Chapter 104

Sloane

Malachi didn’t fall the way I expected a man his size to fall.

By the time I got my breath back, he was on one knee in the frozen grass with a hand braced beside it, holding himself up by stubbornness alone. The thing Cressida had thrown at me had struck him instead, low on his right side beneath the ribs, and where it had burned through his shirt the skin didn’t look red. It looked gray. Thin dark lines were already spreading outward from the wound, like ink dropped into water.

I was still on my knees where he had shoved me.

For a second, the rest of the fight went on without me. Snarling somewhere to my left. A man screaming. The flat crack of a branch breaking under something heavy. Above all of it, the full moon hung over Moonhaven so bright that the frost on the north field glittered like broken glass.<