Page 51 of To Touch A Silent Fury

I had run without thought, without knowing. I didn’t feel here, I couldn’t understand why he would do it, why he would rip the world from me and any chances I had with it.

“Tanidwen Treleftir, look at me.”

For the first time since I’d left my homeland, someone said my name right. He elongated the first syllable and bodied every part of it. He took letters and made them a name, and I raised my eyes to him without hesitation.

The Thread’s face was as hard as stone. “You have to leave. You understand his intent, yes?”

I breathed hard, too. “The suitors are all dead. I was supposed to—Who do I marry now? He just killed them. Did he just Break my Fate?”

The Thread scanned my face. “You tell me.”

I sucked in a wobbly breath and looked down at my gloved hands to see them shaking. I pulled one off before I could fully comprehend what I was doing, what I might have already lost. I had to know if I was Broken.

I thought I would feel it without knowing, like the awareness you were about to be sick. A feeling with inescapable obviousness, but there was too much horror to know if I was myself or not.

I reached out my shaking fingers, and I touched the Thread’s forearm. I gasped in a ragged breath, the relief so profound my vision blackened at its edges.

The Thread held me up. He was nervousforme. I felt it. By my blood, I still felt it. “You must leave here. He has to believe he has succeeded, it’s the only way you’ll survive this.”

I felt underwater; not removed from the events unfolding around me, but pinned down by them, drowning under the weight of it all. “Where am I supposed to go?”

“There is a boat to the very left of the docks, past the barrels. I paid a man to wait there, in case things went foul,” he explained. “You should be safe to leave. He won’t know what happened here yet.”

I struggled to take a few breaths. The men and women fleeing the arena paid us no heed. I may be Moontouched, but I was a woman first, and of course, I would need air after such violence. “And then where?”

He sighed. “Anywhere. Far from here. You cannot return to Eavenfold, we must cast you out as we would a Broken. You can never contact us again.”

I sagged, and he continued to hold my arm. “Can I go home? To Torquan?”

“Not there,” he said, and I felt the inches of my spirit diminish even further. Langnathin had not Broken my Fate, but what difference did it make when he had taken any possibility of a true life from me? “They are thorough. Someone will check to see if you are Broken. You have to wait until the heat dies down, until you are forgotten. A year. Maybe two.”

I couldn’t comprehend the words. Not ten minutes ago, I had been trying to decipher which of the warring men would win me for his bride. And now, all of them were dead. My Fate at the edge of ruin. How was it still alive? What hope could therebe of me marrying the victor of the Laithcart Games when all were dead?

“But my Fate—”

I hated how my voice cracked, and I swallowed hard, asking the very questions I didn’t understand. “He killed all of the suitors. Every last man in the arena. How is my Fate still bound?”

The Thread looked up to the skies. “Because the boy is a soldier and not a scholar. We Threads weave Fates with the truth of things, and not the spectacle of them. He’s a Sightlander, he thinks all that matters is how something looks.”

“I don’t understand.”

He rubbed my arm, and I felt that same emotion through the touch again. It made me want to burst into tears. “Think it through. Breathe. What just happened?”

“He burnt them all,” I replied immediately, my words monotonous, needing no inflection because their horror spoke for itself. How could he do it with such ease? “He killed them all.”

The Thread leaned in close, his mouth near my forehead as he whispered. “Hekilled them all.”

It sank over me then, the realisation of what he meant. “And then he stepped down from his dragon,” I responded. “And stood in the arena.”

I tipped my chin back and stared at the Thread. Our white eyes met, and the mutual understanding there widened my gaze ever further. By the Twins, it was so.

He nodded. “Exactly.”

I took a step back as it hit me with full force.

Langnathin, the Dragon Prince.

He was the last man standing. He was the victor of the Laithcart Games.