“Give me a knife,” the Ironheart said. “I’ll get what I want from him.”
Kestra struggled again. “If they kill you,” I whispered, “Antora is lost forever.”
She shook her head, and I knew my words meant as little to her now as they had meant to me. But even if I hated them, hated what was happening because of those words, they were still true.
The soldier asked, “Where is Kestra Dallisor?”
Gabe cried out again, and in my distraction, Kestra elbowed my chest enough to loosen my grip. I reached for her, but she had already bolted to her feet and was running around the side of the house.
I felt around for the knife and found it, but was barely on my feet when I heard the front door bang open. She shouted, “I’m Kestra Dallisor. I’m the one you want.”
Heavy footsteps emptied to the front of the home. Toward her.
“Lady Dallisor.” The same soldier who’d been speaking before must’ve shoved her against a wall or door and she gave a cry loud enough for me to hear. “Lord Endrick demands you answer for willful disobedience.”
That was followed by another cry and an order to also bind Gabe’s hands, though an Ironheart asked why they should bother tying up an unconscious man.
“We’re taking them both,” the Ironheart replied.
“You only wanted me,” Kestra said, and then, obviously referring to Gabe, added, “He’s useless to you.”
“He’s valuable enough that you risked yourself to come in here.” The Ironheart chuckled. “I’m sure we’ll find plenty of use for him.”
By then, the front door opened again, and I ducked around the side of the house, peeking out to see Gabe’s still body thrown first into the prison wagon and then Kestra being forced outside, her hands bound in front of her, and her dress torn near the shoulder. I noticed she never looked around, which had to be a deliberate choice. She didn’t want to alert the soldiers that I was out here too.
She recoiled at first when they led her to the prison wagon, but the Ironheart pushed her inside and slammed the door behind her. “Oh yes, my lady, you have much to tell us, and you will.”
The oropods led the way from Rutherhouse with the prison wagon at the end of the line. I stepped out to see it go and noticed Kestra staring out from the bars at the back. In the darkness, I couldn’t see the details of her face and I wondered if she could see mine, but I felt her pain and she surely felt the flood of worry and grief and hopelessness in me.
In less than ten minutes, I had lost my mother, heard my best friend beaten to within a breath of his life, and was now watching the last hope for Antora be carried back to the enemy. I knew what fate awaited her. Thinking of it bored the final hole through my heart.
Ten minutes, in which everything that mattered to me in this life had been taken away.
And I was helpless to make any of it better.
As we drove away, Simon’s face nearly broke my heart—more than it already was broken. His final expression had been worse than disgust, worse than hatred. He had stared at me with utter indifference. In that instant, it seemed, I’d become nothing to him.
I sank against the floor of the wagon, crying bitterly for him and his mother, for Gabe who was still lying unconscious beside me, and even for myself because maybe I really was as selfish as everyone believed the Dallisors to be. Wherever they were taking me, I was terrified.
Gabe grunted and his hand near me twitched a little, but he didn’t wake up. I had sacrificed myself, hoping to save him. How foolish that had been, to think they’d ever leave him behind. As cruelly as they’d treated him before, I could only imagine what they’d do now.
And what they’d do to me. I’d heard Endrick’s order repeated in my head and refused it. There would be consequences for that. My heart was already feeling a squeeze on it, as if the only reason Endrick was keeping me alive was because something more terrible than death still awaited me.
When I’d cried out my tears, I crouched beside Gabe and with my hands still tightly bound, I leaned over him. “Gabe? You need to wake up.”
He stirred and groaned, but nothing more.
“Gabe!” I gently tapped at one side of his face, the half that wasn’t swollen from where an Ironheart foot must have crashed into him. “Please wake up!”
After I’d prodded him enough, finally he moaned, “Stop that, I’m awake.” His eyes fluttered open and then widened when he recognized me. “Kestra, you can’t be here! How did they find you?”
“I surrendered.”
He scowled as his mouth tightened. “How could you be so foolish?”
“I did it to save your life! You’d be dead otherwise.”
“If I’m here, I’m a dead man anyway. Where’s Simon?”