Page 3 of Flameborne: Chosen (Emberquell Academy #1)

SOUNDTRACK: Without You by Audiomachine

~ brEN ~

Twenty minutes later, lurching, panting, sweating, my belly burning with pain, I stumbled upon the dirt road that linked the city to the Palace grounds and the Dragon Keep.

I’d been mindless, running in fear and pain and unable to think beyond putting as much space between myself and Ruin’s hands as possible.

But when I saw those two, rutted lines in the clear strip of land between the forest and the rise on the other side, I staggered to a halt, chest heaving and my sight blurred with tears.

Where could I go?

I couldn’t go home. I pushed away the echoing memories of my father’s fury—even darker than Ruin’s had been—and looked for an alternative.

The intersection before me was suddenly a symbol of the rest of my life. My blood ran cold.

I could be a servant.

I turned, following the rutted road with my eyes as it wound around the wood off to my right. I knew if I kept following, it would take me to a gateway in the walls around the Palace.

It was rumored the King took in young woman and employed them… to keep them safe.

I swallowed hard and looked left.

If I followed that road, it would lead me to the city streets. The streets to which my father had threatened to abandon me.

My mother, on her knees, sobbing, pleading as I clawed at my father’s hand which was fisted in my hair, trying desperately to pry his fingers off. But he kept shaking me so that my vision blurred and my ears rang .

“Is that what you wanted, Bren? To walk the streets, bringing shame on your poor mother and me?”

“No!” I shrieked. “Please! Father—”

“Did you even think before opening your legs? Or were you so overcome by the devil you had no thought beyond your own lust?”

I sobbed, and it turned into a retch.

Bent at the waist, hands on my knees, gulping at the air, it took several deep breaths to swallow the nausea back. When I was sure my stomach wouldn’t revolt, I straightened slowly and stared at that grassy verge, suddenly buried by the weight of all of it.

Ruin.

Ruin had been my last hope.

Reluctantly, I let my gaze follow the final path.

Straight across the road, just a little east, the wide mouth of a rocky trail began, disappearing quickly into the trees, but following the rise of the land up, up, up to the Dragonmaw cliffs.

My body swayed and I fell to my knees as the terrain in front of me disappeared and my mind conjured Ruin.

“Go home and hang yourself in the barn for all I care—”

After all the promises. All the plans. After everything I’d given, Ruin discarded me as easily as a shirt he couldn’t mend.

A sick, knotted weight appeared in my stomach as I stood there at the crossroads.

The palace, to become a slave in finery? Or the streets, for freedom in poverty?

The city was a choice. I wouldn’t be the first lowborn girl from the farmlands to give herself to the streets as my father had suggested was all I was good for.

After the thrill and joy of Ruin’s love, how different would it feel to give myself to a man I’d never met?

But then it hit me—thrill and joy? What thrill remained? What joy? It had all been a lie.

“Are you fucking with me? You can’t honestly believe—”

“Y-you said—”

“And you opened your legs, just like I wanted.”

I recoiled. No. I had to go home and face my father’s wrath. Plead for his mercy, or…

Or?

My dark, foreboding thoughts were interrupted by a resonant thunder, beating the air in rhythmic time, and followed immediately by a high, thin cheer.

I looked over my shoulder, over the trees, squinting into the pale sky of the rising sun to see the huge, graceful dragonfuries rise and rise, necks stretched forward, noses pointed to the sun, their massive wings beating the air and carrying their riders—from this distance the men looked like insects clinging to the dragon’s backs .

For a breath I forgot my pain.

One of those insects was the man I loved. Flying into danger willingly because he was brave. And he might never return.

I watched until they flew high enough into the clouds that I could no longer make out their forms. And then I kept watching. Waiting for a salvation that never came.

I was startled a few minutes later when the crunch of hoofbeats on the gravel road, and the creak of a wagon heralded the arrival of people. Others who loved those men. Others who’d gone to see the Furyknights off. I should have hidden myself, but I stood there, dumbstruck.

A horse and rider passed first, the man’s countenance dark. Then a wagon. Then there were footsteps crunching on the dirt and pebbles. People passing in twos and threes, some of the women crying, others only grim.

And then I saw her.

I recognized the elegant trim on her cloak.

She was ethereal. Like the dragon I’d seen earlier.

She rode a sweet, prancing mare, her cloak spread over the mount’s back, her hood down and dark hair gleaming in the sun as brightly as her horse’s coat.

She was a vision.

Of course he would choose her.

Who wouldn’t?

And even if she’d given her virtue, as I had, the fine stitching on her cloak and gloves, and the servant riding at her side told anyone with eyes that she was a woman of means.

Any man given the chance would choose her over a ruined farmgirl with dirt under her nails and callouses on her palms.

Of course they would.

She knew that as surely as I did.

Then my breath caught.

Did she know about me? Had she seen us in the wood?

Would she have asked him what had passed between him and the lowborn farm girl?

For a moment I prickled with anger. Ruin was mine. He’d named himself mine. Taken me and… I knew him. And he knew me. We had learned together until he knew his way very well.

I almost screamed as much as the woman passed, her elegant jaw tight, her perfectly gloved hand holding the reins capably—there would be no callouses on her fine hands.

Fine hands that had found their way with him, as well?

It was the wrong thought, because the moment I had it, my mind replaced my memories of Ruin with her.

Ruin jogging across the barnyard, hair sticking to his sweaty brow, beaming at her .

Ruin unbuttoning his leather jacket, his breath heavy with want, eyes blazing for her.

Ruin, his eyes gentle and warm, tugging to straighten the blanket he’d thrown over the hay, then picking a single blade of straw from her hair…

One after another, in quick succession—

Ruin taking her in his arms the way he’d done with me.

Ruin pleading and kissing, undressing her.

Ruin declaring himself.

The pleasure he’d wring from her sweet body—so soft and clean because she didn’t work.

But then my torturous mind shuddered into a deep, dark hole, because, no. She and Ruin would never roll in the hay on a sunny afternoon. They had no need to stoop so low.

She would welcome him to an elegant bed in a manor home.

She would cry his name from secluded shadows behind locked doors.

Or perhaps a dark room at night, skins glowing in the light of the fire.

I was going to vomit. But the thoughts wouldn’t end.

Ruin’s sun-weathered hands, dark against her pale skin, his strong fingers gripping her body, his jaw buried under her throat—her lithe body entwined in his strength, pretty face thrown back in ecstasy.

With a small cry that drew the attention of the woman and her servant, though I ducked my head to hide from them, I darted across that road and onto the rising path to the cliffs.

Pressing my hands to my belly to ease the pain, I ran.

I was a fool.

Ruin didn’t love me. He never had. He had a bigger, better life, now. I was nothing but a gnat to be swatted away. And as a poor farmgirl of marrying age, I had bestowed upon him the one item of value that might have garnered me a husband: My virtue.

I was not a pretty, porcelain woman of means, with a father who could pay to silence gossip.

I was a broodmare, already spent.

Ruined.

I shuddered as that final truth slid home like a knife between my ribs. Ruin wasn’t mine. And he’d never wanted to be.

Desperate, weeping, I looked up the path ahead, shadowed by overhanging trees, and my parched throat wanted to squeeze shut at the thought of the climb to come, but I pressed on.

It was the only answer.

I wouldn’t have to drag myself home, only to admit I’d been discarded and demeaned.

I wouldn’t have to heal.

I wouldn’t have to remember.

I would never again be forced to look a man in the eye while he spat loathing at me.

All of this would be over .

All I needed was for this to be over.

And so, as the path grew rocky and steep, I pressed on to climb to the Dragonmaw Cliffs.

Hours later, drenched in sweat and body screaming with pain so stark my knees shook, I took the final steps to the summit.

The icy wind off the ocean howled between the scraggly trees that thinned where I stood, then finally stopped, giving way to thick, rock-speckled grass that grew right up to the cliffs, bisected only by a thin, dirt trail, running parallel to the edge.

A few feet beyond that trail the land fell away in a sheer drop to the sea, where the waves thundered against the unforgiving cliff-face, and churned around the pointed rocks that speared out of the water like dragon fangs, giving the coastline its name.

I stumbled out of the forest cover into a biting wind that cut like cold knives on my skin and whipped my hair so it stung my cheeks and plastered my skirt to my legs, the thick fabric sucking against me like walking through water.

Just feet from the edge, a great gust threatened to push me backwards. I leaned into it and kept going until my toes were mere inches from the lip, where the sod swelled over the edge and left the grasses dangling over the deadly sea below.

Here, the booming of the waves against the base of the cliffs punctured even the howling wind. But what made me quaver was the sight of those massive, black cliff-faces, spanning miles to the north, curving out from below in a testament to the battering they’d taken from the ocean for millennia.