“Stop!” I yelled.
I stood on shaking legs and ran to the nearest deadman. I yanked his arm, trying to make him stop moving toward the battlefield. It came right off with a crack of winters-old brittle bone. The deadman ignored me. The reanimated bodies bumped me as they passed. I was not even worth attacking any more. I had sold my humanity for this. I might as well be one of them now.
I had to stop this.
I thrashed the nearest deadman with my pitchfork. He turned on me, swiping me with the back of a burly hand. I stumbled and fell. The deadman didn’t bother to finish me.
Desperately I ran down the hill. Halfway down, I slipped on slick grass and tumbled the rest of the way. I had slipped on blood.
There was blood on my hands.
“He will bring the darkness,” the seer had said.
Those were the seer’s words, the words that had haunted me since that crazy woman had tried to kill me as a child. Those were the words that had spurred Safford’s hunt for my head. Those were the words I had tried so hard to prove wrong. I had just fulfilled the seer’s prophecy. My current circumstances exactly mirrored the vision I had shared with her so long ago.
I really was the Prince of Death.
Hopelessness overwhelmed me. All around me, people were dying, and more monsters were rising to take their place. I had caused all of this chaos, all of this loss and sorrow. It was all my fault.
Sobbing, I struggled to right myself. The deadmen continued to mill past me. I was invisible to them. I was nothing to them.
The handle of my pitchfork was slick with blood. Desperately, I stabbed at the nearest deadman. It had once been a woman. She gazed right through me and walked on.
I would not be ignored.
“I SAID STOP!” I slammed my pitchfork against the ground. A wave of sys pulsed from the point of contact outward. One by one, the deadmen turned to face me in a great rippling of movement. The fighting ceased. Banash collapsed with a groan of exhaustion. Parts of her now-full suit of armor dissolved into small spheres of light, which shot off in every direction. One moved toward Shryonn, another toward Rath, still up on the hill watching over Mel’s body.
“You will obey me,” I said.
The deadmen waited for my command. I felt their curiosity pricking my skin. I felt their restlessness. They were like a thousand disgruntled children told to come in out of the rain.
Yet they listened. The mist no longer spewed from their mouths. I imagined all of the desperate souls trapped inside them, begging to be set free.
I tried to remember the melody Banash had once played, the one that made the deadmen fall, empty and quiet. The melody became a tangible thing, like a thousand threads wound in the air before me. I gathered as many of them as I could in my mind.
“Be free,” I said and yanked the threads.
With bone-chilling sighs of relief, the deadmen collapsed. Empty bodies hit the ground and lay still — as still as Mel now lay at the crest of the hill.
I stood alone in a sea of bodies.
“The Heir has risen!”
I was startled by the sound of cheers. The soldiers who remained took up the chant. “The Heir has risen!” was repeated again and again with the steadiness of a beating drum. Both armies, Safford’s and Shyronn’s, chanted together, hysterical with relief.
Why were they cheering for me? Didn’t they know that this was all my fault? Their brothers and sisters had died in a bloodbath because of me.
But how could they know that? They didn’t know of the Voices. They didn’t know that my mother was the Deadman Queen. They had only seen me save them. They cheered for me. They pounded their weapons against their shields. They embraced each other. The noise sounded like the beating of a heart.
Somewhere in this sea of bodies lay Zarra. I had used her body as a weapon. At the crest of the hill lay Mel, whose final words the Voices had taken with them. I would never know what she had been thinking when she touched me, knowing that she would die from the contact.
It was all too much.
I didn’t want to be praised. I wanted to be cursed and stoned. I wanted to disappear. I dropped my pitchfork and ran. I fled into the woods in a desperate attempt to escape myself.
I ran so hard my lungs hurt. I stopped feeling the ground beneath me. I just had to keep going. If I stopped for a moment, it would all catch up to me. All the screams, all the terror, all the death. All my fault.
Keep running, keep moving. I tripped and tore the skin on my hands against the rough bark of a tree. I struggled to my feet. Keep moving, keep moving. I couldn’t breathe. Still, I stumbled blindly through the trees. I imagined the whole force of the world chasing me down.
I had lived in such comfort knowing that I was the innocent victim in all of my circumstances. No longer.
My vision was so blurred with my tears that I didn’t notice the cliff until I was stumbling over it, staring down at the sharp rocks and crashing waves below me.
I felt no fear as I fell forward. I welcomed the idea of an ending.
But I wouldn’t have my way, even in this. I felt a familiar burn on my hand, and I stopped midair, suspended above the rocks.
“Gotcha!” Rath gasped, straining to keep me in the air.
“Just let me go,” I moaned. My heart leapt at seeing him, my dear friend and comrade, and then plummeted when I realized he was neither of those. He was my slave, sealed to me by my father’s wish. He wasn’t here because he wanted to be, but because he had absolutely no choice.
Maybe it would all be better if I just let myself die. Then I could watch from the shadows with no fear of being hunted. No one would ever see me. I would be a wonderful masterpiece of nothingness. That sounded so inviting. The only thing standing between me and my new dream of death was Rath.
“Not a chance,” Rath hissed, “I did not spend,” he wheezed, “all those winters” — gasp — “keeping you alive—” the word “alive’” came out mangled from the effort it took for him to keep hold of me. “For you to die a death as pathetic as this!”
“Let me go!” I insisted, struggling.
But Rath had the magic of the armor on his side. He hauled us both onto flat land and dumped me on the ground. I lay where I landed, staring up at the trees overhead.
I simply could not believe that the sky was blue and that the sun was shining beyond those leaves. Noticing the beauty of nature only made me feel more broken and out of place. In the natural order of the world, where did I belong? I was the thing that should not be, the abomination of all that was beautiful and good. I was the Prince of Death.
“You followed me,” I said dully. I knew he expected me to speak, but that was all I could manage.
“I didn’t need to,” Rath said. “I knew you would do something stupid soon enough.” He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “We even placed bets to see how quickly you would need me.”
He took a deep breath, still overcome with the effort it had taken to impede my death. He flexed his hand. I could see that the skin was an ugly, angry red where he had touched me.
“Shyronn owes me twenty marks,” he said.
I knew he was trying to make me laugh, trying to make everything I had just done seem smaller, but the absolute hugeness of it all choked the joy out of me. His joke only managed to annoy me and remind me what a complete waste of humanity I was. I leapt to my feet and ran at the cliff with all my energy. I wanted to feel like I could fly, for just a brief moment, and then I wanted it to be over.
“Oh no you don’t.” Rath grabbed me by the collar, pulled me away from the cliff, and used his magic to shove me back to the ground.
I lay soaking in my own self-loathing.
“People died because of me,” I moaned.
Rath didn’t respond. He silently hovered nearby, waiting for me to talk.
“I can’t keep doing this, Rath,” I said. “Everything I do is wrong. I try to help, and people die. I try to protect people, and they get hurt. I tr
ied to save Mel, and she just died anyway. Because of me. I’m just so … so tired.”
“So am I,” Rath said.
I propped myself up on my elbows to get a better look at him.
He met my gaze with his own. There was a fire burning in his eyes. “I see what you’ve become, and it makes me sick,” he said. His words dripped with disgust that alarmed me.
I jumped to my feet. “You didn’t have to save me.”
“Yes, I did.”
Maybe if I growled slow enough, Rath would finally understand. “I want you to let me die.”
“I can’t,” Rath said, “and I won’t.”
“I will fight you,” I warned him.
“You will lose,” he said.
I shouted an anguished battle cry and ran at him. But who was I fooling? Rath simply pointed his open palm at me and blew me off my feet.
I would not be stopped so easily. Rath would not rob me of this freedom. I had lost control of everything else in my life. I would not lose the right to die.
I dove at Rath with my bare hands. He wasn’t expecting this. We wrestled on the ground like little boys. Rath’s one leg worked in his favor, making it easier for him to wiggle out from under me. This wrestling match hurt a lot more than any I had engaged in with my brothers or my childhood friends. Every time our skin touched, it hurt. But the pain kept me going. We threw punches and smacked at each other, all the time muttering insults under our breath.
“You pompous jerk, always controlling everything I do!” I shouted, my face contorted by his hand.
“You self-righteous, ungrateful worm!” Rath shot back. “I worked so hard to keep you—” he grunted as I swung a punch that just barely grazed his forehead, “safe!”
“I never wanted any of this!” I whined, twisting my torso to get a better shot at his smug, stupid face.
Rath kneed me in the stomach. “You are so much like your father!” Then he opened his palms and shoved me off of him with his magic.
I landed in a heap on the ground. Still seething, I demanded, “What does that mean?!”
Rath panted and glared at me as he straightened his tunic and coat. “Your father was just as ridiculously stubborn as you are,” he said. He set his jaw defiantly, but all the fight had gone out of his words. He was remembering the last time my father had been so “ridiculously stubborn” and all that it had cost him.
Rath’s skin was covered in red marks and welts. Seeing the physical manifestation of his pain reminded me markedly of my own. The pain dawned on us at the same moment, and we both groaned in anguish. I shook my hands as if I could jostle the pain away. Rath was already rubbing an ointment on his palms. They were cracked and bleeding.
“Your touch never used to hurt me this badly,” he said. “You’ve changed since the Old Capital.”
I didn’t want to talk about me. I was in no mood to be lectured about the evil of my ways. I changed the subject. I asked Rath a question I had wanted to ask since I first learned how I came to live in the outlands.
“What did you do with the baby?”
I caught him off guard. “What baby?”
I gritted my teeth in annoyance. “You know what baby I’m talking about,” I snapped. “The baby you replaced me with, the one you stole out of its cradle. The one who should have been Donald Baines. What did you do with that child?” I hadn’t realized until this moment how much that question had been gnawing at me.
Rath stared at me for a long moment. He seemed to be trying to decide how much to tell me. When he didn’t speak right away, I badgered him again.
“Rath, tell me the truth. What did you do with that baby?” When I still received no answer, I pushed harder. “Did you kill him? Tell me how.”
“Why would you want to know that?” Rath faltered, alarmed.
“I want to know exactly how that baby died. Did you leave him to starve? Did you feed him to deadmen? Did you poison him with one of your wretched potions?”
“Stop.”
“How did you kill him, Rath?”
“I didn’t—”
“Did you stab him? Boil him and use his pieces in your medicines?” The weakness in Rath’s eyes made me cruel. I wanted to hurt him so badly that he would kill me. I just wanted to die. “Did you smother him like you’ve been smothering me? Or did he die like Zarra, stabbed right through?”
“I kept him!” Rath yelled over me.
I blinked in surprise. “What?”
Rath spoke in a rush. “I kept him, and I tried to raise him on my own, and I couldn’t.” Rath wouldn’t meet my eyes. “He reacted to something he ate, and he died. That was it. I didn’t get to swoop in and save him. I didn’t get any warnings or any superhuman power to rescue him. That only ever happens with you.”
The frustration he must have kept pent up for all this time leaked from his eyes in a barrage of tears.
“He died in my arms,” he said, “and I was helpless to save him.”
Rath was shaking so hard he couldn’t keep himself in the air. He sank to the ground and buried his rash-covered face in his hands. His voice trembled as his tone turned from one of grief to one of anger. “I couldn’t even be there when he burned. I was summoned from the funeral pyre all the way to the blasted outlands to save you from choking on a ham bone.”
I remembered that ill-advised dare. It had been yet another of my ploys to prove that Rath existed.
“And while I saved you from your own stupidity,” Rath continued, “my own boy burned all alone.” Rath balled his hands into fists. “So the next time your safety was in peril and I could have saved you some discomfort, I let you take the fall. You deserved to know what real pain felt like.”
I stared at Rath with my mouth hanging open. I didn’t know what to say. Rath had every reason in the world to hate me.
“Why didn’t you just keep me?” I asked at last.
Rath held up his hand, covered in blisters and already scarring from holding onto me for just a few moments.
“I couldn’t touch you,” he said.
A heavy silence fell between us.
“I couldn’t save your father, Izzy, and I couldn’t save my boy. I couldn’t save a whole lot of people. But I can save you, and I will continue saving you until your pathetic life amounts to something. Your father did not die so that you could throw yourself off a cliff.”
I rested my elbows on my knees. My nose had started bleeding. I pressed my forearm against my face to stifle the flow of blood. “What would you do, Rath, if you didn’t have to save me all the time?”
“I would have saved your father,” he said, “and this whole world would have been different.”
I was getting tired of the way Rath worshiped my father. I felt insignificant next to his bloated memory. “My father was only a man, Rath.”
“There is no such thing as ‘only a man’ or ‘only a woman.’ When a cloud brings rain after a long drought, is it only a cloud? When a tree provides fruit to feed your family, is it only a tree?” Rath sighed, leaning back on his hands and gazing up at the branches above us. “Your father saved my life, Izzy. And I don’t just mean once. He saved all of me. As long as I owed him a wish, I was free from the burden of granting any others. I could live a normal life, develop normal relationships. Little kindnesses like that can change the world.”
I was surprised to find tears streaming down my face. The more Rath talked about the wonderful things my father had done, the more I felt like a failure. So many people were dead now because I hadn’t been strong enough to fight the Voices.
I couldn’t go back to my people, to Shyronn. I couldn’t face them.
Rath said nothing for a while. He just let me cry. When I was all cried out, he handed me his kerchief. “I know you feel lost, Izzy. You feel like you’ve made such a big mistake that you’ll never recover from it. But listen to me: one mistake won’t define you. You’re bigger than this. You can do great things, Izzy.”
“What great things could I possi
bly do that would make any difference?” I moaned, burying my face in my hands.
Rath was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “You could help me get rid of the deadmen for good.”
I dropped my hands from my face. “How could we do that?”
“We’re going to do what I should have done a long time ago. We’re going to break Seraph Alaudrin’s seal and set him free.”
“How?” I asked.
Rath smiled grimly. “You’re just going to have to trust me,” he said.
We followed the Burse River up into the mountains, traveling on foot for many days. As we walked, Rath told me stories about his life, the Jinee settlement called Hira where he had grown up, and the culture of his people, the Jinee. But mostly, he talked about Seraph Alaudrin.
“Even sealed away, Alaudrin had the power to protect his chosen people,” Rath explained one night as we sat beside the fire, cooking some meager food and resting our exhausted legs. “Once long ago, a group of travelers happened upon Hira. They were welcomed into the village as friends, but their presence soon brought disaster. The travelers discovered that Jinee were bound to their word in exchange for kindness and began to abuse this power. They gave the Jinee gold coins. In exchange for this gift, the Jinee were required to grant a wish — to every single one of them.
“At first, they asked only for riches, which the Jinee could easily conjure by stealing. But their wishes soon grew more and more twisted. They asked for Aldrin brides; the Jinee were forced to kidnap young women from the nearest Aldrin cities. The travelers wished for a palace; the Jinee worked tirelessly to build one, dismantling their own homes to find enough material. They wished for the murder of the current king of Aldrin; it was done. They wished for servants and an army; the Jinee became their slaves.
“At last, a clever Jinee merchant by the name of—” he made a rumbling sound in his throat “—convinced the greedy travelers that greater treasures awaited them if they could break open Alaudrin’s seal. They tried, but with the first strike of their weapons, vala pulsed from the seal. Their life energy was sucked away, and the whole group of invaders collapsed into piles of dust. Only the Jinee could withstand that level of vala. We were saved.”
Fatal Heir Page 24
