Chapter 80. They Never Hurt Her Body, and That Was the Cruelest Part

Chapter 80: 80. They Never Hurt Her Body, and That Was the Cruelest Part

I stayed on my knees on that frozen lake until Magnara came back and pried my hand out of the air.

It was almost dawn by then.

The stars had faded to a few cold pinpricks, and the sky over the pines had gone the color of dishwater, with two moons still hanging in it like a pair of mismatched coins.

The old one was thin and ivory and far away.

The new one sat low and white and impossibly near, so near that I kept thinking I could see a shape in it, a curve of cheek or the tilt of an ear, and each time I looked closer, the shape turned back into plain light.

I had not slept... I had not eaten, and hell... I had not moved, except when someone nudged me, and even then I’d only shifted just enough to get back into the same position.

My right arm was still held out in front of me, stiff as a signpost, and I’m not sure I’d have noticed if it had fallen off.

"Leon," Magnara said.

She was crouched in front of me, which put her eyes roughly level with mine. Her forearms were wrapped in fresh bandages, and the left one had already bled through.

She looked like someone had dragged her behind a wagon for a week, and she was looking at me with an expression I couldn’t read.

"Your arm..." she said.

"I’m fine."

"Your arm is shaking so hard that your teeth are rattling; can’t you see that for yourself?"

"That’s not my arm... more like the cold."

She didn’t argue. She wrapped one enormous hand around my wrist, very gently, the way you’d hold a bird, and she lowered my arm to my lap an inch at a time.

The muscles screamed the whole way down, and I didn’t make a sound.

When my hand finally came to rest on my knee, still curled open... I stared at the palm as if it belonged to somebody else.

"We cannot stay," Magnara said. "The ice will not hold a thousand beastwomen through the day... and even for a human like you."

"Okay..."

"Can you stand?"

"Yeah."

I couldn’t... I tried that twice.

On the third try, Magnara got a shoulder under my arm and hauled me up like a sack of grain, and I stood there swaying, with my knees knocking together, staring across the lake at the horizon.

I should have explained the lake because I didn’t understand it then. It was called Mirrormere, and it lay a full day’s walk from Hearthfang Keep, which meant that the moon’s light had carried every one of us a very long way in a single heartbeat.

All around me, as the gray light grew, hundreds of people were getting to their feet.

Prisoners and soldiers and refugees, Hearth Guard in tattered gray, Nightclaw riders in dirty white and gold, and minotaurkin in dented plate.

Nobody was in charge of anybody.

A few were embracing.

A few were sitting in the snow with their hands over their faces.

The sound of it, a low murmur of weeping and hushed voices and somebody laughing too loud, drifted across the ice like smoke.

Velora was already moving through the crowd, her voice a hoarse, steady rasp, pulling the Nightclaw back into rank.

She’d lost her ribbon, I noticed... Her hair hung loose and tangled around her shoulders, silver on one side and black on the other, and she hadn’t bothered to tie it back.

I couldn’t tell if she’d slept at all.

Sylvara was awake... She sat in the crook of Magnara’s cloak, where she’d been propped against a pack, her face as pale as milk and her hands knotted together in her lap.

When she saw me looking, she opened her mouth. Then she looked past me, up at the sky, and whatever she’d been going to say went out of her face.

And Elsbeth sat alone at the edge of the ice.

She’d been there all night... I knew because I had watched her, in the gaps between watching the moon, and she hadn’t shifted once.

She sat with her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped around them, staring north, toward a keep that was a full day’s walk away and a mother who wasn’t in it.

Bryn stood a short way behind her with her hands clasped, not close enough to touch, and not far enough to leave.

Neither of them spoke.

I wanted to go to her... I did.

But my legs didn’t work, and I didn’t have anything to say, and I thought that if I opened my mouth, what came out would be something so broken that it would only make it worse.

And then... There was a lynxkin sitting a few yards away with her knees pulled up and her arms wrapped tight around her chest.

I hadn’t seen her wake. She was thin and rangy, with tufted ears and a long, narrow face, and I knew her.

The last time I’d seen her, she had been grinning at me across the snow with a pair of double-hooked swords in her hands, telling me my footwork was sloppy.

But now... she looked at me, and the grin was nowhere in sight.

"Corra," I said.

My voice came out like a rusty hinge.

She flinched.

The gold crystal that had glowed at her throat for so long was gone. All that was left was a ring of pale, puckered skin where it had been, and a few tiny golden grains caught in the fur of her collar.

Her hands were shaking so badly that she’d tucked them under her arms. She stared at me with enormous, red-rimmed eyes.

"I remember..." she whispered. "I remember all of it."

I didn’t say anything.

"The caravan... and the fight..."

"I was... smiling." Her voice cracked. "I was so happy... I thought you were all my friends, and I was so glad to see you, but... I tried to kill you."

She pressed the back of her wrist against her mouth. "I am so sorry... I am so... sorry...! I am sorry...!"

"It’s okay," I said.

"It is not..."

"It wasn’t you in the first place."

"But it was STILL my hands." A tear rolled down her nose. "And STILL... it was my mouth, saying those things."

"I could hear myself... I was calling it Master...!"

"I was telling you he would be pleased." She started to rock, very slightly. "I am sorry. I am sorry, I am sorry."

I knelt down beside her. It took me about a minute, because my knees refused to bend, and Magnara kept a hand on my elbow until I was down.

I didn’t touch Corra... I just sat there next to her on the ice, close enough that she’d know I was there, and let her cry.

"How did they do it...?" I asked when her breathing had slowed.

I wasn’t sure why I asked. It seemed like the question that someone needed to ask.

"The crystal... Did they hurt you?"

She shook her head.

"No," she said. "That is the worst of it... it feels like they were kind to my body."

She told me in a thin, flat voice, with her eyes fixed on the snow. She’d been a courier, she said, before the Chain found her, running messages between settlements in the southern foothills.

She had a little sister at home who was sick. The slavers caught her on the road, and they didn’t beat her, starve her, or threaten her.

They sat her at a table, and they gave her a hot meal.

A pleasant man with a soft voice asked if she’d like to know that her sister was being looked after.

"They said they could send a doctor..."

"They said she would never go hungry again... and they said all they needed was one thing from me." She swallowed. "He asked, Would you like her to be safe?"

I closed my eyes.

"And I said yes," Corra whispered. "That was all... One word."

"And the glass went into my neck, and it didn’t even hurt... and all of a sudden... I was so happy."

She stopped talking. The wind pulled at her ears.

I put my hand on her shoulder. It was the only thing I could think of to do.

She leaned into it, just slightly, and I felt a long shudder run through her.

I hadn’t understood, until that moment, what the thing really was.

I’d spent days thinking of the Oathglass as a weapon, like it was a tool for stealing people’s wills.

But it wasn’t just that... It was a trap that used the one word nobody could refuse, the word a decent person said to save someone they loved.

It turned their kindness into a lock.

I didn’t say anything... I couldn’t...

But I held on to her shoulder for a long time, and I thought about a man in white who had once held out a bag of honey sweets.