Page 305

Something in her registered that they were still breathing. Someone nearby was already calling for help.

Almost to the edge of town now. The northern wall loomed.

Ahead, a woman collapsed, her skirts splaying across the sidewalk. A stout Gate Watcher with a soft face grabbed the box from her hands and bolted.

The street dead-ended into the city wall. Rows of narrow brick houses fenced them in on either side.

This time, Taly heard the thunderouscrackas reality split open.

Pull back!

Distantly, she registered Skye screaming in her head—registered the voice behind her shouting her name and the clatter of boots.

PULL BACK!

But Aneirin was right there. So close. The culmination of weeks of torment and taunts that had set her blood boiling.

She was so close to clawing back some measure of her own, tofinallyevening the score.

He aimed for the wall, where that tear in reality gaped like a wound spilling darkness. The portal was massive, warping and bending like a reflection in a shattered mirror.

Frost bloomed across her skin.

The pressure shifted, leaving her ears ringing and her chest tight.

She could catch him. She was almost there.

Aneirin hit the crack. The world rippled around him.

Taly, stop!

The edges of the rip were collapsing, the massive void shrinking as reality knitted itself back together. Air rushed outward in a roar.

Taly saw it traced in gold. To keep going was to slice herself in two, but she was past the point of stopping.

Then a hard body crashed into her.

And Taly slammed into the pavement just as the crack and the nothing inside it exploded.

Chapter 62

“Holy shit, Valdaerys.”

Taly floated at the edge of consciousness, flat on her back.

“Seriously, don’t break the human.”

Sound blurred in and out. Voices.

She tried to move, to remember what it was to have arms, legs.

“Wait? That’s a human?”

There—there was her body, sprawled on the gravel. Pain throbbed at the base of her skull, shooting up and down her spine with each shallow breath. She must’ve blacked out when her head hit the ground, if only for a moment.

“Doesn’t run like a human.”

Fingers pressed to her neck.