by Molly Ringle
She slashed at him. He feinted around her, then reached in and lit the wick of the firework with one of her flames before racing past. The wick began throwing tiny sparks.
Everyone else was still roaring, screeching, flinging elements. Ula Kana, he verified with another glance, had swung around and was flying at top speed toward him, over the hot expanse of the desert.
Good.
Merrick’s magic was ebbing along with his strength. He tipped his arm back and hurled the firework into the air. His bone broke again, and he collapsed face-up on the black rock. Pain roiled through his body.
The clay ball arched overhead, hovered, began to fall, then exploded with a bang and a burst of colored light. A thousand sparks in blue, red, yellow, and green spiraled upward and outward, hung in the sky, and floated slowly down.
Though his leg felt like it was made of daggers, and he could hardly breathe through the pain, Merrick turned his head toward the border.
Larkin and Arlanuk had gotten through the fire line—someone had thrown water on a portion of it—and fought their way to the border of the desert. Under a melee of swooping fae, Merrick saw Arlanuk dive forward onto the ground. He lifted his fist with something gleaming and black in it and struck the earth.
A sheet of glimmering air shot up, scattering rocks and flame, reaching high into the sky. It curved, spreading outward along the border, arching overhead, meeting the two walls forming on the other sides. The hunters in Arlanuk’s forest, and Sia Fia’s folk in her territory, had answered the signal. The prison took shape.
Merrick laughed, his ribs shaking, though he was too weak to get off the ground. Ula Kana whirled and shot toward the shimmering wall. She rebounded against it, and he laughed again. She tried in one place after another. She threw lightning bolts at it only to have the wall absorb them. She screamed at her allies to break it with their elements.
The fae inside the desert left the prisoners’ bodies and tried their luck at destroying the wall, but their spells of water, earth, fire, or air did nothing to it. When they reached to touch it, they found they could go straight through. Which they did, then paused on the other side and looked at each other, and at Ula Kana.
The fae outside the desert prison had slowed in their fight with the humans, and examined the shimmering boundary too. None rushed in to save her.
Ula Kana zoomed back around and smashed into the array of firework stars, scattering them. Floating above Merrick where he lay, she glared at him. “Your work, little witch? If so, I’m astonished. I had judged you far less competent.”
“Rosamund’s. Larkin and I are only delivering it. With help from the fae.” His face was clammy with sweat, and he was wracked with nausea, but a peace had settled over him. It was done. The quest was done.
“My powers do not extend beyond this boundary, I find. You’ve cut me off from my allies. This after such grand speeches about banding together in friendship.”
“You use compulsion. Not friendship.”
“What do you know of my motives?” A wailing edge had entered her voice, the first time he had heard anything other than smooth derision from her. She sank lower, almost within his reach. He smelled burning hair—his own or hers, he didn’t know. “You are within my powers, though. Did you think you’d survive after such a deed?”
“Not really.” Though Larkin had been the one saying it over and over, Merrick had known it too despite his denials: death had always been the likeliest end to this mission.
Larkin shouted from across the expanse. Merrick struggled up onto his elbow. Larkin and Arlanuk and a handful of fae had passed through the wall and were running toward them.
Ula Kana turned with a roar and swept her hand at them. The ground split open in a mile-long line between Merrick and his friends. Lava spurted up, glowing red, the heat so intense that Merrick’s face stung even from a hundred feet away. Fumes scorched his lungs; he began coughing.
Larkin and the others stumbled backward, shielding their faces.
“Merrick!” Larkin called. “We’ll send someone to you!”
“No, get out!” Merrick shouted back. “She’ll kill you.”
Ula Kana shot a spout of lava at his friends. The lava cooled with a hiss in midair and tumbled down in broken black rock—the work, he saw, of Rosamund, acting in tandem with a mermaid shooting water from her hands.
Arlanuk bellowed and stomped. The rocks leaped into the air and fell to form an arched bridge across the chasm. He strode onto it, three hunters behind him.
Ula Kana flung out her hand. Lines of flame blazed across the air, one touching the forehead of each hunter. Their steps slowed, and they stared at her. Then she chuckled, released the lines to vanish in smoke, and swung back in the air to give them space to approach.
Arlanuk’s gaze turned to Merrick, and he unsheathed a poisoned knife from his belt.
“Keep the rest out!” Merrick shouted to his friends. “She’s swayed them. Keep them out!”
“But you’ll die.” Larkin’s voice cracked in despair.
The heat-rippled distance between them was too great to make out details like the beauty mark near Larkin’s mouth, or the eyelashes from which Merrick had once brushed dust. Probably Larkin couldn’t see Merrick’s smile either. Merrick smiled anyway, even as grief welled up from every broken part of him. “At least I won’t die a failed hero. Run. Please run.”
Ula Kana threw five fireballs in quick succession at Larkin’s group. Between the mermaid, Rosamund’s spells, and Larkin’s sword, all the balls were deflected, but the group retreated. Ula Kana flew at them. They sprinted, crossing the desert’s border a mere second before the wall stopped her.
Merrick lay under the cold, swayed gaze of Arlanuk, who loomed above him and held him in place with the threat of the knife.
He hoped it would be the knife, in the end. Ten heartbeats. That was quick, and he loathed the thought of dying at Ula Kana’s hand. Even Arlanuk’s, at Ula Kana’s command, would be better.
Her shadow, long in the setting sun, stretched over him. He looked past her, at the serene darkening blue of the sky. He would fly again, and soon.
Larkin had said it was nothing to fear.
No pleas, protests, or bargains existed that would save him, and she would only enjoy his attempt. He stayed silent, waiting for the strike, staring into the sky. He’d never had a chance to ask Nye if Elemi and Cassidy were all right. Perhaps on the other side he would know, somehow. Then a thin streak of fire crossed his vision, heat scorched his forehead, and a probing sensation crawled inside his brain, paralyzing his limbs.
“You forgot,” she mused. “I can sway you too. Perhaps you would be interesting to keep. You’re half fae, enough that I can do this to you. You can fly; you have such curious magic. And you’ve caused such upheaval in the fae realm. I do like upheaval. Perhaps you can even release me, if we think on how to do it. After all, you freed me once. Why not again?”
His spirit struggled, but he couldn’t move. Oh, no, not this. Death was far better. The things she would make him do … Larkin would come back in for him, there was no way to stop the stubborn dear man, and then Ula Kana would make Merrick kill him, all without Merrick ever knowing if Larkin loved him, because they would never have the chance to speak of it …
Ula Kana stroked his cheek with one finger. He felt the skin sear and blister. “You sad thing. Even if you could walk free this moment, do you really think he would want you? You’re no hero. You’ve botched up every step along the way. It’s funny, really. Don’t you think he sees it as well? So he lay with you, so what? That doesn’t mean he’ll stay at your side once he’s back in the human world. So he says he loves you. That was just a speech to move the disgustingly softhearted fae. He couldn’t have meant it. Humans lie a thousand times daily.”
A glorious, weightless feeling suffused Merrick. He still couldn’t move, but …
“There,” she soothed. “You’re relaxing into it. You see how much better it could
be. Let me help you.”
His pains eased—she had healed his leg again, at least enough that it hurt less. Strength returned like rain to parched ground, flowing from his head down to his toes. His body climbed to its feet without his telling it to.
She floated down to stand on the ground, the size of a human. Her fiery locks tamed themselves to a bewitching mane of human-like hair. Her lava-rope lower body wrapped itself into leg shapes. She wore nothing, and her form changed into the shape of a man, an utterly beautiful man, pale with dark eyes and red lips. “Now,” she said. “Are you ready?”
Merrick glanced past her, coolly, at where Larkin ran along the border, limping, seeking the best way in. Rosamund hobbled behind, along with Nye and Haluli and the wispy blur that was Philomena. So weak, all of them.
Arlanuk snorted in derision and stomped. Where the recently-made chasm lay, the ground ripped upward instead, a jagged obsidian cliff a hundred feet high shooting up in a ring as far as Merrick could see, possibly around the entire desert boundary, cutting off Merrick from the other humans. They couldn’t reach him.
Just as well.
He looked into Ula Kana’s eyes. “I’m ready.”
She smiled and extended a hand to him.
He pulled together his will, drew the bare spike of iron from his pocket—it stung his palm, a hundred tiny slivers—and drove it into her eye.
CHAPTER 46
SECONDS AFTER THE CLIFF THREW ITSELF into being, Larkin heard Ula Kana’s shriek: a high-pitched sound that struck against the mountainsides and sent obsidian chips flying in a rain of razors. He shielded his face.
Then as the little blades fell away, Larkin beheld Merrick, rising into the air, flying toward the cliffs, about to clear them.
But whatever blow Merrick had dealt Ula Kana hurt her for only a few moments.
A lightning bolt flared, brilliant in the twilight.
It hit Merrick in midair, lit him with a swarming net of electricity, and threw him onto the pinnacles of the cliff. Draped over the rim at the top of the jagged black wall, he lay motionless.
“Merrick!” Larkin could barely hear his own shout through his throbbing eardrums. He ran, ignoring the pain of his cut foot, racing through the shimmering wall. Rosamund shouted something; he couldn’t make out what. Likely it was about covering him with a spell, for Ula Kana shot overhead like a diving falcon and was thrown back at once by a sudden localized whirlwind. Their fae allies, wise enough to avoid becoming swayed, stayed just behind the border, throwing their spells as best as they could from that distance. They could not come in to retrieve Merrick. Only a human could.
Only Larkin could.
At the base of the cliff he looked up, up, up to the small scrap that was Merrick. These cliffs were as high as the palace towers, but with no staircase, only sharp, irregular, largely vertical slabs of obsidian. His gaze darted from one nearly-impossible handhold to another, seeking a path. He clutched at a chunk above his head, planted his foot on a thin ledge, and stepped up.
Ula Kana’s laughter danced in echoes from the other side of the cliff. “Little Lava Flower,” she sang. “Once again you cannot climb to reach your lover.”
Larkin tightened his lips, gripped the next ledge, and moved up another foot.
“You can,” Rosamund called. “I shall see to it, Your Highness.”
He pulled himself up another few feet—ledge, handhold, slippery lump of black glass—and still did not fall, though already his limbs had begun shaking.
Lightning struck again, cracking open a piece of the cliff directly to his right. He swung aside and almost toppled, but grabbed at another chunk of the wall and stayed aloft. Its sharp glass edge cut his palm. He kept climbing, panting.
“The least I can do is make it exciting for you,” Ula Kana called.
She was answered by a blast of wind and water, which went over his head and left him untouched, but seemingly drove her away. He climbed higher, bleeding hand slipping often, pain stabbing up his wounded foot each time he planted it on a new step. He glanced down after some minutes. He was halfway up the cliff—already so high that his allies on the ground looked like beetles.
His knees shook; he shut his eyes and turned his face forward. The panic pounded raw inside his chest. He would die if he fell; that was fact, not irrational fear.
But there was still a chance for Merrick, and only if Larkin reached him soon. The allies were flinging their elements, keeping Ula Kana away, drawing her attention elsewhere as best they could, but she was too interested in Larkin and Merrick to be put off long.
Up he climbed, love and insane determination driving his limbs even when he thought he could not possibly keep on. Both hands bled now; he wasn’t sure how he would carry Merrick down even if he did reach him. Still he climbed, for he had gotten high enough to see Merrick clearly, close enough to see a drop of blood occasionally fall from the arm that dangled downward. He knew he would have nightmares for the rest of his life about that blood, that arm, if he abandoned Merrick here.
“So impressive! He hasn’t fallen yet,” Ula Kana said, startlingly close. She had darted over the top of the cliff and was hovering just above him. “All the more blood when he does fall.”
He froze. The wind blew chillier across the mountainsides in the approaching night, this high up, but from her direction he felt waves of heat.
“Ah! Though there’s a good deal of blood already,” she said, leering at Merrick.
Her laugh was cut off by a rain of ice-arrows, spearing her and sending her hurtling over the cliff with a screech.
“Climb! Climb!” shouted musical fae voices from afar—perhaps the water fae who had sent the arrows.
In a last push, every muscle trembling, a taste like metal in his mouth, Larkin dragged himself higher, to just below the rim. He swung an arm up, grasped Merrick’s limp hand, and pulled him down.
Cheers arose from below.
Merrick’s weight almost knocked him off the wall. He braced his body against the cliff’s unforgiving points and glassy surfaces, and clutched Merrick across his chest with one arm. He eased himself down a step onto a steadier position on a narrow ledge, then pulled Merrick up over his shoulder to free both hands. He began his descent.
Ula Kana was exchanging insults and blows close by with the fae allies, filling his ears with noise. Sparks and chips of stone rained down on him.
“Merrick. Merrick, speak to me.” Larkin gasped out the words, descending as quickly as he dared.
Merrick said nothing. Other than being jostled by Larkin’s motion, Merrick remained utterly still. He smelled of burned hair and scorched cloth and blood. Larkin would have to set him down to detect any breath or heartbeat, and he almost hoped they would both be struck down first so he would not have to find out.
He forced his sliced hands and feet to keep moving. Spells flashed past his head from Rosamund and the fae. Haluli flew in and out so fast she was only a streak of blue, weaving some net of air that seemed to keep Larkin shielded from Ula Kana. He was one-quarter of the way down. Still much too far to go.
Ula Kana screamed in rage from the other side of the cliff. The wall shattered outward, throwing Larkin and Merrick with it. He lost hold and they fell.
Even as panic reduced the world to a vague, blurry roar, Larkin held Merrick close to him, preparing to die with his love in his arms.
Air blasted him from below, a veritable hurricane, slowing him. It was Haluli’s net—perhaps bolstered by Rosamund. His speed decreased as he fell through it, until he thumped to the ground on his side no harder than if he had jumped off a bench. His friends were shouting in alarm before he could ponder the miracle.
“Run to us!” Rosamund said. “Quickly.” Magic invaded his body, animating him with strength—another of her gifts.
Carrying Merrick, Larkin rose and staggered across the boundary. There he dropped to his knees and laid Merrick on the black ground.
Arlanuk stormed through after him, knife rais
ed, then stopped and slowly lowered his arm as Ula Kana’s thrall fell away from him. His hunters followed, leaving the prison behind, and similarly went quiet.
Nye was on his knees, weeping. Haluli knelt beside him, her light dim and her wings sagging.
“He’ll be well, I can heal, he will be well!” Larkin shouted at them. He spread his hands on Merrick’s chest, gathering up his magic.
Rosamund touched his arm. “Your Highness.” She nodded toward his side.
He looked swiftly, in irritation, then stilled.
Merrick stood there, transparent, flickering. He regarded his parents sadly, then turned to Larkin. “It’s all right.” His voice wavered and warped, air washing words away as they formed. “I’m free. Nothing hurts. Larkin, stay with my family. Cassidy and Elemi are all right—I know they are. Aren’t they, Dad?”
“Yes … ” Nye said, his voice rough through his tears. “They’re fine; they came to me at my house to … to look after me … but they need you too, Merrick.”
“Larkin will help you. They’ll love him and need him, and he’ll need you all. You’ll be happy again before long.”
Keeping one hand on the physical Merrick’s chest, Larkin reached with the other toward the ghost, though of course his hand slipped through. “No. We don’t want this.”
“I know. I’m sorry. But you can’t heal death.” Merrick was already glancing backward, surely tempted by that path of moss leading away, which Larkin had once seen but could not now, from the side of the living.
Tears flooded his eyes. His fingers clutched the front of Merrick’s shirt while he kept staring at the spirit of his love. “I didn’t want you to wake me only to give your life. I don’t have anyone else. Please, you must stay.”
“You have my family. Dad, you want Larkin to stay with you, right?”
Nye was still weeping. “Yes, but … oh, my son, my kid. I’m so proud, and I wish none of this had happened.”
