The Blood Mirror Never Lies novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: Her Five Years

Cassian's POV

I bound her arm myself, in the tower, with a strip of clean linen and hands that wouldn't stay steady.

"You're shaking," Elspeth said.

"I am about to give you back five years of your life, and I don't know what you'll think of the man who is holding them."

She sat on the edge of the bed with her bandaged arm across her knees and looked at me.

"I know what I think of him now."

"You know what you think of the man you met a week ago."

"Is there another one?"

"Yes," I said. "He sat on a throne and looked at you like something on his boot. You will remember him. I want you to see his face."

She was quiet.

Then she held out her left hand, palm up, with the red ring around the wrist.

"Do it."

I knelt in front of her.

I laid my forehead against hers and closed my thumb over the ring.

I thought about the five years, and I let go of them one at a time.

The gate she already had. I gave her the rest in order, and I felt each year leave me and settle in her.

The last of them was me.

I had known all of it, for a week, from the inside. I had not known what it was to give it back.

She saw herself across a hall, looking at a tall man on a velvet throne, and the way her heart went off like a struck bell.

She saw the night the red ring first came up on her wrist, and she saw herself hide it in her sleeve for a month because she was afraid of what I would say.

She saw me laughing alone at a letter, and she remembered that she had stood in the doorway to watch it, and loved me then.

She felt the cup of tea I'd poured her once, badly, with my hands unsteady, and she'd drunk it without sugar to spare me.

And then she saw the catacombs.

She saw my face at the trial, the disgust in it, and I felt her go cold to the bone.

I did not let go of her.

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