The wind’s whispers pressed him to run, but Jaime ignored them and climbed the steps. When he was at the top, he dragged his eyes over the courtyard. The smears of blood formed a vertical line with a crescent and two dashes below it. Four of them—aligned in a square.
This was the same emblem that Achuros drew into his ledger.
And the longer he stared, an eye began to form in the center . . .
Royal soldiers suddenly swarmed into the courtyard—tens, hundreds of them, until he couldn’t count. In the time it took him to turn around, the Archpriestess was already standing behind him.
The clashing light of the hidden sun and the glowing moon silhouetted half her face. Her bottom lip was ripped. Jaime hoped someone in Arcurea had done that to her—Florin, maybe. Or better, Lady Prescilla. Now that they were standing face-to-face, Jaime noticed it: her irises had turned as poison-black as her pupils.
As their eyes locked, it felt like all of the Kingdom of Air was drawing a breath.
Her knife slashed across his eyebrow.
Warm blood spattered into Jaime’s eyes. He stumbled backwards, temporarily blinded. An explosion of pain went off in his body.
The Archpriestess thrust out one arm—and he went tumbling.
Jaime crashed onto the stones and rolled forward a few times, sharp points digging into his face. His body finally woke from shock. It was a shallow wound, but Damasia hit a blood vessel. Warmth gushed down his face. Jaime bent onto his elbows, choking for air. His lungs heaved—no, no, no.
After four seasons, his asthma was coming back.
He landed in the blank square of the cursed symbol.
Raising her head to the sky, the Archpriestess bellowed: “Temple Jaypes is mine!”
Those foul words echoed across the silent expanse of the mountain chain, drowning the air. Jaime forced himself to rise to his feet. His eyes fixed on the Archpriestess, blurred by hatred.
“Kill him!” she shouted.
Jaime held onto the geyser of hate bleeding from his heart. He couldn’t hear his heartbeats anymore, or the Voice. He heard, saw, and felt nothing but the swarm of arrows rushing at him across the courtyard.
Jaime twisted his body. A wall of air blew out the volley. The archers released their bowstrings again, but his lip contorted. He snarled at them. Another wall broke their attack. Before they could try again, he sent lashing currents straight into their ranks. Shouts of surprise. Bodies crashed into each other. Horses threw off their riders and streamed out of the courtyard. As the front lines cracked, the archers he wounded scrambled to get up—the flesh where his currents had struck bore bloody gashes, like whip marks. Good. The unspeared soldiers drew their swords and leapt over the fallen men. Tears streamed into Jaime’s eyes, mixing with the blood of his face wound. Soon, the soldiers trapped him into a tight circle. He spun around and around in a blur, evading the jabs of spears. Thrust violent bursts of air at them. Each held the force of artillery. Several soldiers screamed as they tumbled over the balustrade. The sky swallowed them up. Others lay facedown on the ground, their eyes lifeless, their necks snapped, their noses smashed into their skulls. As The Empyrean’s energies overpowered his mind, reality blurred. The evening sky seemed to transform into tar. Torches glowed like diabolical eyeballs of light. The soldier’s shouts turned into fiendish laughter. And drums. They didn’t look like men any longer, but vaporous bodies hidden behind white mist. They leered and jeered against the fire and smoke. Their whispers flooded the skies.
Kuurjal hzajdi gûl. Tee hee hee!
Mocking him.
Jaime struck down one soldier after another, but another one filled his place. There were too many of them. The strength of his avai energy rolled in and out. Gaps appeared in his vision. Air no longer entered his lungs. The flight with Arrys, Toran, and Eridene in the skies seemed like a distant dream.
Someone struck him in the head. A blade jabbed his left calf.
He collapsed.
The tide of soldiers parted as the Archpriestess approached him. Jaime looked up at her, chest rising and falling shallowly. The knife in her hand dripped a fresh trail of blood.
“Stand,” she ordered.
They forced him onto his feet. His left leg stung. He shifted his weight on his right. Damasia seized the medallion. Then, she licked up the blood on his forehead with the point of her tongue.
“It was all too easy,” she whispered. “My Air Alliance contact revealed everything to me. After you vanished from Arcurea, not even the King’s bondlords knew where to find you. But I did. How sad Achuros died for nothing.”
Jaime rasped, “It was you. You betrayed the airpriests.”
She laughed.
Their faces blocked out the other soldiers, so none of them saw the flash of evil dilating the black in her pupils. This was no airpriest. No, this was a monster originating from the same hellworld as the Voice.
“Fare thee well, Prince of Jaypes.”
He closed his eyes.
Cold steel bit into the flesh of his throat.
Chapter Thirty-Three
A storm opened out of the dark skies.
Jaime kept his eyes closed. He had completely lost his grip on reality. But the rhythmic blasts of air fell stronger and closer, and the soldiers’ grips on him loosened. He dared open his eyes.
Gold the size of his head hovered between him and Damasia. A beak. It reflected his blood-stained face.
Slowly, he lifted his head.
Enormous wings beat the air. Dark feathers. A crest like the horns of a dragon—he was staring at a hawk, but this hawk was the size of Sojin’s destrier.
It released a sharp, high-pitched cry.
“Larfour,” whispered the Archpriestess. The black ink drained out of her gray irises. She backed away from its spear-sharp claws.
The soldiers shouted and scrambled for cover. The giant hawk dived. Half-consciously, he slipped into Aulos’s windcloak, pulled the knapsack over his shoulder, and staggered onto the balustrade.
Jaime fell.
Somewhere above him, faint bellows chafed against the hum of flying arrows. Glacial air burned his face. No currents existed up here to catch him. He fell through the clouds, fell in the direction of the mortal world, until the only thing that existed was the beating cadence of wings. The hawk had caught him.
His eyes rolled back. His head went limp.
Crackling fire. Wild wrens, owls, partridges.
Gods.
Partridges?
Their bird cries were little throaty clicks—a noise he hadn’t heard since he escaped Mount Alairus.
Jaime tried opening his eyes, and immediately regretted it. They were so crusted. Like someone had dumped salt on his eyeballs, sealed them shut with honey, only to be torn back open with a prong.
He forced his them open.
The world was blurry and distorted. The prickly trees swayed violently, stormwinds blew the alpine ferns and bluegrasses flat. Something smelled of cold mint.
Were those trees kingpines?
Kingpines didn’t exist in the south or west. He was near Mount Alairus—near home!
Near Mamá.
Jaime grappled with his body until he was upright. A wool blanket blocked out the worst of the windchill. Someone had wrapped a thick pad around his left calf. The small fire struggled to stay alive.
In front of it was a pile of golden apples.
Gods—
Chomping noises from behind. Then a voice said: “What did the lord apple say to lady melon, say you?”
“Arrys?” Jaime cried.
The dusky young man gulped down his apple and said, “‘Tis a shame we cantaloupe.”
Jaime threw off the blankets. “You’re alive! What—what are you doing here? How did you find me?”
“Master hunters are the Larfene.”
Jaime shoved his hands in his pockets. “This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be here. I have to . . . ”
Have to what?
The skin above his right eye stung madly. One more gift the Archpriestess had given him—a scar he would wear for the rest of his life. It dawned on him that with the High Temple fallen, he had no idea what to do next, where to seek help from.
He covered his face. Arrys caught him as he was falling to his knees.
“The airpriests are dead. I’m a Sage, Lord Jaypes’s chosen, but somehow, I’m always one step behind the King. I—I don’t understand.”
Jaime tried to push Arrys off. He kept his glistening face turned away from both his friend and the firelight. “I’m okay.”
“I have known grief,” Arrys said quietly. “The kind that parches great rivers and hides crop under cracked earth for an eternity.” He paused. “My baba and mamah died in an avalanche. Always I see their faces in crowds, from the corner of my eye, when the torches are low. But when I turn around, they are gone. I mistake them for someone else. This is a wound that never heals.”
Jaime refused to look at him.
“I understand, Prince. Feel. It is okay.”
Arrys pressed his arms against Jaime’s back. His balance caved. Jaime collapsed over Arrys’s shoulders. The last time he embraced anyone like this was Hida, just a few minutes before Hilaris’s burning.
“I need to get to Townfold—” he choked. “I need to know if she—if my mamá is alive.”
“Prince, the Greatsporting is in three weeks.”
“I don’t care!”
“You have my syrai. It will be done.”
Later that night, after Arrys left to a brook to wash, Jaime closed his eyes. Without his medallion, he felt like he was trekking the Kingdom naked.
As the darkness deepened, Arrys’s shadow skulked across the scraggly forest floor. Through the slit of eyes, he studied the Larfene’s steel hoops, his sunstruck skin, the glistening beads in his thick eyelashes. All of him seemed to capture the firelight.
Arrys turned his back.
Jaime stifled a gasp.
Black ink swirled over his tendons, down his upper arms. It looked like calligraphy of some sort, interwoven with ivy, jasmine, and the fiery remiges of a hawk. The details were dagger-sharp and delicate, down to the individual strokes.
Breathtaking and terrible as a pyre’s flame.
Who are you, Arrys?
Jaime sifted through the energies of his avai, but they were murky, impossible to read—he detected tendrils of love, fiercer than what he ever felt in Hida. But he also picked up on fainter tendrils of bloodstain. They were buried under a long, dark past of murder.
Why are you here?
Just when his eyes closed, someone urgently shook him awake.
“Time to get up.”
Groggy from pain and exhaustion, Jaime rolled aside. “No. Go away—”
“I could,” said the low voice, “but this camp is about to see a storm in fifteen minutes.”
“A storm?” Jaime flipped upright, biting down when pain needled his calf.
The fire was out. Irate gusts gnashed at the needles of the kingpines.
Arrys pulled the hood over his head, a finger against his lips. “Soldiers. They are marching this way. Where is this Tenfold you spoke of?”
He closed his eyes and listened to the banestorm. Its winds were streaming in from the east. “Townfold is in the direction of this banestorm’s origin.”
“Mm, I feel it.” Arrys narrowed his eyes. All of his senses seemed perked like a feline’s.
Jaime checked his neck by habit—and started when he didn’t find the medallion there.
The Archpriestess has it, remember?
They streamed across uneven slopes of broom and woodrush, familiar flowers nipping at his bare knees. A year ago, Jaime had raced through these same shrubs with Hilaris in a race to the barrows.
Arrys prowled. Jaime limped.
The gales battered away his drowsiness, blasted his hair flat. Branches whipped at his brows. The wind screamed at him. Every waking step was a nightmare.
In only a ten-minute window, Jaime smelled a menagerie of air currents: wild ones, wispy ones, some galloping across the forest in single-minded urgency, some diffusing tremors of massive energy greater than all the human avai of Arcurea put together. These made him stumble backwards and choke out a gasp.
“It’s like the whole Kingdom’s being ripped apart,” he yelled.
Arrys said grimly: “Northeast Jaypes has been this way for several months now. Air has fallen from Unity. This Kingdom is coming to an end.”
Jaime’s heart accelerated.
The Legend is real.
He glanced up at the boiling clouds.
They were dark as metal, clashing and kicking and roaring at each other like giant rams. The boundlessness of its energy, the berserk wrath of the air currents—this was the kind of mega-storm the four gods tried to stop long ago during the pre-formation of the Kingdoms.
All for nothing. This would be Jaypes’s final storm.
Eridene. I have to get to her. What if she’s still waiting for me at the base of the Lunar Peaks?
He swallowed down his panic. The kiss of her sweet breath blotted out everything else.
An eternity later, the trees parted. The Estos River muttered under him—the same waters he had jumped into with Casse. A mildewed bridge opened toward a valley of colorless slopes.
Jaime slid to a stop.
Lord Jaypes . . .
Where Townfold Village should have been was a smoking wasteland. The lofty kingpines he fondly grew up with were splintered teeth sticking out of waist-high debris. Tattered New Jaypes banners flailed in the wind. No thatched houses. No arbors of grapevines, no porches shadowed by awnings, heirlooms passed down by generations of Alairan families. No sounds of clanking iron from Jorges’s forge, or the taste of crusty barley in the air.
Jaime fell to his knees.
Tatty tents struggled to stay standing against the tempests. Perhaps a fifty, perhaps less. This was all that was left of Mount Alairus.
“It’s over,” Jaime said.
Arrys placed a hand on his shoulder.
“My mother—”
“Go first,” Arrys murmured. “I will follow close behind. Strange tracks on these paths trouble me.”
Jaime didn’t ask questions. By the time he staggered down into the valley and neared a shallow bend in the river, Arrys was gone.
The world went silent except for babbling water and the crunch of his sandals against dandelions. Thick mist obscured the way. His steps slowed.
Whispers.
Sweat crept down his neck. These weren’t coming from the winds. It—whatever it was—was growing closer.
It was hunting him.
The pines formed tight clusters the banks, stamping shadows against the mud. They started to move and transform in the corner of his eyes. Jaime glanced behind him.
The bluegrasses around him were still.
A breeze tickled him behind the ear, warning him of death. The feeling was so strong, like a chariot smashing into his chest at full-speed.
Swish.
Jaime whirled around, crouching his knees into defense position. He couldn’t swallow. Several pine needles gyrated downward from something he couldn’t see.
Animal fear fueled him into a sprint.
Thick mud slurped at his sandals. Jaime limped across the river, cutting his ankles over shallow rocks.
The things teased the edge of his sight—rolling clouds of white—chasing him from both banks. So many of them.
“Arrys!” he screamed.
Baby-pitched laughter in his ears.
Arrys, Arrys, they mocked back. Hee hee.
Jaim
e glanced over his shoulder for the Larfene’s hooded shape, but as he turned back around, he crashed to a halt.
A spark of mist intercepted the river, blocking him from Townfold Village. Mini human-shaped outlines flashed in and out of the white smog. Their heads and arms were bent at grotesque angles.
His mind raced for Air. He grasped at his chest for his medallion. Without it, he couldn’t draw his element.
Jaime backed away from them. Splash. Splash. Another wall of mist rolled to a halt behind him. Trapping him. A thousand whispers and baby laughter scraping his ears.
The mist-monsters were real.
Chapter Thirty-Four
A spitting yowl forced his eyes open.
Jaime gaped.
A golden leopard twice the size of any mountain cat he’d ever seen bound over the rear wall of mist-monsters—it looked exactly like the larger version of the lantern-eyed tomcat that followed him around the Krete Forests last fall.
Countless hisses echoed in his ears.
The fog broke formation. Flitting silhouettes, whiter than ghosts, appeared behind it. They moved too fast for him to make sense of they were.
The leopard landed on its feet. Bared its fangs. Some of the mist-monsters accepted its yowling challenge with sound of grinding iron teeth.
Jaime sprinted upstream. Pressed his hands to his ears to shut out the horrible noise. Water soaked him down to the marrow.
A mist-monster cut in front of him, giggling in delight.
It locked gazes with him.
For one breath, Jaime saw blistering, pupiless eyes—the color of human flesh burning in flames.
Those eyes set his mind alight. The stormy landscape vanished into a new dimension of infinite pitch-black. A doorway of burning light floated toward him, growing larger, larger. Its light drenched his skin in crimson.
Doorway into The Empyrean—
It was trying to drag him into the spirit world—into a layer of hell.
No!
Tongue frozen. Jaime screamed. No sound came out. Instinct told him whatever was behind that door would end in horrible death—
Let go of my mind! he cried.
Stormfire Page 24
