And so the lords of the Living Lands swore their oaths to the High Keep lest all be lost.
~ From the Chronicles of the Lyrac Accords
THE NEXT DAY started much the same with all of us back in the library, except this time I avoided the kavé. I had tasted it in the back of my throat all through last night as I tossed and turned on my cot in the dressing room—after checking my hiding place underneath to see what Zik had left.
But all the various little treasures I’d accumulated since our arrival at the High Keep—nothing too incriminating, since I didn’t have a secured hiding place for any purloined items much less a fence to bargain for me, even less a bolt hole set up in the event of the previous going wrong—were still tucked away, and I apologized to Zik in my head.
But even having my few worldly goods secured under me didn’t let me sleep. Through the last remaining hours of deepest night, I held the obsidian shard like a worry stone, circling the pad of my thumb over the sheared facet. In the blind dark, I caressed the flawless glass, gliding my fingertip lightly, oh so lightly, along the broken edge, always on the threshold of cutting myself but never quite.
Or so I thought. When Zik woke me the next morning—I’d fallen asleep after all, it seemed, but I rolled out of bed sullen and unrested—I went to the privacy chamber to try to splash some wakefulness over my face only to find a myriad of crisscrossing white lines on my finger, not a one deep enough to bleed but marking me nonetheless.
When we were all assembled in the library, Dyania took a place at the head of our table where all the pointless efforts of the day before were still scattered, looking even more chaotic and hopeless now that we’d had a night’s rest, such as it was. The lady gazed at us all solemnly.
“I had a dream,” she started. “A dinzah dream.” When Imbril sucked down a startled breath, she gave him a wry smile. “Not last night. My brother didn’t believe that I would go to my fate with appropriate decorum, so he made sure I was insensible through the most awkward part of the transition”—she looked away—“the part where I would’ve said goodbye.” She shook her head, not so much a repudiation of her brother, I thought, as annoyance with herself for even mentioning it. “On the way here, I dreamed that the earthbone road carried me to the black tower…but it gleamed bright as a star.”
Lisel frowned. “I thought after not finding anything yesterday, we would find a new way,” she said. “Not cling to the same old thing.”
“It wouldn’t be the same,” Dyania explained. “Prince Aric has been used as a weapon, yes, but one wielded without care, as likely to cut a friend as the enemy.” She gazed around at us until her dark-light focus stopped on me. “Feinan, you said he must feel untrusted, not heard even. Why would he fight for us when he knows we’d let him die?”
“Why do you?”
She ignored my question and continued, “I think we must seek him out, ask him what no one else seems willing to: if of his own volition he will save the Living Lands.”
Lisel frowned. “You were granted an unexpected reprieve when the Devouring could not continue. You would hand yourself back to his mercy?”
“Mercy? No. That’s not what we need from him at all. But maybe we can give him a taste of it in return.” She pursed her lips. “That is the purpose of a Feast, after all—weaving pure auras into a chain to bind the beast. But what if we offered him some…some sort of kindness, not a sacrifice—a gift instead of guilt?”
“My lady, your gentleness and thoughtfulness do you credit,” Imbril said. “But I think you imagine an honor in the prince that doesn’t exist—can’t, considering his demonic corruption.”
Dyania looked at me. “You’ve spoken to him, several times. What do you think, Fei?”
I spread my hands in front of me to block their curious looks. “I don’t think anything.” That wasn’t true, of course; I thought all the time, but it rarely proved advantageous. But thinking about or speaking to the Dragon Prince seemed to me a particularly poor idea. “The king and the haloria and no’Maru all think the Dragon Prince is trouble, so…” I shrugged.
She lifted an eyebrow at me. “Feinan no’Sevaare, you of all people calling out trouble seems unfair.”
With a scowl, I slumped lower in my chair. “You warned me to take nothing from the Dragon Prince, but now you want to take a chance with him?”
Imbril and Lisel made similar unhappy noises while Zik sat straighter in his seat. The lady smiled at him. “Yes, Zik? You have something to say?”
He looked stunned that she’d noticed. “I believe, my lady,” he said, “that we can’t do this alone.”
As that truth was sinking in—to me more bitter than the remains of kavé at the end of the day—the faint sound of a ruckus reached us through the library window. With Zik still basking in the lady’s smile, Lisel rose to go peer out.
Her shoulders stiffened before she wheeled around. “The resupply train has returned—in pieces. I must go. The rest of you, stay here.” She ran from the room.
The rest of us glanced at each other in alarm and then rushed to the window.
From our tower, with just a few clear panes in the stained-glass glorification of Ormonde, we had only an awkward sideways glimpse of a slice of the outer bailey, but it was enough to see the flurry of frantic activity pouring inward—harts and yaxen, guards and palace servants and rougher-garbed folk, chariots and wagons, all in a tangle like spectrum threads and homespun carelessly and blasphemously knotted.
“What happened?” Imbril’s voice trembled.
Zik’s reply was even more beaten. “It looks like the morning after Velderrey.”
Dyania put her hand on his bent shoulder, although I wasn’t clear whether she was comforting him or supporting herself. She glanced at me over his head. “Fei.”
In answer to her unspoken request, I nodded. “I’ll find out.”
“Go carefully,” she said.
Imbril stiffened. “We’re in the High Keep. What do we have to be careful of?”
If anyone answered, I didn’t hear it as I was already out the door.
Not that I’d wished any ill fate on the caravan, but getting out of the library was a relief. I sped down from the tower as quick as my boots and gravity would take me. But when I emerged in the bailey…
Ah, I should not have chafed at the serene, solitary scholarship. Out in the yard, all was commotion. Not chaos exactly, since the guards and servants obviously knew how to give and take orders. But this seemed more than anything they’d dealt with before.
Some of the draught animals were wounded, their legs slashed, and their bellows of fear and pain tore at me. The caravan conveyances were in worse shape, the sides scored with long gashes, many of the spokes in the wheels shattered. And the people…
I swallowed hard, my stomach churning even without kavé. I recognized those sad bundles from the aftermath of the Velderrey. For all the impression of turmoil from above, down here it was clear that the situation wasn’t as unfamiliar as I might’ve hoped. The guards and servants divvied up the wounded and dead, clearing the worst of the wreckage as I looked for Lisel.
I found her in conversation with a man in hartier garb, leaning heavily on a splintered pike. She clamped her hand on his shoulder, straightening him, and he nodded, though his eyes remained downcast. Not that I needed any confirmation of what had occurred, but I drifted up beside them.
Lisel glanced at me, giving me a small shake of her head. As interminable as our time in the library had seemed, in truth the slow, laden caravan had only been gone a day and a half. If they’d been attacked by demons and then escaped back to the High Keep…
That was close, closer even than Velderrey.
Before Lisel could speak—not that I needed the gory details of the explanation when it was so clear what had happened—I caught a glimpse of a face familiar through streaks of blood.
“Gryner!” I rushed toward him, my throat tight.
But he held up a hand, wrapped in a rough, filthy bandage, pausing me at a distance. “Hold, Sevaare,” he ordered gruffly. “I…I am demon-touched.”
I stumbled forward one more step before my knees locked inadvertently. “Are you…?” I swallowed the rest of the question. Of course he was certain. No one would say it if it wasn’t so.
Though he might not be hollowed quite yet, his sunken eyes were already haunted with the knowledge of what would come. “I wanted retribution for what they did to Torbar.” At the name of his friend who’d died at Velderrey, his voice broke. “I was a fool. It was worse, much worse than Velderrey.”
I couldn’t imagine. I didn’t want to imagine. “I know one of the lors,” I said quickly. “There are blessings, maybe salves or unguents or some such…”
He didn’t even bother shaking his head. “At least you didn’t come with us,” he said gruffly.
As if the horde wasn’t coming for all of us.
Several palace guards approached, their faces as white and sharp as the points of their pikes leveled toward us. “You were touched?” one of them asked Gryner.
He jerked his head in a nod. “I’ll come, no fight—”
“He fought for us,” I said angrily. “He volunteered to accompany the cavalcade of Chosen Ones, and he fought in Velderrey and now again. You can’t just take him away.”
A heavy hand on my shoulder made me whirl on Lisel. “Tell them,” I urged her.
But they were already guiding Gryner—not quite at pike point, but the threat was there—toward a huddle of a few others, their shocked expressions fading to hopelessness like death masks slipping over them even as they stumbled toward the outer gate.
Numbly, I watched Gryner and the others go. “What will happen to them?”
“There’s a haloric cloister in the outer ward near the dawn well,” Lisel said softly. “They’ll be examined. If they aren’t blighted, they’ll be sanctified and released.”
“And if they are deemed to be demon-touched?”
She gave me a hard look, her mouth twisting into a grimace. “You are no fool, Feinan no’Sevaare. Why do you ask when you don’t want the answer? You already know it anyway.”
I’d lived with loss and privation and uncertainty my whole life, and coming to the High Keep had seemed such a grand opportunity. Yet even in the darkest alleys in the worst neighborhoods of the lightkeep where I’d been abandoned, I’d never encountered such bleak futility as I felt now.
To be demon-touched was to lose everything of the light, to fade into the darkness forever, to become one with the horde.
I twisted to go after Gryner and the rest, but Lisel caught me by the elbow. “The clerks of the cloister won’t listen to you. And knowing you, you’ll only make it worse for the suffering.” She closed her eyes for a moment when I made a faint noise of dismay, then she looked at me again and said in a gentler voice, “Maybe there is something Imbril can do for your friend.”
“Since he’s been so useful, he and the other holies,” I said bitterly.
Her fingers flexed on my arm in warning before releasing me. I turned my face away, glaring helplessly. One of the yaxen was standing on three legs, the fourth held gingerly off the packed, scuffed dirt of the bailey. A stableman scratched the beast’s humped shoulder for a moment and began to lead it slowly away—not for the stable but in the other direction, toward the butchery.
My whole body tight but shaking, I raced back the way I’d come, to the library. The lady, Imbril, and Zik were all at their piles of books again, but they all stood immediately when I crashed through the doorway, so obviously they’d been waiting for me. I burst out with all I’d seen then turned to the lor. “What will happen to Gryner?”
Imbril wrung his hands together. “There’ve been demon-touched at the cloister before,” he said hesitantly. “But I’ve never been charged with their care. All I know is what I studied back at the hall.” His eyes closed briefly. “It’s not going to be what you want to hear.”
At his inadvertent echo of Lisel’s words, I glowered. “What is the point of all the blessings if they don’t make things better?” I slammed my fists against my thighs, pacing in front of the hearth. After running through the palace, sweat prickled under my arms, but I felt so cold.
The lady gazed at me. “Fei, I’m sorry about your friend—”
“I barely know him,” I objected, even though my eyes felt more prickly than my armpits.
“Be that as it may, it’s clear he matters to you.”
I let out a harsh sound. “It’s where we’ll all be if things go on like this.” I couldn’t exactly tell them that I could’ve been part of that caravan if I’d taken the opportunity to run away. I whirled toward the lady. “We have something we can try,” I said urgently. “We have the rune, the one you used on the candle with your blood that lured the demons. If you could extract them from Gryner and the others who were touched…” I found myself clenching my hands together like Imbril, entreaty and doubt together in a weak pleading. I spun toward the lor. “And you must have some sort of invocation to destroy the demon once it’s out of them, yes?”
“Of course. And sometimes it even works, but—”
“This is all we have so far,” I said decisively, as if I had any say at all. “This will be our trial.”
I left them to gather what they needed—Imbril said he could bring the others to the cloister—and I ran down again. So many steps, so much sweat, and yet I could not feel warm.
As I jogged out through the gates, I heard the guardsmen muttering together. “That caravan was meant to resupply the lightkeep,” one said in a worried tone. “If the other caravans are taken as they return…”
I didn’t catch what his companion said, and it seemed to me we had more immediate worries, but the chill sank deeper into my bones. Maybe I should’ve been thieving more while I had the chance. Lady Dyania’s virtues might’ve curtailed some of my worst tendencies, but if provisions ran short, I doubted the folk of the High Keep would deal as fairly with me.
The cloister was easy enough to find, its white walls gleaming soft and pure in the light of the winter sun. No guards stood sentry, which surprised me considering the pikes that had driven the demon-touched this way, and I let myself through the white lattice gates unchallenged. Probably no one exposed themselves voluntarily to the unflinching eye of the sanctified haloric disciples.
Or, more likely, no one would expose themselves to the corruption of the damned.
In the courtyard, despite the open air, the atmosphere was hushed, close. The low glow of braziers turned the curls of thick incense smoke into mesmerizing vortices that reminded me uncomfortably of the demonic portraiture in Ormonde’s library. I averted my gaze and moved deeper into the sanctum. At the threshold of the low-roofed main building, I peered within and froze. So this was why they didn’t need armed guards.
The double lines of doorways within were barred with thickest iron. This wasn’t an infirmary; it was another prison.
I’d very deliberately made sure never to end up in a place like this. Every instinct honed by my years on the streets told me to get out.
Gritting my teeth, I forced my steps forward, whispering, “Gryner?”
There was no answer. I peered through the first set of bars. Someone lay within on a bare pallet, wrapped in white robes and bound in chains of black iron. I sucked in a harsh breath, reluctantly angling my gaze to the face. The skin was sunken and sallow, almost skeletal. It wasn’t Gryner.
At least I hoped it wasn’t.
Aghast, I hustled on to the next cell and then the next. All the cells were full. So many demon-touched, more than had come from the latest supply caravan.
Finally I found Gryner. Like the others, he was wrapped in white silkha and bound in black iron, staring at the ceiling with blank eyes. But he rolled his head toward me when I choked out his name.
“Feinan,” he grated out. “What are you doing here?”
“I wanted to make sure you were… And I…” I wrapped my fingers around the bars. “Gryner, I’m so sorry.”
He blinked at me. “It wasn’t anything to do with you.”
Maybe not before, but it was now. I’d felt unfairly trapped, but this… This was worse, just as he’d said.
Coals in the braziers crackled softly as he stared upward again. “They came out of nowhere,” he murmured. “So many… Our guards stood against them bravely, and there was a novice lor, though I didn’t see what became of her. There was a lord…”
I frowned. The caravan had been for tithe and trade, no lords or ladies, but maybe Gryner was confusing it with the cavalcade of the Devouring. “One of the Chosen Ones was with you?” Maybe a less honorable scion than Lady Dyania had sought to make their escape.
“Not a Chosen One. A shadowed one, exiled.”
My hands slid limply down the cell bars. “You mean Prince Aric was out there?”
“A lord among the horde,” Gryner corrected. “He stood beyond them, dreadful and dire. A demon master.”
Demons didn’t have masters. The horde fought in an insatiable but insensate mass, no strategy or tactics beyond destruction and despair.
What was the point of being evil incarnate only to have a master?
Suddenly, I remembered the signs of the attack on the wagons and burden beasts, seemingly deliberate, as if to maim and terrify, not just annihilate.
If the horde had a master now, if the attacks were guided by forethought and intent…
Did the prince and the haloria and the High Keep know? Was this why they’d called for a Devouring to fortify their hold on the dragon?
Not wanting to think about that, I tightened my grip on the bars. “I’ve summoned my lady, the Chosen One,” I told him. “And one of the most hallowed lors. We’re going to…” I hesitated, because really, what were we going to do? “Do everything we can.”
Even through the weight of the chains, I saw him wince. “No. Don’t come any closer. There’s nothing…” His voice trailing off, he thrashed his head against the bare pallet. “There’s nothing you can… Nothing…” The breath left him on a slow sigh.
“Gryner,” I whispered sharply. “You have to fight this. Wait for my lady, wait for the blessing. She saved us once—”
His head whipped back toward me, unnaturally fast. “Nothing. There’s nothing you can do. You are nothhh…” The word ended on a horrid, macabre hiss. His wet, bulging eyes glinted like sullen embers, and I jerked back.
My spine slammed against something harder than the iron bars.
Merciless hands wrapped around my arms, swinging me away from the cell door. And released me just as fast, sending me stumbling.
I whirled around, half crouching, fingers splayed to reach for the blade in my boot. I straightened just as quick. “Prince Aric,” I gasped. “What are you doing here?”
No lights reflected from his scarred eyes. “What are you doing here?” he cast back at me.
I swallowed hard. “You’re not here to…to eat the demons, are you?” I glanced past him toward where Gryner was imprisoned within. Then I straightened, hope flaring through me. “Can you get it out of him? Get out of all of them? Will he be okay once you destroy it? How do you—?”
“Stop,” he snarled through gritted teeth. “I’m not here to save anyone.”
He said it with a finality, a cruelty considering that Gryner and likely others afflicted could hear him. I glared at him. “Then why—?”
“I don’t answer to the haloria or the king, not to the Chosen Ones—or you.”
“Heyo, I get it.” I settled back on my heels. “You are beholden to none.”
He averted his face. “Just one.”
The demon dragon. I bit my lip, wishing I hadn’t been quite so impetuous. Lady Dyania thought we might need him, after all. “I was shaken at the fate of the caravan and my friend,” I explained. “Forgive me, Prince Aric, for speaking out of turn.” I bowed my head but gave him a cautious glance.
He just stared past me. “I don’t have what is needed for forgiveness. And I don’t know why you seek it when I’ve no doubt you fully intend to speak out of turn again.”
I pursed my lips. He wasn’t wrong, but… “I was just being gracious,” I informed him. “You might try it.”
“When it serves me as little as forgiveness?”
I shifted my weight impatiently. “If you aren’t here to help, and presumably not to seek your own healing”—neh, now I was just being cruel myself—“with your leave, I’ll take myself elsewhere.”
I started to back away, but he turned, keeping me in sight of those icy eyes. “You take a risk coming this close,” he rasped. “The demon might seem contained, might seem like nothing you’d ever let near. But its whispers will tease you, its promises plague you until you find yourself giving in freely—even joyfully.”
At the hypnotic cadence of his warning, I swayed, a strange weakness in my knees worse than racing around the steep High Keep. My breath hitched. “But they are all chained up and locked away,” I protested. “They can’t get to me.”
“I’m not talking about those damned wretches,” he said with a guttering growl. Every place he’d touched me when he’d yanked me away from the iron bars—my spine against his chest, my arms locked in the unbreakable manacles of his fingers—tingled, hot or cold or awash in lightning, I wasn’t sure. I wavered, and I didn’t know if I was going to bolt for the exit—or fall back into his forbidden embrace.
“Feinan.” For a heartbeat, the syllables of my name were nonsense, meaning lost like some antiquity buried in tidal mud, a relic from another time when I was not swamped in this yearning for a power just beyond my reach.
But it wasn’t the prince who’d said my name, and the instincts and experiences that had kept me alive thus far jerked me back from some dire precipice the same way I’d cleverly avoided more than one trap laid by Orton and his headthumpers or Sevaare’s watch. I dipped my head and scuttled behind Lady Dyania and Lor Imbril who had appeared just inside the doorway.
But even though I was safely away from the prince, my heart beat an erratic contretemps, as if the panic of the day was finally catching up with me.
Or as if my heart wanted to be elsewhere.
“Prince Aric,” said Lady Dyania, whose voice had broken my thrall. “Have you come to see what you might do for these unfortunates?”
“No,” I muttered under my breath at the same time he said the word more curtly.
He continued in the same pitiless tone, “I came for a taste of demon.”
From safely behind the other two, jostling for that space with Zik, I glared at him. “So you are going to eat them?”
His return glare made everyone cringe. “I told you, no. There’s nothing I can do for them. But I might track the horde that attacked the caravan if I have the demon’s essence. Once I find them, if anyone from the caravan was taken, I can make sure none return.”
“Return?” Zik’s question was little more than a squeak. As awful as it was to contemplate those lost to the horde, the reminder they might come back, utterly changed and corrupted…
Of course I’d known about the horrors of the demon-touched, but I hadn’t really thought about it. I wished I still hadn’t thought about it.
The prince turned his back on us and went to the cell door, letting himself in though I’d thought it was locked. He stood at the end of the pallet, not quite looking at Gryner.
Tight as they were, the chains rattled delicately, almost mocking. “Your Radiance.” An honorific, appropriate from the attendant of Maru Deep to a regal scion of the light. And yet, like the jangle of iron, Gryner’s tone sounded like a challenge.
“Astrel-mnei, nihil. L’acurso, no’Invari,” the prince said. The intonation was dark and flowing, like a midnight wave that washed away the unwary. I didn’t understand the words, but his voice sent a shiver through me.
He was summoning the demon.
Imbril stiffened, his eyes widening in some pious offense, but Dyania flicked her finger, a tiny gesture to stop him from responding.
Gryner angled his head to stare at her, his neck stretched too far, beyond what seemed right. “Chosen One,” he said with a leer that was not him, not any hint of him I’d ever glimpsed. “I think there is not enough of you, even pure as you are, to go around.”
With an offended gasp, Zik took a step forward, but I grabbed his arm and hauled him back to my side. He was trembling; anger or fear or both, I wasn’t sure.
“Gryner,” I whispered urgently. “This isn’t who you are. Fight it.”
“Unfortunately, this is who he is, now,” the prince said. “It is the shadow of the demon twisting the aura of the man. The demon-touched are more dangerous than any monstrosity straight off the earthbone roads.” He took another step closer to the foot of the bed, staring down at Gryner. “Evil can take everything of this husk—its words, its memories, its talents—and wield it all like a weapon to hurt us more than fangs or claws.”
Gryner smiled, and in the emberlight of the brazier, his teeth looked strangely sharp. “You would know, wouldn’t you, my prince?”
My heart was thumping so hard in my chest, I wanted to scream just to let it out.
“And you know things too, don’t you, no’Invari?” The prince didn’t smile back, but his icy eyes glinted. “Tell me of the pathways you creep in the night. Tell me of the unraveling verge that set you free.” That strange, darkly flowing cadence was in his voice again. “Make use of this tongue you’ve stolen to give shape to your hunger, this breath that voices your emptiness. Tell me where I might hunt you, and I’ll finally end your lonely nights.”
“Hunt us? No, brother. Join us.” Gryner’s voice split across octaves, a human timbre and something else too, something deeper. “Once you find the verge and stand at its edge, you’ll finally see the truth: that you are wanted there, awaited. Not empty at all, no longer alone. Come home…”
The exhortation wasn’t even directed at me, but it sank into my guts like a pike.
Home. Mine was out on those dangerous roads somewhere, maybe, with the family that had left me behind. It hurt, so bad. But the sly words seemed like a miss for the prince, considering the High Keep was his home, after all. Why would the demon try to call him home when the obsidian tower was right there?
But then abruptly I understood. The demon in Gryner spoke to the demon in the prince, the dragon that would let all of our lightkeeps fall to the Lost Lands if we didn’t hold it.
Prince Aric swayed on his boots, not much, just the slightest waver toward the bound and grinning demon.
“Your Radiance,” Dyania whispered. “Aric… Don’t listen.”
But her plea was lost in a sharper command. “Step away, you fools.”
Imbril jerked back to reveal Numinlor Kalima and a handful of white-clad haloric guard with her. One of those had yanked Imbril nearly off his feet. The rest of us went with him, huddling close. The prince held his ground, though for once I agreed with the numinlor. Gryner might be locked up, chained, but the malevolence of that presence within him was more insidious than smoke, twisting through our thoughts and hearts, seeping into every crack.
“Tell me where you crept from, where you would flee, given the chance,” the prince gritted out. “You know it will hurt me, you want to hurt me, so tell me, no’Invari.”
“So close. Too close.” Gryner’s eyes rolled back, and his head thunked into the hard pallet, again and again, while a keening wail seeped between his teeth. The hollow drumming and dismal screel was like a weird echo of the macabre festivities in the grand galley the night before. Despite the weight and strictures of the chains, his whole body bowed off the bed, his spine an impossible arch. His skin took on a ghastly mottled shade, as if bruising from some force within. Zik cried out in fear, and the rictus on Gryner’s face seemed even more like a repulsive smile.
To my shock, Numinlor Kalima shouldered by us all, shoving the prince aside with her last step. “Out of my way,” she snapped. “If I’m going to save him, get out.”
Was that even possible, to save him? I’d wanted it to be when I summoned the prince, but now it seemed so unlikely. But the numinlor bent at his bedside, clamping her hand to his forehead, holding him down with surprising strength.
“Peace and light to you, child,” she said in a curt tone that sounded very much not peaceable. She swept her hand down his face, over his eyes, then covering that horrible grin as if she might smother him, as if she had no fear of his bite. “Peace and light.”
The stink of dinzah made me stiffen, and Dyania let out a harsh breath. But neither of us spoke against the numinlor; how could we?
Gryner eased down, the bone-breaking strain in his body vanquished.
I swallowed with an audible gulp. “Is he cured?”
“He’s drugged,” the prince said. His pale gaze swiveled to the numinlor. “Why silence him when he was still lucid enough for the demon to speak and reveal itself?”
As she straightened, Kalima swept the lacey fringe of her white scarf over her shoulder and glowered back at him, her hazel eyes hooded. “You of all people know that the longer we let the demon chew at what aura he has, the less remains of him. The dinzah will dull the bite of the demon while the sunlaris tincture burns out the shadows.”
Dyania took a half step past Imbril. “So there’s still a chance to salvage his aura?”
“No.” The prince’s response seemed unequivocal. “The aura is like a crystal goblet. Once cracked, all within leaks away. The sunlaris is a balm for some, but it can’t heal what’s gone.”
As someone who’d never drunk from a crystal goblet, the reference seemed flawed to me. I’d imbibed out of plenty of chipped and cracked ceramic mugs and dented metal, some better repaired than others, some not at all, and perhaps they were not as aesthetically pleasing as crystal, but depending on the beverage within, they could leave you just as sated or utterly drunk.
The numinlor straightened. She was not as tall or heavily muscled as the prince, but she was imposing in her own right. Her white robe reflected the braziers’ glow as if she were a bloody, fiery goblet herself. “We will still do what we can for him.”
“Nothing,” the prince growled.
“Maybe there’s nothing for you here.” She lifted an eyebrow at him. “So be gone. Let the monster take you away, find something somewhere else to kill.” Her imperious glare took in the rest of us. “Actually, this seems like an ideal opportunity for you to test the trick you used in Velderrey.” She gave a curt nod. “Lady Dyania, you shall accompany Prince Aric and see if you might summon the horde for him to destroy.” Her gaze snapped to Imbril. “Lor Imbril, you go as auric advisor and witness.” She gestured to her guard. “See to it that they are properly outfitted for the quest.”
“Quest?” Imbril echoed weekly.
“Banished, more like,” I muttered, but very much under my breath.
We weren’t quite prodded by pikes, but the threat was there as we were escorted from Gryner’s cell. I craned my neck to peer back at the hapless man, drawing breath to exhort Numinlor Kalima to be gentle—or at least not cruel.
But Dyania nudged me sharply in the ribs. “Don’t make it worse,” she warned quietly.
Such an unfair accusation, and yet she probably wasn’t wrong.
I didn’t see what happened to the prince, but he was not with us as the haloric guard hustled us back toward the palace.
When Imbril stumbled, they nudged him along. “The sun is going down,” he protested. “Certainly Numinlor Kalima did not intend for us to leave now.”
But it seemed the guard decided that she intended exactly that. We were thrown in among the rest of the armed party assembling to go out after the remains of the savaged caravan. So many pikes, so many torchieres, so many runes carved surreptitiously into the sides of the chariots even though Dyania had said they wouldn’t work. Except that we were being sent to see if her “trick” would give us an advantage in a fight against the demons.
Once we painted the runes with her blood and set it on fire to invoke the light everlasting.
I didn’t blame Imbril at all for being appalled at this reckless journey, so unlikely, so ill considered—and that was saying something considering it was coming from me.
The sun had already set behind the Argonyx as we rode out beneath outer bailey wall. I’d wanted to flee the High Keep, but not like this. This was a ridiculously bad idea in my history of ridiculously bad ideas.
And it wasn’t even my idea!
“How can this be happening?” Imbril muttered.
He and the lady were seated across from Zik and I in one of the half-closed supply wagons while Lisel drove from the high front seat. It was neither as sheltering as the Sevaare carriage nor as nimble as the chariots, but somewhere in the middle and not comfortable at all. At least we were bundled against the winter cold, but somehow it didn’t help the deeper chill creeping within—going to fight the demon horde with nothing more than a few hours’ useless searching through old books and the candle clutched in the lady’s fist.
What were the chances that we’d all be killed—or, like Gryner, stumble back to the lights of the High Keep with the taint of infernal torment upon us?
“What is no’Invari?” I asked. When the others looked at me, I reminded them, “No’Invari. What the prince called the demon speaking through Gryner.”
“It’s an old word,” Imbril said. “Invar was the name Ormonde gave the Lost Lands after he glimpsed the accursed realm.” His voice took on the cadence of a prayer or a story. “While he battled the dragon upon a verge, he saw within a shadowed place that swallowed his amaranthine light. A dark kingdom, not utterly unlike our own lands but teeming with demons, ravaged by the foul and wicked, void of auric purity. A warning to the Living Lands. The demons are no’Invari—the unnamed of Invar.” He paused a moment. “Just another way to say demon-touched.”
“No.”
We all blinked at Zik.
He tucked his chin into his blanket at our abrupt attention but stubbornly waggled his head. “No’Invari aren’t just demon-touched. It’s worse, ya. They are people who sought out the verges, wanting to deal with demons, to bargain with shadow. Something lured them, and they chose the Lost Lands.” The corners of his mouth drooped, making him look much older, as if all the hardship and tragedy of his homeland had coalesced upon him. “No’Invari are dreadmarked.”
Dreadmarked.
The word shivered through me. But Gryner hadn’t sought out the horde on purpose. He’d merely taken a job—neh, two jobs, three if I counted his first attendance on the previous Chosen journey—that put him in the demons’ path. That shouldn’t count, should it? And the vengeance he’d sought against them for his friend’s death, wasn’t that only fair? Since we’d all chosen this quest, or at least not found a way to escape it, did that mean we were all dreadmarked? Even the holy lor and noble lady?
Not fair at all.
When I looked back at the High Keep falling away behind us, as if we might still retreat, the wind of our passage whipped tears from my eyes. The obsidian tower was the last spire still reaching for the fading sunlight, and the smoky stone shone black, like a crystal goblet of night. A darker flaw seemed to crack along one facet as I watched. Maybe just a teardrop fracturing my vision?
No, the flawed shard fell away from the spire—then spread its wings and soared.
The demon dragon and her bound passenger, marked and damned.
I caught no glimpse of Prince Aric against its black breast before the monster spiraled higher and was lost in the deepening shadows of the night.