The fall of the shadow changes with every turn of the road—but still the shadow is yours.
~ A saying of the earthbone travelers
“IS THIS WHAT Daoja heard?” My free hand clenched in a helpless fist. “Is this the cracking of the world?”
“So it seems.”
He tilted his face away from the horrendous view, letting go of me.
“What do we do?” I asked, trying to squelch the frantic note from my voice. “Call the dragon.”
He swiveled his face toward me, his hard expression reflecting that distant lick of flames like obsidian. “Call her? Like one of the fine ladies’ lap canids?”
I threw up my suddenly icy hands. “But this is what she wants—destroying things.”
He shook his head. “I’ve always had her leashed and lashed when we’ve gone after the horde,” he corrected. “I’ve no way to bring her to heel from this distance, even if she could hear me and would listen.”
I laced my fingers over my head, as if I could keep my terror from running away with me. “You say you are bonded. She gave you her sight as she takes your aura. Daoja swears she can hear the monster in her dreams. Certainly you can summon her over a few rocky peaks. If she truly hungers, she will hear you.”
“Even if we called her, what if I can’t hold her?” he whispered. “She would break me. Her brethren are right there at the High Keep, and she knows me, knows what I know…”
With an impatient oath, I twisted away from him and started to run.
And I wasn’t even running away from his hopelessness. He hadn’t spoken the cruelest truth: the dragon was unfettered because I’d broken the bone whistle. We were too far and couldn’t help and the High Keep would fall.
And it was all my fault.
Downhill wasn’t exactly easier than uphill, but at least it was faster. Stones tumbled around me, knocked loose by my own boots and by the prince’s behind me. Of course, the one time he wanted to be behind me.
The flicker of the watchtower pyres brightened as we descended. No, it wasn’t the signal fires alight, it was the wall of the High Keep itself. Oh no, no… As we got closer, I saw the marshal and his men directing one of the massive flamecasters at a rising wall of blackness. The device they’d used against the caravan attackers wasn’t the only such weapon. These were larger, obviously intended as defense for the whole lightkeep instead of an attacking weapon. The fire was so high, it burned everything in its path, flames splashing like waves.
The stench and the screams echoed back to us. And for a moment I wished the shadows would wash over me and take it all away.
“We have to get to the tower, rouse the dragon.” Aric cut to one side.
I hesitated, wanting to run after the marshal to ask after Lisel and the rest of my friends, but I turned and followed Aric. Bloody light seared my eyes, and my ears clogged with the nerve-rending shrieks from people and demons, so much alike as they fell together in death.
We raced through the outer ward toward the inner bailey gate, and it was here that I understood how terribly things had gone awry. The flamecasters had set the demons alight, and the vicious but clever monsters had thrown themselves in searing piles against the walls, using their own bodies as incendiaries, setting the mortar and stone of the walls ablaze until the sturdy ramparts of the High Keep had fractured, exposing the palace itself.
“They burned the very walls.” My voice cracked like our defenses. “How do you light stone and ice?”
“It wasn’t mere flame, but auric power,” Aric said grimly. “And the demons wouldn’t do this themselves. They don’t strategize and scheme. They are being orchestrated.”
Claeve, he meant. The demon master was here, somewhere.
The king’s soldiers and the haloric guard weren’t just for decoration. I didn’t know much about fighting, but they wielded their weapons ferociously and it seemed effective, judging by the mounds of demonic debris.
But there were just too many of the monsters. They set themselves on fire, flinging their already blackened bodies against their burning fellows and then charging at the guards. The screeching and the stink of charred flesh and stone made my stomach churn. Confused in the chaos, it was only because of a burnt-out hole in the inner bailey wall that we were able to gain the palace ward.
Within was eerily quiet. Was the horde concentrating on decimating the defenders in the outer ward? Or had the battle already swept the palace itself?
I shuddered. “I have to find my friends,” I fretted as we hastened up the wide sweep of the main steps.
Aric glanced back at me. “The dragon—” He cursed and lunged toward me, the short sword swinging in his hand.
I yelped and ducked—and the blade plunged into the demon sneaking up behind me. Since when did they sneak? That was my thing.
Its long claws scrabbled at the sword as Aric stepped past me, driving it backward down the steps. It didn’t resemble anything in Ormonde’s library, more like a yaxen had swallowed a catamount that had clawed its way half out. Though its slavering jaws hung wide open, exposing rows of jagged teeth, it didn’t make a sound, which was somehow worse than the shrieking.
In the same grim silence, Aric wrenched the sword free, only to wield it again and again, in terrible, sweeping arcs. The remorseless butchery left the demon in twitching chunks.
My nerves flinching along in time, I collapsed on the steps, still clutching my knife. Its demonic energy might not be subject to the rules of death, but dismemberment was a hindrance all the same.
Finally, Aric returned, sword smeared with demon gore. He paused several steps below me, his always forbidding gaze particularly bleak, and at first I wasn’t sure why since he had saved us—again.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice barely carrying over the distant sounds of battle. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.” He half-turned letting the blade drop out of sight.
Impulsively, I lurched to my feet and descended toward him to lay my hand on his shoulder. Under my fingertips, the muscles quivered, not with exertion—he’d ended the demon readily enough—but with…a fear of his own, maybe? “I’ve seen violence, Aric. I might scream every time, but I’m not sickened by what you just did.”
“Not just now,” he said. “So much violence. So many deaths.”
“Let’s just not add our own,” I urged him.
When he angled his head to rest his chin, just lightly, on my knuckles, some of the tightness eased from his face. But only for a moment, and then we ran onward.
The corridors of the palace were silent, more empty than the nights I’d crept around.
“Where is everyone?” I whispered.
“The guard and staff are well-trained,” Aric said. “They know what to do.”
That wasn’t an answer. I huffed. “From all the times the palace has been attacked by demons?”
“Everyone in the High Keep lives in the shadow of the obsidian spire,” he reminded me. “Maybe not everyone has faced a demon, but they’ve all seen the dragon’s wings above them.”
I swallowed hard. When we came to the corridor that connected the palace to the black tower, Aric grabbed my arm, dragging me to a halt. The short sword was still in his other hand.
I wished that sword was longer.
Glancing around, I put my hand over his, a silent question.
He just shook his head, scowling.
Something in the darkness…
He flashed his flattened palm at me in a stay gesture and stalked forward.
Not a chance. I leaned down to liberate my knife from my boot—not the animdao blade, but the one with the sharper edge. It was even shorter than Aric’s sword, but it was in my hand. Though I still wasn’t leaving the sphere of his protection even if his presence was its own danger.
Most of the corridor lamps were unlit, some just blown out, but some broken. Oil dripped down the walls in rivulets like dark tears, glinting erratically in the cast from the few remaining intact lights. Strangely, the reflecting shine spattered outward too, in violent arcs, as if the lamps had exploded.
Or been smashed in a fury.
Beneath the sporadic shine was a darker web that swallowed the fitful light. A crack, I realized. No, not a solitary flaw, but many spiderwebbing fissures radiating through the walls.
In a few places, pieces of the plaster and tile façade had flaked off, revealing the raw mountain stone beneath—and glimpses of runes carved there, the edges unsoftened by time.
The marks must’ve been etched back in Ormonde’s day when the High Keep was crowned as the kingdom’s sovereign heart after the demise of Velderrey. Had the runes been placed by learned lors or superstitious masons? Maybe both working together in the hopes that their new home would escape the fate that had befallen the old.
Where were their hopes now?
Aric swore under his breath, and I hustled up beside him—only to halt abruptly to gawk.
The arch of carved obsidian that marked the mouth of the prince’s tower and the dragon’s lair was…gone. Obliterated. The finely hewn scales like black petals were shattered to jagged fangs choked with rubble. The passageway up was impassible.
“Is there a secret path?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said through gritted teeth. “If we fly in from above.”
I swore too. So the dragon might sneak out but we couldn’t sneak in? What annoying architecture. “Will the dragon leave without you? Will she try to escape or rejoin the horde?”
“I don’t know.” He spun away. “She’s never had such a chance.”
“Where are we going?” I kept pace, footsteps as frantic as my heartbeat. “What do we do now?”
“Find your friends. That might be all we have left.”
I was almost more shocked than seeing the broken obsidian. “You want to find my friends?”
“Unless you have enemies better suited to saving our lives?”
“Is that what we’re doing now?” I ran after him.
“Maybe saving the lightkeep too, if we’re lucky.”
We were not lucky.
I could have told him that, though I would’ve thought he’d know it already, considering he was dreadmarked and I was nothing. But we were too busy running through the demolished palace.
It wasn’t just that it looked like a battle had raged through the corridors—it did look like that, with more wrecked lamps glistening with oil and something brighter, shinier, which I knew without looking too close was blood—but it seemed as if the palace itself had started to crumble. That unnerving web of cracks we’d seen radiating around the passage to the black tower spread through all the halls. Somehow the damage looked even scarier in the finished hallways where the fractured façade, torn tapestries, and soiled silkha screamed silently of the mortal peril.
And still we encountered no one after that lone demon. No bodies either, which… I wasn’t sure if that meant no one had died or if the demons hadn’t left any pieces.
“Where is everyone?” I whispered.
“All but the fighters will have barricaded themselves in the most defensible area, which is the grand galley.” His jaw flexed. “The lord marshal has no love for me, or I him, but he prepared the High Keep as well as he trained his own men.”
“Won’t we be on the wrong side of the barricade?”
“If we knock politely, I’m sure they’ll let us in.”
I grimaced. “Welcome the Dragon Prince and a skulking waif to their refuge?” When he just shrugged, I gestured for him to follow. To my surprise, he did without question. “I’m supposing Marshal Vreas didn’t lock down this other way.”
We ducked into the servants’ corridor.
Cracks still marred the walls here, but the visible scars of battle were missing.
“The marshal would not overlook any access, no matter how insignificant,” Aric said.
While I appreciated his defense of a man he didn’t even like, I let out a soft snort. “You’d be surprised.”
The passage doorway was locked. So I went after it with my knife and experience.
Aric made a noise under his breath. “Definitely not a pure aura,” he muttered.
“Which is not what we really need right now.” I slanted a glance at him when the latch clicked in agreement.
But when I pushed, it didn’t yield. I scowled. “The lock released, but for some reason…”
He didn’t question me, just stepped up next to me and nudged me gently to the side. “My turn.” He threw his weight and strength against the portal. Nothing happened. I expected him to ask me again if the lock was open, but instead he just battered at the barrier.
A strange little warmth suffused me. It didn’t have anything to do with the panic of getting to the other side where some measure of safety waited; he respected my entirely unrespectable, disreputable skills.
“Together,” I told him.
He took a half step to the side, making just enough room, and we shoved our combined force at the door.
It inched open. Sharing a victorious glance—that this moment counted as a victory was a testament to our desperate situation—we lunged again, shoulder to shoulder.
We managed to wedge it just far enough open that I could slip through. It was dark on the other side, but I didn’t need a light to feel the chunks of heavy furniture wedged up against the portal. With me pulling and him pushing, we made just enough space for him to join me within. I locked the portal again and we shoved the barricade back into place.
“Not up to the marshal’s usual standards,” Aric muttered. “No barred barricade, not even an armed guard left to watch.”
I bit my lip. “Maybe they had something else to do,” I said uneasily.
We hurried on.
Like the corridors beyond, it was too quiet, but at least the ominous cracks were missing. We burst into the grand galley that so recently had been full of light and merriment, ill-fated as it had been in its own way. Now all was dark and silent until the prince struck a lamp.
Then a squawk echoed through the room, like a chook crying querulously in the night, quickly muffled.
“It’s Prince Aric,” I called. “And me.” Not that anyone would know who I was, but presumably they would realize that a demon wouldn’t identify themselves as such.
A figure in white, half ghostly, sped toward us. “Feinan!” Lady Dyania reached out to hug me.
I kept my arms at my sides, letting her control the impulsive show of her worry and relief, although I lifted my hands to squeeze her elbows just a little. “What happened?” Then I shook my head mutely. “Never mind. We know what happened. What’s happening now?”
“Where’s the king?” Aric demanded more specifically. “Is the marshal with him?”
“I’m not sure,” Dyania said. “Lisel told us she was joining her father in the fight, so I presume he’s out there somewhere.” She glanced at me. “Everyone who could hold a sword went out. The rest and the Chosen Ones were sent here.” She straightened. “Waiting for you, Your Radiance.”
He turned his face away. “You would’ve been more useful with the blade.”
“That’s what I told them,” she said. “But they wouldn’t listen. We heard the king’s rallying cry before we barricaded the windows.” She gestured across the hall, although it was too dark to see what reinforcements had been added over the huge panes. “I would guess the king is with them too. We haven’t seen any of the lors.” Frowning, she brushed a shaky hand across her brow. “But, Your Radiance, why are you here? Where is the dragon?”
“In the black tower, likely,” I answered for him. “But the corridor up is destroyed.”
Maybe this was why the dragon’s rider was lashed to the monster, never allowed down from their lonely lair. Except the High Keep had never been attacked like this before. I let out a breath that shook as much as the lady’s hand.
“I need bodies, willing hands,” the prince said, “not auras, if we’re going to clear the passage to the tower and the dragon.”
Dyania glanced back. “Hands and bodies we have, but strength?” She shook her head. “And willing?”
She didn’t need to explain why it would be hard to find someone to go with the Dragon Prince to free the monster.
“The lightkeep is overrun,” Aric said grimly—the most grimly I had ever heard from him, and that was saying something. “The army won’t be able to stop the horde, not without the dragon.”
Dyania glanced around, and I could almost see the frantic question on her beautiful face: Certainly there was someone here who had a suggestion, an option. When no one spoke, she cleared her throat. “A candle flame and blood in the rune, as we did in Velderrey…”
But Aric shook his head. “No point without the dragon.”
I glared around at the huddled nobles of the High Keep, all but invisible in the gloom. “We must free the dragon,” I called. “Who will come with us to dig through the tower?”
No one answered that question either.
Before I could ask again—maybe louder?—a flare of light from across the grand galley sent a frightened gasp through the shriveling nobles.
“The lightkeep is overrun! We must flee!”
That seemed like something a demon would say. Indeed, Aric had noted the first part just moments ago, and until recently, I’d frequently sung the second part.
But the white shape bustling toward us resolved into Lor Berindo. “The king commands,” he said, realizing that no one had moved. “Soldiers are holding a path. We must go now. Follow me!”
Aric rounded on him. “Mikhalthe can’t challenge the horde, not without the dragon. Tell him to send fighters to the black tower—”
Unfortunately, that reminder got all the nobles moving. They surged toward Berindo, almost overrunning the doddering lor like demons washing over the walls.
Aric cursed as the nobles flocked toward Berindo who waved his hands. “This way,” the lor called, clearly reveling in his new role as messiah to the frightened masses. “The king is waiting to lead us to sanctuary.”
“And where will that be, exactly?” Aric muttered.
I spun frantically on my heel. “We have to get some to come with us. We can’t move that debris by ourselves, and we can’t fly up by ourselves either.” I cursed. “They can’t just run away!”
Aric gave me a look. “Can’t they?” He raked one hand over his head, leaving deep furrows in his shaggy black hair. “They’ve always left it for someone else to fight. Why would they change that now?”
I groaned. “Would they rather die on the run than stay and fight for their home?”
Aric pursed his lips. “Mikhalthe might not be wrong,” he conceded. “We can at least escort them as far as this path Berindo mentioned. Once we find my brother and his soldiers, maybe I can requisition a few to help us clear the passage to the black tower.” He shook his head. “Feinan, do you have your animdao blade?”
“Always. But Nenzo couldn’t get it to hold an edge. It could maybe cut an overripe wintryberry, but not neatly.”
“Be that as it may, keep it at the ready.”
I narrowed my eyes. “In Velderrey, you told me to put it away. It seemed to me that the animdao knife pained you. I don’t want to hurt you.”
He shook his head. “Its aura speaks to the part of me touched by the demon,” he admitted. “It whispers…” He shook his head again, not a rejection or negation, I thought, but a signal of his inability to give words to the sensation. Although it reminded me too much of Daoja’s erratic madness. “Anyway, it will give other demons pause. Maybe not long, but…”
“A chance,” I finished with a nod. “Sometimes that’s good enough.”
We hastened to join Berindo.
“Where is Kalima?” Aric asked. “If we can’t have swords, a blessing is better than nothing.”
The lor frowned, obviously not convinced the prince had become suddenly pious. “She sent the rest of the haloria and the cloister lors out with the army.” He glanced back, waved one hand again, and said, “May the light shine everlasting.” And he hustled onward.
“Were it so simple,” Aric drawled. He gestured me ahead. “Blades out,” he reminded me, then lifted an eyebrow when Dyania presented, with a flourish, the knife I’d gotten for her from the attendant of Maru Deep who’d died in the horde attack at Velderrey. But he only nodded. “Stay close together. The demons have trouble distinguishing among many targets at once, and in their avarice a cluttered field will distract them for a moment.”
I grimaced. Yet another strike against those who sent him out by himself. Even if the dragon did give him a mighty advantage.
We hurried after the fleeing nobles, the lady and I on one side with our knives, the prince across from us with his short sword. A few of the nobles had weapons—I saw one portly older lady with not one, not two, but three table knives plus an array of long-handled serving forks tucked into her decorative spectrum thread sash.
She saw me slanting a long glance at her and grinned fiercely. “The High Keep will not fall,” she announced, brandishing the three knives. My expression must’ve said something of what I thought about our chances, because she added. “And if it does, the amaranthine light shines on.”
I wasn’t going to make a comment about how little that mattered to me either. I slowed my steps to let her pull ahead, which brought me even with Lady Dyania, who was scanning the empty corridors with consternation, eyeing the cracks in the stone.
“I feel that if I touch it, it will crumble to dust beneath my fingers,” she murmured. “If the High Keep still stands, it’s only because no one has sneezed yet.”
I grimaced. “This is so much worse,” I whispered. “Nobles arming themselves. The prince separated from his dragon. The High Keep under attack for the first time in memory.” I shook my head.
“Heyo,” she drawled. “I’m still alive, which means there’s an opportunity, remember?”
I shot her a fleeting smile. “Soft palace living has left me yearning for more than such a thin hope,” I admitted. “Your reminder is fair but bitter.”
She shook her head. “There is sweetness in every breath,” she said. “If we choose to taste it.”
Far be it from me to argue with a lady and a Chosen One.
Especially when we were both likely to die the same.
I was so sure an attack would come. Where easier for the enemy to strike than at this cluster of frightened nobles, soft and plump for the slaughter? Their auras might not all be pure as the Chosen, but they must be rich in the experiences that wealth and access provided. The horde—or at least their master—might even suspect there was a reason the dragon hadn’t attacked yet, considering this was the monster’s retreat. Could Claeve somehow know the bone relic had been destroyed, that the dragon was unrestrained and unreachable?
But our unstrategic retreat went unbothered. Following Lor Berindo, we gained the inner ward then crossed beneath the shattered gate to the outer where a handful of the king’s guard waited. They lifted their lamps high, waving us along.
“Follow the lamps,” one of the guards called. “The runes will protect you.”
Ani made a derisive sound, but I felt a little better, even knowing it likely wouldn’t help unless some Chosen One’s fresh aura—meaning blood—was empowering them.
In the outer ward, a familiar form was hefting one of the lamps high, and I hurried over. “Lisel!”
She turned toward me, and in the guttering light of her lamp, the smudges of soot and something that shone blackly—dried blood or demon goo, I wasn’t sure—made a death mask of half her face. “Fei,” she said, her voice breaking with relief. “I wondered…” She shook her head. “Where is the prince?”
I waved vaguely behind me. “Herding nobles with a short sword. The passage to the black tower has collapsed.”
“We heard. First wave of the attack, so many dead, and the worst noise. I saw it crack the stone, shatter bones.” She shuddered. “We thought the dragon was imprisoned in the tower along with the prince. And you and Zik, presumably.” She peered at me. “Where is Zik?”
“Still in the tower,” I said. “I have to hope that Nenzo can keep them safe, considering he’s spent enough time with the prince to plan for all the worst.” I couldn’t tell her about leaving the tower to seek out Daoja; it wouldn’t be fair to ask her to keep that secret too. And I wondered about the dead she’d seen; Aric and I hadn’t passed any corpses when we’d sneaked back into the keep.
Oh, I did not want to remember Gryner’s mocking hiss as the demon spoke through him…
Instead, I asked, “Did you see Claeve? Is he commanding the horde?”
“I haven’t heard anything of that. But I’m not sure how many people here know about him. My father…” She shook her head harder. “All his life, he’s fought the horde. But now he’s struggling to keep up.”
I didn’t blame the marshal. All of history and all of his life had been a certain way; for it to change now must seem impossible to him and the others.
My fault, of course, for destroying the whistle, even if its loss had been inevitable, brittle as it had been.
“Where is the king sending us?”
“To Velderrey.” When I flinched back, she gave me a look. “It’s the closest defensible spot and at least recently purged of demons.”
“Indefensible,” I shot back. “Which is why it’s been three hundred years forsaken since it was overrun the last time. Why there?”
“To be sure, my father did not consult me on the choice.” She hesitated before adding, “And I think we have not many options left. Even if we make a run for Maru Deep or somewhere else to take a stand, we must gather and fortify ourselves for the journey.”
Shouts from ahead made us both flinch. More demons?
But it was the nobles, shouting at each other. Lisel grimaced. “We gathered as many wagons and even chariots as we could to travel to Velderrey. But there won’t be enough for everyone. They’ll have to unload and send some back to pick up stragglers on the road.”
I sucked in a hard breath. “No wonder they’re screaming.”
Her blue eyes glittered, tears or anger I wasn’t sure. “This is bad, Fei. Watch out for yourself.”
Wasn’t that rather what had gotten me into this mess?
Before I could tell her to do the same—although I wasn’t sure watching out for ourselves was going to make a bit of difference—she straightened. “Your Radiance.”
I glanced over my shoulder at Aric who gave her a brisk nod before addressing me. “I’ve held a chariot for your lady. Join her and go.”
Inexplicably, I felt my jaw jutting. “I can fight.” Which was not really true at all, and I had no idea why I said it, so I amended, “I have my blade, for what it’s worth.”
“Which isn’t much.” His tone was sharper than my animdao knife, cutting through my belated and imprudent bravado. “And we’re not fighting. We’re running away.”
That should have been a relief, I supposed. So why was I hesitating?
I glanced back at Lisel, who waved me off. “Go,” she said. “There’s nothing to be done here, nothing to save.”
Still I balked. “But Zik. And Nenzo. And…everyone else who will be left behind.”
“There are always those left behind,” Aric said with a hard look at me.
He meant my family abandoning me, as he’d heard me tell Nenzo, and the reminder—coming out of nowhere as it did, like a betraying shiv—pierced me. But that didn’t mean I wanted to do it to anyone else. But he grabbed my arm and dragged me along, and even the most frantic, fearful nobles, clamoring for a spot among the limited seats, got out of his way. The portly old lady with the forks was being handed up into what was usually a hay wagon, judging by the chaff blowing from it. She caught my eye and lifted her makeshift weapons.
Oh, we were doomed.