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FIFTY-SEVEN

RUNE

THE WITCH MANACLES RESTED heavily in Rune’s lap, the cold iron enclosing her hands from wrist to fingertip, ensuring she couldn’t cut herself or draw a spellmark.

Thunder rumbled overhead as she looked out over the crowd. Many of those spitting on her, cursing her, demanding she pay for her crimes with her life, were the same people who’d once sat around her table and danced in her ballroom.

It didn’t surprise Rune.

These people had never been her friends.

In one sense, it was a relief. Rune didn’t have to pretend anymore. They finally knew what she was. She cared about Alex, though, who now faced certain death. Whose own brother would deliver him to it.

Their gazes caught across the heads of the Blood Guard soldiers between them.

“You should have renounced me,” she told him as Laila grabbed her arms and dragged her down from the horse. “You could have saved yourself.”

“You can’t renounce your own heart,” said Alex, stepping toward her, eyes brimming with emotion. He lowered his head, pressing his cheek to her temple.

Before he could do more, Gideon separated them. “Enough.” Rune’s gaze skimmed the front of the Blood Guard captain’s jacket. The scarlet wool was so soaked with rain, it looked almost black.

Gideon seemed made of stone. Cold and immovable as a mountain.

“It’s time,” he said, turning her toward the purging platform.

There were two sets of steps, one on each side. As he steered Rune toward the closest ones, she saw someone being led up the other set. A birdlike woman with a cloud of black curls. Seraphine. The same iron restraints enclosed her hands.

Rune tried to swallow her fear.

This was always where it was going to end. You sent Nan to the purge, and now you’ll follow her.

Thinking she could escape with Alex had been a mistake. Only fools believed in happy endings.

As Gideon guided her to her death, Rune thought of how fitting it was that he should be the one to hand her over. She’d spent two years hating this boy. It seemed appropriate that she should go on hating him until her last drawn breath.

Except even here, at the end, her hate failed her.

Rune knew what witches had done to his family. She knew the horrors he’d suffered at a witch queen’s hands. Rune, like a certain witch before her, had toyed with Gideon. Deceived and betrayed him. He had every reason to believe that all witches were the same: horribly cruel and unspeakably evil.

So how could she hate him?

Especially with his hand pressed to the small of her back. Even in his anger, he was tender with her. Stoic Gideon—so firm in his conviction, so diligent in his duty—was reluctant. Conflicted. She felt it in the gentle press of his palm.

Rune remembered the last words Nan had spoken before the knife slashed her throat. I love you, she’d whispered, while staring at Rune in the crowd below.

Rune swallowed the lump in her throat and glanced up at the boy beside her.

I forgive you, she thought. Perhaps that made her a fool, but what did that matter, if this was the end?

In forgiving him, a strange thing happened: Rune found forgiveness for herself, too. For what she’d done to Nan.

The thing she’d needed all this time was right there inside her.

Gideon didn’t look at her as he handed her to the four Blood Guard soldiers waiting to secure her ankles in chains. Chains that would raise her upside down to be slaughtered. The steady warmth of his palm disappeared from her back as he turned to walk away.

“Gideon.”

He flinched and stopped, but didn’t look back.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry for all of it.”

Finally, he glanced at her, and the wounded look on his face pierced like a knife.

Above the heavy plink of the rain, she heard him say, “So am I.”

He strode off as the cold iron bit her bare ankles, and the locks clicked into place.