His mother’s voice, prying a pesky shoot from the edge of their herb patch.
Sometimes, that’s all there is for it. Out, like a weed—
His bones straining as though they might burst through his flesh, Meilyr spread his hands andgathered.Pried.Ripped.
Yew jerked. Groaned. Bowed.
Slowly. Too slowly.
His blood blared, barely indistinguishable as individual beats, so hard and fast he had to have only moments left of consciousness. Moments left to tear the life out of the soil – the body. Moments left to save Osian.
Osian.
Osian, who lunged past him and dived his hands into the mess of pried-apart yew and root, grasped the hilt of his sword and drew it as if from a rusted scabbard – a stone on a hill.
Meilyrheavedthe other way, and the sword came free with a clear, bright ring of metal. As his vision bled, his mouth exploding with iron, Osian plunged his sword down with a cry through the gap in the parted yew.
Flesh-sound. Blood. Roots.
Osian severed the last of the life within the thing that had once been the king’s adviser, with a strike that cleaved through the rain in the courtyard beside him.
The creature shuddered. Began to wither. Some of the smaller roots snapped at the air like rattled serpents, but the life was leaving, the wrongness with it.
Osian stepped back, breathing hard – alive.Alive.
The roar left Meilyr’s body as quickly as it had come. He fell to his knees, hard on the stone, and slumped sideways.
‘Meilyr!’
Scuffing of boots. The clatter of steel. Rain.
Osian pulled him into his arms. ‘Meilyr! Meilyr, breathe!’
Meilyr sucked in air like a man drowning, heart jolting back into rhythm. Abysmally fierce, as though it might split his skull. As though he had run a hundred miles.
Osian touched his arms, his face, his shoulders, leaving behind little brushes of blood.
Osian.Alive, woven from gold even in the rain. Stirring memory.
‘Meilyr…’
In the wake of the devastation, cold realisation seeped in.
The familiar sound of the rain, the familiar feeling of his emptied body.
Meilyr, what have you done?
He wrenched out of Osian’s arms and to his feet, falling against the wall.
Osian’s knowing, shocked eyes. He had seen. He knew.He knew what Meilyr was.
‘Meilyr—’
Meilyr shoved himself from the wall and ran.
FORTY-TWO
I would be his even in desolation,