This scene takes
place after DEFY, before IGNITE.
Rylan
Smoke from a morning fire curled
through the air, a dark tendril that I found myself staring at, transfixed. The
smell of charred flesh suddenly filled my nostrils, diving down into my stomach
where it turned my breakfast to acid, burning its way back up my throat before
I swallowed once hard. It’d been weeks since Jude died, since his body lay on
top of one of the death pyres, but I couldn’t rid myself of his loss—of my
guilt that he’d had to sacrifice himself so we could succeed in stopping the
king.
So that Alexa could defeat Iker.
“Rylan!”
I jerked back to alertness. As if my
thoughts had conjured her, I turned to see Alexa striding toward me across the
hard-packed courtyard, with Mateo and Asher trailing behind her. The pain that
was already lodged in my chest twisted and sharpened. Her hair was braided
today, and the curves she’d tried so hard to conceal for so long were
discernible beneath her uniform now. I swallowed again, but this time for a
different reason. I had always known, from the first time I met the twins and
Marcel slipped up in front of me and then swore me to secrecy—but it was
different now. Now that everyone knew the truth about the prince’s—no,
the king’s—best guard.
“Are we sparring today or not?”
“That’s why I’m here,” I replied and
held up the wooden sword by my side as evidence.
Laughter with an edge of cruelty
sounded from beside us. I glanced to the side in time to see a couple of
soldiers marching past openly staring at the scars that covered half of Alexa’s
face and stretched down along her neck, their twin expressions of disgust and
mockery enough to get my blood churning. They couldn’t be more than fifteen, maybe
sixteen years old at most.
“You boys have a problem?” I called
out before I could think better of it. I noticed Alexa stiffen out of the
corner of my eye, but I pressed on anyway. “The only reason you’re alive and
able to choose whether you wish to stay here as a soldier or return home is
because of her, so why don’t you—”
Alexa reached out to touch my arm,
cutting me off, “Rylan, don’t. It won’t help.”
As the boy-soldiers scurried off, I
looked down at her, at the bruises beneath her beautiful hazel eyes, attesting
to the lack of rest she was getting and the anger inside of me crumbled back
into grief. I’d gone over it a thousand times in the weeks since the siege on
the palace, trying to figure out if there had been any way possible for me to
get to her—to do something to save her from the unalterable effects of Iker’s
unholy fire. It wasn’t that I wanted her back the way she was; nothing could
diminish a beauty like hers. Not pretending to be a boy, not the scars that
marred her skin now. I wished for it for her sake, to save her from the
scorn and derision that seemed to follow her like a second shadow.
How quickly the kingdom’s gratitude
for what she’d done had changed, mutated into something darker, something
crueler. A female guard, they muttered. A woman who was horrifically
scarred, guarding the king? They complained, they mocked, they questioned.
But she stood tall and continued to
do what she did best—guard Damian. They didn’t know that she cried herself to
sleep at night. But I did. Because I heard her, through her door, when I was on
night duty standing in the hallway by the king’s room, which was next to hers.
When it was so silent, I could hear the muffled sobs, even though I could tell
she had buried her face in her pillow to try to hide her sorrow and pain.
“Who’s going to fight me first?”
Alexa spoke and I realized that while I’d been lost in thought, she’d picked up
a sword and walked into the practice ring. I recognized the familiar fire in
her eyes. She was ready to fight—she needed to fight.
“I don’t like to fight girls, my
mother told me it wasn’t polite,” Asher said from beside me and it took all my
control not to turn and punch him in the mouth.
Alexa’s gaze darkened and her grip
tightened on her practice sword. “You just don’t like having to admit that a girl
has been beating you for years. Care to see if you have better luck now that
you know I’m not a boy?”
Before Asher could respond, which
from the look of the rising color in his neck would not have been anything
good, I stepped in the ring. “I’ll go first,” I said. “I’m not afraid to admit
that a girl can beat me.”
Rather than looking grateful,
Alexa’s jaw clenched in annoyance. A tense silence descended on the practice
ring.
“You know what? I think I’m going to
head over to practice my archery instead,” Asher finally said from behind me.
“Mateo, you coming?”
I glanced over my shoulder to see
Mateo grimace. “I’ll stay. Someone will need to help pick Rylan up off the
ground when Alexa is done with him.”
“Suit yourself.” Asher turned,
tossed his practice sword back in the pile, and then stormed off.
We were all silent for a beat and
then I hurried to face Alexa again. “I’m sorry he’s acting like such an a—”
“Don’t,” she cut me off again, her
unscarred cheek slightly flushed beneath her naturally olive colored skin.
“Let’s just do this.” She sank into a fighting stance and lifted her sword, and
with a nod I did the same.
At the first hit of her sword on
mine, everything else melted away—grief, anger, pain, uncertainty. There was
only this. The weapons in our hands, the reverberations each time they hit, and
the lightning fast dance of destruction that was a fight with Alexa.
Even though it usually ended just as
Mateo had predicted, with me on the ground, I didn’t care. It was my favorite
time of any day—the few precious minutes when Alexa’s entire focus was only on
me.
For that brief moment in time, it
was me and her and no one else.
