by V. E. Schwab
“Please, stop.”
“Witch.”
“Kill him.”
And then, the circle of space collapsed, the people plunging toward him, and he threw out his hands and closed his eyes and screamed, “STOP!”
There was a sound like a large door being slammed, a heavy crack as the wind whipped into everything around him, and threw it back with horrible force. At the same moment, everything around Will went very, very still.
He opened his eyes.
He was standing in the center of a column of wind, a wall of air that whined and moved so fast that the whole world blurred beyond it, and he blurred within, his body thinning more and more toward nothing. A nothing that was safe, empty, a nothing without thought and feeling and pain and loss. He began to vanish.
And then, above the howling wind, he heard the first screams.
Threaded through the wind was something bright, all light and color, brilliant and hot, and Will realized through his thinning mind what it was.
Fire.
The wind had caught up the flames from the funeral pyre and spread them to the garlands that ran like roots through Dale.
Will, still fading, tried to pull himself back. The wind didn’t listen. He kept fading and the fire kept spreading.
No. I didn’t want to… He reached out, but his arms were smoke and air. He tried to break free of the tunnel of wind, but every time he moved, the cyclone only shifted, keeping him in the center.
I didn’t mean to hurt… The screams grew louder, the air choked with smoke, and he tried to pull back, but it was too late.
The wind tore Will from his body, and his mind, and set him free.
9
William woke in snow.
The late afternoon sun shone down as he lay there on the cooling stone path, and looked up at the sky, and watched the white flecks float down around him, thinking how rare a thing it was in Dale. It fell, and coated his skin, his hair, his cloak. And then he took a breath, and choked, and realized what it was.
Ash.
He jerked up, coughing, and then he looked around, and saw that he was sitting in the charred remains of Dale. The buildings, what was left, were blackened, stone skeletons with the wood burned out. And all around, to every side, were mounds of ash. Will got to his knees, and reached for the nearest heap, and when he wiped away the film, his hand met still-warm bone. A corpse. All the mounds were corpses. Will staggered to his feet, and spun to look up the great steps. His mother’s pyre was gutted, burned to nothing, and beyond it the Great House stood, a still-smoking shell.
And through it all, a deathly stillness reigned. No sound but the settling of dust and the pounding of Will’s heart, and then his boots as they tore through the ruined streets and down to the base of the hill where Dale gave way to the lakes and the field and the moor. He reached the edge and collapsed to his knees and retched.
There was a line on the ground, a seam where the singed world stopped and the green one started. A crisp, clean, impossible divide.
The wind. It hadn’t simply pushed the people of Dale back, it had trapped them in, confined the destruction to the hill, sparing only Will and the moors beyond. He shuddered, and wrapped his arms around his ribs. He made it to his feet again, and toward the nearest lake, the shards of the coffin still scattered across the grass. Among the warped metal and wood, he found his pendant, took it up, and carried it to the water’s edge, where his legs gave way. He felt hollowed out as he closed his hand around the necklace, and pitched it into the lake.
His reflection rippled, but he didn’t meet its gaze. Instead he forced his eyes up to Dale, the sun hovering above the ruins of the Great House.
He couldn’t stay. He felt the wind, now gentle, brush against him, soothing. At first he resisted, but then he realized, with a hollow kind of grief, that there was no reason to hold back now. He could have power or people, but never both, and now the people were gone, and so he gave in, let the wind rise and fall with his breath, let it course through him as he forced his shaking body to its feet.
And then, he began to walk.
He walked until he was no longer the heir of Dale, or the callous prince, or William Hart. He walked until he was simply a shadow, a stranger, a ghost. Until his edges blurred and his body thinned, and he was nothing but a gray streak against the wind.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
V.E. Schwab is the No.1 New York Times bestselling author of multiple novels, including This Savage Song and the Darker Shade of Magic series, whose first book was described as “a classic work of fantasy” by Deborah Harkness. It was one of Waterstones’ Best Fantasy Books of 2015 and one of The Guardian’s Best Science Fiction novels. The Independent has called her “The natural successor to Diana Wynne Jones.”
