by Mary Weber
“Nym! What have you—?”
I feel Eogan grab my arm. His fingers clamping around my owner circles to pull me away, to keep me from the beast whose black eyes are glaring greedily into my soul.
Eogan.
I blink again and refocus. Calling forth the one thing Draewulf will never own. The song of my origin in my blood and soul and quickly collapsing heart. It rises up, feeble and weak, but enough to create an immediate connection with the fire zapping back and forth between the billowing clouds overhead. With the people and beasts and heartbeat of the Faelen ground beneath that bore me to be this for them. To do this for them.
To free this world for them.
I hold tight to Draewulf’s neck, keeping his blade tucked into my stomach even as my blood is draining out and the monster’s face is becoming a fog. I clench him harder. As if by sheer will alone I can keep him physical—keep him here in my fingers that are pounding with the slowing of my heartpulse.
Eogan’s still tugging me back, but I can hardly feel it as I drop to my knees, bringing Draewulf with me. Instead, what I feel is Eogan’s skin connecting with mine, sharpening the strength of my blood and ability.
I tap into it one last time.
The sky booms above us and finally prompts Draewulf to glance up. A flash of fear invades his face before he’s looking back at me, and now his body is fully dissolving beneath my hands, and his claws and arms are stretching into my spine. I can feel the dark and hate and death as he begins to climb inside my skin.
I don’t know why, but I start to laugh. At what? Maybe at him for being so pathetically desperate. Maybe for the people around me who’ve faded from my sight but are about to be free of him.
Maybe for myself and the fact that no one—not even Draewulf—can ever own me again.
A feeling of warmth takes over as the last of my blood leaks out.
And with one final utterance of the melody I was born into but never could quite grasp onto, before my breath leaves my body for eternity, I grab what’s left of his neck and unleash the greatest bolt of fire and atmospheric light I have ever created into the beast in front of me.
Then I’m falling.
Suddenly the world is sideways and I’m on my back and my vision has faded to dark gray.
It’s interrupted once by an eruption of light as the monster I was holding, the monster who used to be a man named Draewulf, explodes into a bomb of light that shoots out ten feet each way and shakes the ground I’m lying on. As if the sun I had paused has just exploded inside him. Next thing I see, he’s still standing there but charred into dust. And, slowly, the pieces begin crumbling, trickling to the earth from which he came.
And he is gone.
Everything goes black.
CHAPTER 41
THE SOUND OF WAR DIMS AROUND ME. IT TAKES forever to open my eyelids again. They’re so heavy. I’m so heavy. I can’t move. My lids flutter eventually, and when they do, sunlight is spilling across a room of white curtains and windows, with a wooden ceiling much higher than my head. I frown.
I remember this place.
In a dream, I think.
Yes. A dream.
When I was losing Eogan.
I peer down at the bed I’m curled up on and trail my hands over the cool sheets before wandering them up to touch the sun particles the breeze is lifting through the air. I take a deep breath. The air tastes delicious. Like homemade bread and citrus.
Eogan moves from his spot against a door frame leading outside where he’s watching me. The honeyed light slips down his messed-up bangs before shimmering along his black shoulders. The light that’s coming from beyond him, through the door.
It’s coming from the Valley. Beautiful. Lush. More vibrant than I can ever recall seeing it.
Enchanted. The word floats into my mind.
Real.
Something tells me it’s more real than anything I’ve known in all my seventeen years. More tangible. More thick.
It makes me homesick, just like the melody streaming in and filling this space in my room, calling me, inviting me.
Eogan shifts in front of me, forcing me to blink and refocus. He smiles with relief. “You’re here.”
I frown. Of course I’m here. But . . . “It’s beautiful out there.”
“Can you feel?”
“Your hands on my arms? Yes.”
His smile broadens suggestively, and my face warms before his expression turns stiff. He walks over as I slide my feet from the bed, but before I can stand he’s bending over, taking my cheek in hand and willing my gaze to center on his. And suddenly it occurs to me that I really just did feel his hands in my hair a moment ago and sliding over my arms and pressing around my neck and chest. Except he wasn’t touching me.
I try to sit but he says, “Don’t get up.”
But I want to. I want to be with him, and I would if my body would work. Blasted hulls, why won’t my body work?
“I won’t let you go. You’ll be all right,” he whispers into my hair.
Go? What is he talking about? Go where?
My eyes flicker toward the open door where the sunlight’s pouring through. I squint to see beyond it, to the Valley that looks familiar and foreign. Sweet air emanates from it—that honey-blossomed scent—and entwined in it is that music again, wrapping its notes into the breeze and ruffling around Eogan’s beautiful black hands and face.
My heart nearly jumps through the roof of my mouth with the ache. That is where I’m to go—where I want to go—until everything within is aching to go—to explore, to find myself in that space, because answers reside there. What had Queen Laiha called it—not a person, but something exists there? A word.
Understanding ripples through my veins like the Elemental blood, pumping its way from my soul to my heart to my head. Bringing with it the thing I’ve always known but somehow, at some point, forgot. The word. The word that is life, that is in all things, that created all things. Like an existence all in itself.
The word that spoke life to these Hidden Lands of ours.
And yet, not a word as we know it.
I want to laugh at the simplicity of it. At the insanity. At the beauty and ache within me to become a part of it—to know the answers to this life and world and . . .
And to see Colin again.
Colin is there. I feel him in this moment, and I swear I hear him calling.
I reach toward the door.
“No,” Eogan says. “You can’t leave. Not like this. I will not allow it. I will not lose you this way. Fight it, Nym!”
I brush my fingers against his lips and inhale. Then try to yank away because I have to go now, but his hand grasps mine to hold it in place. I smile. “There are worse ways to leave, trust me.”
He leans down and draws his lips across mine, his mouth caressing my own in a kiss.
It tastes of life. And death.
It tastes of good-bye.
“Like hulls I will.”
Abruptly his face blurs as does the world, the air, the atmosphere. Then he’s swearing. “You survive this or I swear I will haunt your spirit with every last breath in me.” His words begin to shudder, then slur. “Don’t let go, Nym. Open your eyes. Open them, please. Because I refuse to let you go.”
I will not let you go . . .
But he has to because this is my destiny.
And my whole journey has led to this place.
Eogan
Nym’s body lies broken beneath my hands. I’m stopping up the wound, cru
shing down on her stomach to keep more blood in her body than is bleeding out on the rich, red earth and black dust that is all that’s left of Draewulf.
“Nym, stay with me!”
I can already feel her spirit slipping. Feel it like the foreign emotion welling up within me. Grief.
I shove the emotion away and look around until I see Kel running over with tears streaming down his face. He’s covered in dirt and blood. Good hulls, he looks just like his father.
“Eogan.” His voice breaks as he turns and points back to where his father’s body lies. But he keeps running.
When he reaches us, his face goes ashen. “No! Nym! Is she . . . is she . . .?
I grab his hands and place them on Nym’s bloody stomach. “Press down and don’t let up.”
He nods and presses down as I move my fingers to check her pulse. I face those blue, blue eyes that are glassy and glowing like the Elisedd Sea after a storm. She turns them my way and smiles.
“Oh hulls. I thought we’d lost you, love. I—”
It takes approximately three point five seconds for me to know she’s not seeing me. Her eyes are there and her gaze is there, but she’s not looking at me.
Her smile stays as her head tips slowly to the side.
In that moment, in that second, she is gone.
CHAPTER 42
Eogan
I PUSH HARDER AGAINST HER PULSE ANYWAY. “C’MON, Nym.” Then I hit her chest as if to restart her heart. Restart her life.
Nothing.
I shove my hands onto her chest and hold them there. Willing whatever it is in me that’s been able to heal wounds recently, to engage.
But there’s no power. No energy I’m drawing out or shoving in.
Litches.
It’s worked before on her—why not now?
I pound her heart again. “C’mon, Nymia! Do this with me!”
I pound again. Hours. Days. Years of her life and mine. I have no idea how long I shove at her heart. How loud I command it to work.
But at some point the awareness dawns that I’m pushing so hard I’m likely to break her fragile rib cage.
I lean back and let go.
Kel is still pressing furiously on Nym’s stomach while tears and snot gush from his face onto her pale skin. He looks up at me as if to ask why I’ve stopped. “We both know why, kid,” I almost mutter. Instead, I shove a bloody hand through my hair and try not to laugh painfully at the futileness of it all.
The caustic chuckle bubbles out anyway before I can stop it. It’s followed by a prayer. A plea. A whisper. Whatever you bleeding need to call it—it’s simply, “Please.”
Because that’s it—that’s all I’ve got for the Creator. A pathetic, “Please.”
I sag back on my haunches and stick one hand in my hair again and keep the other entwined around her long white strands, staining them red. Even at her death, I can’t help but touch and tarnish her.
“That’s enough, Kel,” I finally say.
He stares up at me but doesn’t obey. His face that looks so much like his father’s is serious. Angry. Weeping. He presses harder.
Weeping for her and his father.
I squint and glance away, outside, to give him the honor of having this moment alone as the battle fizzles down around us.
Then I widen my eyes. It appears with Draewulf slain, his magic is gone. Leaving the wraiths weak from the looks of how easily they’re being mowed down by Faelen farmers and noblemen.
As if to accentuate the duality of this moment—the victory for the Hidden Lands at the loss of Nym—a shaft of sunlight burns through the clouds and shoots down onto the scene. As beautiful as the day I first came to Faelen in hopes of finding restoration for my soul. For the man I wanted to be rather than the one I’d become—cold, hard, calloused.
As beautiful as the day Nym stood in Adora’s room staring out the window at me. Not knowing I’d seen her white hair, white skin, and those blue eyes that could look through a person and sear value and hope onto his broken soul.
As beautiful as the day she stood in the Valley and called down the elements before splitting them apart in a rainbow. The same day I knew she’d forgive what I’d done to her family once I confessed. The day my soul became real and alive and hopeful. The day I almost kissed her again.
I’d like to think she is in that same Valley now. Reliving those moments, finding new ones, perhaps with people more deserving of her.
Perhaps with Colin. And Breck. And Kenan.
I drop my gaze away from the sunlit victory and let it fall back on her. The shock of her lying there lifeless hits me again because, bleeding hulls, I don’t know how to do this alone.
I don’t know how to lose her.
“Why the bleeding litches did you step in the way?” I want to scream at her.
Instead, a well of warmth slicks down my cheeks and jaw. I put a hand up to dab at it—to see what’s happening—and when I pull it away, my fingers are wet.
I am a hard-hearted War General of a man, crying at the destruction of the woman who owns my soul.
CHAPTER 43
Eogan
I GROW AWARE OF THE CLOUDS HAVING ROLLED IN. Deep, dark, full of their own grief for this woman who owned them without ever abusing or bending them to a perverse will.
A flicker of lightning charges the sky.
Then another.
Then so many it’s like the atmosphere’s veins are exploding in yellow and orange in a farewell serenade.
My hand slides to her chest as if I can will the sight into her, feel the honor of it all for her, show her with my eyes and warmth what she’s done to this world. The effect she has had.
What she’s meant to it.
Abruptly something inside me breaks, like a bone snapping. I hear it as clear as I hear the absolute sickening silence of Nym, and a roar tears from my lungs, scaring the hulls out of both Kel and me.
What in—?
The Cashlin queen’s words from last week come to mind—readings from when she interrogated me. “Your forefathers misused the gift so long they forgot what it was. They’ve only known the cheapened version you’ve seen.”
I had frowned at her with no idea what she meant.
But I feel it. My power flows from my skin to Nym’s—much like on the airship when her chest was torn open after the battle at Tulla.
And now I’m feeling it stronger.
Thump.
Thump.
Thump, thump.
What in hulls? A heartpulse. Is it mine or hers?
It’s ours together.
Eyes widening, I stare at my hand. At the chest beneath it beating. So faint and slight—just like this slip of a girl. How is this possible?
It’s getting stronger as the blood in my veins burns and singes and scathes the very flesh from my bones.
I cry out again as lightning above strikes and rumbles and my hand is fused to Nym’s chest. The amount of power flowing out from my skin is terrifying as litches. As if it, too, was fully awakened by Nym’s song.
Just like the other Uathúils.
The crystal shield with its diamond and light properties erupts from her skin and spreads across her body and up over my fingers.
In that moment she is here, breathing, heart beating, opening her eyes to stare at me with that irritable smile she wears all the bleeding time. I yank my hand from her in fear, in shock, as she reaches her own out to touch my cheek. And I can’t help it—Kel and I swe
ar out loud at the same time.
She is whole.
Tears catch in my mouth because, blasted hulls, I am a grown man crying again.
Because this . . .
This is more than I ever deserved.
CHAPTER 44
THE CLEANUP IN FAELEN HAS TAKEN JUST OVER A WEEK. My healing took a little over a few hours, thanks to Eogan.
Draewulf’s gone but his presence isn’t. At least not all the way. And there are still wars to be won in the south—in Bron and Drust. Although rumor has it the people in both kingdoms have already started rioting. As soon as word reached the Bron coast, it spread like a lightning storm—the promise of freedom to the fragmented villagers of Drust seemed to prompt an especially quick reaction. They came out of hiding and began rounding up wraiths from what Rolf has said.
And without Draewulf’s and Isobel’s magic, the undead are weaker. Easier to kill.
“You’re certain you and Eogan will come visit Cashlin as soon as you have a break in Bron?” Rasha asks for the five hundredth time.
“As soon as I’m finished helping, I’ll be up to see you.”
Her eyes glint red around the pupils, until she’s apparently contented herself that I’m not lying, and throws her arms around my neck, squeezing so neither of us can breathe.
And it is the most perfect feeling in the world.
Her friendship. Her cheek pressed against mine as we both pretend we’re not crying even as the damp tears make tracks between us anyway.
“I’m going to miss you,” I promise.
She pulls back and glares at me. “You better. Or I will hunt him”—she jerks her head toward Eogan—“down with every last blade at my disposal and skewer him dead.”
Eogan lifts his hands in the air. “Whoa. Hey, I’m not the one in charge these days. She does what she wants.”
Rasha snickers and winks at me. “Blasted right she does.” Then leans in to mumble, “He’s a good person, Nym,” before turning to whisper something in Eogan’s ear, to which his eyebrow rises.
