by Mary Weber
“Nym, stop!” Rasha says.
“Read his intentions. What do you see?”
Her hand tugs at me. “You’re going to kill him! We’ll find it another way. We’ll ask Isobel! You can’t do—”
Can’t I? I stare at her as the heat from my fury floods the ice in my blood. I am beyond finished with this man’s uncaring for the world going to the pit of hulls all around him while he stays in his comfortable fool ignorance. I pull, yanking the energy from his chest bones. Like marrow I can taste.
Sir Gowon wheezes and stumbles forward. He opens his mouth and I sense it—the words on the tip of his confused, tormented mind. I will make him speak or else—
Then he gasps:
“When shadows are sewn to sinew and bone, and darkness rules the land,
Let storms collide and Elisedd’s hope arise,
Before the beast forces fate’s hand.
Just as from one it came and to five was entrusted, to only one it can go, to rule or to seek justice.
If his demise is to be Elemental,
Interrupt the blood of kings in each land.”
I stare.
“Elegy 96 is a prophecy,” he slurs. “Handed down for generations of Bron kings. It’s a foretelling of what is to come.”
Twenty seconds go by as every vein in my body is curling up like roots around my chest.
And then my mind is flashing backward to the witch’s house. “He’s taking the blood in order,” Draewulf’s wife says. “He needed Eogan first. Interrupt the blood of kings, and whatever you do, don’t let him take the final one.”
Come on, Nym. Wake up.
I try to pry my eyes open but they’re too heavy.
And now my memories are moving forward to Eogan.
ON THE AIRSHIP, HE’S STARING AT ME, TALKING TO ME BECAUSE AN Elemental will be Draewulf’s downfall.
The airship shudders, and the sensation is answered by a matching shiver beneath my skin, in my veins, as Eogan’s voice emerges again through the wind and sea salt and snowcapped air. “When Draewulf comes to Faelen, it’ll be for you. Because your Elemental ancestors were the original rulers of Faelen. And you’re last in line, Nym.”
The red raindrops are back, pounding my head again. I try to duck. To get out of the way, but their piercing glow follows me.
“The prophecy,” one of the red drops says.
“The queen knows of the prophecy,” another answers. “Reach back further. To the beginning.”
“I don’t want to go back,” I tell it. “I need to move forward.” Always forward.
“We need the past,” the hammering drops say. “To help see the future.”
What future? “There is no future if he can’t be stopped.” Doesn’t the bloody rain know this?
“Exactly.”
STICK WALLS. SLATTED LIGHT. HEAT AND STENCH AND SWEAT COATING the air, coating my lungs, which can barely breathe. I’m gasping as if they don’t know how to work yet. They squish and ache and, oh, my body aches. I sneeze and blink and suddenly I’m staring up at a face that is brown.
A pair of stormy gray eyes blink back. I smile. They smile. Then drop water on my cheeks—and I wail because it’s startling and frightening and I don’t want to see this woman cry. This woman I don’t know but somehow I must be a part of. Must have come from.
And from the man hovering behind her.
Why does he look so sad too? With that white hair and those sea-blue eyes that are beautiful.
Are they mad?
Footsteps outside. Tromping. Making angry sounds. And more cries are coming from somewhere.
Why are they so angry? Is that what’s making this couple sad?
“It’s time,” a whisper says.
The woman holds me closer, and I can feel how small I am. She squeezes me to her breast, and suddenly I want to stay here. With her. I want to nuzzle against her and sleep.
“If we’re going to get her out, it has to be now,” the blue-eyed hovering man says.
“I know, I just . . .”
The lovely woman is crying again. Then she’s handing me to an old lady in a scratchy cloth that makes me want to wail. Before I can, she pops a thumb in my mouth and swishes us out a small door while the sad lady stands, watching and crying, and the man holds her.
The angry footsteps are growing closer.
The old woman runs faster, weaving around hovels and trees.
“Hurry,” a male voice says.
And suddenly I’m being shoved through a tiny dirt hole beneath a tall stone fence that looks made to keep people in permanently. “Poor child,” the old lady mutters. “May the Creator spare her.”
“Halt!” a voice yells, but it’s too late because the new male hands that have taken me from the woman and already strapped me to their chest are working to mount a horse to take me away.
“To the Fendres Mountains,” the male whispers. “I know a man and his wife you’ll be safe with there, far from this blasted internment camp.”
I lean forward and blink and try to catch my breath, but what the hulls was that?
It’s no use, though. I can’t find the air. I don’t know if I ever will. I need to cough. I need to inhale and escape these memories and these red pelting raindrops that are abruptly fading fading fading.
I choke and squint and stare around me as the darkness lifts and the raindrops slow.
Not raindrops. Voices. Questions.
Red Luminescent eyes dull around me at the same moment the throbbing in my head stops.
I frown. What in—? “What have you done?” I demand of the three Luminescents in front of me.
They don’t answer.
They don’t have to.
They are the Inters.
And now they’re finished.
CHAPTER 7
A CREAKING SOUND ERUPTS BEHIND ME through the red-illuminated dark and someone’s poking my shoulder. “This way.”
A door opens, sending in a candlelit glow over my shoulder to light up the heavily curtained room and the three elderly Luminescents all seated in a row. They’re so old it appears as if their skin is decaying. I cough, and it’s as if I’m inhaling that scent of dead bodies on ice again. I gag and shove off from the freezing chair I’ve been sitting on. I am done with this place.
Out of the dim, the dancing Cashlin guard’s hand reaches for me. I shift away before he can prick me again, but he just says, “If you behave, I won’t use it now that they’re finished.”
Is he jesting? I look from him to my interrogators. “You invaded my mind without my permission. You invaded my memories!”
“Memories you could not have given us if we’d simply asked,” they say in unison.
“You had no right.” I’m shaking now. And my hand is flexing. A lightning bolt streaks down and I barely stop it from slamming into the ceiling. I reach my hand out where I feel it itching beneath the skin—and sense the Inter’s Luminescent strength beating through their blood. For the slightest moment it calls to me. Take it.
“And you had no right to crash into our home,” their three voices ring. “We simply wanted to ensure you were who we thought and had no ulterior motives.”
I shove the subtle dark thirst aside and squeeze my fist until the sky rumbles and crashes, then breaks open into rain. Real rain. “You had no right.”
“We needed more about you. Specifically, what Draewulf’s designs are upon you.”
“And?”
“It is as you believe. Just as the Creator gave power to the five original bloodlines, the beast will take those powers to rule all. Including you, who are Elisedd’s hope.” The three women look behind me as if one entity and tip their heads. “He will take you last as the final piece to secure his immortality.”
“He will take me?”
“You are now dismissed.”
The Cashlin male guard slips beside me and holds out a hand.
I glare at the Luminescents, then turn and stride for the door. To hulls with all of them.
As I step out and the door swings shut, I call down one more lightning strike. Its aim is slick and true, and the crashing of glass rocks the ceiling of the room we just came from. Not enough to kill them by my estimation. But enough to interrupt their abilities for a time.
The male guard looks at me but says nothing. Just keeps leading us away with what I’d say is a hint of respect in the firm set of his jaw.
“I didn’t harm them detrimentally.”
“And you didn’t hear a complaint from me.”
I frown.
He shrugs and continues his stride. “The Inters would’ve seen you intended to cause such damage and could’ve stopped you. They saw fit not to. Which means it is not my responsibility.”
Interesting. “In that case, I need to reach Eogan. I need to get our people out of here.”
He blinks again but doesn’t reply as we walk down one, two, three opaque glass hallways through this palace that I swear is like a womb. Warm and pulsing with rhythms and heartbeats of life through the walls and floors and atmosphere, even though it’s completely void of voices or other patrons. It’s creepy. It takes a moment to realize I keep looking for more glass-encased dead people as if it’s their rhythms and heartbeats I’m sensing.
“Where are all the people?”
He glances over. “Only a few live here, mainly the Luminescents. Having too many people around sets off their abilities constantly and tires them.” He leads me through an archway and into a clear sort of tunnel with a see-through floor—and abruptly we’re walking high above the city where the morning dawn is just beginning to hit. “Thus, the majority of our people live outside the Castle. Along there.” He points below toward the shadowed city walls.
One section of the city’s main wall is built into the forested mountainside like a hornet’s nest. All patchworked and transparent and stacked up like catacombs. On the opposite side of us is a lower wall, dividing the inner Castle from the outer city. With the morning still gray, it’s easy to see the breakfast fires illuminating the elegant houses carved out along that wall. Great glass porticos and columns, like something from one of Adora’s historical picture books I used to browse through in her library. These styles are old and incredibly graceful.
My annoyance at the guard and his people abates slightly, if simply out of respect for the beauty and artistic heritage created by a people who are stubborn, yes, and even despicably wretched, but are that way from age and lack of contact with an outside world that has been changing too fast.
The tunnel we’re walking through arches ahead of us. It must be over one hundred paces above the ground, and after a moment we’re crossing over an entire section of the Castle’s courtyard. I slow for a moment as the vastness of it all catches up with me, then pull my gaze up and keep walking.
“How does everything not break?” I say.
“It’s stronger than you’d think.”
“The glass?”
“Technically it’s not glass. It’s a combination of tree sap from our forests and the minerals we mine.”
I eye the span of forest beyond the city that he’s referring to. “And that’s easier than simply using the wood?”
“Wood is useful for many things, but if you hadn’t noticed, it tends to burn.” He shifts his gaze to proudly scan the courtyard below. “This city has been standing longer than any other in the entire Hidden Lands. And, Creator willing, it will stand for many centuries to come.”
“How did they make it?” I wave a hand around us at the crystal tunnel we’re inside of. “I mean . . . look at this.”
“Carefully and with lots of heat.”
Heat? I shoot him a glance. Could my abilities bring it down if I tried?
“We erect molds and fill them with the molten liquid we melt the minerals down to, then add the sap extracted from the trees. Don’t you have windows in Faelen?”
“Of course. At least in the nicer houses.”
“Have you ever seen anyone make them?”
I frown.
“Exactly. We make and trade them. Or we did years ago.”
“Now you just keep to yourselves and let the rest of the world destroy each other,” I say and walk faster. A moment goes by before I notice him tapping his circle wristlet. I shiver and edge away. “Do you make that too?”
He looks smug. “Among other potions. The herb farmers up in the Pass make it. It’s harmless, odorless, and—”
“Allows your Luminescents inappropriate access to a person’s mind.”
He shrugs. “It’s more humane than other forms of interrogation.”
“So that’s what your people appease themselves with in order to uphold their pacifist status?” I scowl at him, but if he notices, it doesn’t matter because we’re almost to the end of the glass tunnel and he’s already indicating another part of the city. The giant gates fitted into a thick wall are sitting exposed toward Tulla. I squint and look again for that odd aspect that feels out of place. As if they’ve forgotten something and I just can’t put my finger on it.
I stall. And stare harder.
Where are their archers? Where are their soldiers?
I peer around to count how many archers I can spot atop those walls. There aren’t any. Then I glance around in search of some semblance of the Cashlin army barracks or soldier dwellings near those gates.
Nothing.
They have nothing. No protection.
Just elegant crystal houses with beautifully laid-out pathways and pale-green gardens that look half frozen in this chilly climate.
Oh, Rasha . . . what in litches are your people thinking?
I swallow and glance up at him. “What’s your name?”
He slows and turns to me. An odd expression flickers across his features. He opens his mouth. Shuts it. “Doesn’t matter.”
The look disappears as quickly as it came, but it’s replaced by an abrupt dawning within me that he’s relishing the idea of his anonymity. Probably doesn’t get much of that around here with all the Luminescents. I smirk. “Well, ‘Doesn’t Matter,’ where’s your army? Where are your guards and soldiers?”
The pink that floods his face is a color of shame, or perhaps exasperation. “We’ve rarely needed them before, so we . . .”
“Just stopped having them?”
“No. We have them. Just not at the level we may have once had.”
My stomach twists. “Your queen is insane. She suspected Draewulf was alive and yet let your defenses dwindle?”
“Stubborn perhaps, but not insane.”
“But the barracks? The archers? The lookouts at your city gates—?”
“They are there,” he says hurriedly. “Just hidden. The rest . . . we’re gathering.”
Oh litches.
Oh bleeding litches.
We truly have hastened these people’s already-impending deaths. And there’s not a bleeding thing we can do.
“I have to see Eogan,” I whisper.
CHAPTER 8
I hesitate before entering. The candles must’ve gone out—or been put out—leaving it hard to see, other than to tell that the space is wretchedly quiet and almost empty. Are the others still being interrogated by the Inters? I doubt it. I step in and, too late, the oaf shuts the door behind me and a second later I hear the sound of wood clicking into place, locking me in the dim. Curse him.
Before I turn to let loose on the door, the sound of snoring snags my gaze to Kenan. He’s lying on one of the beds, his nose twitching as a splash of gray dawn ripples across his face. And seated in the shadows on the floor nearby him, less than ten paces from where I stand, watching me as if he’s been waiting for hours . . .
“Eogan.”
My soul stumbles.
He looks weary and beautiful and what I imagine coming home to be like. I stare at those brilliant green eyes and swear I can feel his heart beating all the way from where I’m paused. Steady. Quiet.
Safe.
Oh hulls, I want to climb inside that heart and never let go—just feel his rhythm steadying my soul as it drowns out the past and present and entire rest of the world.
“You survived,” he says, still studying me.
I clear my throat and try to ignore the bloom of heat invading my cheeks. “As did you apparently. Did they hit you with that drug?”
He shakes his head, and something about it says it would’ve been more merciful if they had. “But three hours of questioning was enough for the queen to decide I wasn’t a threat. How about you? Did it hurt? The interrogation?”
Yes. No. I won’t say because it doesn’t matter—his clearly hurt more.
