by JA Andrews
The earth shuddered, and the nearest wall of the courtyard trembled and collapsed. Alaric and the others lurched away from the keep, shielding their heads from the stone and rubble raining down.
The ground rumbled for several more seconds, stones continuing to fall from the keep, then slowly, everything fell silent.
No one moved for a long moment, then Alaric stepped quietly through the haze toward the place where Mallon had been. A breeze stirred the cloud of dust and revealed a gaping hole in the ground where the altar had stood. It spread halfway across the courtyard and was deeper than Alaric was tall.
There was nothing inside it but rubble. No altar, no Gustav, no Kordan, no Mallon.
Ayda stepped up next to him and beamed. She drew a deep breath and flung her arms out. “It’s gone!” she sang.
“What was that dark thing?” Milly asked.
“A piece of Mallon,” Ayda said, “He infested me with it the day my people sacrificed themselves.” She smiled impishly. “I just gave it back to him.”
“Gave it back?” Douglon asked.
Ayda smirked. “Well, I gave it back surrounded by a web of my people.”
“Your people?” Milly asked faintly.
“What was left of them,” Ayda answered. “They were very angry. And then we added some fire.” Her smile widened to a grin. “Turns out that’s a destructive combination.”
“Turns out?” Alaric asked. “You didn’t know?”
“I didn’t know for sure, but I had a suspicion. You could say that I understood the concept of what would happen.”
“However you did it, it was well done.” Douglon motioned to the crater. Then he grimaced and pulled his arm back protectively to his chest.
Ayda looked at him in exasperation. “I only left you alone for one night.” She walked up to the dwarf and grabbed his arm.
Douglon grunted but didn’t pull his arm away. “I don’t need you to fix it,” he grumbled. “It’ll be fine.”
Ayda touched the wound gently. Douglon let out a sigh of relief and Ayda patted his cheek sweetly. “Now stop getting hurt.”
“The lights around the darkness,” Milly said, still looking puzzled at the great hole in the ground, “were they…?”
Ayda sobered. “The elves have held the darkness in check for eight years. They continued to hold it until the flames destroyed the darkness.”
“And destroyed them?” Alaric asked.
“And them.”
Alaric looked at the pit, a surge of loss rolling through him. So many elves destroyed. Not that they had exactly been alive before, but the price of killing Mallon had been a heavy one. Next to him, he caught sight of Ayda’s face, blazing with pride.
“It’s all they wanted,” she said. “To destroy him. They’ve waited for too long.”
She breathed deeply again and laughed. Seeing Alaric’s sober face, she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “Don’t be so serious, Alaric. This is a good day. The best day in a very long time. We’ve won. And the only losses on our side today were those who went willingly.”
Alaric looked cautiously at Ayda. “So are all the elves… gone?”
Ayda wrinkled her nose. “No, not all of them. Just some.” Then she cocked her head slightly. “The ones that are left do seem a little more withdrawn than usual, though.”
“Perhaps they can be, now that they don’t have to hold the darkness back.”
Ayda nodded. “Perhaps. They are small and tired now.” She sighed. “And I suppose they will be bored for the rest of my life.”
Alaric smiled. “Maybe we can find some other great force of evil to fight.”
Brandson groaned quietly, and Ayda looked at him, noticing for the first time that he was slumped against the wall.
She walked quickly to Brandson and knelt down next to him.
“Can you fix it?” Milly asked, her voice breaking a little.
Ayda sat back on her heels and looked helplessly at Milly. “I’m sorry. It’s animal poison. I can heal wounds. That’s just putting things back together. But poison—poison spreads and… and things aren’t broken, they’re changed. I don’t know how to change them back.”
Brandson groaned.
Alaric walked up to Brandson and knelt across from Ayda. He gently lifted the pants Milly had cut open out of the way so that he could see the wound more clearly. There were streaks of dark red climbing up his leg and the flesh was hot.
“We need to get him some medicine,” Alaric said. “Let’s get him to his horse.”
“What are we going to do?” Douglon demanded. “Find some sort of poison doctor out here in the middle of nowhere?”
Alaric grimaced. “You already have.”
They all looked at him blankly.
“Evangeline was poisoned. What do you think I’ve been studying this whole time?”
“And you have antidotes stashed nearby?” Douglon asked.
Alaric sighed. “Let’s get Brandson to his horse. It should take less than a day to get to my castle.”
“You have a castle?” Milly asked.
Alaric smiled weakly. “Well, no one else has claimed it for over a hundred years, so yes. I have a castle.”
They just kept looking at him.
“And Evangeline is there. And all of my research on poisons.”
Then Brandson moaned and the group jumped into action. Alaric and Milly each ducked under one of Brandson’s arms, helping him walk. Douglon led the way back through the keep, shoving any large debris out of their way. They reached the room with the horses and Brandson sank into a chair.
Alaric led Beast to the doorway and cast out to see if any monsters were nearby. The explosion must have scared them off, because there were no large life forms down in the valley. Everything he felt was far off on the hills.
“The valley is relatively safe, for now. We should hurry.”
Alaric and Douglon helped Brandson claw his way up onto his horse. Douglon mounted his horse next to him and tugged and pushed the smith into a better position on his saddle.
“Sorry,” Douglon muttered gruffly, his eyes showing far more concern than his voice.
“Here,” Alaric said, moving next to Brandson. “Someone will need to ride next to him to make sure he doesn’t fall, but I think I can help him a little.”
Closing his eyes, Alaric took a deep breath and recalled spells he hadn’t tried in a year.
He found the one that he’d first tried on Evangeline. The one meant to slow the spread of the poison. It sat in his mind discarded where he had thrown it when he was furious that it couldn’t work well enough.
Taking a deep breath, he set his hand on Brandson’s leg and whispered the words he couldn’t quite bring himself to say out loud.
When he opened his eyes, everyone was looking expectantly at him. Brandson moaned again.
“I don’t think it worked,” Douglon said.
Alaric ignored him and closed his eyes again. It had worked. He could feel it. He could feel the energy stopping the spread of the poison, blocking it at the edges. He felt the smallest bit of poison slip through his net and knew that Brandson’s time was still limited. But now, he might have the time he needed.
Then Alaric reached up and held his hand toward Brandson’s face. “Dormio,” he told the blacksmith, and Brandson’s head slowly slumped down on his chest, his brow relaxing and his breath calming.
Milly, eyes wide in alarm, rushed up to him.
“He’s fine,” Alaric assured her.
“He’s not fine,” Ayda pointed out.
Alaric glared at her again. “He can’t feel the poison. And I slowed the spread of it, too. We should have several days before…”
Milly nodded tersely.
“Then what are we waiting for?” Douglon demanded.
The group headed out of the valley with Milly riding behind Brandson, helping to keep him seated. Douglon rode alongside, ready to help if needed.
Alaric led them south, back
out of the valley and along the same trail they had taken to get there. That night, when they set up camp, the exhaustion of the last few days settled heavily on him. He could sense Kollman Pass getting closer. For Brandson’s sake, he wanted to rush, but his own desire to get back there was steeped in reluctance.
The ruby hung around his neck again, its weight familiar but no longer comforting against his chest. He now had the antidote for the rock snake venom, but it didn’t matter. If the energy in her ruby wasn’t enough to bring her back, what good was an antidote? The swirls of red light felt fragile and delicate.
He was never going to be with her. This would be the end. He would heal Brandson and send them all on their way. And then? Then the only question was whether he would wake her to say goodbye or just let her slip painlessly away.
Chapter Fifty-Three
They rose early the next morning, trying to reach the castle by evening. As they saddled the horses, Alaric looked at Ayda. “You never told us how Gustav managed to trap you as a tree.”
“I was stupid,” she answered. She glanced at Douglon with a rueful smile. “I wasn’t paying attention.”
“That’s surprising,” the dwarf answered.
“I had reached the courtyard and could see that the wizard was planning something, because there were some runes scratched into the ground, but I couldn’t see him anywhere. It was still dark and as I wondered what to do, four creatures came slinking toward me from all directions.”
“And let me guess,” Douglon said, “you didn’t want to kill them, so you turned yourself into a tree.”
Ayda looked guiltily at him for a moment, then giggled. “That’s exactly what happened.” Her face sobered. “They were so sad. They were so lonely and twisted, and they were only attacking because they were commanded to. I didn’t know where the wizard was, but they hated him. They hated the keep, and they hated themselves. The only thing they didn’t hate was me.” She paused. “But they couldn’t stop.”
She took a deep breath. “So I couldn’t kill them. And I couldn’t free them fast enough. I would have needed to touch each one, and I didn’t have that much time. But they all were supposed to attack an elf. So I figured that if I were a tree, maybe they would be able to give up. And they did.” She shrugged. “It seemed like a good idea until the wizard stepped out of the shadows.”
“She just loses the big picture,” Douglon explained to the rest of them. “It’s not that she makes bad decisions, she’s just never paying attention to the big picture.”
“And how were you expecting to get back to your own shape?” Alaric asked her.
“I didn’t see another choice,” she answered. “But I did know you all were close by. You wouldn’t have left me as a tree, Alaric.”
They pressed on, hoping to reach Kollman Pass in the early afternoon. Alaric spent the day focused on Brandson, contemplating which herbs he would use to fight the poison. He concentrated on the fact that he would need to notify the queen of what had happened. And that he’d need to send Douglon to the dwarves as soon as he would consent to leave, which wouldn’t happen until Brandson was healed. Which led him back to his consideration of the antidotes.
What his mind refused to land on was her. The image of Evangeline lying in the crystal filled his mind, but he refused to look at it. Every other time he had envisioned her, he had been driven by hope, driven by ideas of how to heal her. But now…
The sun was lowering toward the horizon when they finally reached the road that led to his castle. They turned a corner in the broken old path and there it sat.
It was small and grey. It had three turrets that rose to different heights and was surrounded by a storybook wall. There was even a drawbridge and a moat. Milly gasped and Ayda clapped in delight at the old castle glowing in the afternoon light.
When they entered, Alaric led them to the tower that held the bedrooms. He told them to choose whichever they liked. They lay Brandson on a luxurious bed in one of the higher rooms.
Alaric saw Brandson safely to the bed and renewed his spell to help him sleep. Then he asked Milly to get some water from the kitchen and headed toward his workroom.
He walked up the stairs, his steps getting heavier as he approached the carved door on his left. He paused beside it for a moment, raising his hand to touch it. But instead, he let his hand drop and continued up the stairs at a brisker pace.
He pushed open the next door on the right and entered his workroom. When the smell hit him, he took a deep breath. It smelled like herbs and dust and medicine. And even though everything in there was meant to stop poison, to restore life, he couldn’t hold back the thought that the room smelled like death.
It was lined with tables and bookshelves. He lit a lantern that hung from the center of the ceiling and banished the dark thoughts from his mind. Moving from shelf to table to shelf, he collected things quickly, setting them onto a small tray. When he slipped one round nut into his pocket to keep it from rolling around the tray, it dropped to the floor. Alaric looked down at his robe. It was torn and filthy, the pocket ripped straight across the bottom. He shrugged out of it and tossed it into a corner. The cold of the castle stones seeped into him.
Next to the door hung a black Keeper’s robe. It was clean and it was warm. Alaric reached out tentatively and lifted it off the hook. He slid his arms in, and the robe draped over his shoulders like a blanket, wrapping around him and welcoming him home.
He picked up the nut, put it in one of the many pockets of this robe and headed back to Brandson’s room, closing the door of the workroom firmly behind him. He passed the carved door again without pausing.
In Brandson’s room, Alaric sat quietly at a table, measuring and mixing while the others stood awkwardly around Brandson’s bed, sometimes looking at their sick friend, sometimes letting their eyes roam around the room.
There wasn’t much in it, but the furniture that was there was carved of rich wood. The bed was covered in thick blankets and fluffy pillows. There were dark red drapes that hung at the balcony. Someone had started a fire in the fireplace and set a kettle above it.
Ayda walked over to the balcony and looked out.
“This place is beautiful,” she said.
Alaric grunted, measuring out exactly fourteen simbo seeds.
She opened her mouth as though to say something else, but after glancing at Alaric, fell silent.
When he was finished mixing, Alaric used Milly’s water to make a thick paste, then brought it over to Brandson. Gently, he cleaned the wound out again. He smoothed the paste over the wound and bound it with a fresh bandage. Then he gave Milly some leaves and asked her to brew Brandson some strong tea from them.
With all those tasks done, Alaric sank back onto the chair at the table and watched Milly coax the tea down Brandson’s throat.
“That’s all I can do,” he said quietly. “I think the antidote will help, but we won’t know until at least tomorrow morning. Every four hours, he should drink another cup of tea.
“How do you know what antidote to use?” Milly asked from her seat next to Brandson, holding his hand again. “Don’t you need to know what he was poisoned with?”
“Sometimes, that matters,” Alaric said, “but there are combinations of herbs that are good at fighting a broad range of poisons. I gave him the strongest blend I know of for animal poison.” Alaric sighed and looked down at his hands as he cleaned the paste off of them. “I spent many months researching antidotes for animal poisons, specifically against the rock snake. So I am now quite familiar with the antidotes to most of them. There are very few that don’t have a known antidote, and most of those are reptiles.”
Ayda turned and looked directly at Alaric.
“May I see her?” she asked.
Alaric’s heart clenched. When he didn’t answer, Ayda took a step toward him, her eyes kind.
“She is your wife, Alaric. May we meet her?”
At the word wife, Alaric flinched. He looked around the room
at the others. They stood looking hopeful and uncomfortable. Their faces were so familiar that suddenly, he wanted them to meet her.
He stood slowly and walked out into the hallway, turning up the stairs. He heard the others following after him. This time, when he reached the carved door he raised his hand and pushed.
A wave of fresh air hit him. The doors to the balcony were open and the room was flooded with evening light. There were pots of flowers in the corner with blooms growing cheerfully, Alaric’s painstakingly created spells keeping them in a state of perpetual summer. Two small trees grew in blue pots on the balcony, just outside the doors. The drapes on the balcony rustled free of dust. The floor was smooth, clean stone.
And in the middle of the room, up on an intricately carved table, lay Evangeline, encased in a thin layer of crystal. Alaric walked up to her, his gaze still heavily on the floor. He walked up to her side, only able to focus on her hand.
It looked smooth and soft as it lay perfectly still. He set his hand against the crystal and his heart almost stopped.
By contrast to his own, her fingertips, halfway up each finger, were blue.
The group behind him filed in. Douglon held back by the wall while Ayda and Milly approached the crystal.
“She’s beautiful,” Milly said.
Alaric stared at her fingertips.
Ayda set a hand on the top of the crystal, above Evangeline’s face. She closed her eyes and stood perfectly still.
“Nice to meet you, Evangeline,” she said softly.
Alaric lifted his eyes to Evangeline’s face, serene, free of worry.
“Is the crystal what’s keeping her alive?” Milly asked quietly.
Alaric nodded. “Partially. The crystal is keeping her body from aging, or at least making it age very slowly.” His gaze dropped to thin, small runes that were marked with ink on her neck. “And there are spells that are protecting her body, giving it strength.”