The road goes on and far away,
Leaving my beloved far behind.
Though the lonely path turns and twines,
The call of the horizon will not let me stay
~ A song of the earthbone travelers
I SCREAMED.
All my life, I hardly ever screamed, and yet I cried out like that blade was coming for me. And maybe my panic mattered for once, because in response, Aric angled toward me, and the knife slid up across his ribs at an angle to bury in his opposite shoulder.
As he spun away from the blow with a sharp oath, half trapped by the confining doorway, I realized why he was so distracted and slow that a surprise lor could wound him so badly. His other hand, not the one that’d helped me off the ground but the one touched by the bloodfire rune, was…wrong. Exposed by his sleeveless gilet, the skin up his arm was marked with blackened streaks. I wanted to believe it was just dirt or soot, but somehow I knew it wasn’t.
Kalima slashed at him again, and for all her pristine silkha white and finely woven spectrum threads, I could see she was not without shivving skills. More, there was a mark of righteous wrath upon her—cheekbones bright with roused blood and her mouth drawn wide with grim exultation at stabbing the reviled Dragon Prince.
Despite his wound, he danced away from the blow. But not far; though he was obviously hampered by my presence, he wouldn’t retreat, not when that would leave me exposed to her strike even though her long-simmering hatred for him had been obvious from the start and I knew a lightkeep-named thief was mostly beneath her notice.
To my surprise, she didn’t press the attack. Instead she retreated a step toward the stagnant pool in the center of the room, glaring at Aric, her expression a maleficent tangle of anger and loathing—and glee.
I glanced at the blade in her hand. It had none of the ceremonial beauty of the haloria’s other sacred trappings. It didn’t even poise like the well-balanced working blades of my streetwise acquaintances. My gaze caught on the narrow groove carved in the metal, not so unlike the runes in the walls…
“Aric,” I said urgently. “The blade is poisoned.”
Kalima glared at me, the brown and green and gold of her eyes roiling muddied. “And once again you speak out of turn.”
“Even the lowliest guttersnipe has the right to call out a traitor to the Living Lands,” I snapped.
“I’ve sought always to preserve the Living Lands.” She angled the knife. “And the blade isn’t corrupted.” Before my relief could take hold, she continued with a sneer, “The sanctified sunlaris tincture is lethal only to the demon-touched.”
With the bulk of his body, Aric put me behind him, though I caught the metallic tang of blood on the air. “The king is here to destroy the horde and its master. The Chosen Ones are pouring their light into the darkness. Whatever you hoped for, Kalima, the power you’ve hoarded is gone.”
“And so will you be, Dragon Prince,” she snarled. “The sunlaris will sever your bond with the monster. All those scars you took will finally bleed, and you will die, alone.” Her vicious smile twisted tighter. “At least you will be at peace.”
She all but spat the word, and I recoiled at the shocking cruelty of her attack, even without the knife.
And to my horror, Aric swayed, as if his boots were once again poised above a terrible precipice. “Peace?”
The word cracked with the rough harmonics I’d heard when he’d cut himself down from the dragon to approach me that first night in Velderrey. But it wasn’t the dragon’s voice in his that I heard now, just his own longing.
No. I would not let him go for mere peace.
This time, I stepped in front of him. Clinging ostentatiously to the front of his gilet, I angled him sideways. “Go,” I wailed at her. “You’ve won. The palace and the Living Lands are yours. Just leave us here to die!”
With a smirk, she sidled away from us, onward to whatever she intended.
Then she paused.
“Too much,” Aric murmured to me.
“Never enough,” I whispered back.
Kalima glared at him and then at me. “You can’t save him,” she said through gritted teeth. But I saw the way she gripped the fouled knife tighter, as if she weren’t entirely sure. “I don’t have time to watch him fade, but I deserve this meager pleasure.” She peered at Aric with sharp assessment. “And he will die. I won’t allow any miracles in my wake.” With a twitch of her knife, she gestured at the befouled pool. “The sunlaris wasn’t meant for you, but since I suspected you’d sneak back here…”
I misliked her suddenly calculating tone, but we’d come for the luminarci anyway, so I supported Aric’s wavering steps as Kalima prodded us within toward the columns.
The first time I’d seen the columns, I thought they’d channeled fitful cloudy sunlight from beyond the tower. But that slowly churning nacreous glow was the distilled auras of so many unknown victims, and my heart seized at the knowledge.
As for what we must do with the luminarci now…
“Tell me you’re faking this weakness,” I begged Aric under my breath.
“I’m faking,” he said, so obliging. But his rasping voice was too faint and his weight was too heavy on my shoulder for me to believe him.
When I’d sneaked through here before, I’d wrinkled my nose at the stagnant pool with its scrim of algae, but now the stink was almost overwhelming. As if Kalima had been tossing dead bodies into the thermal waters to make corpse soup.
Neh, mustn’t think about corpses.
Kalima was glaring at Aric. “Why are you still standing?”
“Folly,” he said. “And a touch of stubbornness, I suppose.” Despite his bravado, he sagged against me. “You taught me that, though, so blame yourself.” His arm across my shoulder tightened just a little. “And maybe I just needed a reminder.”
Warmth trickled through me. Probably just the blood from his stab wound, unfortunately.
Kalima wasn’t any more amused. “This was never about you, poor boy.”
“As you might imagine, I’m still feeling personally affronted,” Aric drawled. “And I already told you, I stopped being a child the night you sent me to the dragon.”
“It wasn’t I,” she objected. “You blame me, but I never wanted you at all. I tried to convince your father not to bring you here, to leave you with whatever tavern wench he’d swollen with his seed. But ah no, a king must have his pride.” Her lips twisted with derision. “I never fooled myself that any dreadmarked prince could hold back the horde.”
Aric tilted hard against me, so heavy I almost dropped him. Helpless, I had to ease him down to the floor.
Crouched beside him, I stared at Kalima, my mind whirling like when I picked the lock on a rich man’s jewelry box only to find dust. “Why? Why would you sabotage our only hope since Ormonde’s time?”
Though I thought I was impervious to derision and disdain, her look of contempt was so abiding I actually felt bad for speaking.
“And where has that gotten us? Only here.” She expanded her glare to Aric, as if annoyed he was still breathing. But once again, her expression shifted to something shrewd and sad. “Let me tell you a story.”
I tucked my chin back. “Ah no, never mind. I know I just asked why, but really you needn’t—”
“I was noble born,” she said, ignoring my long sigh, “but a younger daughter in a large family, and so I was pledged to the blessing of the light everlasting. I studied so hard, but by my first trial, it was clear I didn’t have the auric strength to become lor.” For a heartbeat, she aimed her glare around this rotting heart of the white tower. “Neither of you could understand what that was like. Even though it was everything I’d been meant to do, everything I trained for, everything I wanted. And it would never be.”
“No, how could we ever feel such loss?” Aric murmured. “We who should never have had anything at all.”
The knife in Kalima’s hand twitched as if she wanted to stab him again, but when I adjusted my stance slightly, to ready myself, she apparently thought better of getting too close. “Just before my last chance, a young woman came to me. I’d seen her around the dawn well but we’d never spoken. She offered me a draught and said if I drank it, I would pass my trial. I did. I found another draught on the night before my last trial to become lor. Years later, on the night after my consecration as numinlor, she came to me again and bid me follow her. She brought me here, into the depths of the haloric hall, into the bones of the mountains, and she showed me the flaw.”
When she paused, I swallowed hard, reluctantly riveted. “Flaw?”
“A fault through the protections that had existed for centuries, a glimpse into the Lost Lands. She said just as I’d been pledged to the haloria, she had been fostered by a secret circle tasked with hiding the flaw. I had to close this part of the tower so they could build the luminarci to patch the flaw, but I couldn’t tell anyone else because the resulting fear and chaos would only widen the chasm. As numinlor, I kept the secret and kept the luminarci filled as a barrier against the horde.” Kalima’s tone turned peevish, like a dinzah dreamer denied. “Maybe if I’d had a few more of those vitalizing draughts, I would’ve…” She restrained herself with obvious difficulty. “I’ve searched ever since to find a way to preserve the Living Lands.”
“And your best guess was stabbing Aric?” I said incredulously.
“Because I have Claeve.”
Aric and I exchanged one disbelieving glance before I said to her what we both were thinking. “He is the demon master.”
“Which is any worse than a Dragon Prince?” Kalima shook her head. “Claeve commands the horde. That is more than anyone has been able to do since the first verges a thousand years ago—not even Ormonde who took only one dragon. If he is made king of the Living Lands, Claeve will keep the darkness at bay.”
She had betrayed us, not even to seize power for herself, but out of fear and the threat of chaos she’d been unable or unwilling to share with anyone else.
Aric laughed. Weak as he was, the sound was warped but real. “Did Claeve himself promise that? Or this secret circle? And you believed them?”
Kalima hissed out a breath. “What other choice did I have?”
“A choice you’ve now made for all the Living Lands.” Aric sagged back on one elbow. “At least when I took the Chosen only I was damned.” In the faltering shimmer of the luminarci, his hand, burned by auric purity, splayed like a blackened star upon his breast, and blood from his stabbed shoulder seeped a scarlet diagonal across his gilet like a heroic sash.
The kind of heroism celebrated in songs after death.
I swallowed hard. “It’s not too late.” I wasn’t sure if I was talking to Aric or Kalima—or myself. “We can stop Claeve. We’ve seen that the Chosen protections can work against the demons.” I looked away from Aric’s blackened hand. “There is still a chance—”
“No.” Aric and Kalima spoke together, and somehow that was worse. And worse than worse were their expressions: Kalima’s sympathetic grimace and Aric’s waning look of surrender.
“No,” I echoed, and in case they misunderstood me, I repeated, “No no no. This is not how we end, giving in to the darkness and hoping”—I sneered the word—“hoping for a ray of light someday later. We must fight for it, steal it, if we have to.”
“You of all people should understand,” Kalima raged at me. “Sometimes you must live on the scraps when nothing more is coming.”
That stopped me—almost. Just because she was right didn’t mean I had to listen.
A rumble from somewhere below us forestalled further argument. Although I doubted any discussion mattered anymore. The stagnant pool burped up a vile scent, slopping chunks of algae onto the cracked white tiles. Not just rot and sewage, but something worse, as if the mountain itself were dying from within.
Kalima took a step back. “It’s already begun,” she said. “The luminarci are nearly empty. No fight, no hope, no words will stop it now.”
“What have you done?” Aric rasped.
“Claeve demanded a monster of his own to rival the dragon. It was the only way he would promise any chance for the Living Lands. It was spawned after the Great Gorging, nursing on the scraps of the lightkeep, and now is the time of its emergence. It will protect us from the rest of the horde where you and your demon have failed.”
The menacing rumble became a continuous roll of thunder, as if the auric storm I’d seen was finally breaking upon us.
Kalima held out her hand to me. “Enough. Leave him here. The prince was never yours anyway, and now it’s over. You are clever enough to take a place with me and we will guide King Claeve for the good of the Living Lands.”
I stared at her outstretched, jeweled fingers. “Such truths you speak.” For I was clever indeed, and certainly someone would guide the new king—and Aric could never be mine, even if he hadn’t been poisoned and near dying. “Especially that this is over.”
Aric struggled to reach for me, but his wounded arm didn’t move except for a brighter pulse of blood through his black tunic. “Fei.”
Uncoiling from my place beside him, I lunged at the numinlor.
She wasn’t a fool, sadly, and she didn’t trust me. She met my attack with her knife already raised.
But the animdao blade was in my hand too.
Metal clashed on metal with an almost musical chime. Just as Dyania was better with a blade than I would’ve guessed, Kalima had moves, and I grunted to myself. Why were these high-born ladies so learned with knife play? Unfair.
At which point were you under the illusion that life was fair? Lisel’s wry question rang in my ears, as inescapable as the mountain wind that had whistled through the pass above the harts’ high field. Out of nowhere, I found myself hoping that Nars had found his place.
Kalima swiped at me, almost half-heartedly, although the blow would’ve gutted me had it landed. “Stop fighting me, girl. Your pathetic aura wouldn’t satisfy even a demonic mouse.”
“Fei, enough. Save yourself.” Aric’s agreement might’ve given me pause, but his voice was too weak, barely more than a whisper, so I didn’t have to listen.
As the erstwhile numinlor and I circled warily, another sonorous gurgle echoed from the pool. More cracks appeared between the broken tiles, but no water poured out. Instead, the clumps of algae tumbled inward between the gaps. Kalima and I both staggered, awkwardly hopping the widening fissures as more chunks of stone beneath the tile fell into the hole.
One of the luminarci columns went dark. The hollow crystal cracked, and in the next breath, it turned to dust. As the links of metal looping round the top clanked down, Kalima dove aside. My ankle, the one twisted before, failed me, and I dropped to one knee to avoid the chain.
Which left me staring down into a gaping wound in the mountain.
Down down down, the fissure twisted in a strange helix. And I could see all the way because instead of abyssal darkness, the opening glowed with an eerie phosphorescence.
Like the auric lightning. Like Aric’s scarred eyes. This was what Ormonde had seen as he pursued the dragon.
I let out a little eep.
If not for the spreading breaches, Kalima would’ve pounced on my distraction. From partway around the hole where the pool had been, she glared at me. “Do you believe me now? We must capture it, chain it like the dragon for King Claeve.”
“What is it, Fei?” Aric had pulled himself closer to me, but when I looked over at him, his icy eyes were shadowed, going dark. He did not try to peer into the hole.
“There’s…something down there,” I whispered. “Something big. Bigger than the dragon. It glows.”
“Ormonde foretold of the levaimyth,” Kalima told us. “I read of it in his private chronicles. A power beyond demon or aura, of the worlds itself, Living or Lost, to be wielded by one strong enough.”
“No one could hold that,” I grumbled, as if snide observation could counteract gibbering terror.
Because whatever it was—levaimyth?—I knew it couldn’t be commanded. Not by a prince or a king or a demon master.
It was pure evil given shape.
And it was rising.
Like thick, ropey versions of the auric light powering the wall runes, tentacles groped at the sides of the gaping hole, reaching upward. Up toward us.
“This is your chance, Aric,” Kalima said. “Give yourself to the levaimyth, and your aura will bend it to serve the Living Lands.”
“Once again you sacrifice him,” I snarled. “You would make him Claeve’s monster?”
Kalima’s smirk at me was malicious. “You can’t keep him as yours.”
Anchoring his blackened fist in the rubble, Aric dragged himself even closer to the crack.
I pinned him with a hand at his nape beneath the tangle of his black hair. “No.” I ducked my head to his shoulder, where the bleeding had slowed to a sluggish pulse which worried me worse than the bright flow. “Don’t listen to her. You never did before, and don’t you dare now.”
“I feel it,” he whispered. “It calls, deeper than the dragon…”
“And you didn’t listen to her either.” I pressed my lips to his temple. “Fight them. Stay with me. Stay.”
“For the Living Lands.”
“For me.” Tears blinded me like his dying scars, but I would not let him go. I’d never had much—and most of that stolen—but by the light everlasting, he was mine.
Kalima swore out a very not holy word. “Enough. Your blood and aura are wasting, Aric.” She crept closer to us, like an inevitable fate. “Those years of pain—the savagery and your sins. Now you know why you suffered, why you’ve inflicted suffering on all those Chosen: for this moment. You are the last link in the chain I’ve forged to bind the monster. Sacrifice yourself to the levaimyth, save the Living Lands, and finally justify your dreadmarked existence.”
And he would do it, because for all the horrors done in the name of the Dragon Prince, Prince Aric had always fought for the Living Lands.
He looked up at me, though I knew he couldn’t see me, not with his own eyes or the dragon’s, and somehow he found strength in his aura-burned fingers to cup my jaw as if he would draw me down gently, inexorably to his kiss.
Blood and tears and yearning. Too much.
And never enough. I tore away from him. “No! Let the Living Lands fall where it may!”
Ignoring the pain in my leg and the crevices in the floor beneath me, I lashed the animdao blade at Kalima, not that forcing her back a step or two would silence her words—or the truth in them. She flinched away, her eyes widening in surprise.
Her lips parted too, and for a heartbeat, I thought she might finally acknowledge that I had something meaningful to say.
Then a graceful sweep of red, more brilliant than any jewel, blossomed across the white of her robe. She looked down, and I followed her gaze—as the swordpoint pierced the silkha between her breasts, moonglow silver through streaks of blood.
To escape, she staggered forward half a step toward me before a strong arm clad in dark red swept around her throat, holding her fast—and driving the rest of the curving blade through her. She arched with a pitiful cry, and her long silkha scarf unraveled from around her neck, fluttering down to the fragmented tile.
Claeve pressed his cheek to hers from behind. A lock of his hair uncoiled over her shoulder, the silver-white somehow even more shining than untouched silkha.
“Hush,” he murmured. “All these years, you’ve said quite enough. And since you were so ready to sacrifice…”
The sword disappeared with a whisper and another whimper from Kalima. The demon master never loosed his grip on her throat, his legs behind hers moving her forward as if she were just a poppet until her white slippers teetered on the edge of the levaimyth’s volcanic cocoon.
She reached up to clutch at Claeve’s forearm—not to free herself but to hold on, I thought dazedly. As her expression flowed from agony to understanding to incensed, I almost pitied her. When her gaze locked on mine, I knew she saw my reluctant sentiment—but judging by the bitter twist of her lips, she rejected it.
Claeve shoved her into the levaimyth’s maw.
I didn’t want to look…
As she tumbled, the eerie glow of the levaimyth seemed to splinter around her, unraveling in a spectrum of stained hues. Whatever her reasons, whatever her choices, the one-time numinlor of the Living Lands was apparently not so flawless as she’d demanded of the rest of us.
The levaimyth shrieked as it consumed her.
I swallowed hard too, so I wouldn’t empty my guts, and scooted back from the edge.
Claeve stood watching us, that gigantic curved sword at a jaunty angle, dripping with the numinlor’s blood. If he’d spattered any, the stain didn’t show on his crimson guise. “She wasn’t all wrong.”
Not feeling very clever at the moment, I just blinked. “Which…which part?”
“The levaimyth must be bound and commanded. Thanks to Kalima, it has feasted secretly on nobles and lors, on demons too, of course, and those they’ve touched, and others, so many others. All those auras…” He swayed a little, though I saw no wound on him. Abruptly I wondered what had happened to King Mikhalthe. If Claeve was here, did that mean the king was dead?
The demon master roused himself from whatever momentary lapse had distracted him. Clearly the distractions of the king, the rest of the army, and the Chosen Ones hadn’t been enough.
Leaving me and the fading Dragon Prince.
I was just so tired. “Are you going to throw us in there too?”
Claeve tilted his head, those fathomless eyes gleaming. “Seems a waste of my effort. The levaimyth rises and can take what it wants. Which it will, unless I take it.”
I gestured, not quite as grandly as I’d intended but welcoming enough. “All yours.”
He smiled. “It will be, yes.” But the arrogant look dimmed a bit as his black gaze slid to Aric. “You had the chance. And refused it.”
“To die in the monster’s maw?” Maybe he was fading, but Aric still had that mocking smile. “As Feinan says, all yours.”
“Not the levaimyth. With the dragon, you could have taken the Living Lands long ago.” A furrow marred his brow. “Why didn’t you?”
“I didn’t want it.”
Claeve and I shared a slightly incredulous look. Neh, I wouldn’t want the Living Lands either, but I’d never really had the opportunity, so that was easy for me to say, wasn’t it?
Aric shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. Claeve, you have to close the verge.”
For a heartbeat, even the ominous rumble in the depths paused, as if contemplating that improbable command.
Claeve laughed incredulously. “Close the verge? I just finally opened it!”
“And I’m telling you, you don’t want this.”
The demon master’s face twisted. “Because you’ve lost it, you want no one else to have it.”
“Because I know now what matters.” Unerringly, Aric turned his gaze to me, those scarred eyes shimmering.
My heart ached with the need to ask him what, exactly, he meant by that, in detail, and how much it mattered, compared to, say hypothetically, a lifetime of a road trader’s wares or a king’s treasury.
But Claeve was underwhelmed by our moment. “The demon dragon was a monster of renown, but the levaimyth is beyond that. For three hundred years, it has fed to bursting on auras, unmoored from the inadequacies of the lesser horde haunting the Living Lands. In rising, it will tear apart the Lost Lands too, freeing every demon at once. Unless you join me to hold it.”
Aric shook his head. “It’s too late for me. The wounds I’ve taken over the years that the bond with the dragon have held at bay are come due. I can’t see or even hold a sword. I haven’t the power anymore to help you. We must close the verge.”
Claeve’s expression twisted. “You would have joined Mikhalthe. You claimed him as brother and wanted a place at his side.”
“Maybe there was a time. But I already told you, I know what matters now, and I choose otherwise, though too late.”
“She is nothing!”
So I was right about what Aric had meant. The lightness in my heart was ridiculous, of course. “Close the verge. Find you own nothing.”
“It is too late,” Claeve said. “The luminarci that Kalima kept filled has sated the monster and constrained it, but when the last one empties, the towers will fall and the levaimyth will rise.” He focused on Aric. “And it will consume us all if you deny me.”
“I cannot give you what you need,” Aric said.
But his blinded eyes weren’t aimed at the demon master.
Brushing my fingertips over his brow, I whispered, “But you gave me everything I wanted.”
Claeve hissed out a curse, and coming from a demon master, that probably should’ve been more frightening. But the pallor and chill of Aric’s skin beneath my caress left me too bereft to focus on our enemy.
And Claeve wasn’t even the worst. The thunder from beneath the mountain wasn’t just a roll now but building toward a catastrophic crescendo as the fiend of the Lost Lands groaned toward a noxious birth.
I reached for Aric. “Come on. We have to go.”
“It’s over, Fei. We lost.”
“No.” I realized I couldn’t grab either of his hands without hurting him. “There’s always—”
As if in answer, the mountain shook.
And there was no resisting it. No clinging tenaciously as I’d done on Nars or trusting in the chains despite fear as with the dragon. I just fell, sprawling over Aric, who at least had the advantage of already being flat on the ground. Even Claeve staggered, going to one knee, the mighty moonglow sword clanging against the broken tiles.
The verge gaped wider, cracks fleeing away in all directions around us. In the wall with the locked door that had kept out people who weren’t me, the last white tiles peeled off and shattered with a sound too much like Kalima’s dying cry. Beneath, the raw stone shivered and ruptured, revealing the smoking ruin of the night beyond.
“Kalima promised you would bond with the levaimyth to save yourself from the sunlaris. Would you choose otherwise and doom us all?” Claeve levered himself upright, his black gaze fixed upward as chunks of the ceilings plummeted around us. “The tower is breaking!”
As if that wasn’t an obvious result of setting off an auric earthquake in the guts of a mountain. I hunched over Aric. “We’re getting out of here.”
His bloodied shoulder bumped me. “Fei, you must—”
“Don’t even say it,” I growled.
“Leave me.”
“You tried that already,” I reminded him. “You failed.”
He let out a shuddering breath, as if he too was breaking like the walls. “Of my failures, this one I prize.”
I’d never been anyone’s prize.
As the tower crumbled, I found my feet. “Claeve,” I called. “Help me get Aric away, and I will tame your thrice-blighted monster.”
He laughed, a particularly malicious sound in the surrounding chaos. “You?”
Even as the arches crashed down, I raised my chin. “I took the Dragon Prince, didn’t I?”
For a heartbeat, Claeve’s gaze locked on Aric. “All yours.”
Then he turned in a flourish of crimson—and fled.
“Coward!” I yelled after him. “Running away is my thing.”
Aric groped for me, though I knew any movement must pain him terribly. “Fei, it’s all coming apart. The mountain, the verge…me. I know you’d never leave me, but it doesn’t matter anymore.”
“It matters,” I told him plaintively. “You said you know what matters now.”
We clung together as the white tower came down around us.