Page 17 of Hearts Lost

Still, fear and guilt tangle together in my chest as I walk closer to the teleportation hub, pushing the tiny silver sphere with my toe. I stop a step away from the stones and nudge the oily little sphere. It rolls until it’s just inside the ring of standing stones.

“Ready?” a woman calls from inside the teleportation hub.

I jump again, my heart hammering inside my throat. I try to look away, but my eyes are drawn to the tiny silver sphere sitting inside the teleportation stones like a dagger slipped through the ribs. Like the king’s soldiers knocking on the door, coming to ask you a few questions.

The woman in the middle of the stones, the woman that my mind insists on identifying as Lythienne, calls out the names of all the magicians and then of the two heart magic couples, Elanerill and Orryen and someone named Rowan.

The final name she calls snatches at my memory. Arryn? A woman inside the standing stones replies, but she’s wearing a cloak and I can’t see her face. I shove the thought aside. Arryn isn’t an uncommon name, and I can’t imagine Lady Arryn Damoira from the Kingdom of the Summer doing anything in a setting like this. No, the perfect and proper Lady Arryn Damoira probably negotiated the release of her beloved Prince Folwynn, and then she was probably murdered for it.

A cold shiver crawls across my skin as a low, deep, throbbing hum begins to swell in the air. The stones start to glow with a pale blue light that flickers wildly and casts deep shadows over the uneven ground. I take a step back, my eyes still drawn to the place where the shifting light hides the little silver sphere.

Activate it with your hatred, King Grathgore had said in what already feels like a different life. I pull a breath over my lips, low and steady.

“You okay?” a man asks from beside me.

Aloserin, of course. My heart jumps like it’s trying to break out of my chest. I try to nod at the man standing next to me as blood hammers through my skull and every muscle in my body pulls tight. The air feels thick now, and the figures inside the teleportation hub are almost obscured by the heavy magic swirling in the air. The deep, low throb of the teleportation hub pulls at the marrow in my bones; I grit my teeth against it.

Now. It has to be now, or they’re going to break through the barrier. And then King Grathgore will kill my sister.

Grathgore. The name itself bleeds rage into my chest. I turn my eyes to the ground, to the spot that hides the magical sphere, and I focus my thoughts.

There is something you hate, is there not, horse daughter? Grathgore had said.

My vision narrows as rage rises inside me, as hot and strong as acid. There are so very many things I hate. The soldiers who came to take my sister away, the men who’d pulled her crying and screaming from my mother’s lap all the while talking about what a great honor this was for our family, how her talents would serve the Kingdom of the Summer. Those same men who’d come for me years later, with honor on their lips and ropes in their hands, just in case I decided to run.

I hate them, hate them all, even the ones I’ve come to know. Even the ones I’ve worked beside for years. I hate Prince Folwynn, with his handsome smile and his casual cruelty. I hate the palace of the Kingdom of the Summer, hate everything about it.

The air around me feels hot. I pull in another breath, and anger coats the back of my throat, slick and warm and metallic.

I hate all of them. But not nearly so much as I hate the King of the Summer. I let myself picture King Grathgore standing before his massive ebony desk and handing me the silver spheres of destruction. The way he’d made me barter my sister’s life for my own.

The way he’d laughed.

Hatred sears through me like steam hissing from a kettle, like smoke from a fire that’s jumped the hearth and is consuming the house. I can feel the hard metallic sphere, yawning open like a monstrous mouth, pulling in all my hatred and rage and fear. Feeding on it. Demanding more.

Someone screams. I jolt back, and something claws at the inside of my chest like talons. Something that wants to devour.

Screaming. Screaming pours from the teleportation hub, which is now as blindingly incandescent as the midday sun. Something low and oily whispers inside my head with a voice like rats’ feet over dead grass.

But then the voice recoils, and darkness blossoms in the heart of the teleportation hub. Darkness rises up like smoke, like tentacles, and embraces the screaming figures inside the hub. Anger tenses and tightens, my anger, but it’s not mine anymore. I’ve given it away, used it as fuel—

The teleportation hub explodes in a blinding, shrieking flash of white-hot rage. I have just enough time to think I should have stood inside the hub, within the inky black tentacles that have now woven themselves around all the figures standing inside the stones, and then I’m vaguely aware of being lifted, lifted, lifted into the air and pushed—

And then the world goes black.