Realm of Ruins

by Hannah West

  “Where is he?” I demanded, barely able to spit out the words for the shock of paralyzing fear that rang through me.

  “I’ll take you to him.” Jovie stood fluidly and brushed past me, smelling of Ivria’s perfume. I realized that the back of her white dress was cut in two panels that fluttered as she walked—like the wings of a moth.

  I couldn’t help glancing at the doorway that led to my bedchamber and the portal beyond. What if she was lying? What if Mercer was safe, waiting with Glisette and Kadri beyond the curtain as I’d thought? I could kill Jovie and her guards and flee.

  But what if she wasn’t lying? What if Mercer had come back through the portal out of concern? The guards could have come for him, or he could have gone looking for me and been caught.

  The realization sank in: Mercer wouldn’t have left me, not even after I’d raged at him.

  My fears were confirmed when Jovie held her hand out to a guard, prompting him to fish a streaky gray-green elicrin stone on a black cord—Mercer’s elicrin stone—from his pocket and hang it over her finger.

  Struck with anger and horror, I wanted to rip at her tight braid until I drew blood. Jovie and I were both small, but journeying on foot had made me more sinewy and sturdy, and I couldn’t resist designing dozens of attacks. But for every one of her bones I fantasized about breaking, every scream I dreamed of drawing from her lips, I thought of Mercer breaking and screaming. I’d been so horrendously foolish to come here. I should have been imagining Darmeska when I opened the portal, the end of this tiresome road. But I had thought only of home.

  “Why haven’t you or your father killed me?” I asked Jovie as we started down the hall, the guards flanking us.

  “The Master hasn’t decided whether we can fully trust the Ermetarius men. If we kill you on a whim, your family—namely, Ander—might revolt, and we would have to kill them too. But I don’t want to kill them, and their gifts may prove useful to the Master. So I must furnish a credible reason, and your attempting to help a known murderer and criminal escape from the Conclave’s clutches…” She smiled crookedly. “Well, I won’t even have to kill you for that.”

  “You know I’m not who they say I am.”

  “Do I know?” she asked, the pupils of her normally soft eyes sharp needle points as she whirled on me. “I don’t know much about you, Valory, except what I’ve observed from the distance you always forced between us. We could have been nonmagic mortals together if you had simply admitted you were no better than I, that you didn’t deserve a seat in the academy any more than I did. If you had, I could speak to your character, maybe even convince the Master to chain you up rather than have you killed outright. He cherishes those of us who believed in his resurrection after our ancestors hunted the contract for centuries to no avail. I have the power to persuade him. But you never stuck your neck out for me.”

  She clearly relished lording this delicious revenge over me—revenge for crimes I hadn’t realized I’d committed.

  If she hadn’t threatened Mercer, I might have felt sympathy for her.

  “Valmarys isn’t divine, Jovie,” I said as we walked on, jogging down staircases, crossing paths with only guards—never anyone I could trust to help me, if anyone would even dare. “He’s just an elicromancer fay whose right-hand man can take and give elicrin gifts.”

  Light bloomed in her elicrin stone and she roared, “Nagak!”

  The spell swept me off my feet and knocked me against the wall. Pain wracked my head, back, and limbs as I slumped to the floor with a groan.

  “Blasphemy,” she hissed, casting her shadow over me. But without inflicting any further damage, she whipped around. “Come on, Valory.”

  I trembled as one of her nearby guards dragged me to my feet and shoved me forward. I staggered on, and soon we reached the arched metal door leading outside, to where the palace straddled the Roac River.

  The water rushed by under the looming blue shadow of the monstrous building. We walked alongside the river, stopping at an iron gate. Jovie swung it open and I smelled the dankness of a stone stairwell leading to the dungeon below. When she closed the gate behind us, I realized how far I’d strayed from the portal. Imagining returning to it alive, with Mercer in tow, seemed an impossible fantasy.

  I had never visited the dungeon before. The chilly, dripping passages smelled as wretched as expected. The pallid torch flames stood no chance against the dank, dark caverns.

  “Why aren’t you a member of the Conclave?” I asked Jovie, suppressing the shiver that longed to scramble up my spine as we passed filthy prisoners slumped in their cells. I told myself that their crimes were reprehensible, that a just king had been the one to pen them here like pigs. But behind scraggly beards and stale smells, I recognized faces of courtiers and guards, people from my old life in Arna.

  Jovie’s compact shoulders tensed. “I hold an even higher position as the favored servant of the Lord of Elicromancers. If we asked it of him, my Master would put an end to conclaves and kings. But Arna is our home, and we couldn’t have resurrected our Master without King Prosper’s help. We let them play at their politics knowing who is truly lord and commander.”

  “Have you seen him? Valmarys?”

  “Masked and cloaked,” she whispered in awe, clutching her elicrin stone. “When he rewarded me for my devotion with my gift. He was glorious.”

  Tilmorn, I thought. I wished I had destroyed him at the summer cottage.

  Dampened voices echoed as we shuffled down slick steps. I could hear the river overhead. Drops trickled onto my scalp.

  A long hall stretched before us. Neswick stood outside a cell, his elbow propped casually on his opposite arm as he stroked his beard. I heard distant, tired breaths, shuffling soles, a moan of pain. My heart constricted in terror.

  Jovie shoved me forward so I could look inside the cell.

  Uncle Prosper stood on the other side of the rusted metal bars, blood splattered across his face and his gray-and-gold doublet.

  So this was the dawn of the new age of Arna: ruled by a king who would leave his sister’s wedding to make an innocent prisoner bleed.

  And bleed he did. When I saw Mercer’s face in the shadows, every last drop of hope was wrung out of me. He looked even worse off than when I had first found him. He slumped over on his knees, blood matting his sandy hair. His face was almost unrecognizable with cuts and bruises.

  “Mercer.” I gasped out his name and clung to the bars, my legs buckling beneath me. He had lied to me, but he was mine to punish how I saw fit, with belligerent arguing—not with violence and bloodshed.

  His swollen lips formed my name, silently at first before he managed to find his voice. “Valory has done nothing wrong,” he gasped, blinking up at Jovie. “The prophecy isn’t true. I lied to her, hoping she would work with me to kill Valmarys.”

  Prosper hesitated.

  “A pathetic lie,” Neswick said. “Carry on, my king. Just remember, Lord Valmarys wants him turned over alive.”

  Prosper turned to Neswick. “This monster set blights on my realm. He torched half the forest. Lord Valmarys will understand his king taking a share of the vengeance.”

  “I doubt he considers you his king,” I said to Prosper, my eyes fixed on Mercer’s face. “Nor are you mine.”

  Prosper clenched his fist, but instead of punishing me for my words, he dealt a kick to Mercer’s ribs that made him cry out and nearly collapse.

  “No!” I screamed, and every metal bar screeched as it bent until each empty cell in the musty corridor looked like a mouthful of jagged teeth.

  “I will kill you if you hurt him again,” I said, my vow broken up by heated breaths.

  “Summon Knox to neutralize her.” Prosper’s voice was even as he spoke to two guards, who hurried to do his bidding. My uncle barely looked a day older than Ander and was nearly as handsome, but his eyes were more distant than they’d ever been, their gray light muted like a snowy sky. I had always thought Tiernan cold for keeping ev
eryone at a distance, including his family. Now I understood that it was not apathy or indifference that made him aloof. It was wariness.

  “You are cleverer than I thought, feigning a return to your senses,” Ander said from behind me. “But you never lost them, did you? You knew what you were doing all along.”

  I turned to find him poised in the open doorway, his anger palpable. The air was fraught with it. His elicrin stone brightened and body armor slowly crystallized over his skin.

  I turned inward, digging for that pulse of power in my deepest parts.

  “I advocated for your welcome here even though you don’t belong anymore.” There was an easiness to Ander’s stride, a certitude of his own righteousness. His cruelty did not have a tinge of wicked glee as Melkior’s always had. He was like a dignified marble statue of an ancient warrior come to life—and the result was terrifying.

  Jovie seemed to find his disapproval of me most satisfying. She set loose a wicked smile that reflected her most cherished ambitions coming to fruition.

  Ander advanced until he loomed over me, faint torchlight glinting off the impenetrable crystal shell forming over his hands, arms, chest, and neck. “I wanted to believe you had not embraced your darker side,” he said. “But Father was right. Neswick and Jovie were right. You’re not a fool. You’re not a victim. You’re a traitor.”

  He struck me across the face with his hard fist. My nose cracked, pain burst from behind my eyelids, and a scream of rage rang through my aching ears—Mercer’s. My teeth seemed to rattle loose in my head. Blood pooled in my mouth as I fell to my side on the damp, cold floor. I tried to connect with the power inside me, but the pain was like a wall, as solid as the rock-hard coating on Ander’s skin.

  “I’m relieved you see now, Oleander,” Jovie said.

  “You know, you are very little like your father,” Neswick mused, traipsing into view, his belly lapsing over his belt. I thought he was speaking to Ander, but I blinked through the pain and found him looking down at me. Blood spilled onto my lips as I tried to move, to speak, to be anything but a helpless wretch floundering on the floor. I heard the clattering of Mercer straining at his chains.

  “Yes, I knew Leonar Braiosa,” Neswick said, answering my unspoken question. “He was one of the best mountaineers alive. I paid him to act as my guide and help me scale Mount Emlefir. I was searching for the artifact of lore that would raise Emlyn Valmarys. I suspected it lay hidden in the ruins of my Master’s court, but no one, not even among my devoted clansmen, knew exactly where his court lay.”

  My eyes fluttered closed. I could not abide such pain. Neswick’s every word was a chisel striking my temple.

  “Your father did not ask who I was, or what I searched. I don’t think he cared. Our Summoner legends said there were magical traps around the mountain tomb. Anyone who managed to enter it would go mad. Touching the contract would burn the flesh. Attempting to read the runes would blind the eye. I explained to your father the perils of the mission, but he was not dissuaded. He found a way inside. Yet his carelessness cost him: he emerged blind and babbling, his hands blistered with burns.”

  I recalled Grandmum’s explanation of my father’s encounter with Summoners before he died. Neswick wore a mask and withheld his true name but could not help sharing hints of his dogma. Coward. Blood leaked down the crease of my lip.

  “I accepted my mission as futile and followed Braiosa, hoping he would lead me back down the mountain to the safety of the nearest village. But lunacy made him erratic and hasty. I lost track of him and wandered for two days before I spotted smoke from a small fire against the dusk. There I found your father, his eyes lucid in the firelight.” Neswick’s laugh was dark as he peered off into an unknown distance. “He was roasting a rabbit on a spit with his hands neatly bandaged. He had fooled me, taking the artifact and leaving me to wander the wilderness. After so many centuries, with their makers long dead, the protective spells had faded. Your father was neither mad nor blind. He burned his own hands to make me think the legends were true. And from the pack beside him jutted an item that gleamed in the twilight. The resurrection text had lain in that cave, unguarded, for years.”

  I thought of Grandmum during our carriage ride to Pontaval, how her insistence on telling me nothing about the Summoners had led me to act out of ignorance and knock on Devorian’s door. She, like the elders of Darmeska before her, was tight-lipped and dutiful to a fault, hoping Evil would hold less power if its name went unspoken. She didn’t even know what creature the tablet summoned until she consulted Malyrra. Magic secrets of old had been guarded too closely—but left untended. The sea witch was right: our collective human memory was weak.

  “He had taken what belonged to me. So I attacked, inflicting severe wounds, but Braiosa managed to escape with the tablet. I earned these for my struggles.” Neswick pushed up the sleeves of his white doublet, revealing burn scars that spanned the lengths of his forearms and snaked around his elbows. “My Master would see what I had endured for his sake, that I continued to devote my life to his return after being thwarted time and time again. It is only fitting recompense that we sacrifice Leonar Braiosa’s daughter in the name of the immortal rule of the Lord of Elicromancers.”

  Neswick seemed gratified by the symmetry, which should have enraged me. The wounds he had inflicted had ultimately caused my father’s death. But his account brought me a strange sense of peace, for my father hadn’t faced his mortality stumbling along in aimless isolation. After laying eyes on the tablet, he must have known it was a thing that could only yield evil—and that Neswick would use it without restraint. My father had died for a cause, fighting in flames and glory to bring the tablet to Darmeska, where Grandmum and the other elders could guard it with elicromancers’ help.

  But elicromancers couldn’t always be trusted to keep dangerous secrets. Prosper had helped create the protections, or at least knew which ones had been used…and he had helped Neswick and the Summoners break them to steal the tablet.

  I refused to give Neswick the satisfaction of anger. “Ander,” I begged, though I could barely form the words. “I’m not the enemy. They are. Please…”

  “If you could have seen these two lying to the Realm Alliance,” Neswick huffed. “Master deceivers. Jessa Veloxen was under their thumbs and content to remain there.”

  Ander’s eyes slid from Mercer to me, from Jovie to Neswick, and finally, to his father, who gave him one sound nod that said, Finish this.

  “Heal her, Jovie,” Ander barked, despite his father’s encouragement. “I don’t want her to go like this.”

  “She’s a traitor.”

  “Yes, a traitor who deserves death—but a swift and painless one.”

  With a sigh of annoyance, Jovie complied. The hem of her pure white gown had picked up filth along the dungeon floor. It swept over my cheek as she leaned close to me, fading in and out of focus.

  Power surged from her elicrin stone. The pain gradually ebbed, and my nose cracked as it righted itself. My teeth wriggled firmly back into their sockets.

  I swung my gaze to Mercer, who dripped with sweat and blood. Fates, how handsome he was, even half wrecked by torture. His bright eyes begged me to save myself, whatever the cost, though all I wanted was to torture Jovie until she healed him too. My heart ached with such fierce anguish I knew I couldn’t contain it.

  The pain gone, my power and I connected, two fingertips touching on a cold, dry day, quarreling lovers’ hands meeting in reunion. There you are, I thought, and jerked my wrists to break them all.

  But their elicrin powers provided a shield, and I could feel my strength ram into it. Blights were one thing. Even with elicrin gifts, they were weaker, half alive, easy to break.

  Jovie’s arm snapped and she emitted a horrifying squeal as bone protruded through flesh. Shock passed over the others’ faces, which I savored, but it wasn’t enough. After a moment of agony, Jovie recalled that she could heal herself and did so, wincing, sobbing with panic as
bones, ligaments, and flesh rearranged.

  You can do better, I thought. Break them.

  I didn’t understand the flash of steel through the air, Prosper pinning Mercer’s hand to the wall, until my uncle’s dagger slammed down and severed the smallest finger of Mercer’s left hand, eliciting a cry of pain that hurt infinitely worse than the merciless blow to my face.

  “Attempt anything else with that perverse power of yours and he’ll lose more than fingers,” Prosper spat over my scream of horror. “Finish this, son.”

  Ander gripped me by the throat, cutting off my sob with his impossible strength. His gray eyes winced nearly imperceptibly. As I began starving for breath, I wondered if, for only a moment, he considered that he might have aligned himself with traitors instead of against them. But perhaps he’d already wandered too far down this path, clawed through too many tangled thorns to turn back.

  The panic set in, the ache of reaching, striving, laboring for air, the pain crushing my rib cage and the back of my throat. My fingernails slid along the crystal shell of armor that guarded Ander’s hands and fingers, finding no purchase. No doubt he viewed strangling as more merciful than beating me to a pulp, but it didn’t matter how he chose to do it. My own family had been poisoned against me and would not spare my life.

  An arrow zinged through the damp air with a metallic whiz as it crossed through the bent bars and embedded itself in Prosper’s shoulder. Neswick barely dodged a subsequent shot aimed at his chest. I recognized the green-and-black-barred fletching of Kadri’s new arrows. Hope coursed through my veins.

  Ander dropped me, leaving me rasping for air as I pressed myself against the wall to clear a path for Kadri’s arrows.

  Glisette aimed a spell at Prosper, but even while weakened by the blow Kadri had dealt, he was quick to call out, “Sokek sinna!” The spell made a glimmering shield billow out from his sun-bright elicrin stone. It stretched from wall to wall, embracing Neswick in its protection.