Page 158 of With Wing And Claw

The girl.

The Mother wants the girl.

‘Please tell me …’ She gagged, gasped in a breath. ‘Please tell me Ophion sufferedterriblyas he died?’

‘Oh, he did,’ Emelin grimly said.

‘Good,’ she heaved, and then she threw up again.

It seemed to take ages until her stomach finally calmed, until the images finally settled into the hollows in her memory. Hands pulled the vomit-filled bowl from under her. Someone carefully wiped her face with a warm, damp towel. She collapsed into the cushions of the armchair, eyes closed, body drained to the last drop, her mind feeling like the blood-soaked soil of Faewood.

Like a graveyard.

‘Just breathe,’ Agenor said, letting go of her shoulder.

That seemed like a decent suggestion. She decided to follow it.

Footsteps padded around her. A tap turned on and off again. Someone poured another mug of tea and pressed it into her hands, and she lifted it to her lips mechanically, the hot drink rinsing away the lingering taste of bile in her mouth.

Fly, Thys!

And she had never known.

Was that why the Mother had taken that memory but left her father’s execution as a warning to remember? No way of twisting their desperate flight into an act of treason. No way to turn her mother’s sacrifice into the act of a self-serving coward.The Mother wants the girl, Ophion had shouted – a simple but all-revealing truth, no reason for all that cruelty except for vicious, petty jealousy.

And the Mother had gotten hergirl.

An almost-daughter of her own, the second-best thing to fill the time as she continued her quest for the true prize of her heart – only to discard that first hard-won child as soon as her coveted blood-born son arrived.

Traitor’s daughter.

Fuck, and she was glad of it.

‘Did she know?’ The words emerged in a croak. ‘Did she know I talked before she died?’

‘She told us to spare her if we ever wanted to see the bindings broken,’ Emelin said immediately, no questions or hesitation, as if these were perfectly normal things to ask. ‘It didn’t seem to occur to her that she wasn’t the only one who could share the information, and she found out she was wrong before I slit her throat.’

It didn’t make anything better.

It did make everything just a little less bad, though.

‘Thank you,’ she whispered. ‘Thank you so much. I … I’d like to be alone, now.’

A glass thudded onto a tabletop.

A snake hissed as it was picked up from the floor.

When she opened her eyes, an eternity later, they were both gone, having closed the door quietly behind them. Only their glasses were left on the mother-of-pearl table. Agenor’s leather folder lay on the floor beside her feet. Where Emelin had been sitting, the little stone binding lay discarded on the couch, stripped of all its vicious power.

By the window, the plate-sized begonias pulsed gently in the sunlight.

Thysandra’s mind was entirely her own.

Chapter 33

There was one lastbattle she had left to fight, and she was both dreading it and craving it with a vehemence that made her heart hurt.

She made herself eat two more buns before she allowed herself to leave the room. She brushed her teeth. She brushed her hair. She put on a dress, took it off again, put on another dress, and found that one lacking as well; eventually, she settled on a gown she hadn’t worn for ages, deep purple at the hem that blended into wine red, then vibrant orange, then daffodil yellow. It looked like a sunrise. Like a new beginning.