The Bones of the Earth by Rachel Dunne

Author:Rachel Dunne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The bars of Rora’s cell were so cold they stung, the one time she touched them, and when she yanked back her hands she left skin stuck to the metal. After that she didn’t go near the bars, curling up on the ground and holding her blood-spotted hands against her chest. She didn’t think she’d ever be warm again.

Rora figured it must’ve been Anddyr. The first time she’d seen him, he’d made an invisible wall around her and Aro, one that’d turned back thrown things just like her dagger had been turned back from the black-robes. Since then, she’d seen him call up fire with a wave of his fingers and roast a whole village with a finger-wave not too much different, so she didn’t expect it’d be much harder for the witch to make the fiery pain that’d burned through her chest. If the witch’d had time to make cahoots with the black-robes, she bet that was plenty damn time for him to tell ’em all about how she was a twin, which made at least two betrayals. The number changed the angrier she got.

She’d known she shouldn’t trust him, but that was the trouble of thinking like pack. You didn’t betray pack, not ever, that was why Tare’d cut off her ear and still hated her. Pack was everything, but Joros and the witch weren’t her pack. Easy to forget that, but it was true. Still, the betrayal stung.

If she ever got out of the mountain, ever got warm again, she made a promise to herself: she’d use her warmed-up hands to wrap around Joros’s throat. She wasn’t one for killing with her bare hands, but if anyone’d earned it, it was him. The witch she’d give a quick knife in the eye, so he didn’t have time to wiggle his fingers to stop her. Those were the warmest thoughts she could think up, in the long, cold dark while they kept her waiting.

Those were better thoughts than the ones about the knives. For a little while, she’d had a real pack again, even if she’d forced her way into it. She’d had a pack, and she’d got enough trust to lead some of ’em, and then she’d gotten ’em killed. Hadn’t been hilt more’n two weeks, and the first real leading she’d done had ended in death. She tried not to think about it, because the sad and the guilt would drown her if she let them.

She’d spent time in cells before—never too long, that was the good thing about having a pack—and she’d figured out it was mostly just waiting. Waiting for the stomp of iron-shod boots and a jailer to swing open the door, waiting for the whisper of feet and the louder whisper of metal tools scraping in the lock, waiting for a door or a hole to open where it didn’t look like there should be one, waiting for any way to get past the bars ’cause once you weren’t locked in, the rest was easy as a blade.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.