Her gazed snagged on Eithan, who wasn’t moving.
Oh, sun and bones, he can’t be dead! Tears sprang to her eyes.
She couldn’t think about that. She turned her gaze back to Sullo.
He was struggling, his face a mask of rage. “You need to learn some respect for your elders, daughter,” he seethed, and he raised his arms above his head. A mass of fiery golden light gathered there. Sullo hurled it at her.
She gaped at it for too long, but at the last minute, she ducked.
It sailed harmlessly over her head and hit the carriage, which went up in a bright explosion. There was a boom of sound and the force of it radiated out, knocking her down, face first into the ground.
Dirt in her mouth, she tried to crawl. The back of her legs and her arms and her head had been scalded. She was in pain.
She cried out, turning on her internal light to heal herself.
Of course, she’d stopped the spell, and she no longer had Sullo pinned to the wall, so he was back, and he kicked her underneath her chin.
Her head snapped back painfully. She pushed herself up with her hands to look up at him.
He towered over her, eyes glowing, beams of light radiating out from his golden hair. Light spilled from between his lips when he spoke. His voice shook the ground. “You’ve been running wild without a father, haven’t you? This is bad, Nicce, very bad. You are a bad girl.”
She looked at Eithan again, who still hadn’t moved.
She turned to look at the carriage, of which there was nothing left. It had burned to ash. There were dark jewels scattered over the courtyard, broken and blackened. She licked her lips. “Y-yes, you’re right. I didn’t have a good father figure growing up. I’m so sorry.”
Sullo shook his head. “You’re not going to make this all right with apologies.”
“Let me heal Eithan,” she said. “Please.” She didn’t even know if Eithan could be healed. He might already be dead. She didn’t know how bad the wound was.
“Eithan’s not a good influence on you,” said Sullo. “I don’t think you should spend any more time with him.”
“Please?” she said, and tears were spilling out of her eyes, unbidden. Nothing mattered if Eithan was dead.
Suddenly, there was a bright purplish light. It appeared in midair and splintered outward, like lightning bolts. A hole opened in the middle of the light, and it widened and widened.
Nicce gaped at it, transfixed.
Sullo turned his attention there also.
Nicce glanced up at him and crawled backwards. Just a few inches. Would he notice?
Sullo didn’t notice. He started towards the hole.
Nicce knew what that looked like now. It looked like the portal in the dark forest.
Someone stepped out of the portal.
He was tall, like Sullo, and his body seemed to be composed of crumbling dirt. When he moved dark bits of dust fell from his limbs. His hair was like sheaves of grass, growing wild around his head, flowing in a breeze that seemed to surround him. His eyes were bright and luminous, like droplets of rain, pupilless.
“Aitho,” said Sullo.
The crops god.
Nicce crawled backwards quicker. Sullo wasn’t even looking at her.
“I was right, wasn’t I?” Aitho folded his arms over his chest, clumps of dirt falling off of them. But even as he lost pieces of himself, he didn’t seem to change shape. Did he make more of himself somehow?
She couldn’t think of this. She needed to get to Eithan.
“You were right,” said Sullo. “But I don’t think it’s her fault.”
Both of the gods turned to look at her.
She froze. Could Sullo tell that she moved, that she was closer to Eithan?
“I understand,” said Aitho. “None of us wish to harm our own offspring.”
“I can’t, Aitho, truly,” said Sullo. “Look at her.” He gestured. “Isn’t she just the prettiest thing you’ve ever seen?”
“You see her with a father’s eyes,” said Aitho, shrugging, turning back to Sullo.
Sullo turned back to Aitho. “I do, of course I do.”
“But she tried to kill you.”
“Oh, she’s going through a rebellious phase.” Sullo shrugged. “I’m sure she didn’t mean it. She’s fallen in with a bad crowd, that Nightmare Court.”
Nicce didn’t know if she could move again, but she had to risk it. She was close now, and if she just scooted a little further over the ground, she would be near Eithan.
“But you can’t allow her to continue to behave in that way,” said Aitho.
“I’ll kill the Nightmare Court,” said Sullo. “That should solve the problem. I’m sure she’ll be a sweet, sweet girl after that.”
She made it. She inched closer, and she was next to Eithan, who was lying crumpled on the ground, arms over his head.
“She killed a god and tried to kill another one,” said Aitho. “She may be your daughter, but this kind of action can’t go unpunished. Furthermore, we can’t have our vulnerabilities made public, can we?”
Slowly, Nicce moved Eithan’s arm away from his face.
Eithan made a barely perceptible sound of protest.
He was alive! Her heart soared.
“Well, I’m not killing her,” said Sullo. “And if you try to kill her, I suppose we’ll have to go to war.”
Nicce brushed at his lips, and then at his teeth. She’d learned this trick before, to get his fangs to expand.
“No need to be so dramatic, Sullo, really,” said Aitho.
She cut her wrist on Eithan’s fangs, letting blood drip into his mouth. But to heal him, she’d need to light up, and they would surely see, wouldn’t they?
“You’re not going to kill her.”
Eithan latched onto her wrist, sucking at her blood greedily.
Nicce debated. The portal was pretty bright, and maybe they wouldn’t look.
“I never said anything about killing her,” said Aitho.
“You said she had to be punished.”
Nicce did it, turning on the light, which shone out brightly. She poured it into Eithan’s mouth, pushing as much of her light into him as she could.
“I did,” said Aitho. “And I think she should.” He blinked. “What’s that?” He looked at Nicce.
She shut off the light, went still.
Sullo turned to look at her. “I don’t see anything.”
Aitho shrugged. “No matter. I think it must be the reflection of the portal or something. Which reminds me that we don’t have a lot of time until it closes, so let’s continue this conversation elsewhere.”
“I’m not going with you anywhere,” said Sullo.
Eithan was sucking hard at her wrist.
She touched his chest, feeling around the singed area to see about his wound.
He winced.
But it was sealed over. She could feel that. She yanked her wrist back.
Eithan made a noise of protest.
“You have to,” said Aitho. “Come now, Sullo, we tried it your way, and this is the result. Speaking of which, who killed all these people?”
Nicce caught Eithan’s gaze and make a deliberate motion with her eyes. Then she began to scoot herself away from the two gods.
“Oh, that was me,” said Sullo.
Eithan moved with her, flinching at the movement, but coming along.
“You’ve got to be joking,” said Aitho. “Really? What would possess you to do such a thing? We are all in agreement to leave them alone, aren’t we? This sort of thing, a smiting, well, you’ve set us back centuries. What is wrong with you?”
They scooted backwards, keeping their eyes on the gods the entire time.
“It’s not working anyway,” said Sullo. “They’re just stupid here, that much is obvious. Across the oceans they’ve got cannons and those little mini-cannons? Do you know what I’m speaking of?”
Nicce and Eithan kept moving, moving more quickly as they gained
ground.
“Guns, yes, but we are working under the theory that they need to feel as if they have some control over their lives in order to be inspired to do such things. This is an experiment that has been well underway for some time. Ciaska has been a notable problem, but you—”
“I have gone along with it, but truly, I don’t see why we don’t simply go across the oceans, then. We can leave the Four Kingdoms to their own devices, and then have some fun again for once. Do you remember fun?”
Now she and Eithan got up on all fours and began to crawl, casting glances over their shoulders now and then to make sure the gods weren’t looking.
“Yanna and I feel very strongly—”
“Well, as you said, I’ve ruined it, haven’t I? No more experiment in seeing what they do without interference. So, let’s go back to interfering again, shall we?”
“This is not a conversation to be having now. The portal will close.”
“Yes, well, why is that, do you think?” Sullo was sulky. “Do you think that since we’ve stopped meddling, we’ve grown less powerful?”
The gate loomed ahead of them. They were close. Sullo’s and Aitho’s voices were growing less distinct.
“I don’t think that at all,” said Aitho. “We are the same.”
“And so are they. Hands off or hands on, the people of the Four Kingdoms behave the same. Perhaps if we removed Phir’s crystals from the perimeter around the continent?”
“Then they’d be influenced by the technological advances across the sea. It would ruin the purity of the experiment,” said Aitho.
They crawled through the gate and put a barrier of stone between themselves and the gods.
Nicce put her fingers on Eithan’s chest again, probing his wound.
He grimaced.
“Do you need more blood?” she whispered.
“Let’s run,” he said. “Once we get into the forest, where we can hide, you can heal me completely.”
She nodded.
The two scurried off the path and into the woods, rushing through the trees, putting space between themselves and the gods.
What they didn’t realize was that someone else was watching them.
Cassiel, the jewel gatherer, having nothing else to do with himself, had followed them to see what they would do with his jewels. He wasn’t entirely pleased to see them destroyed and blackened and scattered all over the ground.
Now, he watched them escape through the woods, and he decided to keep following them, just to see where they went.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Nicce healed Eithan behind a particularly thick maple tree trunk. It would have been nice to have leaf cover, but there was none. They were at the end of the winter, when it bled into spring. The branches were all still bare, but the air wasn’t oppressively cold.
With Eithan healed, they moved more quickly, and they found themselves at the foot of the mountain quickly enough. There, they went back to the stables that were kept for the Knights of Midian. There were three horses left. They took two of them and galloped off.
They decided that it was best to head straight for the coast.
They rode until the sun set, and then they kept riding. When they reached the coast, the horses were exhausted, wheezing and snorting as they dismounted. They let the animals rest, tied away from the shore as they went to examine the fishing boats.
Nicce knew a good bit about the boats from the time that she’d spent living with Zed the fisherman. She had even thought perhaps he would be there. It was the same coastal village, the closest one from both the Guild and Castle Brinne.
But she didn’t see his boat. She wondered if he’d saved up his money and bought his farm like he’d always wanted.
She knew that some of the fishermen lived on their boats but most went home for the evenings to houses in the village with their wives and children. The odds were good that if they simply boarded a boat, it would be empty.
Eithan let her select one, and they climbed aboard.
After checking to make sure that no one was asleep below decks, they freed the boat from the dock where it was secured and took to the sea.
Nicce had never sailed at night, but the moon was bright that night, and it didn’t prove to be too much different than the day, only a bit harder to see. There was a friendly wind that filled the sails right away and took them out onto the water.
Soon, they were far enough away that the village was only a speck in the distance.
She looked out to the horizon, to the moon’s reflection on the endless water.
“Anything else I should do?” Eithan had been taking her orders readily since they’d taken the boat.
“We just sail now,” she said. “I’ll let you know if I need you to do something.” She gazed out at the water, and she was chilly. She huddled into her clothes.
Eithan put his arm around her. “Do you think the others got away?”
“I hope so,” she said. She looked up at him. Should they talk about the gods’ discussion, about the way that they were apparently deliberately not meddling in humans’ lives in the Four Kingdoms to see what affect it had on them? Should they talk about how Sullo had made it seem that the gods could make their presence known across the sea any time they liked?
She didn’t say anything.
“It’s my fault,” Eithan said.
“What are you talking about?”
“I… we didn’t have any kind of plan,” he said.
“It was about as much of a plan as we had with Ciaska,” she said.
“We got lucky with her,” he said.
“Yes,” she agreed.
He squeezed her shoulder. “So, when were you planning on telling me you wanted to kill all the gods?”
“That was… We weren’t ready. I pushed us too fast and too hard.” She wrapped her arms around his chest and held onto him. “You could have died. I thought you did die.”
“It was, uh, bad,” he said. “But I held on, maybe by a thread, I don’t know… I just knew you could heal me, and I needed to fight to stay alive, so I did. I lay there and I focused everything on hanging on, waiting for you to get to me. And you did.”
She was going to cry. She sniffled.
“Hey.” Both his arms were around her, rubbing her back. “It’s all right. We’re all right.”
“We are,” she said. “Somehow, we are.”
“We’ll find the others,” he said. “And we’ll all be together, and we’ll be able to…” He took a breath. “To live. Really live. Not just survive.”
She pulled back, looking up at him, and she hated herself for it, but a tendril of worry went through her. Living? What did that even mean? Could she be satisfied with something as mundane as that?
She remembered that itch, the one under her skin, the feeling at the back of her neck that she’d felt when she was worried that she might be pregnant with Zed’s child, all of her life stretched out in front of her in banality, and she had been horrified.
And when Eithan said they could live, just live…
But her thoughts were interrupted because ahead of them, on the horizon, there was suddenly a booming crack of thunder and a bolt of lightning sizzled out of low-hanging clouds and down into the water.
Where had the clouds come from?
She looked back at the shore, the distant village. Everything was calm there. She could even see the moon in the clear sky. She turned back to the cloudy sky overhead.
It was starting to rain, big fat drops of rain pelting their faces. The wind picked up with a quick gust.
“Eithan, the sails,” she said, rushing to take them down.
“What do I do?” he said.
“Just lower them. If we let this wind take us, it’ll toss us every which way.”
For several moments, that was all they could concentrate on, but they managed it, and then they were clinging to the ship as the wind howled and the rain stung their faces—cold rain, nearly freezing—and the sea turned
choppy.
“This storm is strange,” said Eithan.
Nicce was remembering something that Zed had said, something about his brother, who’d been hit by lightning and killed in a storm on the sea. Zed had blamed Phir, the storm god, saying that Phir didn’t want anyone to leave the Four Kingdoms.
She knew that Phir was dead. Apparently, he’d killed himself out of the sheer boredom of living forever, according to Feteran, anyway.
But she was remembering the conversation she’d overheard between Sullo and Aitho, something about crystals surrounding the continent…
Eithan’s hair was sopping wet, dripping at the ends. His face was pelted with droplets of rain and he had to yell over the storm. “Did you hear what they said about Phir’s crystals?”
“I was just thinking about that,” she cried, looking back at the shore, at the calm water there, the clear sky.
“What do you think happened to the others?” said Eithan.
She shook her head, and she might have said more, but there was another crack, and an enormous bolt of lightning struck the ship, setting it on fire.
She was thrown backwards.
Eithan was on the other side of the flames.
It wasn’t a big enough boat to have a lifeboat, and the ship was going to go down.
She yelled to him through the flames. “Abandon ship!”
“We’ve got to swim for shore, don’t we?” he said.
“Yes,” she said, and she dove off the side of the boat. But she didn’t go for the shore, not right away. She swam down, down under the water and peered through the dark murkiness.
The crystals were on the bottom, glowing with a strange blue-ish light, and they stretched out in a line as far as she could see, a barrier, keeping them inside.
When she surfaced, Eithan was on the other side of the burning boat, and he was screaming her name, panicked.
“I’m here!” she called back, swimming for him.
She shouldn’t have gone under and wasted so much energy looking for those crystals. She should have gone with him.
When he saw her, he treaded water until she swam closer, even though she yelled for him to go on without her.
They swam together, leaving the boat in flames, which had overtaken every part of it that wasn’t submerged under the water.
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