EMBER’S POV
“It’s not — they’re not—”
“They are commoners,” she says, and the word drips. “That is precisely what they are. I am not a balm, Ember. I am not a kindness you dispense. I am the Silver Wolf. My power is an art, the highest there is, elegant and old and earned across a thousand generations, and it is not — it has never been — meant to be SPENT on prolonging the lives of the weak. The weak die. That is the function of weakness. You keep trying to make me an instrument of mercy, and I keep telling you I am not built for it, and you keep not LISTENING.”
It’s Hale’s words.
It’s Hale’s words coming out of the beast in my own chest: the weak die, that is the function of weakness, and the horror of that runs through me cold and sick.
That the proud thing inside me, and the danger
