46

The Rite

I open my eyes to yet another ceiling overhead. Or…no…not overhead. A wall in front of my face because I’m lying awkwardly on my side.

Everything rushes back, and I make a sound that is definitely panic as pins and needles of thawing start pricking unpleasantly all over my body. Still, the warmth of the room is a balm. Not dry and penetrating like Aryd, but not the bone-deep cold of Tyndra, either.

Where are we?

“She’s coming out of it,” Vos’s voice says from somewhere behind me.

“I can’t believe that worked.” I think that’s Horus’s voice. How is he here? Is Tziah here, too? Bina? The other one I haven’t met yet?

Reven’s face appears in front of me, sideways but close, so I guess he’s squatting down. He looks awful. Drawn, pale, like he might be sick. “We made it back to the Shadowood. But we have to move fast to get you back on the road, and you have to be awake for the ritual.”

He smooths a hand over my hair. Is his hand shaking? The concern in his eyes is so stark, it wraps around my heart.

“Ready?” he asks.

I manage a nod, my gaze clinging to his, trying not to let fear overtake me. It suddenly strikes me that I’ve lived in almost constant terror since meeting this man. That can’t be good for my health.

“Are you…” How do I put this without giving his secret away to the others? “Can you—”

“We’re back in the Shadowood,” he says. “It’s night. And the…others want you alive, too.”

Oh. Right. Because they want to take me to the king who needs my power.

Reven doesn’t move, though, searching my gaze. “Leave us.” A demand, not a request.

But I shake my head. “They can stay. Your leaders should be part of…big things.”

“We’ll fill them in later,” Reven growls. “After.”

I can make out Vos now over Reven’s shoulder, and I can tell by the way his eyes turn flinty that he thinks Reven’s hesitance has everything to do with him.

Reven doesn’t look away from me.

Horus is the one to lead them out. “Come on.”

Vos’s lips twist sourly. “It seems we are needed elsewhere. One of the levels of hell, perhaps.”

“I hear the second one is lovely this time of year.” I can’t help it. It just pops out. But I’m lying here with a freaking glass spear in my side about to be saved by a ritual that could poison me. I’m not exactly in the headspace to get lighthearted humor right.

Reven bends a look on me that’s probably supposed to be quelling, but I still catch the trace of amusement.

Horus pauses at the open door, through which the tall, moon-kissed trees of the Shadowood are visible beyond—almost steadying, now that I know where I am. “Be well, domina,” he murmurs, then disappears outside.

I bite my lip, because for a Wanderer to call me that is an honor.

Vos stops at the door, waiting. Apparently for Tziah. But instead of joining him, she kneels down at the head of the bed where I lie and smiles encouragingly at me, frosted black eyes kind. Then she presses a kiss to my forehead, like a little blessing. She and Vos leave without further comment.

The snick of the closing door acts as a catalyst. Like a shot from a bow, Reven begins.

He checks a book laid open on a small table beside where I’m lying, then bends down and strikes flint over a single candle, the fire flaring to life and setting the room softly aglow. In the small flame, he lights a stick of incense, the heavy, cloying scent swirling around us. He touches the end of it first to his forehead and then mine, with a small sting of the heat and leaving an ashy imprint I suspect on us both, purifying us for the ritual.

I’ve seen the priestesses do the same at the temple in Enora.

He lays the burning stick in a tray. Then, holding a candle between us, he looks at me. “Each time I pause, repeat the words I say.”

“Okay.”

With a deep breath, he begins, gaze steadily holding mine. “We invoke Tyndra, goddess of strategy and the stars.” He looks pointedly at me, and I repeat. Then he continues. “With no sacrifice but the fire in which all others will be made. We ask for your blessing of knowledge as we carry out the rite of shadow healing.”

Fire. I’ve always wondered why Tyndra, with her icy dominion, was the goddess of fire. I realize he’s waiting, and I repeat his words stumblingly, hoping I get them all correct. Then he carefully sets the candle down on the floor behind him.

Next, he picks up another candle and lights it with the flame of the first before facing me again. “We invoke Tropikis, the goddess of healing and life-giving plants. To you we offer a sacrifice of water.” He tips a goblet over the candle, the few drops sizzling with a hiss as they hit the flame but don’t put it out. “Darkness is about compromise, filling the voids left by light. We ask that you let it lead to blessings.”

He sets that candle down apart from the first, starting to form a circle around us, I think. I’ve only ever read about various rituals like this, never seen one performed.

The next candle now, lit again by Tyndra’s candle. “We invoke Wildernyss, the goddess of the arts and storm. To you we offer a sacrifice of wood.” He holds a small splinter over the flame until it burns on its own. “We ask that you let this woman’s loyalty to the shadows that bind be a blessing in your eyes.”

He places the candle on the ground, half a circle formed now. Another candle is lit. “We invoke Aryd, the goddess of magic and the moons. To you we offer a sacrifice of land.”

Once I finish repeating after him, he looks to me expectantly. It takes me a second to realize what he wants as he holds up a small bowl. From inside it, I use my power to lift a few grains of sand—all I can manage—letting them hover over the flame, glittering in the light, before dropping them into the fire, where they turn orange.

“Patience is the truest form of blessing, as is a life tied to shadow. We ask that you bless her with this gift,” Reven said.

A life tied to shadow. What am I giving up in order to save my own life?

Still, I repeat the words.

Another candle. “We invoke Mariana, goddess of music and the sun. To you we offer the sacrifice of metal.” Reven holds an arrowhead over the flames. Possibly the one that went through him. He waits until the metal turns an angry red. Which takes time, but I guess we just promised patience. “Passion is the beating heart of life. We ask that it be a blessing to all who dare let it in.”

I know what he’s doing. Each goddess is associated with a natural element and a spiritual one. He’s invoking all that—metal and passion, wood and loyalty, earth and patience, knowledge and fire, and compromise and water. The last will be air and…honesty.

That could be a problem.

After I finish repeating the words, Reven leans over the candle, his gaze intense and glittering in the flame. He tilts his head but pauses when he’s so close his breath brushes over my lips. Stomach clenching with reaction, without question I close the distance and kiss him.

His lips are cool against mine. Truly chaste. Which means the wave of warmth that rushes through me at the touch is all me. I can’t hide my gasp.

I would have leaned in for more, except he tips the candle toward me and the flame singes my skin. With a start, I jerk back and then whimper at the dull, throbbing ache in my side.

There it is. The pain.

I’m definitely no longer numb. Like that simple kiss has brought my nerve endings back to life, but it’s also waking up the hurt. I squeeze my eyes shut as a lance of agony reaches through the pleasure and grabs onto me, trying to drag me down.

“Hells,” Reven mutters from above me.

Then I hear him hastily moving to the last candle.

“We invoke Savanah, goddess of fertility and animals. To you we offer the sacrifice of air.” I open my eyes to repeat the words and watch through the radiating pain as he waves the candle in a circle seven times. “And ask you to bless our sacrifices with our vow of honesty.”

The words pour from stiff lips. Honesty. I still haven’t told him all my secrets. But it’s too late now.

Reven sets the last candle down, and we both stiffen as all the flames in the room gutter, shadows crawling and climbing from the corners, filling the space between and entering the circle where we are—the magic buried in every grain of the dominions at work.

“With these sacrifices and rites,” Reven says in a voice gone silkier, “I bind this woman with shadow.”

Woman.

Am I, though?

I’m still young, feeling my way through life by instinct. Still unsure, no matter how I may put up a front to any and everyone, including myself. Still learning how to navigate the worlds in which I’ve been forced to try to thrive.

I swallow. “With these sacrifices and rites, I bind…” I swallow again, this time around an arrow of pain, then continue repeating his words. “Bind myself with shadow.”

I don’t know what I expect. Nothing, honestly. But the second the last word leaves my lips, everything about the world falls away except for Reven, and the shadows descend, closing in over us. Not merely an absence of light. No, the shadows pounce on me like the predator who wields them.

Reven grabs my hand and holds on tight as my body lifts into the air. Then pain. Wrenching, horrible pain that makes me think my body is being ripped in two, but brief. Over before I can scream.

A clunk sounds. I crane my neck to look down and find the glass spear tip on the wooden floor at Reven’s feet.

I only have time to gasp because the shadows surge forward, pouring into my gaping wound.

“Reven?” I can’t help the dread stealing my voice.

He tugs my hovering form down hard and, still holding my hand with one of his, buries the other in my hair, his face close to mine. “Eyes on me,” he says. “Don’t look away.”

But I can feel them. The shadows. Writhing like snakes inside me. “Not the evil ones,” I say to him. Plead, more like.

And goddess help me, the expression of utter despair that crosses his features shatters my heart. “No,” he says. “I have them leashed inside me.”

I can do this.

Just as I think that’s true, all the shadows disappear inside my body, as if sucked down a drain. Except I’m the drain. I glance down again and gasp. Through the gaping tear in my clothes, I can see the wound is closed, but instead of skin, it’s the same kind of scars Reven carries on his wrists. Darkly silver and shiny like pewter. I’m held together by shadow.

And all the pain is gone.