“Five days. He should’ve been dead by now, but he’s using magic to keep himself alive despite the pain. The will to live is a truly remarkable thing.”

I wanted to march down there and take Hugh’s man off of it. I wasn’t kind. I could be cruel. I had used my sword to punish before, but at my absolute worst, the punishment I delivered lasted minutes. The man on the cross had been there for days. The Iron Dog might have belonged to Hugh, but there was a line between good and evil, and that kind of torture crossed it. This was bigger than Hugh and me. This was about right and wrong.

“And if Hugh returns?”

“He won’t. I purged him.”

“You what?”

“That which is freely given can also be taken away. I’ve severed the link between us. He still has the benefit of our blood with all its power—that, unfortunately, I cannot strip without taking his life—but we aren’t bound. The light of his gift is no longer precious to me.”

The small hairs on the back of my neck rose. My father no longer cared if Hugh lived or died. “You made him mortal.”

“Yes. Even with his healing ability I expect he won’t last the next century.”

“Does he know?”

“Yes.”

Hugh had been my father’s wrecking ball. Roland would point at a target, and Hugh would smash it, until only blood and ash remained. Then my father would sweep in to rein in his cruel violent Warlord, and Hugh’s victims would rejoice, because anything was better than Hugh. Roland was Hugh’s reason for living. And now his god had rejected and abandoned him.

I hated Hugh for a list of things a mile long. His people murdered Aunt B. He used magic to throw me into my father’s prison and slowly starved me to death, trying to break my will. He murdered one of my friends in front of me. But I understood Hugh. He was an instrument of my father’s will, as much as I had been an instrument of Voron’s. Voron pointed and I killed, without question and, worse, without doubt. It took his death and years on my own before I broke free. I knew exactly how much that rejection from the man who raised you like a father could hurt. I had thought Voron cared for me. When I found out that he’d been training me so he could watch the pain on my father’s face as Roland killed me, it nearly broke me, and by then Voron had been dead for a decade.

“You were everything to him. He committed all those atrocities for you, and you’ve stripped him of your love, the thing he cared most about.”

“Hugh outlived his usefulness. His life had been a series of uncomplicated tasks and eventually he became his work.”