Perispi. Aside from my elicrin stone, which she’d already stolen, any trophy he could present as evidence of my death would be a grisly one. The possibilities turned my stomach. My sister had become a monster. “A tongue? A hand? A head?”

“She asked for the princess’s lungs,” he answered, and added a word I didn’t recognize: taolo.

“What is taolo?” I asked.

“Liver,” Navara supplied breathlessly.

“And from you”—he looked at me—“hair ripped out by the roots.”

I wanted to laugh despite the grim situation. Ambrosine was too craven to even request more than a lock of hair from me.

“That coward,” I muttered. Tears blurred my sight. I leaned my pounding head back against the rough bark and licked the salt from my dry lips. “Kill me. Use whatever you need from me as proof for both of us.”

“There has to be another way!” Navara said, but the appeal sounded halfhearted. She was noble and sweet, but only human. Of course she didn’t want to die and have her corpse carved up and brought to Ambrosine as some morbid memento of triumph.

I ignored her and spoke to the huntsman. “She won’t know the difference.”

Even as I said it, something inside me thrashed with the blind will to survive, but fled as soon as Perennia’s name whispered through my mind, a lonesome autumn wind dragging along shriveled blossoms.

“No!” Navara cried. “I can’t face her alone. I need you.”

“You do realize I just offered to serve up my bloody guts to save your life?” I said, a hysterical laugh threatening to break loose. “Now you’re begging me to help you destroy her? You can’t have it both ways.”

Navara stared at me, at a loss.

“Do we have a deal?” I asked the huntsman.

He nodded solemnly.

“My friends can help you,” I said to Navara. “Send word to the queen of Calgoran. Tell her everything.”

The princess’s throat bobbed, but she, too, gave a small nod.

I looked back up at the huntsman. His features may as well have been carved of marble for all they revealed, but in his eyes, determination battled doubt.

He was accustomed to watching creatures accept death when they stared into his eyes. A strange understanding seemed to settle between us. I wondered why the Agrimas teachings did not name a Holy of Mercy. My grief-addled mind imagined him as a statue in the Edifice of the Holies, draped in white, swiftly putting suffering creatures out of their misery.

Steeling himself, the huntsman took up his knife once more. “It will be quick,” he promised.

I shut my eyes again and waited for the slice of the deadly blade.

“I can fool her,” I heard the huntsman say.

I blinked my eyes open. An odd anger pounded at my chest, which made an unseasonably cold wind nip at the ends of my hair. Normally, that anger would transfer to my elicrin stone if I allowed it, brightening the misty chalcedony with power, which I could direct as I wished.

Now that anger would fuel the raw magic that had lived inside me before I received my stone—the unwieldy magic that didn’t ask permission and was no slave to my better sense.

“Stop toying with me!” I shouted, and suddenly I wanted to live, in spite of everything.

“I’m sorry,” the huntsman said. He lowered the knife. “I don’t want to do this. But if she knows I’m lying, she will kill my family. That’s why I…otherwise I wouldn’t…” He trailed off. “All I need is a lock of your hair. I’ll let you go, and I will hunt for the other parts. But you cannot show your faces.”

“We won’t,” Navara vowed, lifting her stately chin. “We’ll stay hidden. Your family will have nothing to fear, Sev. If we come back, it will be with an