Curses and Will Chapter 15: Chapter 8: The Blade That Burned (Part II - The Fear That Never Fades)

Read chapter 15 of Curses and Will by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

The night was thick with blood and fire by the time we cleared the inner courtyard. I ran with Annya held tight against me, the wind carrying ash and betrayal across my face in equal measure. Behind us, the sound of clashing steel and snarling magic and the low groans of the wounded grew fainter with every step, but somehow that distance only drove it deeper into my chest, deeper than any blade had managed during the entire siege. Jonathan. The Blade Demon. My teacher. The closest thing to family I'd found since waking in this world. He was still fighting. Still standing, impossibly, even with a gaping wound torn through his chest, even with one eye crushed and his arm gone entirely. He had made himself into a wall between death and the girl we'd both sworn ourselves to protecting. And I was the one running. No. Not running away. Running because he had ordered it, because his last words to me had been a command and not a request, and I understood enough about the man to know that disobeying him now would have been its own kind of betrayal. But understanding that didn't stop my legs from shaking with every stride. It didn't stop something in my chest from fracturing further with each step that put more distance between us. "Don't look back," he'd shouted, his voice tearing through the chaos like the final toll of a bell rung for someone already gone. I looked back anyway. I couldn't help it. One second, that was all I allowed myself. Through the smoke and the firelight, I saw him still standing, knees beginning to buckle, sword dragging a groove through the stone beneath him, surrounded on all sides, battered past anything a body should reasonably survive. But not defeated. Not yet. He turned his head toward me with the one eye he had left, and in it I saw rage and sorrow and something that might have been pride all tangled together. His mouth moved, shaping words I felt more than heard across that distance. Live. For her. Then a dozen mages struck at once, and a single explosion lit the courtyard like a second sunrise, white fire swallowing everything where he'd been standing. My legs gave out from under me. If Annya hadn't whispered my name right then, soft and urgent against the chaos, I think some part of me would have turned and crawled back toward that fire anyway, content to end there beside him rather than keep moving forward without him. But I didn't. I held her tighter instead and forced my legs to keep working, through gardens torn apart by the fighting, through halls slick with things I refused to look at too closely, past the bodies of servants who had smiled at us only days earlier without knowing any of this was coming. The palace was falling around us in pieces. Every scream I heard felt like another nail driven into something that was already finished. Every pillar that came down somewhere behind us felt like a memory being crushed flat before I'd even had the chance to properly hold onto it. Every step forward felt like walking barefoot across broken glass. But I kept going, because his final order was still ringing through my bones louder than any of it. Protect her. I didn't know yet what that order was going to cost either of us before the night was finished. I only knew that stopping wasn't a choice I had left available to me anymore.