Finn stared out the window, Zoe beside him, as the land below bloomed under the golden light. There was a buoyancy in the air where there had only been heaviness before, a sense of the world pivoting.
“This is more than just the renewal of the border,” he said. “It’s the restoration of the land itself. The Borderlands can thrive again without the dominance of the Shadow.” He spun around to look at the vortex where Sienna spun within. “She has changed everything. The Resistance can take back Old Aleppo, purge my father’s forces. It’s a new beginning.”
He walked back to the edge of the circle of skulls and reached out a hand, holding it only a millimeter from the spinning vortex. It was as close as he could get to Sienna through the veil when just this morning he had woken with her in his arms. The warmth of her body, the smell of her hair, how she had fitted so perfectly against him. It was how he hoped to wake every day for the rest of his life, but now …
Finn bit his lip as he tried to hold back the tears that threatened. She had chosen to leave him for the final time and the blood of a Mapwalker was now the hope of the Borderlands. He would honor her sacrifice and live on for the land they both loved — but now he would do it alone.
In the library under the Ministry back in Bath, Bridget sensed a sudden tension in the maps, the pulsing of ink beat more strongly within her veins. The rustling around her grew louder as cartography began to shift and re-form, as if the very fabric of the world had shifted.
She turned to the desk and pulled out the volume of Mapwalker annals. She opened it to a page marked with a scarlet silk thread. A figure sketched in ash on its ivory pages, her features suddenly clear.
Sienna, wrapped in a shroud of shadow and light in the midst of a whirling vortex of blood. Her life force would sustain the border and keep the Shadow at bay — at least for a time. The border was renewed and the natural disasters would soon end on Earthside as the world moved freely once more.
Tears ran down Bridget’s cheeks as she reached out a fingertip and touched the face of the young woman trapped within the Tower of the Winds. Sienna was bound to her Mapwalker destiny just as Bridget was herself shackled to the library, a balance of Blood Cartographers until their lifespans ended or someone else took their place.
A gasp came from behind her, then a low moan of despair. Bridget turned to see John staring down at the sketch of his daughter. He sank to his knees and Bridget knelt to embrace him as they mourned the end of one time and the beginning of another.
Mila felt a shift in the water as she darted between the ripples of the river heading west toward the coast. It was as if all sharp edges became smooth for a moment and then reset themselves, like an earthquake passing beneath the mantle of the earth, lifting and lowering everything in its wake.
She glanced behind to check on the twins and by the look on their faces; they felt it too. Something had changed in the Borderlands and somehow, Mila knew that Sienna had made it to the Tower of the Winds.
They swam fast over submerged boulders, translucent skin flashing in the sunlight that dappled down through the water. Mila led the twins on. No time for stopping, and no need to. They all reveled in the freedom of being one with the water.
Up ahead, Mila heard the thundering of a waterfall. The river frothed, churning as it became shallow in places, and carving deep in others. Eddies and whirlpools formed at the sides. Daniel slipped into one, laughing with delight as he spun around. Dawn joined him, and the twins flew in circles hand in hand, dancing in the water.
Mila smiled as she watched them play, remembering her own solitary life in the canals of London and later in Bath. No one understood her. No one laughed with her. But that would all change now.
The Mapwalker team had been her home for a time, but losing Xander had been a heavy blow. Sienna would always be a friend, but her powerful blood meant she stood apart and her choices were beyond reach now.
Finn’s words in the cave at Ganvié echoed back to her: There are so few of your kind. And yet, here they were, three lost Waterwalkers heading for home.
“Come on, you two,” Mila called out. “I’ll show you what fun really is.”
She beckoned and then turned in the water, darting ahead of them through the rapids as they followed her with whoops of delight.
Mila dived down into the depths before the waterfall met the edge of the cliff and then leapt like a dolphin up out of the froth and into the air.
She spun around, her body diaphanous in the sunlight, a figure of water droplets and air, her laugh the tinkle of rain on stone. The twins leapt just behind her, shrieking with joy. The three of them plunged down the falls into the pool below and then on — toward Ekon and Ganvié.
THE END