Second Age of Storms, 51st Summer, Day 25
Jin fell. She spun through dark, gritty clouds as lightning flashed around her. Below her she caught glimpses of the gray slope—but it had changed. Veins of orange pulsed in the rock, a glowing web.
She’d lost Tibius. That didn’t matter. She’d made certain he would fall to his death, and if there was any goddamn justice in the world, that would break his control over the rovex and Kadrin would be safe. Sou-Zell could take him and Reena home to Kerina Sol. They’d be together, at long last.
Below her, the mountain groaned and shuddered. The orange veins pulsed brighter—then, with a mighty tremor, the stone split. It cracked open along the glowing lines, and smoke hissed from fresh vents, smoke that bled from orange to blue as it tasted air. Jin fell toward the heaving stone.
It was a mana spring, welling up before her eyes. She was going to fall right into it. But who cared what happened to her? What mattered were Kadrin and Reena, up in the castle. The castle that was about to split apart and be swallowed by the newly forming spring.
It had all been for nothing.
The rovex shook its head and snarled—a broken noise, almost a whimper, completely unlike the confident roar of moments ago. Kadrin didn’t stop to wonder why it seemed distracted.
“Now!”
He sprinted for the crushed remains of the staircase on the right. The steps at the bottom had collapsed, but just out of Kadrin’s reach was a still-intact railing. There wasn’t time to sheathe his sword, so he dropped it—then he turned and put out his hands. Sou-Zell was right at his heel. He hesitated only a moment before stepping onto Kadrin’s interlaced fingers.
Kadrin swung his arms upward with all his might. As it turned out, he’d slightly overestimated Sou-Zell’s weight. Damn the man, doesn’t he get enough to eat? Sou-Zell sailed over the railing and recovered in time to land lightly on his feet, like a cat. He turned at once to reach down and pull Kadrin up.
“Jin!” Kadrin called. “Reena!”
He took the stairs two at a time, heedless of the rovex’s bewildered snorting behind him. When he reached the top, his heart sprang into his throat and stayed there, like a stuck pit.
A woman stood in a doorway, framed by the flickering storm. She wore a black caftan and a veil over her dark hair. Her back was turned. Kadrin couldn’t tell if he was trembling or if it was the floor beneath his feet. A muffled curse from Sou-Zell told him it was probably the castle. But he wasn’t thinking of that now.
“Reena,” he said, his voice hesitant and thick with questions: Is it you? Are you real?
The woman turned. Dark eyes stared from a lovely, exhausted face. Blood had run freely from one nostril over the curve of her lip and down her dimpled chin.
“She jumped.” Her voice was horrified. “It’s all coming apart. I didn’t mean for this to—Rasvel, what have I done?”
Kadrin barely heard what she was saying. He was too busy staring at her. Here she was: the girl he remembered from his youth, fully grown. He’d tried to imagine her so many times; he’d sketched her portrait repeatedly and even made one disastrous attempt at a painting. But all his fantasies were faint and colorless, cobbled together from descriptions he’d wrung out of an impatient Jin. They couldn’t measure up to reality.
Jin. For a moment he forgot how to breathe. Then he said, “She jumped?”
Reena let out a choked sob. Kadrin moved past her to the balcony. The castle groaned and shook so violently it nearly took him off his feet. He grabbed the railing, snared Reena’s waist with his other arm, and drew her close until the trembling stopped. Then he looked down.
“Oh,” he said. “When did that get there?”
Below the castle churned the electric blue of a freshly formed mana spring. It grew wider before his eyes, bubbling and hissing, eating away at the rocky slope. That was why the castle was shaking; its foundation was being dissolved, as easily as sugar in tea.
And Jin had fallen in there. Even if the fall hadn’t killed her, the mana would. Kadrin had seen a man die of mana poisoning once. He had managed to drag his way out of the spring, but he’d died in agony all the same. Spending even a few seconds completely immersed in mana was fatal.
To the Talented, anyway.
He turned to Reena. His hands found her face, pushed back her veil, and wiped the tears from her cheeks. She looked up at him, stricken, and Kadrin pressed a kiss to her forehead. It felt natural, easy as breathing. Like the twelve years had been nothing and they’d never been apart.
“I don’t know if you figured this out from my letters,” Kadrin said, “but sometimes I do things without thinking them through. Stealing a Scroll of Talent. Growing flowers on a whim. Writing to a woman I haven’t seen in years, who might be married to someone else and has probably forgotten all about me.”
Reena’s brow furrowed. “What?”
“I’m just reminding you. Because I want to make sure you know this is different.” His words came out in a hurried rush. There wasn’t much time, after all. “I’ve spent the last ten seconds thinking through everything that could possibly go wrong. What I might lose. And I’ve decided it’s a damned stupid idea.” He sucked in a breath. “But I’m doing it anyway.”
Realization snapped into place in Yi-Nereen’s eyes. She clutched at his torn jacket. “Kadrin, no, don’t—”
He kissed her again, on the lips this time. Then he pulled away with the taste of her blood on his tongue and said huskily, “Be right back.”
He dove over the railing.
Jin plunged through the smoke and into the mana’s icy clutches. At once, all sensation fled; she was completely weightless, suspended in nothing. Time stopped. Pain vanished. A thin line of red trailed through the opaque blue. Her blood, marking the way back to the surface.
But there was no need to do anything about it. Jin let her eyes drift shut. She felt drowsy and tranquil. Drowning in mana had always sounded like a painful death, so she was glad to find it wasn’t.
Oh, Jin.
The sigh rustled through the mana. Jin opened her eyes. Fear lanced through her, but only for a moment before the mana’s chilling touch sapped it away once more.
The enormous saurian she’d seen in the underground spring was swimming around her in slow, silent circles. Stripes along its flank flashed in the pulsating glow. Its flat black eye surveyed her calmly.
Jin reached out and touched the creature. She didn’t burn mana; there was no need. Instead of her sparks questing through stone, part of her moved through the creature. She glimpsed millennia, a consciousness older than the wasteland, older than the Road Builders. You’re the original saurian, aren’t you? The rest were created in your image.
How ancient it was, how unknowable. And yet, it felt familiar.
She drew back her hand. The saurian swam gracefully away. And there was her father where it had been, floating in the mana, his fingers entwined with hers. Gao-Jin smiled at her.
“Little pteropter,” he said. “You always wanted to learn how to fly. But jumping from a cliff?”
Jin wasn’t surprised to see her father. Not here on the hazy edge of death—exactly where spirits belonged. But she was surprised by the sudden punch of how much she’d fucking missed him.
“Sorry, Appa,” she whispered. “I guess I had to learn somehow. Sparkriders just aren’t meant to fly.”
“Don’t count yourself out just yet.” Her father squeezed her hand. “I tried to show you: the wasteland is full of strange, terrible, lovely things. It isn’t the world where I wanted to leave you, but it’s the world that made you who you are.”
“And who is that?”
“A wanderer who sees beauty in every twisted corner of the world. A survivor who isn’t afraid to die when it counts. Someone who loves with all her heart, no matter how many times it breaks.”
The mana stirred. A dark shape appeared above Jin, where her blood trail led away into the blue. The figure slowly grew larger. She looked at her father, suddenly terrified of losing him all over again. “I don’t want to leave you.”
“Everyone leaves,” he said. “You can’t stop that from happening. But this is the truth, Jin: if you can pick yourself up from a fall, if you can go on loving even when it breaks you, if you can follow the stars when you’re lost, you’ll never be alone.”
Arms closed around her waist. She clutched her father’s hand, trying to hold on even as a powerful force pulled her away—but her father let her go with a smile still on his lips, and vanished. Then she was drawn upward, out of the depths.
As the mountain crumbled and the castle shook itself to pieces around her, Yi-Nereen turned away from the railing and saw Sou-Zell. He was clinging to a banister and covered in blood, though none of it seemed to be his. Their eyes met.
She had only ever spoken to him once, at her mother’s funeral. He’d approached her and offered his condolences in a voice that made her question whether they were sincere. But he had broken the protocols of courtship to do it, though she hadn’t known that until later. She had been the last to learn of their engagement.
She had no idea what he was doing here. Had he come to drag her back to Kerina Rut? Old anger flared in her chest, but it quickly settled. Sou-Zell didn’t look like he was in a position to drag anyone anywhere. He looked drained, helpless, and afraid, though he was obviously trying not to show it.
The shieldcasters of the kerina she’d almost destroyed must have been terrified, too. Yi-Nereen’s stomach churned. It had seemed like the right thing to do, the only thing. Men like her father would never change. They would have to die, all of them, for the world to recover from the evils they’d wrought. But… here was Sou-Zell. He’d obviously accompanied Kadrin and Jin. And they wouldn’t have brought him if they thought he couldn’t change.
No one else needs to die, Faolin said. You can save them all. Everyone in this castle. Even Falka.
Yi-Nereen was too exhausted to argue. If Faolin wanted his murderer to live, Yi-Nereen would use the last of her power to grant his wish.
She burned ambrosia for the final time. Her shield bloomed and spread, sweeping through the castle. She touched everyone who still lived within the ruin: Sou-Zell, Falka, the raiders. She wrapped herself around them and held them tightly in a web of her Talent as the castle trembled and fell apart, joining its architects in death. Until all that remained of the ruin at the mountain’s peak was her shield and the precious lives within, interconnected bubbles suspended by Yi-Nereen’s will alone.
The storm had moved away without an anchor; it would pass over the wasteland as an ordinary storm, eventually diminishing to a mere breeze. The sky was radiant with sunlight.
Now that’s beauty, Faolin said. Don’t you think?
Kadrin burst from the spring and dragged Jin onto the stony bank. He sprawled beside her, greedily sucking down air. He didn’t know if they were safe yet, but the world had stopped shaking, and that was good enough for him.
He crawled to Jin and pushed her hair away from her face. She wasn’t even wet—that was one of the more bizarre things about mana, in Kadrin’s opinion. But she wasn’t breathing.
“Jin,” he said, shaking her. “Come back. Don’t do this.”
Her side was covered in blood, sticky and dark, but when he pulled up her shirt, he couldn’t find any wound. Her pulse still beat, though it was slow and sluggish. Then she coughed and opened her eyes.
Kadrin’s relief crystallized instantly to dread. Jin’s eyes burned like molten pools of flame. A little moan of pain escaped her lips. Kadrin put his hand to her cheek and withdrew it with a hiss: her skin was scalding hot.
He’d been too late. Of course, he’d known he would be. It took only seconds for mana poisoning to set in. But damn it, he’d seen Jin pull off so many miracles. If anyone could survive this, it was her.
“Come on, Jin,” he said, hands hovering uselessly over her body. “You got us through the storm. You saved Reena. You’re the toughest person I know. Please.” His voice broke, but he stumbled on. “We were so close to going home. And I never got to tell you…”
The last few words died in his throat. What was the point in saying them now?
Kadrin had been under the surface for less than a minute, or so he thought—but perhaps time passed differently in mana. Everything had changed since he’d leaped from the ruined castle’s balcony. A miniature wasteland surrounded him. Great chunks of rock and masonry were everywhere, as if they’d rained down from the heavens; the air was choked with dust. Kadrin couldn’t see farther than ten paces. He didn’t know what had happened to the castle. Fear gripped his heart, fear for Reena—but he couldn’t leave Jin to die alone on the banks of the spring.
Her back arched, her face contorted in agony. Now her skin was glowing faintly, as if fire were trapped in her blood. Kadrin tore off his ruined jacket and wrapped it around his arms. Then he pulled Jin into his lap. He could feel the blazing heat of her flesh even through the leather, but he had to hold her. “One more miracle, Jin. Please.”
“Kadrin?”
He looked up. Through the thick dust hanging in the air, Reena stepped into view, holding her sleeve over her nose and mouth. Her eyes widened at the sight of Jin. She crossed the distance in a few long strides and sank to her knees beside Kadrin. Behind her came Sou-Zell.
“Thank Rasvel you’re all right.” Reena reached out as if she was going to touch Kadrin’s face; then she drew back her hand. For a few moments, neither of them moved or spoke. All they did was stare at Jin as she shook and burned in Kadrin’s arms. Dust drifted slowly around them, peacefully, as if the wasteland didn’t care Jin was suffering.
Finally Reena raised her face to Kadrin. Her eyes were reddened and her cheeks shone with tears. “Kadrin, we can’t let this go on.”
“What are you saying?”
He didn’t want to hear her answer. He didn’t want to hear anything that wasn’t Kadrin, we can fix this. We can save her.
“I’m saying…” Reena took in a shuddering breath. “Damn it, Kadrin. I can’t—I can’t watch her suffer.” Her voice came out strangled with pain.
No. This can’t be real. He pulled Jin closer, ignoring her scalding heat, his throat so tight he couldn’t speak or even cry.
“Wait.” Sou-Zell’s voice rang out from behind them, strained but still somehow imperious. He dropped to one knee beside Reena. His jaw was tight and he didn’t look at Jin; he fixed Reena with his dark stare instead. “The courier said some shieldcasters could siphon mana from a person’s body. Is it true?”
Reena froze. The muscles in her throat tightened. “Yes. It’s true.”
Kadrin’s heart skipped a beat. “Then try, Reena. Please.”
The dust was settling. Above, the sky burned clear, brilliant blue. Sou-Zell drew back, a haggard shadow in the wreckage. In the distance, Kadrin thought he heard something: a faint rumble, like a stampede. But he gave it little thought.
Reena lifted her veil, wiped dried blood from her mouth with the back of her wrist, and bent over Jin. One hand stroked Jin’s hair, the only part of her that was cool to the touch. The other hand crept into Kadrin’s. Then she leaned down and pressed her mouth to Jin’s.
Kadrin watched. He could do nothing but watch, his pulse stuttering in his chest, as Reena winced and trembled. Jin must be burning her, but she didn’t pull away. The air crackled; Kadrin could feel the flow of energy between the two women. A sudden fear gripped him: Wouldn’t the mana Reena drew from Jin poison her as well?
He almost pulled her back—he couldn’t lose them both. Then Reena’s grip on his hand tightened to the point of pain, and a shield shimmered around them, a translucent half dome pulsing with energy. That was where the excess was going, Kadrin realized. She’d bleed it off with a shield. His clever, beautiful Yi-Nereen.
Then it was over. Reena pulled back, eyes blazing blue for a brief moment before they faded back to brown. Kadrin looked at her in awe. He touched Jin’s face with a trembling hand. Her skin was cool, and she’d stopped seizing. Her eyes fluttered open, and focused briefly on Kadrin and Reena in turn. Then they closed as she lost consciousness once more.
Kadrin laid her gently on the ground and took Reena by the hands, grinning fiercely. “You saved her.”
The distant rumble was growing louder. Kadrin looked around, hackles rising, but he could see little past the rubble and fallen rocks surrounding them. What was it? Thunder? No, the sky was clear.
Magebike engines.