Curses and Will Chapter 14: Chapter 8: The Blade That Burned (Part I - Orders Carved in Blood)

Read chapter 14 of Curses and Will by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

The days after the trial passed in a haze of pain that didn't seem interested in fading on any reasonable schedule. My bones felt like they'd been shattered and rebuilt with something closer to fire than calcium. Every muscle protested the smallest movement. My skin still carried the raw, seared marks of that night, scars that hadn't decided yet whether they intended to heal cleanly or stay angry. I couldn't lift a blade, could barely lift a spoon, but I was breathing. Somehow, against what had felt like fairly reasonable odds, I was still breathing. On the second night, she came. No guards trailing behind her, no attendants hovering at a respectful distance. Just her. Annya stepped into the room quietly, the dying candlelight flickering across features gone pale with something I couldn't immediately place. Her gaze didn't find mine right away. It moved instead across the bandages, the dried blood that hadn't fully washed out of the sheets, and something in her expression went tight before she lowered herself to sit beside me on the floor. "You didn't need to do this," she said, voice barely above a whisper. "You could have died. I'm cursed. I don't need someone to save me from that." My throat felt like sandpaper, but I turned my head toward her anyway, found her eyes in the low light. "So am I," I rasped. A pause settled between us. "And I'm not protecting you because you need it," I continued. "I'm staying because I chose to. Even if it costs me everything." Something moved across her face in quick succession, doubt first, then something close to fear, and then, for the space of a single heartbeat, a real smile. Fragile. Trembling at the edges like ice testing whether it could hold weight. Then the world came apart. A sound tore through the night that I felt in my chest before I properly heard it, explosions ripping into the palace walls from somewhere outside. The window behind us shattered inward in a shriek of glass and wind. The floor shuddered hard enough that I felt it through my spine. Screams followed almost immediately. Guards being cut down somewhere down the corridor. A maid's cry cut short mid-run. Dark shapes began pouring into the halls beyond the door, hooded figures moving with the particular efficiency of people who had trained extensively for exactly this kind of work, smoke and something that crackled like red lightning trailing off them as they moved. The air filled with the smell of sulfur and blood in a combination I knew I'd never fully forget. I moved before I'd consciously decided to. My legs screamed in protest at every motion, but I stood anyway, sword already in hand. Beside me, like a shadow finally given permission to act, Jonathan moved into the doorway. The Blade Demon. I understood the name fully for the first time, watching him. He was already soaked in blood that wasn't his own, not yet. His blade caught the burning light of the chandeliers overhead and threw it back like something closer to a grin than a reflection. He didn't say anything. He simply stepped forward, and the corridor beyond him became something closer to a slaughterhouse in the space of a few seconds. The hallway turned into a killing field around us. Steel met steel in a rhythm too fast to properly follow. Magic tore stone loose from the walls in jagged chunks. I fought beside him as best I could, but I was slow, still weak from the trial, my arms shaking with every strike I attempted. He, by contrast, was something closer to a force of weather than a man. But there were too many of them. A spear, engraved with runes that glowed faintly along its length, drove clean through his chest. The stone beneath his feet cracked under the impact. He coughed blood. He didn't fall. An axe came in next, took his eye in a single brutal arc. He screamed, the first sound of real pain I'd ever heard from him, and answered with a strike that took the attacker's head clean from his shoulders. Another assassin came at him from behind, severi