straining the words. “I almost hate to tell you what Father did. If you love
them this much while you believe a monster killed the king, how much
more will you love them when you know the truth?”
Despite the still, humid air in my walled-up room, I’m suddenly cold.
He can’t mean … He can’t …
“It was my father who killed yours,” Bo whispers. “He made it look
like the Monstrous, but … it was him.”
No.
spears and dart blowers and swords in their haste to escape. The few still
left inside shove each other as they fight to squeeze through the narrow
opening that is all that is left of the King’s Gate now that the walls have all
but collapsed. Even before I’m close enough to see the sweat and tears on
the men’s faces, I can smell their terror, sour and filthy on the wind,
tainting the fresh air crashing over the mountains like waves of redemption.
The men are so afraid of their city that they don’t notice their old
monster running toward them until I’m close enough to kill them with a
sweep of my claws. Two short, soft boys scream and put on a burst of
speed, darting closer to the wall to get away from me, before racing back
toward the desert, while the man wedged half in and half out of the
opening in the gate cries out and lifts his arms in a desperate—and
useless—attempt to protect himself.
If it’s necessary to kill him, he’ll be as dead with those arms up as
down, but I’ll leave that decision to him.
“Leave now and I won’t hurt you. Stay to fight me, and you die,” I
growl as I pull him through the opening by his armpits and fling him onto
the ground. I wait half a second—long enough to see that he has scrambled
to his feet and followed his friends—before turning back to the opening
and hauling at the rocks blocking my way.
I’m bigger than the men of Yuan. I won’t be able to fit unless I make
the opening larger. I dig my fingers into the stone, until they bruise. I
wrench at the rocks until my muscles scream with effort. I curse myself for
allowing my body to grow thinner and weaker in my weeks wandering the
wild. I dig in and dig down and give everything I have and more, but the last
colossal stone refuses to move. Not a centimeter, not a fraction of a
centimeter.
I grit my teeth and howl with effort, refusing to fail now. Above me,
the city howls more loudly, twisted metal and crumbling glass wailing a
miserable, selfish cry for blood and suffering and death. But beneath it all is
the rush of the clean wind and, finally, a wondrous smatter-patter, the
sound of raindrops on desperately dry earth, the remarkable rhythm of rain
falling harder and harder until the drumbeat of hope pounds all around me.
The drops kiss my bare shoulders, soak into my skin, bringing me to
life like a seed waiting for a miracle.
The stone gives beneath my fingers, rolling away, falling to the
ground with a thud. Heart racing, I shove my shoulders through the
opening and tumble into Yuan. I roll back to my feet and run, around the
granaries, through the barren fields, past fallen trees and massive shards of
glass, cresting the final hill in time to see the tower fall.
And fall … and fall, loose stones scattering like bones thrown from a
medicine man’s cup, foretelling the death of anyone still left inside.