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My stomach lurched. “Erik.”

He halted, as I knew he would. Names held power. And his name had emerged like a plea from my lips, tinged with a longing I knew he would extract and dissect just the way he wanted.

He looked at me over his shoulder, profiling the sharp line of his jaw.

“Please,” I breathed. “Don’t hurt her anymore.”

He crouched beside Marge once more. “I keep my promises, my love. I will show her mercy.” He took her head in his palm, hideously gentle in the wake of such cruelty. He positioned his knife against her torso, and I began shaking again, my chains rattling. “The same mercy you showed that sympathizer at the Opal,” he said.

And he plunged the blade into her stomach.

The air left me on a violent sob. My knees buckled, but the chains wouldn’t allow me to collapse.

As Marge’s final breaths whistled through her lips, and her eyes glazed with soft relief, a thread of trembling power slid like water between my fingers.

I jolted, not recognizing its contours. Then I realized: This was Marge’s specter, flaring out in a final moment of freedom, thrumming slower by the second.

“Perhaps you might better spare the next one a great deal of suffering,” Erik said, but I couldn’t process the words. Couldn’t process anything except the way Marge’s specter wisped out against my skin, dissipating with her last breath.

When I’d first seen my father’s body, there had been such screaming in my head. But now, feeling the impact of Marge’s death for the second time, being unable to save her after foolishly believing that I actually could . . .

There was only a vast, deafening silence.

“Now,” Erik said, smoothing his shirt, “let’s go home.”

39

Erik didn’t bother with the nightmilk. He left me hanging there, staring numbly at Marge’s body, while he prepared for our departure.

Departure. The word was too enormous to absorb. I had already feared Erik when I’d considered him a Wholeborn, resentful of those more powerful than him. I didn’t know how to manage the horrifying realization that he had always been more powerful himself. That I might never win a battle against him, even without this dullroot in my veins.

A bitter coldness settled over me, interrupted by a ribbon of warmth trickling down my right arm. Blood, from where the manacle had broken skin.

I dreaded the inevitable moment when Erik would notice the wound. He would nurse it with too-gentle fingers and a tender smile, seeming nothing like the man who had just pushed a blade through my friend’s stomach. I wanted the pain of this injury—needed it to tether me to reality.

The last few weeks of freedom suddenly seemed so distant in my memory, that imaginary life Keil and I had planned in the Banarrati kitchen now burning away. Soon, I would be back on another ship. I would spend at least another week in chains. And beyond that . . . I couldn’t make out anything.

I didn’t know what shape my life would adopt after Erik took a carving knife to it. Because he would carve it up, I realized. This wasn’t like when I’d been his prisoner before, when he’d served me meals and talked pleasantly beside me. This time, he’d bared himself, and I’d rejected all he’d shown me. Now he would transform my rejection into a weapon and use it to hurt me as much as I’d hurt him.

A thud sounded somewhere outside. A distant bustle of activity.

It wouldn’t be long now.

Marge’s blood had crept around the stone block under my feet, making it appear as though I occupied an island in a sea of red. The phantom touch of her specter still lingered on my skin, freed in those final moments as her blood had flushed out the dullroot flowing inside her. The poison must have been wearing thin in her veins for it to have run dry so quickly. Perhaps even as thin as—

As thin as it was in my own veins.

My breath faltered with the realization. Erik had dosed me with a low concentration of dullroot in the palace dungeons. It now felt as heavy inside me as it had all those weeks ago . . . but no heavier.

Despite Erik’s resentment, did he still care enough to not want to cause me permanent suffering? Had he truly dosed me with the same low concentration so the dullroot wouldn’t scar my specter as it had once scarred his?

I could feel the cut Erik had made on my collarbone, tingling under the salve he’d applied to seal it. I stretched my facial muscles, and felt the tightness of salve there, too—probably applied over post-explosion scratches. Then there were the stitches across my abdomen, the thick bandages around my palms . . .

By expertly tending to every injury, Erik had ensured that not one drop of blood would leak out.

Because, as Stian had once told me, a low dose of dullroot could easily be bled from the system.

Now I looked toward the fabric around my elbow, dotted red, the blood having trickled down from where I’d tugged too hard on the manacles.