Glass Sword

The electricity in my veins might be the only thing I trust in this world.

I want to believe in the Scarlet Guard, and certainly in Shade and Kilorn, but I won’t let myself, not after the mess my trust, my blindness toward Maven got us into. And Cal is out of the question altogether. He is a prisoner, a Silver, the enemy who would betray us if he could—if he had anywhere else to run.

But still, somehow, I feel a pull to him.

The figures of the first line are not wearing the clouded gray of Cal’s hard-trained Silver soldiers. They are not even soldiers at all. They are servants in red coats, red shawls, red tunics, red pants, red shoes. So much red they could be bleeding. And around their feet, clinking against the ground, are iron chains. The sound scrapes against me, drowning out the airjets and the missiles and even the harsh-barked orders of the Silver officers hiding behind their Red wall. The chains are all I hear.

We seem weak because we want to. Shade was talking about the Guard when he said that, explaining their motives. Now I wonder if he wasn’t also trying to convey a message.

A cold thought ripples through me, remembering Julian’s lessons hard learned in the court and the arena. Anyone can betray anyone.

“…What you had to do to stay alive with them, all while helping us, finding out what you are, I don’t know how you came out on the other side. But it changed you…Just because Maven betrayed you doesn’t mean you have to stop trusting people altogether.”

With every breath, I let another thought go, each one harsher than the last. You forgot them. In. You killed people. Out. You let others die. In. You are alone. Out.

That last one isn’t true. Cal is proof of that, as are Kilorn, Shade, and Farley. But I can’t shake the feeling that, while they stand with me, there’s no one beside me. Even with an army at my back, I am still alone.

Maybe the newbloods will change that. Maybe not. Either way, I have to find out.

Four stones, pink, red, deep purple, and green—my earrings. The first three are from my brothers, part of a single set split between Gisa and me. They were bittersweet gifts, given when they were conscripted into the army and left our family, perhaps for good. The last one is from Kilorn, given on the edge of doom, before the Scarlet Guard attacked Archeon, before the betrayal that still haunts us all. The earrings were with me through everything, from Bree’s conscription to Maven’s treachery, and each stone feels heavy with memory.

[…]

“Of course,” I reply. “These [earrings] will be with me to my grave.”

I am a weapon made of flesh, a sword covered in skin. I was born to kill a king, to end a reign of terror before it can truly begin. Fire and lightning raised Maven up, and fire and lightning will bring him down.

[…]

I cling to Cal, Kilorn, Shade, to saving all the newbloods I can, because I am afraid of waking up to emptiness, to a place where my friends and family are gone and I am nothing but a single bolt of lightning in the blackness of a lonely storm.

If I am a sword, I am a sword made of glass, and I feel myself beginning to shatter.

Most of them don’t know what to call me. Mare, Miss Barrow, the lightning girl, some even say my lady. The nickname stings, but not so much as the last. No matter what I do, no matter how much I try to be one of them, they see me as something apart. Either a leader or a leper, but always an outsider. Always separated.

The cold never leaves. It never ends, and it feels worse than any burden. The cold is hollow, and it eats at my insides. It spreads like rot, like sickness, and one day I fear it will leave me empty, a shell of the lightning girl, the breathing corpse of Mare Barrow.