THEIR FORCES HAVE ARRIVED ON THE SHORE,” IYA SAID CALMLY. “Would you like to come, or would you like to sit this one out?”
They were in the gymnasium, Faron running through more drills designed to refine her control over her flames. Gael had wanted to set up a lesson with Tonya Mantle and Grady Rivas or Oscar and Margot Luxton, but Faron was getting tired of making people bleed. Faron loved to win: games and bets, races and arguments. But sending Iya’s Riders to the infirmary didn’t feel like a victory. It felt like a step into a spreading darkness that kept her awake at night, terrified of what she was becoming. Terrified that this kind of power was never meant to be used on human souls at all.
Gael had rejected her request to practice her soul magic on the dragons instead, and so these drills were their compromise. Once again, he had refused to tell her where Lightbringer had gone and what Lightbringer was planning, while insisting the most important thing was for Faron to focus on getting stronger. Once again, Faron had pretended to listen, if only because she wanted to be able to set Iya on fire without him being able to fight her off.
Right now, it would barely delay him, would hurt her more than it hurt his plans. But one day, if she waited until the exact moment it would make a difference, Iya would burn to ashes. Even if it meant she burned with him.
Faron had no idea how long they had been there, but she’d spent enough time with Gael Soto to know that he was no longer the one speaking. Iya was already walking toward the door, giving her no time to check if his eyes had returned to Reeve’s blue, but his voice had that edge to it. That jagged point that promised danger for anyone in his way.
“I’m coming,” Faron said, jogging after him with only a second’s hesitation. If nothing else, she might be able to use the distraction to send a message to her sister.
Lightbringer was waiting in the courtyard, his back to them. The entrance, Faron noticed, was on fire, and the portcullis lowered so that anyone who tried to come through anyway would find themselves trapped. Iya climbed into the saddle and helped Faron up; they took to the air before she could even strap herself in. Behind them, Goldeye took their spot in the courtyard, looking like a spill of blood before the keep.
Lightbringer flew in an arc around the island, allowing her to see the scale of what they were dealing with. Black, blue, and gold dots resolved themselves into Étolian soldiers, swarming through the streets like marbles spilling from a cloth bag. They came from the bay and they came from Margon, the next island in the archipelago. The conscripted on the other islands were fighting back, clearly afraid of what Lightbringer would do if they didn’t. But the black ships anchored on all sides of the island were releasing a second wave of soldiers to march on Hearthstone. More boats with billowing sails approached from Nova, and each one flew the flag of Joya del Mar.
“Is Langley here, too?” she asked Iya through the bond.
“They’re on the continent, not here,” he replied. “I’d rather resolve this before that changes.”
“You let them get pretty close,” Faron noted.
“The cruelest defeat is when you think you’re close to victory.”
Disturbed, Faron turned her attention back to the ground below. Ignatz was in the sky over Margon to provide support to their soldiers. Lightbringer’s massive jaw widened as he flew toward the city and belched fire over the platoon crossing the bridge that spanned from Margon to Caledon. Faron’s stomach dropped, but when the flames cleared, they were all still there, their faces upturned to assess the dragon’s position. An off-white barrier shimmered over their heads, and Faron could swear she saw eyes and a mouth in the swirls of light before it disappeared.
Was that a Joyan nature spirit?
A squad of soldiers broke off, making complex gestures with their hands. Fire erupted in columns around them, shooting upward. Lightbringer swerved to avoid the blasts, but the flames moved like a snake, trailing him through the air with a flickering gullet. Another squad broke off and pointed their hands at boulders, wiggling them loose from the beach to fling at Lightbringer. These were no inexperienced civilians protecting their homes as best they could with the resources they had. These were people acclimated to war, with the power and reflexes to match.
San Irie had never fought all the empires at once, and Faron was suddenly, profoundly grateful for that. The kind of magic being wielded was unlike anything she’d seen before, and there were so many soldiers, they actually stood a chance at winning. Instead of being happy, a hard pit formed in her stomach. There was something she didn’t like about the empires doing what she had been trying to do, but it was hard to put a finger on it with everything going on.
Iya twisted in her arms, but she didn’t need to see what he was seeing. She could feel the heat from the fire still chasing them, making sweat roll down her back and her clothes stick to her damp skin. He threw his own flames around her, misshapen lumps of heat meant to sweep the others off course. Lightbringer dipped beneath them as a boulder connected with his stomach, and the roar that followed shook Faron to her core.
This was the end. This really could be the end. The combined nations could defeat Iya here and now, and she would be free to return home.
Home to an island that hated her.
In the custody of people who considered her a conspirator.
Without Reeve free to go with her.
Faron clenched her eyes shut. It was better for them to stop Iya now, she told herself. It was what Reeve would want. Maybe it was even better for her to answer for her crimes. She’d thought she could do more good at Iya’s side than at home, but all she had done for weeks was cause more pain. Maybe the Warwicks should finally get their wish to see her imprisoned in the Mausoleum, where she couldn’t hurt anyone ever again.
Her very soul rebelled against the idea of them winning, even in this small way. Everything she had done was for nothing if she didn’t save Reeve. She had fought the war for nothing if she fell right into Langlish hands.
The pit in her stomach grew even harder. Her throat closed at the realization that plunged through her. Iya could not lose here. Because, if he did, Faron would lose everything. Her life. Her love. Everything.
She opened her eyes and drew on the power of their bond.
Iya snuffed out the fireball growing in his hand and met her gaze. He studied her, felt her, in the span of seconds. Then he faced front and began aiming his flames at the oncoming rocks instead. Faron twisted in the saddle and sent a wave of fire at the red-orange snake still curving through the sky toward them. It tried to dodge, but she shot another with her free hand and then brought the two waves together with the flame snake in the center. Her dragonfire collided with the nature spirit’s fire, and it felt like punching a brick wall.
Her palms burned. Her bones shook. Her breath stuttered.
“Hang in there,” Iya said, feeding her more power. “You’re doing so well.”
Her flames burned hotter. She heard a high-pitched shriek, and then the fire snake collapsed into ashes that fell like snowflakes down onto the path. They would only conjure another, she was certain, and she would run low on energy eventually. Lightbringer might have been the First Dragon, but nothing was infinite but the gods—and even, still, she was only human and far from infinite herself.
She unstrapped herself from the saddle, telling herself one more time that she was doing the right thing. Or the wrong thing, but for the right reasons.
Lightbringer dived as low as he could without taking a boulder to the face, and Faron leaped to the ground before he pulled back up. She landed flame-first, slapping her burning palms against the ground. The earth split beneath her, cracking in a honeycomb pattern outlined by bubbling red, and racing beneath the feet of the oncoming soldiers. She smelled burning leather, burning skin. She heard curses; she heard screams. She saw the ground blackening beneath the onslaught of dragonfire, never to yield life again.
Heat wafted into the air, making it ripple, as the soldiers whose feet weren’t welded to the ground tried to scramble back the way they’d come. She had poisoned the ground and the air, rendering it useless for the spirits they needed to summon. She had made it too hot for them to risk conjuring another flame, and they were too far from the ocean to do anything about it.
Faron stood up, staring down the soldiers who remained, the ones assessing her as a threat they could still take down in hand-to-hand combat.
“My name is Faron Vincent,” she said, “once called the Childe Empyrean. Langley learned to fear me when I was only twelve years old. Do you really want to know why?” Her fingers flexed at her sides before she summoned two fireballs around her rising fists. “Or do you want to go home to your families alive?”
Above her, Lightbringer unleashed a mighty roar, his shadow large enough to swallow them all.
The crowd rippled, but no one approached her. Faron had just begun to conjure another flame when the soldiers parted to reveal the one person she wanted to see and the last person she wanted to see her like this.
“Faron?” Elara breathed out. Her hair was newly braided into a side ponytail, her body wrapped in Langlish dragon leathers like Faron’s. Her brown eyes were wide, so wide, and there was fear in them. She was afraid of Faron. “What are you doing?”
“I’m—” Faron smothered her growing flames. Her pulse pounded loud in her ears. “Reeve is still trapped in there. I can’t leave him, Elara.”
“We can save him together. We can do this together.” Elara lifted her hands, the way one would before a startled horse. She took a step closer, and Faron stumbled back. “You don’t need to work with him, Faron. Come back with me. Please come back.”
“I—I can’t.”
“What?”
Lightbringer roared again, a thunderous threat. Faron could see what he was going to do before he did it, the spill of fire, the smoking flesh. Her sister, too focused on Faron to look up. Her sister, a casualty of her bad choices.
“I can’t leave him,” Faron said again. She lifted her hands. “I know how it looks. But I’m the only one who can do this, Elara. Our lives are connected. I’m the only one he’ll let this close, so I have to stay. I need to save Reeve. For both of us.”
“Faron, you don’t have to do this alone!”
“You have to go. He’ll kill you!”
“Faron!”
“He took Jesper’s blood. I don’t know why. Follow the blood!”
Lightbringer opened his maw, and fire erupted from his gullet. Before Elara could say another word, Faron turned her head away and slammed into her sister’s soul. Elara gasped, stumbling backward into the arms of a soldier, and Faron hated it, hated how just the feel of Elara’s soul was enough to comfort her, hated that she was using this power against her sister at all. There was no coming back from this. There was no forgiveness. There was just Elara, her mouth open, staring at Faron as though she were a stranger, and there was Faron, burrowing past her sister’s defenses, telling her, Go. Go now.
The flames approached as if in slow motion. Faron’s stomach twisted.
With seconds to spare, Elara—sweating and breathing hard—ran away. The soldiers retreated with her, but only some of them made it. The field disappeared beneath the smell of smoke and burning flesh.
Faron gagged. At some point, she had fallen to her knees. The lingering feeling of Elara’s soul—all that warmth, all the goodness—only served to remind her of how cold and corrupted her own soul was. Of course she was Iya’s co-Rider. Their souls were the same. They were the same.
When it came down to it, they would always choose to exert their power over those weaker than themselves—no matter the cost.
She’d known that rewriting her sister’s free will was wrong, and she had still done it. To keep her safe. A well-intentioned betrayal was still a betrayal.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice breaking. She didn’t know when she’d started crying, but she buried her face in her hands and continued. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.…”
Let the soldiers take her. Let Lightbringer burn her. Her life was meant to end in embers. It was all she deserved.