The Price of Survival

by Meagan Hurst

  The Islierre stood at long last and approached her with all the grace his race was born with, but each step was infused with anger. He grabbed her shoulders, and she fought to keep from reacting to the contact and the threatening power he gave off.

  “I brought you here,” he said softly, almost threateningly. “There is a possibility I could keep your subconscious here. I do not know for how long, and I do not know if your death would destroy you if I shielded you and kept you unaware of your demise.” He studied her. “Or,” he said quietly. “I could summon the Shade—a Shade—and have them change you.”

  “They cannot.”

  “They can. They simply have not because the Dragon did everything including forbidding it. You could have performed the change, but you threw your magic away to save my son—”

  “He is worth every bit of it,” she whispered. “Islierre, you doubt him, but he is stronger than you know. He will be worthy of his people and you when the time comes.”

  “Perhaps, but you are worth more, and you just gained your immortality!”

  She could feel herself fading quickly. “You cannot hold me,” she told him honestly. “And I cannot hold on much longer. The Mithane has taxed his abilities to their limit, and he still cannot detach the arrows. Without them I stand a chance, but as long as they are within me I have none.”

  “Then I will go and remove them.” Before she could tell him it was impossible, the Islierre vanished. The shadowland shifted dangerously as he left—a sign of how furious he was—but his control and hold were solid; nothing else happened.

  She took the time to settle into a chair, putting her head in her hands and her hands in her lap. She felt tired, and it took everything she had to keep from falling unconscious to the floor. And she wasn’t even entirely present. Instead she forced herself to stand, to walk the lines the tiles formed beneath her feet as she waited. She remembered the first time she had entered the halls of the Islierre’s castle at Shalion’s side. She recalled the anger she had seen burning in the young immortal’s eyes at the sight of his father.

  He hadn’t been willing to risk her meeting the Islierre alone; he’d openly told her he presumed his father would slay her the second he realized she was mortal. But he had taken her into the heart of Jaserik, and deep into the realm of its court. Shalion had brought her before his father and solemnly sworn before the Court that he would personally attack anyone foolish enough to challenge her, or harm her in any way. It hadn’t been the most thought out or impressive speech in her mind, but she found the Ryelentions to be spellbound by their Islierri’s words. Prior to that event, Shalion had allegedly never confronted or challenged anyone. He was the silent heir, an heir many had presumed when she had met him to be without power. The only thing they had been willing to acknowledge was his fighting skills.

  The memory brought a smile, but the smile faded quickly. Shalion and the Islierre’s relationship made hers and Midestol’s look like a normal family’s. She didn’t know everything that had happened between them, but she knew enough. She also knew there was very little chance the relationship would mend before the death of the Islierre or the Islierri. It was times like this she wished immortals were not quite so adept at holding grudges. She didn’t blame Shalion for his anger, but she did blame him for letting his anger keep him from speaking with his father about necessary things. Like his desire to make Azabell his Islierriera. Speaking of which, she had to speak with the Islierre about Azabell, and she had to do it before she died.

  Right as she thought about it, she felt the arrow closest to her heart leave her flesh with a jerk. Not even the shadowland protected her from the sensation, and despite the lack of pain, her body registered it as a fatal injury. She found herself on the ground before she could even try to stay standing. The second arrow followed soon after, and Z let out a cry of fear as she struggled to stay alive both in the shadowland and her world. Her vision went grey briefly, and she fought for every second of breath and consciousness as she forced herself to stand again.

  “Islierre,” she whispered brokenly as she gave up trying to keep her balance.

  Sinking to her knees, she closed her eyes in agony from the magic that was overwhelming her system as the protection the shadowland had offered her vanished completely. It was events like this that made her not happy to have her sensitivity to magic—those senses were going insane, and because of it her ability to ignore her wounds had collapsed. Worse, her body was too aware of her condition to allow her to fight or ignore it. Dampness suddenly touched her shoulder and close to her heart, and Z glanced down weakly to see two growing stains of red on her clothes.

  “Zimliya!”

  The Islierre was abruptly beside her, and his arms caught her around the waist. It was a testament to how weak she was that she didn’t lash out at him when he tried to bring her to her feet.

  “He’s working on it, but you have to give him time. Fight,” he ordered her coldly. “Do not choose now to give into the fatality you always managed to ignore before. You never acknowledged your human weaknesses when you were a mortal.”

  “Believe me when I say I am fighting,” she whispered as her eyes closed. “But since you are here, I need to speak with you about Azabell.” She felt his recoil from the name and struggled to speak before he could. “She is not—she is nothing—like the rest of her family. I did my research, Islierre, and I even consulted my seeing talent, and the Mithane’s. She is not a danger to your kingdom. She may very well be everything you could have ever dreamed of getting from an Islierriera—” she struggled to say more, but she found her ability to speak had expired. She was too close to death, too weak, and it took everything she had to buy the Mithane more time. She couldn’t afford to die, not yet.

  And the Islierre’s anger vanished when he realized she couldn’t fight any longer. “Steady,” he said gently as he lifted her. “You’re not helping yourself. Try to stay with me, but don’t talk. I will consider Azabell. I am unhappy with my son’s interest in her, but given how he is, it shouldn’t come as a surprise. I was hopeful he would show more interest in you—especially with the gossip and his jesting displays of affection—but what is done is done. If you say Azabell is worth considering, then I will evaluate her carefully.”

  He carried her back over towards his throne. “Just stay with me a little longer, Zimliya,” he requested, or ordered—it certainly sounded more like an order. “The Mithane is working as fast as he is able, now that the arrows are gone, but it will take some time. Shalion asked me to personally tell you that if you die, he is never going to forgive you and everything Nivaradros did to protect and aid you is rendered ineffective.

  “Stay with me,” he repeated as her eyes began to grow heavy. “Just this one time. We’re doing everything we can to help you, but you have to award us something to work with. I know you’re wounded, I know you should already have passed, but you haven’t, and even the Shade is lending what aid he can. I know what I’m asking of you, but, just try, just a little longer.”

  And that alone was a surprise. Z almost wished she could capture this event. If the Islierre, the Mithane, Crilyne, Shalion, and Dyiavea were all working together without her threatening them, she was certain it was a record. Even that, however, wasn’t enough, and despite all of her efforts, Z found herself slipping away even faster. The water—her life—was slipping through her fingers too fast to catch, and too quickly to slow.

  She was dimly aware of the Mithane’s magic, but it wasn’t undoing the damage quickly enough to save her. Struggling to return from the shadowland so she could attempt to tell him to stop—to save his energy for something more worthwhile—she found the Islierre thwarted her attempt. He clearly feared that letting her go meant surrendering her to her death, and she realized then just how much he didn’t want her death.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered to him, or to everyone; she wasn’t sure. Surrendering into what she felt was inevitable, she heard the Islierre’s frantic deman
ds, but couldn’t manage to grasp the words before everything abruptly ended.

  Shalion

  Waiting for word was impossible. With over seven centuries behind him, Shalion knew he should have been better at this, but it was hard to accept nothing in the face of a possible disaster. He idly pulled at the bandages that surrounded his chest in an attempt to distract his thoughts from the depressing path they were heading down. He had decided against wearing a shirt since he was wrapped from hips to shoulders in a thick padding of bandages; clothing just felt awkward over it.

  It was like wearing armor for the first time, except there wasn’t any weight to it and it wouldn’t stop a weapon of any kind. Or at least any weapon that could truly harm him. It also slightly impaired some of his movements, but that was a minor irritation considering the alternative. It was a shield against one lone danger; the danger of bleeding out. Zimliya had managed to somehow sever the shaft of the arrow that had pierced his chest in half, but she hadn’t been able to do much more than a basic healing. Her aid had allowed him to flee before the Dralations had arrived to finish him off, as they had done to any surviving Ryelentions of their group.

  The magic residue and the poison had been wiped clean by her aid, but the wound itself had already been the size of a grapefruit when he’d escaped the arrow. It had been slowly fighting to close when Zimliya’s magic had either run out, been called back, or no longer had had the focus of a living mage driving it. He’d feared it was the last, but he had been unable to return to her immediately.

  By the time he had managed to regain enough strength to return, Dyiavea had been at Zimliya’s side and he had discovered that while Zimliya was still alive, it was far too close to truly count her among the living. Also, he could do nothing to aid her, and that left him feeling inferior and frustrated. The arrows—and she had been hit not once, but twice—had done so much damage by the time he had reached her that any aid he could have offered had been futile.

  Dyiavea had been so beside herself with the guilt that her father had been the one behind the attack that she had barely been able to explain what she knew about those arrows. Unfortunately, what she had said hadn’t been beneficial, and she hadn’t known how to remove them without killing Zimliya.

  Luck, as humans termed it, had sort of been on their side. The Mithane had come in haste, but Zimliya had already turned white from blood loss, and Shalion knew her words weren’t spoken entirely with knowledge. The bigger sign of trouble was the fact she didn’t even openly acknowledge the Mithane’s presence, and she hadn’t struggled against his aid. She had had nothing left to offer them, nothing but the somewhat unsteady rise and fall of her chest to indicate that yes, she was still breathing.

  Her heart rate had bounced between rapid and skipping beats, and none of them had known how to counter that. Worse, the Mithane wanted him to fetch his father of all people; Shalion couldn’t honestly say he trusted his father with Zimliya’s life. He’d balked at the request, but his refusal hadn’t prevented his fear from coming true. The Shade he despised, Crilyne, had approached with the Islierre on his heels.

  He’d been unable to stop his father from taking Zimliya’s subconscious into his shadowland, and powerless to keep her safe from the possible treachery his father was capable of. He had promised the Dragon he would keep her safe, promised Nivaradros he would protect her to the best of his abilities, but the first time that oath had been tested he had failed. She had ended up in the hands of his father, and Shalion knew all too well how dangerous the Islierre was.

  He’d been forced to remain behind to watch as the Mithane struggled to heal a wound that was growing an eighth of an inch per second, and they hadn’t been able to detach Zimliya from the arrows. It had been a losing battle; Zimliya had grown weaker as he watched. Eyes closed, skin pale enough to make her look past the lands of the living already, she’d looked anything but peaceful, and he had felt the weight of his failure profoundly. Blood had steadily trickled from the right corner of her mouth, and while it hadn’t been a large amount, he knew what it portrayed and predicted in humans.

  Yet she had held on. The minutes fell into over an hour, and Zimliya continued to breathe. The Mithane continued losing his battle with her wounds, but Zimliya did not succumb to them. Instead they’d all gotten to watched in horror as the magic and poison that had been attached to the arrows ate away bigger portions of her skin, as she’d shed more blood—more life—on the ground. Her lightning, shockingly, had emerged and started to condense around the hole closest to her heart, but even that seemed to do little to aid her. And then his father had returned. Shalion recalled being torn between relief and alarm as his father had reached out to grab the arrows. Using shadow in a dangerous manner, the Islierre had slowly burned through—or somehow destroyed—the metal shafts of both arrows until they could finally move Zimliya away from them, off of them.

  It should have solved everything, but it had solved nothing. Zimliya only seemed to grow weaker as the Mithane’s power finally began to make progress on her wounds. Shalion had angrily forced his way to one side of her, but he couldn’t aid her or the Mithane. Stranger still, the Mithane’s magic was slowly healing the injuries, but that only seemed to weaken her.

  He had been in the middle of pointing this out when a backlash of power struck them. The Mithane abruptly collapsed, Z stopped breathing the minute her heart stopped beating, and the injuries he had sustained earlier were aggravated by the backlash. When he had managed to get to his feet, he found Crilyne hadn’t been a victim of the backlash and was already touching Zimliya’s head.

  “Don’t you dare turn her into a Shade!” he’d snarled at the undead immortal.

  “I am not attempting that just yet, never fear,” Crilyne had answered gravely, but Shalion saw a touch of magic enter Zimliya’s chest—the fact it was visible had been alarming—and a moment later Zimliya jerked as if in pain, before she’d started breathing once more. “Let us tend to the Mithane, and to you, Shalion—there is little more we can do for her right now. She will live for now.”

  That had been seven days ago. The only positive thing to have come since that time was that Zimliya hadn’t perished again. The Mithane was still unconscious and under the protection of his people. No one was certain he would recover from whatever had struck him. Without the Mithane or Zimliya, their forces were in disarray; no one could decide how to proceed. Somehow the lack of a solid command hadn’t gotten them all killed.

  Shalion wasn’t a fool though. Midestol had pulled his forces overnight the day Zimliya had gotten attacked, and that was the sole reason they hadn’t lost. No one knew where those forces had gone, but they were not within the Syallibion lands, and none of the kingdoms that were still talking to Zyrhis had seen them either. It was a small blessing—and one they had desperately needed—but Shalion was suspicious over the event. What had caused Midestol to just up and leave a war he could have won with Zimliya’s injuries? He also wondered what the Dark Mage’s move would cost them in the future.

  “Islierri?”

  He blinked before nodding politely to the Alantaion guard who stood before him suddenly. The man regarded him with both annoyance and compassion, which implied he’d missed his name at least once. The man’s presence here was instantly alarming, though, and Shalion’s thoughts immediately skipped to the worst possible news.

  “The Mithane—” he began apprehensively.

  “Is awake and wishes to speak with you,” the Alantaion remarked in a neutral tone. “He is,” the man added as his voice grew an edge, “extremely weak. I would advise you to keep your temper to a minimum.”

  As he wasn’t angry, Shalion found the order confusing, but decided not to comment. He followed his escort back to the Mithane’s tent and was met with a sight he hadn’t expected. There was a swarm of guards before him, and Shalion was slightly intimidated to be this outnumbered by Alantaions without Zimliya within the vicinity. With the war officially on hold, the Alantaions had evide
ntly decided to guard their ruler impressively well—he considered it bordering on a level of paranoia. Then again, as the Mithane was currently exiled from his own kingdom, his weakened state could make him a target of some of his own people.

  “You have permission to enter,” one of the five guards at the flap told him coldly. “You have an hour.” Two of them stepped aside, and Shalion slipped into the tent cautiously. He trusted Shevieck, and he liked the Mithane, but he didn’t trust or like any of the other Alantaions at all. Now he was surrounded by them.

  The tent was surprisingly shadowed given the height of the sun, the color and weight of the fabric, and the lighting inside the temporary domicile. The Mithane, however, was waiting for him, so Shalion took little note of the furniture and arrangement of the floor space. Calm brown eyes met and held his before the Mithane inclined his head slightly to indicate a chair beside the bed someone had hastily found after the Mithane’s collapse. The Alantaion looked old and ill. His movements also lacked some of the grace Shalion was used to seeing, but he didn’t doubt the Mithane could still defend himself if needed.

  “Mithane,” he greeted politely as he took the seat the immortal gestured to.

  “Shalion,” the Mithane replied evenly. “How fares Zimliya?”

  Surprised, his eyes narrowed briefly. “They aren’t telling you anything?”

  “I believe they are under the impression keeping me in the dark will prevent me from tending to her,” the Mithane observed with a grimace. “It is not entirely accurate; I am simply too exhausted to move.” His eyes darkened to mostly black. “Does she still live?”

  Closing his eyes, Shalion sighed. “We believe so,” he said quietly. “Crilyne has all but attacked anyone who has ventured close to his tent. He’s not tolerating visitors. I wish I had more information, but he hasn’t told us anything regarding her condition. There is enough magic surrounding the area that I am convinced she is alive, but due to the power he’s using I am going to—again, this is a guess—say she will not remain alive for long.”