by Evelyn Skye
A smile bloomed on Gin’s face. He hadn’t needed to hypnotize these sailors to convince him of his cause. And they’d also given him an idea for making sure Spirit surrendered to him.
He thanked the prisoners and welcomed them into the Army of the Evermore, a fitting name for a force bigger than Kichona’s alone.
Then he took control of their minds anyway. It had been fun, toying with them, but he wouldn’t leave a chance for them to rebel.
Afterward, Gin retreated to his ship and called for Tidepool again.
She arrived at his captain’s quarters a minute later. “You asked for me, Your Majesty?”
“I need something done on the other side of Kichona,” he said from his desk.
“Not a problem,” Tidepool said. “How soon?”
“Quickly.” He relayed the details of what he wanted done.
A cruel smile twisted Tidepool’s lips. “I’ll send a pair of ryuu right away, Your Majesty.” She bowed and left to dispatch the order.
Gin sat back in his chair, arms clasped behind his head, and exhaled.
Thoma was his, and Tsarina Austine’s heart would soon belong to Zomuri.
Chapter Forty-One
Sora hadn’t been able to sleep, so she left the mining shack and went for a walk as the sun began to rise.
Back in Paro Village, she had sworn to herself that she’d do anything to save her sister, her friends, and Kichona, but at the moment, it seemed like her promise was just a lot of hot air. She had a plan to get to Dera Falls to rescue Empress Aki, but what if Sora was wrong and the empress wasn’t there? And then there was the goal of reuniting the soul pearl with Prince Gin so they could kill him . . . but how in the world was Sora going to get close enough to him to get the pearl into his body?
Am I going to spoon-feed it to him and not expect any resistance?
Stars, these weren’t feasible plans. They were just wishful fancies, the kind that tenderfoots made up when they daydreamed about saving the world.
She felt sorry for Kichona that the entire kingdom was relying on her brains.
Sora sighed. Of course, it was also possible that all her ideas seemed pathetic right now since she was so sleep deprived. Her emotions had been up and down ever since Daemon told her that her soul was damned, veering from fear-induced confidence to helpless despair.
At the moment, she was clearly wading in a pool of doubt.
Eventually, Sora headed back toward the mining shack and spotted Fairy outside doing some warm-up exercises in the dawn light. This made Sora smile a little—it was good to see her roommate up and about, feeling well enough to practice fighting stances.
“Hey.” Fairy jogged over to her.
“Morning,” Sora said. “You’re moving pretty well.”
“Thanks. The thistledoon is helping a lot. But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.”
Sora stopped to give her her full attention. “What’s going on?”
“It’s Broomstick.” Fairy gestured toward the shack. “He won’t get out of bed. He keeps telling me about what he saw in the lake, and I know he’d never do those things, but no matter what I say, he refuses to believe me.”
“I don’t know if there’s anything we can do without the gods,” Sora said.
“But we have to try. I mean, we don’t even know for sure that there’s lake water in him. It’s like something in him broke, and as his gemina, I have to try to fix it. I just don’t know how.”
Sora bit her lip. She understood Broomstick’s gloom, not only because she’d been in the lake, too, but also because she was swimming in her own insecurity. And yet, Fairy was right, they had to try something.
“What’s made him happy in the past?” Sora asked.
“Um . . . throwing parties. Play-fighting with tenderfoots. Blowing things up. But he can’t really do any of those here.”
“He could blow up the soul pearl and save me some trouble,” Sora said sardonically.
“Oh!” Fairy’s eyes glimmered. “That’s worth a try.”
Sora snorted, not because it was funny, but because she’d only said it as a joke, out of despair.
It would be convenient, though. She hadn’t considered the possibility before, since she’d been more confident then, but now . . .
“I suppose he might as well try,” Sora said. “Maybe if Broomstick can blow up the pearl, it would kill the Dragon Prince. We could end this all right now.” She retrieved the soul pearl from the hidden pocket in her collar.
The tiny orb shone prettily in the sunlight.
Fairy wrinkled her nose. “I thought it would be more special.”
Sora dropped it in Fairy’s hand. “I hope it’s not, and that it can be blown to bits like any other pearl. And I hope you and Broomstick succeed so that I never have to see it again.”
Chapter Forty-Two
Fairy approached Broomstick with the idea.
“No,” he said. “Absolutely not.” He cowered under his blanket. Despite being twice Fairy’s size, he looked so vulnerable, with his skin smudged with dirt and his eyes downcast. His anxiety about the Lake of Nightmares prophecy rattled again through their gemina bond.
“It’ll be all right,” Fairy said gently. “I’m here, remember? And the pearl doesn’t pose any threat to you. It’s the Dragon Prince who can hypnotize you, not his soul.”
Broomstick shuddered.
“We can do this,” she said.
He dared to look up from his blanket at the pearl in her hand. “You’re assuming it’s a real gem that can be blown up.”
“No, I’m not. It could be anything. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try each new idea we think of. If none of them works, then we stick to our original plan of killing Prince Gin anyway. But it would be infinitely preferable to be able to assassinate him without having to be near him.”
Fairy grabbed Broomstick’s arm and hauled him up from the sleeping mat. It was like wrestling with an enormous sack full of lead weights, but she prevailed through sheer determination.
“If we blow this up,” she said, “you won’t have to be afraid anymore. Prince Gin won’t be able to hypnotize you, and that vision you saw in the lake will never come true.”
Understanding seemed to soak into Broomstick.
“We have to kill the Dragon Prince,” he said.
Fairy nodded. She held up the pearl in front of him. “And we might have a chance right now.”
They ducked inside what had once been stables, a short distance from the shack. Broomstick wanted an enclosed space to catch the pearl if it flew off during an explosion, but the shack was where all their belongings were, and the toolshed next to it was too small to blow things up in.
The stables were long empty, the dividers rotten and caving in, but the space was still redolent of horse droppings and saddle soap. Broomstick would have walked straight back outside if Fairy hadn’t stopped him.
“If I can stomach it, you can,” she said.
He huffed, but he stayed and set his bag on the ground.
“Do you want the soul pearl?” Fairy asked, cupping it in her hand.
He chewed on the inside of his cheek.
Fairy chastised herself. Broomstick may have wanted to destroy Prince Gin’s soul, but that didn’t mean he’d get over his fear of the pearl immediately. She should have known that.
But she could help him salvage some of his pride by offering an alternative. “On second thought,” Fairy said, “why don’t we do this?” She found a bucket, turned it upside down, and set the pearl on top. “You can blow it up from there.”
He stopped gnawing on his cheek and laughed instead.
“What?” Fairy said.
“How long have you known me?”
“Um, your whole life.”
“And how long have I been blowing things up?”
“Since you singed off your eyebrows.” Fairy remembered that day clearly. Broomstick had somehow gotten his hands on fireworks—who in their right mind g
ives a five-year-old an explosive?—and he’d set it off in the tenderfoot nursery. The rocket had shot through a window, burst on a nearby tree trunk, and set the leaves and grass around it on fire. Plus, the sparks from the takeoff had burned the ends of Broomstick’s eyebrows, and they’d never grown back.
“Right,” he said. “And since then, I’ve never blown anything up without a test chamber.” He rifled through his bag and pulled out a metal box made of reinforced steel, several inches thick on each side.
“You’ve been lugging that around everywhere?” Fairy said. “No wonder your stuff is so damn heavy.”
“I don’t ever want to be in a situation where I could blow something up, but then the opportunity passes because I wasn’t prepared.” He smirked, and Fairy was glad to see this first small hint of the gemina she knew.
He opened the test chamber, and she set the soul pearl in the bottom. Then Broomstick opened the other cases he’d brought and spent some time inspecting the bombs, making little cooing noises as he came to his favorite ones. Fairy didn’t laugh at him, because she was just as weird. Her potions and poisons were like babies to her, and she’d been known to talk or even sing to them.
Maybe this was why she and Broomstick were such a good gemina pair.
Finally, he chose a bomb. They lit the fuse and locked it inside the test chamber with the pearl.
Five, four, three, two, one . . .
A muffled explosion shook the test chamber.
Broomstick unlocked it. Black smoke poured out. Fairy coughed and waved an old horse blanket at it, trying to usher the smoke out of the stables.
“Did we do it?” she asked, once the smoke had cleared a bit. She peered inside the test chamber.
The walls were dark with soot, but the soul pearl sat, gold and unscathed, in the center.
“Stars,” she cursed.
They tried half a dozen approaches, beating the smoke out of the stables each time before looking into the test chamber. After the sixth failure, Broomstick shook his head.
“I don’t think we can do anything with this pearl. It’s not just a gem from the ocean. It’s like what Liga’s arrow said—if there’s god magic involved, it’ll take god magic to undo.”
Fairy sagged. “I suppose we should report back to Spirit and Wolf.”
They walked out of the stable—wow, the air was so much fresher out here—and looked in the shack. There was no one in there, so they headed back outside.
Fairy spotted Wolf and Spirit among the crab apple trees. But when Broomstick lifted his hands to his mouth to holler at them, she put out her arm to stop him. “Wait.”
Wolf and Spirit were standing next to each other, their backs to Fairy and Broomstick. They were probably just looking at something near the base of the tree in front of them, but Fairy suddenly remembered the sound of Wolf’s voice after he’d been injured, when he was losing consciousness and called Spirit’s name. There was something of longing now in the way they stood together, so familiar that they naturally leaned their heads toward each other, that where Spirit’s hip jutted to the left, Wolf’s body arced to allow a matching space, as if they were puzzle pieces that needed only a small nudge to nest into one another perfectly.
Fairy sighed.
“You know he’s yours as long as you want him,” Broomstick said. He understood Fairy well enough to know what worried her, even if she hadn’t said a thing. “And Spirit would never interfere.”
“I know . . . but you see it between them, don’t you?”
“See what?” Broomstick asked.
“The inevitability.”
He paused, as if considering what to say. But then he said, “I’ve seen it for a while. But I don’t think they know it yet, and it doesn’t mean you and Wolf can’t work out for now.”
“For now,” Fairy echoed quietly.
“Maybe forever. Gemina relationships aren’t allowed.”
Except their world had capsized, and the rules had fallen overboard with it.
She watched Wolf and Spirit for another minute. He was using his gravitational powers to keep crab apples on the ground, and Spirit was trying to pry them up. He goaded her on, and she laughed as she lost her grip on the stubborn fruit.
Fairy’s chest hurt. She had wanted to be the first to play with gravity with him.
Spirit tried again, and this time, Wolf released his hold on the crab apple at the same moment, so that Spirit used entirely too much force. The momentum threw her sideways into him, and she knocked him over with her, both of them falling to the ground in a tangle of limbs and hysteria. Their laughter filled the orchard.
It was then that Wolf saw Fairy and Broomstick.
“Um, we didn’t know you two were back,” he said, scrambling to his feet.
Fairy tried to give a nonchalant shrug. “We just got here.”
Spirit, who hadn’t yet caught on to the awkwardness, sprang to her feet with the crab apple in her hand. “Any luck with the soul pearl?”
“I’ll fill you in,” Broomstick said. He gave a meaningful look to Fairy; he was giving her space alone with Wolf, because he knew they needed to talk.
“Thank you,” Fairy whispered as he led Spirit elsewhere.
Wolf approached Fairy slowly, like he knew something was wrong, but he wasn’t sure what, so he was applying an abundance of caution. “Did I mess up?”
Fairy shook her head. She reached up and cupped his cheek. “You didn’t mess anything up. But I realized you’re not really mine.”
“What do you mean?” Wolf’s eyebrows knit together. “Of course I’m yours.”
“You are, right now.” She attempted a small smile so he’d know she wasn’t accusing him of anything. “But there’s something between you and Spirit that I can’t compete with.”
Wolf clasped Fairy’s hand, pressing it harder into the scruff of his cheek. “I swear there’s not. She’s my gemina.”
“You called out to her while you were unconscious,” Fairy said softly.
The blood drained from his face, and he dropped his hand to his side. “Gods, I’m sorry. I promise I’m not leading you on. It’s just that . . . Sora and me . . . I’m sorry.” He brought his hands back up to his temples. “I like you so much.”
“I know you do. But it’s not enough,” Fairy said. “I think there’s always going to be a part of you that’s in love with Spirit.”
“That’s not true—”
Fairy shook her head. “It is. Everything will be right, though.”
And as soon as she told him that, she realized it really was true. She was sad, but not upset. Deep down inside, she’d probably already known that Wolf was supposed to end up with Spirit. “Everyone except Spirit knew you had a crush on her, and I should have known those feelings were too intense to just go away. We’re so intertwined with our geminas. If I thought of Broomstick as more than a brother, I can imagine how complete that love would be.”
“Fairy, we can work it out. I want to. I know I’m a terrible boyfriend—”
“You’re not. But I don’t want to be the consolation prize. I deserve better than that, and so do you.”
“But—”
She stroked his cheek. “Let’s end this while it’s still good.” But it wasn’t easy to say, even though she knew it was the right decision. Her mouth puckered, as if she could actually taste the tang of bittersweet.
“That’s it?” Wolf’s head fell forward, like his neck was no longer up to the task of holding it upright.
“Please don’t be sad, Wolfie. You’re still one of my best friends.”
“I wanted more than that.”
“You’ll have it, just not with me. You’re supposed to be with Spirit, and you can be, because the old rules don’t matter anymore. There’s no one around to enforce them. Either we die before the Society is saved, or it will be rebuilt but completely different. There’s no going back to the way things used to be.”
Wolf closed his eyes.
“I’m sorry
,” Fairy said.
He exhaled and opened his eyes. “You have nothing to be sorry for. You’re remarkable, you know that? Someone’s going to be really lucky to have you one day.”
“I know,” Fairy said, and this time, the smile came more easily. “Do you want to walk back with me to the shack?”
He shook his head. “I’d like to be alone for a little bit.”
“Of course.” She pecked him on the cheek one last time.
Wolf began to walk away, shoulders hunched, but he stopped after a couple steps. “Um, let the others know we’re still leaving for Dera Falls at dusk.”
“All right.”
Fairy watched as he left, going only a few yards before he shifted into his wolf form. Then he broke into a run and leaped into the air, disappearing into the clouds and leaving only the memory of blue electricity behind.
Chapter Forty-Three
Sora knew something had happened as soon as Daemon raised his mental ramparts, but she didn’t know what it was. Their gemina bond had vibrated with sadness, but then the feeling had disappeared, replaced with a silent wall.
Broomstick was still telling her about the different ways he had tried to destroy the soul pearl, but Sora stopped listening and started to walk back toward the crab apple trees, where she’d left Daemon and Fairy.
“Where are you going?” Broomstick asked, jogging up beside her.
“I need to find Daemon,” she said.
Broomstick reached out and put his hand on her arm. “No, you don’t.”
Sora frowned at his hold on her. “You know what’s going on.”
“Wolf probably needs space right now.”
“Tell me what happened.”
He let go of Sora and shook his head. “It’s not mine to tell.”
“Then that’s why I need to find him.” Sora set off toward the orchard again, and Broomstick let her go.
She ran through the trees, searching for Daemon. She didn’t find him, but not far from where he’d been showing her his gravitational magic, she saw Fairy sitting in the dirt, back against a tree.
“Do you know where Daemon is?” Sora asked as she approached.
