FARON DIDN’T NOTICE TIME PASSING UNTIL A WEEK HAD GONE BY.
Every day, she had woken up to sit by Reeve’s bedside, leaving only for meetings and meals, for baths and books. Every day, she sat beside Iya in Jesper Soto’s body and silently checked him over for signs of injury or struggle. It felt as if she held two lives in her hands, and she was juggling them disproportionately. She wanted Jesper safe, but she needed Reeve. She spent more time in the infirmary than she did watching over Iya.
She might not have been a reader, but Reeve was, and she read him story after story in the hopes that he would hear them and wake up faster. Langlish folklore differed from Iryan folklore in one major way: Their stories were about human saints, giant serpents, and great magic. People wielded magic swords or turned into plants or slumbered in hidden locations waiting for the right moment to awaken. In Iryan folklore, everything was a fable, an allegory, or a metaphor: Anthropomorphic animals starred in creation myths, ancestral advisors appeared when they were most needed, and duppies and soucouyants acted as warnings to misbehaving children.
Reeve had loved these sorts of stories enough to use them to figure out a key portion of Iya’s resurrection plan. Faron half expected him to sit up and do it again if she read them to him.
But seven days passed, and he slept and slept and slept.
“He will wake,” Iya said from behind her. Though she’d heard him enter, she jumped anyway, because she was still unused to hearing Jesper Soto’s voice blended with Lightbringer’s. “You don’t have to watch it happen.”
“I don’t want him to wake up alone,” Faron said, swallowing. “After what I did to him, that’s the least I can do.”
“I—” Iya began, then seemed to think better of it. “Your next lesson is ready. Do you want to delay it?”
Faron held Reeve’s hand between her own, checking for a pulse before brushing a kiss across his knuckles. His skin was warm beneath her lips, a warmth that lingered even after she drew back. She continued to sit there with her back to Iya, breathing until she felt more in control of herself. But it infuriated her, how he continued to act as if he cared about her while he worked to destroy everything she loved. He’d razed her home. He’d isolated her from her sister. He had held up a mirror to all the worst parts of herself, and he had told her that was all there was to her.
Reeve lay unconscious before her because of Iya. Because she’d believed that he cared about her, that he could help her defeat Lightbringer and save her sister.
Faron grew stronger with every lesson, but she still wasn’t strong enough to escape. She wanted to be ready when Reeve woke up. She wanted to be able to get them out.
She let her breath out slowly, forcing cheer into her voice. “No, it’s all right. Let’s do it.”
She changed into her riding leathers and coat before meeting him on the beach. Lightbringer was present, for once, which caught her off guard. Jesper’s eyes were darker brown compared to Gael’s hazel, but that was definitely Iya’s warped cruelty staring at her through them. Gael, if he was still anything close to conscious in there, would not be her teacher today.
Still, Lightbringer’s physical presence was unusual. She wondered if his control over Jesper’s body was tenuous, requiring proximity to maintain, or if she was just being optimistic about Lightbringer’s unfamiliar magic. If Jesper was fighting from within, more fiercely than Iya had anticipated, was there any way she could help him?
Then she realized Lightbringer wasn’t the only presence on the beach. Lightbringer’s tail shifted to reveal Gavriel and Mireya Warwick, dressed for a fight. Faron paused midstride, half-thrilled and half-wary. Thanks to Iya’s own commands, Marius Lynwood had recovered from what she’d done to him, but, with Reeve in a coma and Elara the last victim of her power, Faron felt emotionally volatile. Her complicated feelings toward the Warwicks had only grown more complicated after she had learned what they’d done to their own son. She wasn’t sure she could trust herself to hold back.
And no one here would stop her.
Lightbringer turned those massive green eyes on her, which jolted Faron back into action. It didn’t matter whether she felt ready. She couldn’t show weakness in front of a creature that had always dismissed her as a weakling. But at least now she knew what Lightbringer was doing here.
This was her final exam.
Everyone she had fought before had been her peer, students from the Hearthstone Academy who were unfamiliar with her magic and flush with the arrogance of youth. Gavriel Warwick was a seasoned soldier whose magical experimentation had cracked the bindings of Lightbringer’s prison. Mireya Warwick was a weathered warden who ran the most secure and dangerous prison in Langley. Both were twice her age. Both were familiar with her summoning. Both had killed children and likely had no qualms about doing it again.
Gavriel Warwick still featured in her nightmares, skeleton pale and dripping with malice as he set her world on fire. He had surrendered before she’d ever gotten to fight him directly, and that had probably been for the best. The anger that flared in her chest, even after all these years, made it clear that the battle would have been a bloodbath.
She stopped yards away from the Warwicks. “I notice that you haven’t visited your son.”
“If he were awake, I’m sure you’d let everyone know,” said Gavriel. “Must we make small talk? We’re here only as a favor to our saint. My wife and I are leading our current operations in Joya del Mar.”
Iya approached her from beneath the shadow of Lightbringer’s wings, his hands behind his back. It still unnerved her, seeing what was his third face in the time she’d known him, but she stomped down the urge to flinch. Lightbringer continued to stare down at her. Watching. Assessing. Show no weakness.
“Based on previous lessons, you should be strong enough to face them,” Iya said. “If not, we still have a few of the younger Riders that you have yet to spar with.”
“Spar,” Faron repeated dubiously.
“Well”—Iya smirked—“they can’t hurt you, but you can certainly kill them if you like. Their magic is just amplifying ours, that’s all.”
Faron didn’t think she and Iya needed as much power as they had, but she didn’t bother to argue the point. Gavriel and Mireya were settling into defensive stances, so she copied them, searching for an opening. Gavriel was broad, his muscled body speaking of a brutal kind of strength. Mireya was all sharp angles and sharp stares, but that meant she was quick. Force and speed working in tandem against her, wielded by two adults who knew how to use them lethally. Her odds weren’t great.
But when had her odds ever been great?
Faron was a survivor. She always had been.
Iya waited until he was standing on the grass, leaving them the wide swath of golden sand as their battlefield. Then he said, “Begin.”
Mireya Warwick was in front of Faron in a second. Mireya’s dragon relic—her wedding ring—lit up, covering her knuckles with golden spikes made of light. Her first flew toward Faron’s face, and Faron barely managed to dodge it. The spikes trailed across her shoulder instead, dragging blood from the gouges left behind. Pain shot down Faron’s arm, but she had no time to assess the damage. Gavriel Warwick was in her path, his own relic—a dragon-eye necklace similar to Reeve’s—radiating a light that climbed through his chest and arms. He grabbed Faron, spun her around, and flung her toward the bay with so much strength, she soared into deep water.
Frigid seawater knocked her out of her body for a moment, making it hard to tell up from down. Her bleeding shoulder screamed, or maybe she was the one screaming.
The hero of San Irie, so easily defeated. Was this what would have happened if she’d faced the Warwicks at twelve years old? Would San Irie still have won the war, or would the commander have displayed her corpse outside Pearl Bay Palace as a warning to her people? Your saint is nothing. Stand down, or we will reduce your island to nothing, too.
She reached the surface, sucking air into her lungs. Water and bile came with her next few exhales, and she struggled to focus. Gavriel and Mireya Warwick stood on the shore, watching her dispassionately. As if they were bored. Gavriel Warwick knelt down, placing a hand into the water, and his dragon relic glowed even brighter. That glow again traveled down his arm, into his hand, and then it traveled into the ocean… and one by one Faron saw fish begin to float above the waves, unmoving and scorched.
He was boiling the water. It didn’t matter that she was in the depths. He would kill every sea creature between them just to get to her.
Anger overwhelmed her as she floated in the cold, salty water. Gael had warned that his temper had become volatile after bonding with Lightbringer, and Faron felt the truth of that in that moment. In all the moments that had led up to it. She felt as if her rage were always waiting to consume her, but now it ignited into an inferno as she thought of how much of her life had been defined by the kind of plan Gavriel Warwick was executing now. When rulers like the Warwicks saw something they wanted, they would destroy anything to get it. For them, it was not simply about winning. It was about the other side losing. San Irie had lost homes, farms, landmarks. They’d lost time, family, sanity.
Even now, San Irie continued to lose, because of a plan put in place by the Warwicks—a plan that had been delayed only because their son had been the sole member of the family with a conscience. An ancient god, once locked away, had returned to terrorize them all, because, even with their endless territories, the Langlish wanted more power. They could claim they had done it for their son, for their people, but their son was alone in an infirmary bed, and their own people would be dying in droves if they didn’t bend to Iya’s will.
Power was what everything came down to in the end. Power in the hands of people with poisonous hearts.
Would it really be so bad, Faron? To burn it all down?
No. No it wouldn’t.
Flames rose before the Warwicks. Mireya Warwick gripped her husband’s shoulder and pulled him to safety as the wall of fire cut across the shoreline, chasing them away from the water’s edge. Faron swam until her feet touched the ocean floor, until she was running through too-hot water and back onto too-hot sand. She parted the curtain of fire until she saw the Warwicks, their magic already swirling from their dragon relics to face hers. But they were too slow, at least for what she really had planned.
Her soul surged beyond her body and gripped theirs. Sweat dripped down the sides of her face, beaded on her forehead. Blood dripped from her nose as the Warwicks fought her, a stronger fight than any she had faced before, but she pushed and kept pushing. They, too, began to bleed, their dragon relics so bright that she had to turn away. She could feel the pulse of their magic as it twined with hers, trying to sever her hold over them. But she was stronger. Iya was stronger. Lightbringer was stronger.
Mireya Warwick coughed up blood, as if Faron had punctured a lung. She wished she had. It was the least the director deserved.
“Are you going to kill us?” Gavriel asked, and she could see his mind working for a way out of this. Red bled across his eyeballs, the vessels bursting as he tried to hold on to his mind. His voice shook, even as his skin was slowly leeched of what little color it had. “Is that what you truly want? To turn your back on sainthood completely? To become the very thing you’ve always despised?”
Faron almost laughed. Instead, she took a single step forward. “I never asked to be a saint. I only ever wanted one thing: to keep my loved ones safe. And they’ll never be safe, not as long as you’re still breathing.”
Another step. A trail of fire shot from her foot in a snakelike pattern toward the Warwicks. Smoke began to coat the air, making them cough, making their eyes water, making them curse.
Faron smiled wide.
Justice had never felt so good.
“Do you even know how you’ve ruined my life? The nightmares you star in? The hope you’ve crushed?” she asked. Black spots began to dance before her eyes, and she knew it was because of the bond Iya had formed between herself and him, and that hurting the Warwicks would weaken her magic, would take away some of the strength she needed to ultimately defeat Lightbringer. But she didn’t care. She didn’t care, not when she had them at her mercy, finally, finally. “Does it make you happy? That you destroyed what San Irie could have been? We can rebuild, we can be better, but we’ll always be different from what we would have been. Why should you have that much power over us even now? Why should you have any power at all?”
They had attacked her sister with slurs and violence.
They had destroyed her island.
They had resurrected Iya.
She could stop them, here and now. For San Irie. For Reeve.
Faron imagined Reeve awakening from his coma to find her sitting at his side, his hand in hers as she told him she had killed his parents. That they would never hurt him—or anyone else—again. Her heart stuttered as she realized she wasn’t sure if Reeve would even be proud of her. The first and only time he’d seen her perform this new magic, he hadn’t expressed an opinion either way.
I’ve always believed that what we know isn’t as important as how we choose to act on it, he’d said then, newly recovered from the kind of beating that should have killed him. Would have killed him, if she hadn’t intervened.
But this wasn’t like that. Her power so outstripped that of the Warwicks that it was like fighting with toddlers. If she pushed just a little more, she could lock them inside their own bodies. She could make them present their necks so she could slit their throats. She could make them kill each other, then watch, paralyzed, as the other bled out.
Her hatred felt like a poison that made it hard to swallow. It would be so easy, so easy, so easy.…
Faron realized that she was shaking, and it wasn’t from the effort of holding on to their souls. She was covered in a damp layer of sweat, fat droplets clustering atop her collarbone. Blood mixed with the moisture on her face, overwhelming her with the scent of copper and acid. Her heart was racing as every blink carried her to the past. She was standing before the Warwicks, but she was on a battlefield surrounded by burning buildings and mangled bodies, but she was on the beach outside Hearthstone Academy, but she was crying in a tent on the mountainside because she’d killed her first person and could still feel the warm slick of their blood on her hands.
What we know isn’t as important as how we choose to act on it.
Faron may have thought these people did not deserve to live, but she didn’t want to be the one to end their lives.
She was so, so tired of war. Of blood. Of death.
And she was angry—she would always be angry—but she wasn’t a killer. Not when she had a choice.
She settled back into her own body, letting the Warwicks drop to the ground. Unlike Lynwood after their confrontation, they were both still conscious, if panting and bloody. Gavriel immediately lifted a weak hand to check on his wife, who gripped it and squeezed.
Faron’s vision blurred, but she turned away before they could see the tears fall. She felt hollowed out. Without her anger, without her hatred, she was nothing but a husk of guilt and shame. Shame for the part of her that still wanted to finish the job. Guilt for having taken it this far in the first place. She would never forgive the Warwicks for what they had done, and maybe she would never forgive herself for letting them live when they would never have afforded her the same courtesy. But as she limped away from the beach, ignoring Iya’s calls, she felt lighter than she had in weeks.
She may be a monster, but at least it was on her own terms.