Hagath took a deep breath. “She’s right.”
“You cannot be on her side,” Ture huffed.
“Sela, Denan, and the others will be here in two days,” Hagath said. “If the Alamant loses their Arbor and their king, they don’t stand a chance.”
“They never did,” Ture responded.
Larkin flared her sword. “I’ve put up with a lot from you out of pity, Ture. But my pity just ran out.”
He stared at her before turning to Hagath. “I can see why you like her.”
“Apologize,” Ramass demanded.
Ture lifted his hands in surrender. “All right. I’m sorry.”
Larkin glared at him long enough to be sure he meant it before letting her sword fade.
“The Black Tree will have a plan,” Hagath said. “He always does.”
“This is just another one of Eiryss’s mad schemes,” Ture growled. “As likely to get us all in trouble as not.”
Ramass smiled crookedly. “But the times we didn’t get in trouble were fun indeed.”
Ture chuckled despite himself. “Fine.” He crossed to Eiryss and ruffled her hair. “I really did miss you. Pranks aside.”
She bumped him with her shoulder. “I missed you too.”
He shook his head. “But I still think your plan is mad.”
Eiryss turned to Larkin. “It’s a risk we’re going to have to take.”
Feeling vulnerable, she gripped her new amulet; she’d missed the comfort of her old one. “What’s to stop the Black Tree from removing the thorns when I become a wraith?”
“Had he been able to do that,” Eiryss said, “he would have taken your White Tree thorns.”
Larkin hesitated before turning to Ramass. “What do you think?”
He let out a long sigh. “If there’s another way, I can’t see it. But it’s your decision.”
The four of them waited for Larkin. She shuddered at the memory of barbed shadows forcing themselves down her throat, crawling through her lungs, her guts. She heard the sobs and cries of the girl and the grandmother and the baby and the bride.
She wiped at the sweat beading her forehead. “I don’t want anything else from the Black Tree in my body.”
But then she thought of her husband and little sister. Of her friends. Of all those who would die if the Alamant fell. She turned to face the font of wicked thorns, glittering in the evening light. “But a lifetime of bearing the thorns would be better than the memory of their deaths.”
Eiryss patted her leg and turned to Ramass. “You know the Black Tree will try to stop us.”
Ramass glanced at the sun. “We have a couple hours until sunset. Let’s get started.”
Eiryss looped her hand through Larkin’s arm and started up the stairs to the font.
“What if I fail?” Larkin blurted. “What if I can’t do what you need me to do?”
Eiryss’s brow rose. “You’re a queen, just like me. We do what’s best for our people.”
“What if I’m the wrong kind of queen?” Larkin asked.
“That’s not possible,” Eiryss said.
Larkin wasn’t so sure.
They’d just stepped onto the dais when a man dropped from above, landing in a crouch between them and the font. His shin bone snapped and pierced his skin. He didn’t even wince as it straightened itself. He was naked and filthy, covered in layers of drying blood. His hair was matted and crawling with lice. He smelled of rot and unwashed bodies. Even through all that, the resemblance to Ture and Eiryss was unmistakable.
This had to be Vicil.
His mad gaze fixed on her. “She will not touch the font.”
Eiryss held out her hand in a pleading gesture. “Vicil, do you remember me? I’m your cousin, Eiryss.”
“You should have stayed in your coffin.” Vicil charged.
“Eiryss,” Ramass cried.
Larkin stepped between him and her grandmother and pulsed, throwing Vicil into the font. Ramass and Ture shifted to flank Vicil, their magic blades and shields in place. Eiryss and Hagath pulled their pipes from inside their dresses and began playing. The weave rose before them, geometric shapes and delicate vines.
Blood dripping from his back where the thorns had torn into him, Vicil launched two knives in quick succession, hitting Ramass in the leg and Ture in the stomach. Both men staggered. Larkin charged.
Vicil dropped and swept his leg out, catching Larkin’s ankles and sending her toppling down the stairs. He crossed the remaining space with frightening speed. Her training told her to shift to the side and let his momentum carry him past her. But that would put Hagath and Eiryss in danger. She had to hold.
Rising to one knee, Larkin flared the enchantment into an arch that shielded all three of them. Vicil slammed into her. She braced, every muscle in her body screaming as she held her ground. He pounded on her shield with his blade. Once. Twice.
She pulsed again, sending him careening back. Then Ramass was there, his sword thrusting. Vicil danced out of reach just in time. Ture joined in. Vicil retreated, trading blows with both Ramass and Ture. Larkin trailed after them, but she didn’t want to leave Eiryss and Hagath, who were nearly done with whatever enchantment they were weaving.
“Head for the font,” Hagath said to Larkin.
Ture’s blade slipped past Vicil’s guard and into his lower left ribs. Vicil didn’t seem to feel the pain.
“Go, Larkin!” Ramass said.
Larkin ran to the font. Vicil tried to double back, but Ramass caught him in the thigh with a crippling slice. Vicil’s leg buckled; he went down and did not rise again. Ramass and Ture backed away. Why hadn’t they finished him? But then she saw the pity in their gazes. He was their family. And besides, what he’d become wasn’t his fault.
The enchantresses stepped forward, their music bending the weave into a dome that settled over Vicil, who watched them with hatred in his eyes. For a moment, the symbols gleamed silver. And then the song changed, and they faded, leaving only a faint sheen along the edge of the dome to reveal it was there at all.
Having trapped Vicil, the four of them turned to Larkin. Taking a deep breath, she faced the conduit thorn. She didn’t allow herself to hesitate. To overthink. She just pushed her hand into the thorn. The sparkles darkened to black as her blood pushed through.
Instead of warmth and lightness, the Black Tree’s sap seeped inside her, cold with bitter hatred. She gasped as it clawed its way up her arm. The thorns didn’t light up like they should. Ramass came to stand on one side of her, Eiryss the other. Ture and Hagath circled to the opposite side of the font.
“You’re going to have to force him to give up your thorns,” Ramass said.
“Larkin!” a voice cried. Denan’s voice.
“Denan?” She turned toward the sound.
Ramass took hold of her shoulders.
Eiryss held her hand in place. “That’s not Denan, Larkin. It’s the Black Tree. Making you experience things that aren’t real.”
A high-pitched little girl’s scream. “Larkin, oh, light, Larkin,” Sela cried. “The mulgars have got me.”
The sounds of a battle. Swords and grunts and curses and the pounding of feet.
“Larkin,” Denan cried. “We’re going to be overrun.”
“It’s not real,” Ramass said.
But it sounded real. The panic in Larkin’s body was real. Her instincts screamed that it was real.
The Black Tree’s doing.
She turned away from the sound and concentrated on forcing her consciousness into the Black Tree as it had done to her. “You will give me what I want.”
More screaming. The cold sap inside her seeped into her eyes, into her brain. Now she could see them. Mama. Nesha. The babies. Her friends. They were here. Dying all around her. But she did not break the connection. Did not turn away as they died agonizing deaths again and again and again.
And then she was through.
“I see one!” Hagath cried.
Then the V
alynthians were all moving. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven snaps as they broke off the thorns.
“That’s all of them,” Eiryss said.
Larkin staggered back. The screams abruptly cut off. The visions took longer to fade. Feeling bone-deep cold, she wrapped her arms around herself.
“Hurry,” Hagath said.
Ramass stood in front of her, his face hard. Behind him, the horizon had cut the sun in half.
“But we had a couple hours,” Larkin said.
“Two hours in which you fought him,” Ture said.
Light. Had it been that long?
Ramass held up a thorn. “Where?”
Cold gathered on her right arm, the sap instructing her where it needed to go. She tapped the spot and turned away as he slid it inside her skin.
Hagath held up one. “This one?”
Her right thigh. She tapped it. They repeated the process until all the thorns were in her body. Her shaking knees gave out from under her. Ramass caught her and eased her to the ground.
Hagath pushed back her hair. “When you come back, you’ll be better.”
Back from being a wraith. Already, she could feel the shadows forming like a poisonous mist around her. The others stripped out of their tunics.
Larkin had just watched her family die a dozen times in a dozen horrible ways. She couldn’t endure watching more murders and then be forced to murder. Panic reared up and struck.
Larkin tried to escape, but a vine slithered over her legs. She struggled, but she was too weak. “There has to be something you can do,” Larkin gasped. “Tie me up. Cut off my arms and burn them. Something.”
Eiryss unbuckled Larkin’s belt. “You are not bound by the curse. You can fight back. Push him out.”
Larkin cut through her panic to say, “How?”
“You’re stronger than he is.” Eiryss gently pulled Larkin’s tunic over her head.
It was too late. The sun was gone.
Vicil began laughing manically even as the thorns grew over his shoulders, breaking first his right and then his left. “You’ll never escape him.”
Thorns wrapped around Larkin, pinning her. Ture and Ramass’s bones snapped. They screamed, the sound ringing in Larkin’s ears. Beside her, Hagath was reduced to a third her height.
The only one free of the vines, Eiryss shook her fist at the tree. “Stop it! Leave them alone!”
The vines crushed Larkin, her ribs caving in. She coughed up blood. It hadn’t happened this way the first time. This was the Black Tree, showing them his displeasure.
Water
A traveler, murdered in the night by an assassin wielding a magical blade. A thief, his hand removed by another magic ax. He’d died from the infection spreading from his stump. His sister had died of thirst days later, her little body wrapped around the rotting corpse of her brother.
They’d died alone. In agony. And Larkin couldn’t help them. Could only feel relief when they finally drew their last breath. Then, the vision was over, and all she was left with was hollow emptiness.
That emptiness was filled with helpless rage. Mankind had done this. Mankind was a disease. And she would end it. She welcomed the rage. It filled the nothingness inside her. Battered away her hurt and confusion and pain. Pain made her weak. Hate made her strong.
She sped through the Mulgar Forest. His trees told her stories. Stories of men hiding amid their trunks. Twenty Alamantians, in fact. But they were not her quarry. The Black Tree had a different prey in mind.
Just before she reached the Forbidden Forest, the shadows took her deep beneath the trees’ roots. Larkin emerged on the banks of the Alamant as a mere shadow, like that cast by a cloud slipping over the moon.
The sun had set, but only just barely. The sky was a lurid purple, the clouds blowing in on the horizon orange and gold. Far to her right, a pyre of corpses smoldered, their skulls grinning at her from beneath the flames. The lake itself still teemed with the dead, the stench thick and cloying.
The Black Tree urged her onward. But she couldn’t cross water. She paced the shore, the urge to move growing stronger and stronger until she couldn’t resist a moment longer. Knowing she couldn’t cross water, she resisted.
And then the Black Tree offered her the memory of a voice. You are not bound by the curse.
Larkin suddenly understood. She turned her gaze to the city. Beyond the wall, the tops of the trees gleamed with lampent light. Even from this distance, the quiet murmur of the inhabitants echoed over the still water.
There would be no sleep this night. Only death. “I am not bound by the curse.” She smiled a wicked smile and seeped over the water with its bobbing bodies. At the wall, she scuttled up its smooth side, finding handholds that only a shadow could grip. At the top, she hid in the hollows of the branches.
A young sentinel paused, his head coming up. “Do you smell that?” he called to his partner, an enchantress a dozen steps away.
Larkin gripped the branches that made up the roof of the colonnade and pulled herself up, her negligent weight shifting the branches no more than a gentle breeze.
The white-haired enchantress came to stand beside the sentinel. “What?”
“I thought I smelled a wraith,” the guard answered.
She sniffed, but it was too late. They were already downwind of her. “Wraiths can’t cross water.”
He shifted uneasily. “I know what I smelled.”
“It was probably just the dead in the water.” She turned and headed back the way she’d come.
The man ground his teeth. “You think I can’t tell the difference?”
She sighed. “You want to sound the alarm—wake the whole city—for nothing more than a smell?”
Larkin waited. If the sentinel sounded the alarm, their mission would become much more difficult.
When he didn’t relent, the white-haired woman sighed. “Signal the others to be on high alert.”
He pulled out his pipes and played a melody that might have been nothing more than the wind through chimes, if not for the undercurrent of danger.
Favoring speed over stealth now, Larkin slid down the other side of the wall and roiled across the water, fish darting away from her unnatural presence—even if the humans were too stupid to recognize danger, their prey wasn’t.
How she longed for the day when the monsters were all dead.
Larkin paused before the White Tree. She was still white, still glorious, but the colors that had lived beneath her bark had stilled. For a moment, the rage was gone, leaving the Black Tree’s unassailable grief howling through her.
Grief was weakness. Anger was power. She latched on to the shadows’ anger—the Black Tree’s anger—letting it fuel her hunt. She scaled the tree as easily as she had the wall earlier; only this time, there were no guards to avoid. She bypassed the main platform, slipping up one of the side branches until she came to the portal. The same portal the king had last disappeared inside.
From within the shadows of the dead, she drew a single thorn that glittered with malice. One quick thrust, and it had embedded in the wood. For a moment, nothing happened. And then the graft sent out spiraling roots that tunneled through the White Tree’s corpse, which would soon be possessed by the shadows. They would scour the city, destroying it in a single night.
By tomorrow, the very being the Alamant worshiped would be the source of their demise.
Having accomplished her main task, Larkin left the White Tree and crossed the lake. She found a familiar hometree and slipped past the enchanters at the docks. These men were wiser. They did not question their instincts. One of them lifted his pipes and began to play. Others soon joined him. The enchantresses flared their weapons. The tree shifted as more guards woke and shifted into position.
The Black Tree did not understand language, but music he knew. And this music tried to drive her back. To make her forget why she had come. But she had the magic of a queen. The magic of the White Tree. And the enchanters’ familiar magi
c washed over her like a gentle rain.
Larkin found the chambers she wanted and seeped through the floorboards. She tore shadows from the world for a cloak and stepped into being.
Nesha lay on the bed, her auburn hair spread across the pillow and one hand beside her face. On her wrist was a newly inserted thorn sigil; the wound was still swollen and red. On the floor beside her, Soren and Kyden nestled in a basket.
Nesha’s nose wrinkled slightly in distaste, and she shifted.
A thousand memories pulsed. Two girls giggling as they splashed each other in the shallows of the river, the water shocking and delightful. Running through a field of dandelions, the seeds rising like a cloud around them. Curling together beneath the safety of a blanket and promising to always protect one another as their father raged.
Anger and hatred still pulsed from where the thorns pierced her, filling her with memories of senseless death. Of humanity’s failings. She wasn’t killing anyone. She was saving them from a lifetime of suffering.
Her sword filled her hand.
In the basket, one of the babies wiggled, its mouth opening and closing again. Something about the mouth was familiar, like she had seen it before. The memory came in a rush. Bane’s mouth pressed to Larkin’s. She had frozen, too shocked to react.
He had pulled back. “Hurry. Before I lose too much blood.”
Bane. His name echoed through her. She had loved him. Loved him still. And Larkin loved her sister and her nephew and her little brother.
She would not do this. She backed away, her sword winking out.
The Black Tree’s full consciousness shoved its way inside her, taking over her body. The wraith lifted her sword. He was going to kill her family!
“No!” she screamed.
Nesha’s eyes snapped open, and she gaped at the wraith towering over her.
“Roll!” Larkin cried.
Nesha shoved off the bed and onto the floor just as the sword cut the bed in half.
“Run!” Larkin tried to wrest control of her body back from the Black Tree. The shadow’s thorns strangled her from the inside out.
Nesha scooped up the babies—one under each arm—and ran toward the doorpane.
Wraith King Page 35
