Ashes of Snow

Chapter 28

SEEING HIM HERE shatters me. He's back too soon. Too fast, not yet, I need more time—

Cain stomps toward me, his eyes bloodshot, his hair sticking out around the face of someone scared, frantic. I press against the back corner of the cage. He's mad, Lorgen's evil driving his need to kill.

And Nesta, Cressen, and Troy aren't with him.

"Where are they?" I shout. "What did you do to them?"

Cain laughs and stops just above the cage, towering over me. "You just keep fighting," he coos. "Keep pretending you can win. You don't know what my master is. You don't know how futile it is to contest him."

"Don't touch her!" Perrin's voice booms out from the wall and he runs to the end of his chains, a tantalizing distance from where Cain stands, bending slowly to the cage's lock.

"Your prince brought an army with him, did he tell you that?" Cain puts the key in the lock but doesn't turn it, waiting for my reaction. "He brought the armies of the world to save you. Bittersweet, don't you think? All that, and he'll still watch you die."

An army? Is that what Perrin has been saying?

Theon. He forced Theon to attack Spring. And if Avellia is attacking Spring ... Autumn will attack with it.

Cain unlocks the door. Perrin yanks against the chains, stretches out to Cain, yanks again. I press as far back in the cage as I can, willing myself to be as small and inconsequential as possible. I'm Winter's conduit. I should be able to get out of this, kill him, do something to survive. Winter needs me to survive.

Cain swings the door open and reaches for me in one swift motion. His fingers grab my collar and drag me out, the bars of the cage flying past before I can find purchase and stop myself. Then I'm above the cage, soaring through the air until I smack into something soft, something covered in a quilt of silk squares on a mattress of stale feathers.

Cain's bed.

I scramble back and press into the wall, trying to shove myself to my feet. Cain strides toward me, his face wild, a savage dog cornering his long-hunted prey. His eyes flash with power forced into him from someone else. Lorgen is here, doing this even more than Cain. Does Cain even exist beyond the things Lorgen makes him want?

"Do you remember when I first saw you?" Cain whispers. He stops at the edge of the bed, his fingers twirling down the post that holds the canopy above my head. "Years ago. You were a child still, small and fierce."

I stand, grab the opposite post, and start to swing around, propel myself off the bed, but Cain dives, his hands grabbing my thighs and landing me flat out on the silk quilt. As horror shoots through me, Perrin shouts from the wall, still pulling uselessly at the chains. Blood drips from his wrists now, jagged tendrils of red falling onto the floor as he pulls and looks at me with such helplessness that my heart cracks.

I jerk to Cain, scrambling for any last bits of strength. "You didn't have time to get them, did you? Perrin's army interrupted your master's fun?"

"My master has nothing to do with this. He merely makes me"—he pauses and smirks—"unstoppable."

Cain whirls me around so I land on my back with him on top of me, his bulk pressing me into the mattress. I want to believe it's a lie. I want to believe he's still human in there, somewhere, a small flicker of someone who doesn't want to have done the things he's done. But when I look into his eyes, there's nothing. A vast and horrible nothing lined by need and obedience and strength.

He doesn't exist outside of Lorgen's commands. Maybe he never did.

"I regret that this will be faster than I always imagined," Cain whispers, his warm breath cutting my skin like a knife. "But your prince has forced my hand."