CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Two tunnels branch off of the traveled route
Both narrow, twisting, uncertain, and grave
One leaves behind the known for hope of more
One leads to acceptance she’s always craved
Destinies converge in her direction
Hearts stand by as she makes her selection
—THE BOOK OF UNVEILING
Darvyn’s climb out of the gorge was brutal. Fortunately, he had washed up at a section of the river where it turned back on itself in a horseshoe shape. The rock formation at the center of the U was rough, leaving ledges and handholds for him to grab onto as he pulled himself up. The soft earth crumbled beneath his fingers, but with his Song beginning to restore itself, he sang a spell to hold it together and support his weight. When he reached the top, he lay flat on the ground, heaving breaths.
How had he survived his fall into the river? The memories came in flashes. He’d reached out with his Song, but it had still been blocked. The waters had engulfed him as he sank below, tasting its bitter, metallic taint as it had invaded his mouth and nose.
He’d dragged himself out, still trying to catch hold of Earthsong. And then the numbness had come. His limbs had grown heavy and stopped cooperating. His consciousness had failed. Then he’d awoken, having no idea how long he’d been out, but Earthsong had thrummed through him, healing his body.
A half-remembered voice singing a familiar melody danced across his mind. Just a fragment of sound that echoed in his ears. They were probably still ringing from the fall, but it almost sounded like his mother singing a lullaby to him as he fell asleep.
A hallucination. Though it sounded so real. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, focusing on the here and now. His parched throat. The scorching late-afternoon heat. But the strains of a sweet, sad voice singing his name as a soft lullaby lingered on.
Only it wasn’t his name he heard. The song was one that mothers inserted the names of their children into in each verse, singing about the child they loved more than the sun. So why was he hallucinating someone else’s name?
He sat up as the memory solidified. The Keepers had changed his name when they took him. That first night, he’d ridden off with a stranger, tears blurring his vision. That’s when they’d started calling him Darvyn. There were enough Tahlyros around that they kept his surname, and he wouldn’t part with the House of Jackals sigil associated with it, but his original name, the one his mother had given him, had disappeared as completely as she had.
As the song repeated in Darvyn’s mind, it brought a realization. She hadn’t really vanished.
Everything the Keepers had told him his whole life came into focus. They’d said she abandoned him, that they had no idea where she could be. But she’d been searching for the Keepers, had sought them out again and again. Surely word had gotten to the elders that a woman was trying to locate her son.
Anger rose within him, razor-sharp. Rage sliced at him as the desert heat seared his skin.
A torrent of power loosed itself from his hold. Lightning crackled. Winds gusted. Instead of stopping it, he leaned in, releasing the storm inside. He drew heavily from the source, pulling waves of Earthsong to him. The sky darkened as heavy clouds rolled in. With a burst of thunder, they released their loads, drenching the parched desert with rain. Hard drops stung and the Earthsong beat at him, burying him in its might.
He poured everything he had into the spell, drawing more energy than he ever had at one time, until he knew he was close to exhausting his barely restored Song.
Kyara was lost in some dark, impossible pit. He may never see her again.
He’d failed Jack and been betrayed by those who claimed to care for him.
The Keepers had instilled in him a sense of duty from the time he was four years old. His power was precious. The strongest Singer in generations. Men and women had died protecting him from the True Father’s agents.
Guilt had long weighed him down, but now anger mixed with it until he was buried beneath a bitter sadness. If he had known his mother was seeking him, he would have found her. Kept her safe. No rogue physician would have ever touched her.
The storm raged on, leaving him sprawled in a sea of mud. He flopped onto his back, the mud heavy as chains binding him to the ground. The absurdity of it all struck him, and he began laughing. Nothing about this situation was humorous, but the laughter would not stop. It rose from his belly in ripples, unwilling to release him. Was this his mind breaking?
The rain died as his grasp on his Song slipped, and he laughed until there were tears in his eyes.
“What’s so funny?”
That is exactly what Kyara would say if she were here. And just in that tone of voice.
And that was exactly what her face would look like if she were standing over him, frowning like he was a lunatic escaped from the asylum. The vision kneeled beside him, her brightly patterned tunic plastered to her chest, streams of water running down her face.
Darvyn sat up sharply, just missing bumping heads with her.
“Is this your idea of a joke?”
His eyes widened. It looked like her and sounded like her. He reached out and touched the soft curve of her cheek.
“Kyara?”
Her lips twisted in a wry smile. “Were you expecting someone else?”
“You’re alive!” He launched himself at her, squeezing her in a hard embrace.
“Yes, and very wet.” Her arms were stiff at her sides, but slowly, they came around him. “So, I guess this means you missed me.”
If they had been standing he would’ve spun her around, but they sat there in the puddle of muck. He pulled back, his eyes hungry for her face. She was flushed, her breath short. He felt much the same way. When he cupped her cheeks in his palms, her eyes closed on a long blink.
His head still spun from the expenditure of his Song. His heart raced from exhaustion, though it might also have been from Kyara’s nearness. He could blame either of those things for what he did next, but the truth was, he had wanted to do it ever since he’d first laid eyes on her.
When he pressed his lips to hers, her body went rigid, but then her hands pressed against his back, bringing him closer to her. She tilted her head like an invitation, still tentative, but curious. His tongue breached the seam of her lips and she gasped. He could not stop himself from invading her mouth, caressing her tongue and fusing their lips together.
Her hands slid under his wet tunic, warming his chilled skin. But all too soon she broke apart from him, her expression shocked. His heart pumped furiously, rattling him to the core.
Kyara swallowed. He followed the motion of her neck, longing to kiss her there. But shock turned to something else as her eyes clouded over. Something darker, more like fear. She backed away and a hollow opened inside him.
She touched her lips, tracing them the way he still wanted to even though her body language rapidly cooled the heat within him.
“Why did you do that?” she whispered.
“Did you not want me to?”
She met his eyes sharply. “I almost killed you, Darvyn.”
He rubbed his forehead, then scrubbed his hands across his scalp. “But not because you wanted to.”
She let out a deranged chuckle. “What does it matter? Dead is dead.”
“What happened to you? Where did you end up? How did you get back here?”
“It’s actually a long story.”
He dried the area on which they sat. His Song was already replenishing itself so it was nothing to draw the water out of the mud, and their clothes.
Half a pace lay between them, a distance that felt vast. But once she began her story about falling into the darkness and meeting the Cavefolk, he nearly forgot the wall she was putting up.
“They wanted me to stay there with them. They said they would teach me to use my Song, but—” She pulled at a scrub of beardgrass just breaking through the earth. “I don’t think I like their methods.”
His tumble into the river was still very fresh in his mind. “I have to agree.”
“They acted like I’m some kind of savior. There’s no way I can be that.” She eyed him warily. “And you should be careful of me. I’m not…” She looked away and took a deep breath. “What I did to you and your friend … you don’t know what happened to him. He could be— He could be dead because of me.”
Darvyn shook his head. “The Queen said he lives. And whatever happened to him is because of the True Father, not you.” He shifted into her line of sight, forcing her to stop avoiding his gaze.
Her jaw was set petulantly. “I don’t know if I even believe in the Queen.”
“She’s very real.”
“And She sees us? Can She see everything?”
Kyara seemed determined to change the subject. “She can control some of what She sees,” he said, “but She cannot see everything. She visits dreams at random, or maybe according to some design that only She knows. And there are a rare few in this world, like me, whom She can contact at will. I do not know the reason. If She knows, She’s never shared it. Being forthcoming is not Her strong suit.”
“You don’t seem to like Her very much.”
Twilight had fallen, and Kyara was painted in the beauty of the sun’s dying light. He tried not to stare; he sensed it made her uncomfortable, but the last thing he wanted to do was talk about the Queen. Still, it was something they had in common—being controlled.
“I first had the Dream of the Queen when I was four, just after the Keepers took me in. Though I didn’t tell anyone.”
“Why not?”
“I was already different from the other children. Once the elders really understood the extent of my power, I was kept separate. Everything was shrouded in secrecy. I had to be protected at all costs. I didn’t want one more thing to set me apart.” He drew in a pained breath as the memories crashed into him. Kyara’s hand settled on his arm. The light touch helped ground him.
“The Dream of the Queen kept coming, and on top of that, She showed Herself to me for some reason. It was a long time before I knew how rare that was. I’ve never met another Dreamer who’s ever seen Her. Even then I was special.” He spat the word out.
“And She asked me to do things. Go places, help people. I didn’t mind then. I wanted to heal and feed others. To soothe all the sorrow I felt around me. To make people laugh with something funny or magical. But the things She asked me to do weren’t always so benign.”
“What do you mean?” Kyara’s concern sounded genuine. And if anyone would understand, she would.
“The Keepers moved me every few weeks to keep ahead of the spies and the Collectors. Nowhere was safe for long.” The bitterness of that realization always stung.
“I’d had the Dream a few nights before. She’d come to me and told me that we were likely to pass very near somewhere special. And that I was to follow my senses to retrieve something important for her.
“In the middle of the night, the Keepers took me from the house where I’d been staying and hid me in a wagon of straw. It itched something awful. I was scratching, trying to be quiet, when I felt something tug at my Song. I knew it’s what She had warned me about. The wagon slowed at a bend in the road, and I jumped out and ran into the darkness without telling anyone. I thought that’s what She’d meant when She said to follow my senses.”
The memory pummeled him, strangling his voice.
“Where did you go?” Kyara asked.
He cleared his throat. “Tanagol. The same ruins where you stopped after you fled the school. That’s where I felt this sensation leading me. I wandered around in the moonlight until I closed in on the source of the feeling, buried under some old crumbled bricks. A little rock, big as my fist, at the time. It was a caldera.”
“Like my speaking stone.”
“But ancient, and far more powerful. The Keepers tracked me down, they left the highway, braving the night in the bush and found me. But bush wranglers had seen them.”
Her hand on his tightened.
“A group of them tracked us and attacked. I was distracted by the caldera and didn’t give a warning. Two men died that night.”
She squeezed his arm, hard. “You were just a little boy.”
“I was already the Shadowfox. And people died to save me that night. And many other nights. Too many.” He pulled away from her touch. “After that I told them about the Dream. I thought maybe if I’d told them before, something could have been different.”
“The Queen doesn’t know the future, does She?”
“Even if She did, I doubt She’d share any more than She wanted to.”
Kyara fidgeted with the bristle in her hands. Her next words were barely audible. “You blame Her?”
“I’m a game piece on a board to be moved by Her however She wants. I’m a tool for the Keepers to achieve their agenda. I’m a savior, a soldier, a hero, a legend, everything but a man. Everything but my own man.”
Tears filled his eyes. “They lied to me about my mother, Kyara. They said they’d looked for her and never found a trace.”
She frowned. “But that can’t be true. Why would they say that?”
“Control.” That anger bubbled up again. “Complete control.”
She was quiet beside him for a long time. When she spoke, her voice was made of iron. “Well that, at least, is something you can change.”
“No,” Kyara said, crossing her arms. The stubborn set of her jaw caused Darvyn to flash back to their kiss the day before. He shook off the remembrance of her mouth against his before he could get lost in it. Today, she was being unreasonable.
“You can’t stay here. They call it Death River for a reason.”
Her eyes flashed with determination. “Once I leave the gorge, the spell will return. It will force me to try to capture you. I can die here or die resisting the spell. But I won’t harm you.”
“We can fight it again,” he said. “We will find every carcass from here to the Breach Valley. We’ll gather enough Nethersong to help you overcome the spell. I won’t give up. And maybe the Keepers will have other ideas. I can speak to the elders.”
She shook her head. “You can’t trust them. You have a traitor in your midst giving information to the True Father. That’s how I knew where to find you in the first place.”
The stifling heat grew distant as a chill overtook his body. “What?”
“It’s true.” Her eyes softened, apologetic. “They knew the Shadowfox would be at Checkpoint Five following the nabbers. I just had to figure out which one you were and bring you to Sayya.”
He ran a hand over his head. “I can’t believe that one of us would turn traitor. It doesn’t make sense. Only a handful knew about the mission. Why would they want me captured?” Though his feelings about the Keepers leadership were still raw, the men and women who risked their lives to fight for the freedom of their people were his family. The only one he’d truly known.
Her voice was sad. “I don’t know. I wish I could tell you more.”
Darvyn thought about the Keepers he’d worked with so many times before. “I should have been able to sense the deception.”
“Can you feel everyone’s feelings all the time?”
He shook his head.
“Even the Shadowfox is not all-powerful. Unless you asked every Keeper if they betrayed you, would you ever know?”
His jaw firmed. “I’ll find out now.”
“I hope so.”
“And I’m not leaving you here.”
Her eyes searched his. He could feel the gears churning in her mind. “If I go with you…” she said.
He squeezed her shoulders, joy and relief filling him.
“If I go with you, to help discover what happened to your friend and identify the traitor, you must promise not to allow me to harm you. Knock me out, tie me up, do what you must if the spell becomes too much for me. And then leave.”
His jaw ticked; he didn’t like her terms, but they made sense. He’d never felt anything like the sudden weakness that had come over him when Kyara used her power. He nodded.
“Do you promise?” she asked.
“I promise.”
Kyara closed her eyes, appearing relieved, even as Darvyn’s stomach churned at the thought of keeping his vow.