THEY CAUGHT UP WITH THE WARWICKS HIGH ENOUGH INTO THE mountain range for the air quality to have changed. Elara hadn’t been winded from the run along the river, but even she found it hard to breathe all the way up there. Her wet clothes stuck to her body, and the cold made goose bumps rise across her skin. She had channeled Obie to create stairs of shadow as a shortcut up the cliffside, but the heat of his power didn’t prevent her body from having natural reactions to stimuli.
Not that it mattered. She wasn’t going to let the freezing weather stop her from what they had to do; besides, if Reeve wasn’t complaining about the threat of hypothermia, then neither would she. Whether the Warwicks planned to summon Irontooth to fight or to flee, Elara refused to let them get away.
Not this time.
Mireya saw them coming, and her wedding ring flashed with magic, seconds before a cascade of rocks tumbled down the mountain between them. Elara spread a wave of shadows over their heads, and the rocks bounced off harmlessly as if they were no more than pebbles. Reeve didn’t even blink, didn’t stop, didn’t turn. He trusted her to protect them. To protect him.
Mireya conjured a small tornado between her palms and let it loose. It sucked up several stones and twigs and flung them in Elara’s direction. Elara easily deflected them all and then threw the force of her magic forward, into the cliffs. More boulders tumbled downward, but this time they fell into the path ahead of the Warwicks, cutting them off from going any farther.
This and only this was enough to finally get Gavriel Warwick to turn. His face was a mask of pure contempt.
“Again,” he said, “you choose these people, this girl, over your own family. Your own country.”
Reeve stopped feet away from his mother and father. Elara couldn’t see his expression, but the setting sun lengthened his shadow into something she could use if she needed to. She had her own grievances with these people, but she’d had plenty of opportunity to defy them. Reeve deserved to say his piece to his parents before they went to jail.
“Just stop it, Father,” he snapped. “You don’t care about me. You don’t care about family. You don’t even care about our country. All you care about is power and glory. You want victory, no matter how many bodies you have to leave behind. It’s not about Elara and me. It’s not about Langley and San Irie. It’s about you and your selfishness.”
“Selfishness?” Gavriel stepped forward to block his wife from view. Elara kept an eye on her anyway, but she didn’t seem to be trying to run. “You would call me selfish after everything I’ve done for you? How I’ve kept you alive? If anything, you’re to blame for all of this, you ungrateful little shit.”
“Grateful for what? You should have let me die if this was the result.” Reeve gestured over the plateau, where fire and smoke still coursed through the air. “I appreciate that you raised me, but it was your fucking job as a parent. You don’t get to use your basic care as a knife to my throat to get me to do what you want. I don’t owe you anything. Besides, the second you made contact with the Gray Saint, this was no longer about me. This was about dominance.”
Gavriel’s lips curled downward. His hatred made him look ugly, like a monster beneath his skin was finally letting itself out. “And what’s so wrong about wanting dominance? Langley flourished under my control. You lived a life of safety and privilege because of us. Do you think such a thing just happened? I gave you a life I never had. I was a boy from a backwater village who worked his way up the military ranks, who worked for everything he had, who worked for everything you had. Is it so wrong to be tired of working? To take what was promised to me, no matter the consequence?”
Elara swallowed, hating how similar Gavriel Warwick’s story sounded to her own. This man had once dismissed her as nothing more than bait for the real prize, the Empyrean, but all along they had come from the same place. And he had made all the wrong choices. Elara moved to Reeve’s side, sliding her hand into his. His eyes were bright with unshed tears, but there wasn’t a flicker of sympathy on his face. He gave her hand a squeeze, and she squeezed back.
“The second you started seeing power over others as something you were entitled to is the same second you lost sight of that backwater boy,” he said coldly. “Instead of creating a world where boys like that didn’t have to suffer, you became the very thing that caused all your suffering. And if you still can’t see that, then this only ends one way.”
Gavriel stared them down. She could hear distant roars and see the occasional flash of light in her peripheral vision, but Elara was careful not to let that distract her. She curled her free hand, ready to channel Obie’s power. Reeve’s grip tightened around her other hand.
“You’re right, son,” Gavriel Warwick finally said. “This was always only going to end one way.”
Then he jumped to the side just as a pillar of fire, larger and hotter than any Elara had ever seen a relic produce, zoomed toward them.
Elara gripped Reeve’s shadow and converted it into a wall of obsidian blades, but he had already thrown himself in front of her. His hand slid from hers. His arm gripped her waist just as the fire and blades struck from different directions. Everything was light and heat, smoke and blood. Elara flew out of Reeve’s arms, the collision of magic pushing her halfway back down the path. Someone screamed, and Elara didn’t know who, and her heart stopped as her body skidded to a halt—
When the air cleared, Elara scrambled back onto her feet and ran. Her skin was stinging from cuts the rocks had carved into her, and there were pebbles falling down her back and hair. All she could think about was Reeve. Where was Reeve, that noble fool who had protected her when he had no magic to protect her with?
The rocks remained where she had dropped them, blocking the way up the mountain. Gavriel Warwick lay bleeding on the ground, pierced through by no fewer than ten of her shadow knives. Mireya Warwick was curled over him, her own back split open from several more of Elara’s blades. Red dripped from her face onto his, as if she were crying. And Reeve…
Reeve was lying against the cliff face, one shirtsleeve missing. For a moment, Elara didn’t understand what she was seeing, only that something was different about him that had nothing to do with his now-dry clothes. Then she realized that it wasn’t his shirtsleeve that was missing. His entire right arm was gone, the stump at his shoulder cauterized.
Elara was at his side in an instant. He was so pale that he looked like a corpse, but his chest rose and fell with pained breaths. “Oh, gods. Reeve. Reeve, are you all right? Did I do this? Can—can I heal this?”
He rolled his head toward her, his eyes hazy. “I did this. I—I was acting on instinct, as if I could stop dragonfire with my arm.…”
Elara searched the ground around him, but she saw no sign of his limb. It wasn’t just gone. It had been annihilated.
“Nothing left… to heal,” Reeve managed when she turned back to him. “Hurts…”
Tears dripped down Elara’s face as she poured her magic into his charred shoulder, healing what she could. She was no medical summoner; she couldn’t grow a whole new arm for him, especially not if his old one had been destroyed by dragonfire. But if she took away his pain, maybe after all this, they could fit him with a scalestone prosthetic in San Irie.
If they got back to San Irie.
Reeve’s breathing slowly evened out. Color returned to his cheeks. He looked down at the right side of his body, and his eyes clenched shut. His own mother had done this to him. His own father had outright tried to kill him. Now they were both dying. She couldn’t imagine how he must be feeling.
Mireya Warwick’s body shuddered. She didn’t move, couldn’t move, even when Elara stood over her.
“I told him… it wasn’t worth it,” Mireya croaked. “I told him that… we were dealing with something… f-far beyond our ability to control it.”
“You still went along with it,” Elara pointed out. “It’s too late to be sorry now.”
“Sorry?” Mireya turned her head. Blood was everywhere, her once-beautiful face now a crimson collage. There was sorrow in those dark brown eyes, but there was also wrath. “The only… thing I’m sorry for… is that we didn’t let that wretch I gave birth to die.”
Elara shook with rage. She stepped forward—to summon the magic to knock her out or to punch her in the face, she wasn’t sure—but Reeve stopped her. He held her upper arm, staring down at his parents as if they were strangers.
For him, they had probably been strangers for a long time.
A single tear rolled down his cheek, but he just stood and watched as Mireya took one last rasping breath. Death took her away as Elara and Reeve waited. She didn’t know what Reeve was waiting for, but part of her expected the woman to return for one last dig. Evil like that didn’t die so easily.
Then again, evil like that was human.
Elara shook her head. Two of the figures from her nightmares had been reduced to this: hateful corpses who did not know when to quit. They looked so small. Maybe they had always been this small.
“Lightbringer,” Reeve said, lifting his eyes to the horizon.
Elara pressed her forehead against his shoulder, a brief moment of indulgence before the fight to come. “Lightbringer.”