I frown, exasperated. “What the hell are you talking about? How is any of this my fault?”
Mist looks around at the other wide-eyed saddles huddled around us. “You heard them. Protect the king’s favored.” She scoffs with an ugly, humorless sound.
I go sti
ll. Those words—Sail’s words, called out right as the snow pirates ambushed us. I hadn’t thought, hadn’t even considered, how it would sound to the other saddles.
“When it came down to it, the guards weren’t going to protect us. It was just her. Midas always keeps her safe, keeps her special. Even on this damn journey, she got special treatment, didn’t she? Don’t travel too long during the night, because we don’t want to tire the king’s favored. Don’t eat more rations, because we have to make sure the king’s favored has extra. Don’t go too fast, because the king’s favored wants to ride a bloody horse she has no business being on! It’s all her! All the time!”
I feel the eyes of the other saddles swing over to me like a hook on a string.
“And then when it all went to shit, what did they do? Protected her. Tried to make it so she got away, because the rest of us don’t matter. We’re expendable. Replaceable.” Mist is sobbing now, her petite shoulders shaking. “And now we’re here, captured, and what do you think is going to happen to us?”
Rosh tries to gently take her arm, to shush her, but she shrugs him off, staring at me with that fire, that hate, burning me with it.
“Ruined. That’s what’s going to happen to us. We’re going to be ruined. Until we’re nothing. Slaves to be used and then merchandise to be sold. But the king will come for her. Bargain for her. Save his favored. But not us,” Mist says with a bitter shake of her head as more tears fall. “Not us.”
My earlier guilt may have felt like steam, but now it’s like an open wound, torn right through my gut.
All the other saddles continue to look at me as Mist’s words settle in, but I only stand there, silent, mouth dry and wound aching.
What is there to say? In her eyes, in all of their eyes, she’s right. Maybe from no fault of my own, but an ugly truth all the same.
How would I have felt, hearing that order, protect the king’s favored, if I were them?
“Alright, hush now,” Rissa says, once more stepping in, once more trying to diffuse the situation. “Regardless of any of that, we can’t afford to gain any more negative attention than we’re already going to get.”
Her normally seductive lips are pressed in a hard, firm line, her blonde tresses scattered over a dress spotted with blood that isn’t her own.
Rissa looks at the saddles, her peers, her friends. “We’re professionals. Not just saddles from the slums, but King Midas’s select chosen. If we’re going to get through this, we’ll have to perform, but we know how to do that. We know how to work a room.”
The saddles huddle closer together, a circle in the middle of a ship, backs turned on me, the outsider. Separate. I’m separate from them, even now, when we’re in the same terrifying situation. But no wonder they’ve always hated me, always kept me apart. Who could blame them?
I turn away from them, away from the exclusion, my feet taking me to the edge of the ship where I grasp the railing with white knuckles.
Right now, the one person I want to talk to, the one person I know could make me feel better, is dead in the snow with a puncture through his heart. My only friend. Dead, because of me.
My eyes scan the land below, taking in the littered bodies that the pirates left behind. Left there in the Barrens, for the clouds and winds to bury.
Beside me, the Red Raids draw up the ramp, heaving it back in place into the wall of the ship just as a horn blows, indicating that we’re on the move. Below, fire claws grumble and hiss, the vibrations of their growls shaking the boards at my feet.
But my eyes stay planted on the landscape below, sweeping, looking, searching. Where is he, where is he...
I double check my vantage point, but a frown forms between my brows because I don’t see him. I see the other fallen guards, but not him.
When the ship begins to move, slowly sledding over the slick iced ground, my gaze turns frantic, confused. There. He should’ve been right there.
I see the blood, I see the spot where it happened, where his heart emptied out. But no Sail.
My hands tighten on the railing as I continue to look, but I don’t see him. As if he just got up and walked off. Except that’s impossible. But I don’t see him, he’s not there, and I—
Raucous laughter of the pirates draws my eye to the stern of the ship, where it’s lit up from the red, swaying lanterns. But I shouldn’t have looked. I shouldn’t have.
A choked cry flies out of me as I slap a hand over my mouth. The pirates are gathered around, laughter coming from behind their red cloths, but it does nothing to muffle their cruelty.
And Sail...I couldn’t spot him on the ground, not because I was wrong about where he’d been, or that he’d miraculously lived, but because they dragged him onboard.
My horror-filled eyes are wide as I look at where they’ve hung him. They trussed up his lifeless body at the front of the ship, against a stained wooden post.