The Trials by Cari Z

Author:Cari Z. [Z., Cari]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Romance
Amazon: B0BJ2VV876
Goodreads: 63116857
Published: 2022-11-21T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

He woke to the lightest of touches on his brow, calloused fingertips doing their best to be gentle. Camille blinked his eyes open and found himself gazing at Anton’s gaunt face—gaunt and pale, but no longer haunted by deathly nightmares. Anton looked tender as he traced Camille’s features. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, the near-total darkness of the cell swallowing almost all the strength in his words. “I just had to make sure you were real.”

“It’s all right,” Camille assured him. His voice was rough and his breath none too sweet, but Anton didn’t rear back. “Did you get much sleep?”

“A few hours, I think. More than I’ve had in one stretch for weeks now. I don’t know exactly how long.” He smiled, a broken little thing. “It’s rather hard to keep track of the passage of time in a place without sunlight.”

The anger came back, faster than Camille had expected. “They should never have shut you down here.”

“I asked them to,” Anton said, derailing Camille’s rising ire. “I was screaming, raging, hurting myself…sometimes I’d get breaks between the hallucinations, and it was clear that I was making people upset. Especially Hrym. He wanted to help me, but he couldn’t bear the noise I was making. There was nothing he could really do to make things better, of course, but for a while we thought there was a chance that…well, that there were other ways of mitigating the effects of the shells.” Anton sighed. “We were wrong.”

“Darling.” Unable to stop himself, Camille leaned in and pressed a kiss to Anton’s lips. Anton whimpered and clung to him with unexpected strength.

“I keep thinking you can’t be real,” he whispered. “I’ve seen so many awful things, Camille. Nothing I ever wanted to see, so many…I should never have shared this spell.” He sounded desolate. “It’s inhumane, to force someone to relive the violence visited on another. I feel like I’ve died so many times I can’t even count them, and even after the spell dissipates it’s hard to free my mind from the cycle. I see death over and over and over, even if I don’t feel it directly myself.

“And now I’ve taught it to others. I’ve spread this terrible knowledge. I think…I think that perhaps I deserve this, for what I’ve inflicted on the world.”

“No,” Camille said firmly. “You only shared the spell to save your friend. It’s on Lord Jourdain and the empire what became of that knowledge. They chose to add your invention to the theater of war.”

“I knew they would,” Anton argued. “I knew it would be irresistible to them. I didn’t know it was going to be this…this bad, though. What if a child has to endure this torture? What if—”

“It’s not as bad out there as it is for you.” On this, Camille was certain. “It’s not pleasant for those affected, of course, but I’ve seen the spell in action again and again, Anton. I’ve been observing the use and effectiveness of these shells for Lord Jourdain for the past month.

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.