The Shadow Hour
Page 31
“And I threatened that safety,” Echo said. Just like I am now.
“Through no fault of your own.” A soft breeze danced across the rampart and Altair raised his face to it. His brown-and-white feathers gleamed in the sunlight, his bronze features sharp and still. He was every inch the noble general, the brave leader. “You cannot help being human any more than I can help being Avicen.” He turned his orange eyes to her. They burned with the ferocity of his emotion. “But I see now that the world is changing, whether or not I want it to. And though you are not one of us, not truly, our fates are intertwined.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Echo asked. “Why did you bring me up here?”
“To give you perspective,” replied Altair. “So you can see what it is that I see.”
Echo looked over the parapet, past the crumbling stone walls of the overgrown garden, past the reddening leaves and silvery bark of the maple tree arching over the courtyard. Below, the Warhawks prepared for war and the Avicelings played, louder and more energetic than she’d ever seen them, as though they could forget the catastrophe that had brought them to this island if only they moved fast enough.
“I brought you up here so that you could appreciate the weight of what I’m going to ask you,” said Altair. “You have magic of your own now, and a power that not even I fully comprehend. Use it well. Use it wisely.” He nodded his head in a sort of bow toward the Avicen below. “Use it for them. Shelter them as they sheltered you.”
The phrase that Echo had carried like a talisman when faced with the specter of her past in the temple came to her in that moment, stronger than ever.
I am a sword.
“I will,” Echo said, her words carrying the weight of a promise. “Till my dying breath. But you know I can’t stay. The kuçedra went to Grand Central looking for me, and I don’t want to bring it here, too. It’s bad enough I’ve been here at all.”
Altair nodded. “Yes, the kuçedra was following your…scent…in a way.” His lips tilted upward in a rueful smile that seemed at odds with his stern features. “Do you have such little regard for my abilities as a strategist that you assume such a thing hasn’t occurred to me?”
Echo bit her tongue. To say yes would be an insult. To deny it would be a lie.
Altair gestured at the perimeter of the island. “The wards protecting this island are the most powerful our mages could design. The inhabitants of Avalon are undetectable by magical surveillance. That includes the kuçedra, as far as we understand its abilities.”
“But that’s the thing,” Echo said. “We don’t understand its abilities. Everything we know is pulled from myths, legends.”
There was no way to keep the island safe, not with her on it. The power of the firebird flowed through her veins, making her shine like a beacon in the night. Her blood was potent.
Her blood. Her freaking blood. Echo knew a thing or two about wards designed to keep enemies out. And if the firebird was as powerful as the prophecies said, then how powerful would its blood be? By my blood, Echo thought, remembering the words she had spoken so many times to pass through the shield that had protected her own home. Her blood had opened the door for the firebird to enter this world; maybe she could use it to keep the kuçedra out of the Avicen sanctuary if it was incorporated into the island’s existing shield.
Echo grabbed Altair’s arm. He frowned, surprised by the touch. “I have an idea,” she said. “It’s nuts, but it just might work.”
CHAPTER FIFTY
Now that her mission was complete, Ivy was left feeling suddenly useless. She gave the healers in the infirmary the text she’d stolen from Caius’s study and spent the rest of the afternoon hiding from the watchful gazes of the other Avicen. She was a rarity: a pure-blooded Avicen who had broken bread with the enemy, who had brushed shoulders with creatures of legend and lived to tell the tale. The few times someone managed to corner her, she had been peppered with questions she had no desire to answer. Even Altair wanted to question her, and barring that, he wanted to put her to work, training other healers and putting their supplies in order. Right now Ivy wanted to be selfish with her time. Just for a little while.
She rounded a corner just in time to see Dorian and Jasper slip into one of the bedrooms in the east wing. She had heard of Quinn’s treachery and of his past with Jasper. She guessed that combination of factors was the kick in the pants Dorian needed to get his act together.
About time, she thought.
Everyone was still having their own adventures. Ivy had had one of her own and it had left her feeling high, as if her blood had been transformed into pure adrenaline. The thrill of being useful in a way that was completely within her control was intoxicating, but it had faded quickly as people scattered, drawn away by their own tasks and worries, drifting out of Ivy’s orbit. Her usefulness had been depleted.
And that was how she’d wound up here, holding a stale pastry in a folded napkin, standing in front of a closed door as one of Sage’s former Warhawks gave her a curious but blessedly silent glance.
There was only one person who hadn’t looked at her like he needed her for anything. His usefulness had also run out, and he had been shown to this room, put away like a toy soldier in a cupboard, waiting until someone needed him again, when he would be taken out and dusted off and wound up once more.
Ivy knocked. After a few seconds of fumbling and muffled curses, the door swung open, revealing a tousled Helios, his ink-black bangs falling artlessly across his forehead, his honey-colored eyes alight and alert. When he looked at her, he blinked several times, as if he hadn’t been expecting her.
He didn’t say anything right away, and Ivy wanted to slink into a dark corner and die. She felt suffocated by shame. She could make up an excuse. She could say she had only stopped by to check on him and had to attend to Very Important Business somewhere far, far away. But then he smiled, and it lit up his whole face, as if her presence had flipped a switch inside him. He looked down at the pastry in her hands and laughed, a low rumble that made warmth spread through Ivy’s stomach.
“Returning the favor?” he asked, smile continuing to radiate sunshine.
Ivy shrugged. She could be cool. Totally cool. Cool as a cucumber. “I thought you could use a snack.”
Helios laughed once more and threw open the door. With a courtly bow, he stepped aside, gesturing her into the room, and said, “M’lady.”
The broad-shouldered Avicen guarding the door put a hand on Ivy’s arm to prevent her from entering. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
Ivy didn’t know the guard. Not really, anyway. She had seen him in the square at the Nest when the Warhawks did their drills, but he was a stranger to her. More so than Helios. A few months ago, the fact that he was Avicen and Helios was not would have been enough to make her heed his warning, but if she had learned anything since the night she’d patched up a half-dead Dorian, it was that their old allegiances were not divinely ordained. They were arbitrary rules, designed to divide.
When Ivy tried to tug her arm from the guard’s grasp, he said, “We don’t know if we can trust him.”
Her gaze cut to Helios. His expression held the beginnings of disappointment, and his hand tightened on the doorknob. He was expecting her to agree with the guard, to cast doubt on his character.
Ivy wrenched her arm free and slipped on her best scowl. “You may not trust him,” she said, “but I do.”
She was rewarded with another sunshine-bright smile from Helios.
As soon as she entered the room and the door closed behind her, her nerves returned. She felt shy, like a wallflower on her first date. Heat suffused her cheeks. “Is it okay if I stay?”
Helios took the pastry from her and set it on a small table by the bed. He broke the little cake in half and offered her the bigger piece. Against all odds, his smile widened. “I’d be honored if you would.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Caius had never known darkness like this.
Over the years, Caius had grown accustomed to all manner of darkness. There was the darkness of the in-between, something he learned to wield during early adolescence; both he and his sister had come into their own unique abilities at the same time. He remembered Tanith running through the halls of Wyvern’s Keep, blond curls streaming behind her as her childish laughter ricocheted off the dark stone walls, fires bursting to life in previously cold sconces in her wake. During those precarious first few months when their powers manifested themselves, their guardians—a collection of tutors and advisors after their parents’ deaths—had ordered all flammable items removed from Tanith’s bedroom. She had a habit of igniting her surroundings in her sleep. For months, she slept on the cold stone floor, surrounded by her one indulgence: a blanket, for even if that burned, her flames never hurt her.
Caius’s early days of manipulating the in-between were equally fraught. As a child, he used to sleepwalk; once he came into his power, his sleepwalking turned into something far more dangerous. He’d fall asleep in his own bed only to awake elsewhere in the keep with no recollection of having gotten there. He’d tried everything: securing himself to his bed with steel chains, downing draughts brewed to inspire dreamless slumbers, wearing herb-infused charms concocted by the court’s most senior mages to inhibit magical abilities. None of it worked. Caius’s relationship to the in-between was too strong, they said. He, like Tanith, would simply have to master his newfound power through sheer force of will.
Centuries of bending the in-between to his will had made him confident. Arrogant, even. He thought he’d known darkness, but this…this was beyond his control. He was a prisoner to this darkness, ensnared in its inky blackness.
A slight pressure, like the caress of a ghostly hand, trailed over his forehead, brushing away the hair that had fallen across his brow.
It’s time to wake up, Caius.
A voice was summoning him. It was familiar, and should have been comforting, but there was a strain sewn through it that was wrong, all wrong.
Brother. Wake up.
Tanith. It was Tanith’s voice, but it was not. The words themselves were calm, but Caius could not help but feel that she, too, was ensnared by some wild power beyond her control.
And that was when he remembered.
The island.
The bodies of her Firedrakes, slain by her hand.
The kuçedra, its shadows coursing through her veins like blood, bleeding into the crimson of her irises.
The in-between rushing at him, called by his power but not by him.
His eyes flew open, and as suddenly as he had fallen into the darkness, he broke free of it. A surge of recognition flitted through him. He was in his own bed, in which he hadn’t slept in months, in his own bedroom in Wyvern’s Keep. Light seared his vision, and he squeezed his eyes shut once more.
“So sorry about that, dear brother,” came Tanith’s voice, thick and distant through the haze of pain in his skull. “You know how I forget myself sometimes.”
But Tanith never forgot herself. She prided herself on meticulous control of her abilities. Caius wondered if she clung to the uncertainty and fear of those early months of learning to handle her power, if she used those memories as motivation to never let her control slip again. Again, he noted the undercurrent of something in her voice—something other, something not Tanith.
The reddish glow he could see even through closed lids dimmed. Cautiously, he cracked one eye open, then the other. Tanith perched on the side of his bed, her golden armor pristine, not a single blond hair out of place. The blood had been cleaned off her hands. But her eyes…
Some emotion must have flitted across his face—shock, betrayal, disgust, for he felt them all, simmering just beneath the surface—because Tanith raised a hand to her right eye, a sheepish grin tugging at her lips.
“Ghastly, isn’t it?” she asked.
Caius wasn’t sure “ghastly” quite covered it. The capillaries in her eyes had gone black. Darkness bled into her crimson irises, as if threatening to conquer them.
“Power,” Tanith continued, “doesn’t come without a price. But if the price I have to pay is my vanity, then I think I got the better end of the deal, don’t you agree?”
Caius tried to sit up, but pain lanced through his body and he fell back against the pillows. There were more on the bed than he remembered. Tanith reached behind him to fluff one, and the sleeve of her tunic slipped back. Bile rose in Caius’s throat at the sight before him. The protruding veins in her arm were as black as coal, a stark contrast to the paleness of her flesh.
He reached out to touch her, but as soon as his fingers grazed her skin, she recoiled as if his touch burned. She yanked her sleeve down in a show of self-consciousness the likes of which Caius hadn’t seen from her in decades.
“Tanith?” His voice was a hoarse whisper, his throat parched and sore. He closed his eyes again and all he could see was the grotesque tableau that had greeted him on the island: the blood-drenched grass, the lifeless bodies of the Firedrakes Tanith had slain, the darkness crawling along her skin like a disease. He opened his eyes and met his sister’s gaze, disturbing as it was. “What have you done?”
“What you drove me to.”
Her words cut through him as surely as steel. “What I— Tanith, I don’t—”
She held up a hand to silence him, and for once, he complied. Any other day, he would have gleefully argued with his sister, but now he wasn’t certain that the person sitting beside him was his sister. Not entirely.
“We could have worked together,” said Tanith, pushing a lock of hair behind one ear. The veins on the back of her left hand were beginning to blacken. “When you found the firebird, we could have mended what was broken between us. We could have used it for a greater good, but you took it for yourself.” She shook her head in short, sharp twitches. It was as if she was talking to herself, not to him. “Perhaps you were punishing me. For my arrogance. For my lack of faith in you. For the sins I’ve committed against my own blood.” Her hand snaked out to clasp his. When he tried to pull away, her fingers dug into the bones of his wrist with a strength he knew she hadn’t possessed before. “But I found another way, you see, and it’s all thanks to you. Your research led me here.” She gestured with her free hand to her eyes, to the blackened veins trailing down her arms. “The firebird is not the only cosmic force in this world that can be harnessed.”
Caius pushed himself up, ignoring the pain in his aching limbs, deaf to the screams of his tortured muscles—gods, what had his sister done to him? “Listen to me, Tanith, you don’t understand what you’re dealing with. The kuçedra cannot be controlled. Not by you, not by anyone.”
Tanith’s laugh cut through the air like shards of broken glass. It was like nothing Caius had ever heard before. If remnants of his sister were trapped somewhere inside this monstrosity, she was losing the fight. He could hear it in the jagged edge in her voice; he could see it in the darkness coursing its way through her blood, propelled by a force too chaotic to be contained.
“And that’s where you’re wrong, Caius.” She held up a hand and blew into her cupped palm. It was a gesture he’d seen her make a thousand times before, but now, instead of flames bursting to life in the cradle of her palm, shadows, thick and viscous, writhed there as if they had a life of their own. At first he thought it was the same substance that gave form to the kuçedra, but then he felt it. A tugging, deep at the core of his being. His energy plummeted, shrinking as the mass of shadows in Tanith’s hand grew. She was drawing
on his power, his energy. The aches and pains in his body surged with a ferocity so stunning it stole his breath.
“This is what the kuçedra is. This is what it does,” Tanith said, twirling her hand in the air. The shadows danced around it, chasing each other like a school of fish. Caius felt himself deflating as she continued to draw on his power. “It takes and takes and takes.”
She flicked her fingers and the cloud of shadows vanished. It was a wasteful expenditure of magic, but Tanith showed no signs of having exerted herself. And why should she? None of the magic was hers. Air rushed back into Caius’s lungs, but that sweet relief was short-lived, as pain settled deep into his bones, plaguing every muscle fiber, every beat of his heart with a fresh wave. Magic never came without a price, and it seemed that he was to be the one paying it for Tanith.
Speaking was an exercise in agony. “How?”
Tanith leaned over him, brushing the hair off his forehead. He would have shrunk from her touch had the muscles in his neck and shoulders felt like cooperating. “You are my blood, Caius. We are connected, you and I. We always have been and always will be. What is yours is mine,” she said, summoning another small cloud of shadows in her free hand, draining more energy from Caius, “now that I have the power to take it.”
She stood and turned away in a swirl of crimson. Her cloak dragged across the stone floor as she made her way to the door. The lock, Caius noticed, had been altered so that it could only be opened from the outside. While Tanith’s back was to him, he cast a surreptitious glance at the windows. Through a crack between the heavy green drapes, he saw that they’d been bricked up. It had been hastily done, and pinpricks of light showed at the seams. But even a rush job would be difficult to overcome in his current state. Difficult, he knew, but not impossible.