The trees were green and lush, still damp with dew, and the air was warm. We flew over it all at a pace that took my breath and made my eyes water like the chill night winds used to, the ones that would snap at my cloak and whip my hair against my face from my old roof perch atop the castle. The flight of the fey was not as comforting as that long-ago perch, but it would be over soon enough. The burned remains of Hollow Forest came into view, a circle of ash and broken trees, of shattered rocks spanning a chasm that dipped into dark earth.
It was where Ruby had nearly died.
I found her in the sky, tethered as she was beneath a fey guard who was twice her size, the lines of her body built for flying because she was half fey. But Ruby would never know flight the way they did. It was not part of her magic. It was something no one had thought to spell into her, something she could not have naturally won.
Ruby’s mother had helped her survive with the dark words of cast spells, but she’d been concerned more with giving the child power, access to the fire that ran through her own veins. She’d wanted to keep Ruby alive, and she’d severed Ruby’s ties with the base energy, but Ruby was neither elf nor fey. She was both. She was more.
Before us, two fey descended from the sky to deposit Anvil and Steed onto the broken earth. Behind them, Grey was dropped somewhat less graciously, but he managed to keep his footing. Rhys and Rider were lowered beside me, my boots clattering onto a pile of broken stone, theirs into scattered ash. Chevelle was deposited solidly past Rhys, and Ruby landed in a somersault beyond both. All of us were safe on somewhat-solid ground. The fey who’d delivered us waited behind the group, nearer the trees, and Veil landed on Rider’s other side. We watched as the cloud of pixies delivered Liana, mostly because it was difficult to look at anything else. The swarm rose from her gracefully, shifting as one through the sky before dispersing at some unseen cue.
Liana brushed her hands over the material of her robes, though nothing appeared out of place. Her dark eyes roamed our line of six elves, two halfbreeds, and a high fey lord. “Shall we begin?”
Ruby stepped forward, turning to face the rest of us with Liana at her back. “Frey was born with the ability to control both light and dark magic. The staff will allow her also to direct, with Veil’s aid, the fey energy within the stone to weave a new boundary. While we are here, she only needs to seal up the fissure, but she will need Veil’s assistance in holding back what flows beneath Hollow Forest.”
Liana’s voice was low, but she made certain the lot of us heard it well enough. “Are we to presume you are the expert of the fey energy, halfling?”
Ruby did not so much as spare her a glance. “Presume all you want, changeling.” Ruby’s gaze skirted Veil’s then bored into mine. “I was in the fire. I understand how the energy flows.”
I gave her a small nod, knowing that her look meant that she’d also felt the connection Veil and Liana had with that energy.
Ruby held my gaze as she went on. “Your magic will not allow you to direct energy that is not your own without a conduit. The staff will act as conduit, but only with the aid of Veil can the fey energy be reached and drawn back to the stone. He is to that energy what Chevelle is to the other.” I felt my guard go still around me, but Ruby did not waver. “As such, the two are parallels.”
As I struggled to grasp what she was telling me, Liana moved too swiftly to stand between Ruby and the rest of us. I followed her gaze to Veil, who did not seem to particularly relish the comparison between him and Chevelle—or maybe it was something more. I opened my mouth to ask Ruby if she’d meant the darkness inside of Chevelle and what would happen when that darkness met the energy that Veil was made of, but a look from Liana cut me short.
A quiet whisper brushed my ear, a sound spelled to life in only the way a spellcaster could, and my heart went cold. The words she’d given me were meant for no one else. I felt myself moving backward, but the broken stone shifted loosely beneath my boot. “I can’t—” I shook my head, moving my eyes from Liana to Veil.
The fey lord’s face was hard, his jaw set and his mouth in a thin line. It said that he’d not wanted Liana to reveal what he must know she had. It said that he’d made up his mind.
“No,” I told them. “There’s got to be another way.”
But my words were binding. The bargain I’d made echoed back at me. Whatever it takes. I looked to Liana helplessly, but she remained steady. She’d made her bargains. She’d chosen her side.
My blood, of both the light and the dark, ran cold. Within me was something else, too, a bond that connected me—my energy—to Chevelle and to the darkness that was spellcasting. They were asking me to use that connection to heal their land, using Veil as a conduit. But I would be connecting his energy not to that of my ancestors, but to the darkness that was deadening the land. It was more than dangerous to the fey lord. It would end him.
They’d clearly known all along. Liana understood how the fey energy worked. She’d been drawing it for ages, and she’d stood by Veil to help pull Ruby from Hollow Forest. I couldn’t understand why they had not simply admitted he was at our mercy, but it was bigger than that. The fey could not show fear—a fey lord could never reveal defeat. But this was not about his position. It was a sacrifice to save his people.
I swallowed the words that wanted to come. Veil and Liana obviously knew everything and understood what he was giving up. They were going to use my connection to Chevelle to drive fey energy into that darkness and destroy it at the source.
Liana’s words from the battle with Pitt came back to me, her warning that only the fey lord could direct the river of energy beneath Hollow Forest, along with Ruby’s words, that Chevelle and Veil were parallels. Liana and Veil would have laid everything into place: his successor, his plan for the fey. We had come to a place where Veil had to give up his life in order to save his kind.
“There has to be another answer.” My words sounded hollow, echoing off the broken stone. No one offered a reply. A pixie flitted into the clearing, dancing through the still air and over the chasm, the pit that was once Hollow Forest. I glanced at the way the sun flashed through the flip of its wings and caught sight of the shift of a shadow behind Veil. An ochre-skinned soldier in armor and helm crept behind the fey lord.
My mouth opened to scream at the same moment the blade pierced Veil’s side.
26
Frey
Veil roared, and the field around him shifted into action. His wings burst wide as he spun, his teeth bared and hands clawed in anger or pain.
“Now!” Liana screamed, and for one moment, I had no idea what she meant or who the command had been aimed for. Then the soldier who had stabbed Veil in the side was knocked backward, his helmet thrown from his face to reveal the dark, depthless eyes of a changeling fey.
Liana was on me, her long fingers wrapped about my shoulders to turn me from the scene and toward the chasm that had been Hollow Forest. “Now!” she said again.
“Are you mad?”
“He’s been stabbed,” Liana hissed. “If you don’t do it now, you might lose your chance.”
Her words sent ice through me, but even if part of me understood she was correct, I could not do what they wanted. Chevelle was suddenly beside us, shouting commands and throwing his hands with a deftness that confused me more, at least until I smelled the sulfur of that darkness, the rising stench of spellcast energy stronger than any I’d ever felt before. The dragon’s screech tore through the air, and Liana was moving me to run with Chevelle.
There had been a changeling hiding among Veil’s guard. A changeling and a spellcaster. He had driven a knife through Veil’s side.
“Do it!” Liana commanded. “Close the well of energy before it is too late.”
I shook my head frantically, and my gaze found Chevelle. His expression said everything. My Second, my anchor, had no hope.
Veil cursed in the melee behind us, the sound rising over the clamor of clashing swords. It was more than that
battle, and it was more than a simple changeling hiding among the fey. If Veil failed, the changelings would win far more than a simple struggle or a fey crown. My grip tightened around the carved ironwood shaft of the staff, the cooling hum of its presence suddenly overtaken by the warmth of fey energy. The power in the stone was rising, swelling to meet the connection I’d made with Chevelle.
He stood before me, throwing powders and rushing out words, but he too must have felt the brush of fey powers. His head snapped toward me, eyes sharp. I knew what he would see in mine: fear. Uncertainty. Hopelessness.
“I have to do this,” I told him. “I have to end the deadening, and I need your help.”
Chevelle swung to face me, his expression hard. “What have they told you?” His gaze flicked to Liana accusingly.
“Now,” she hissed again. “We’ve no time to argue.” Her hands were slick with blood, though I’d no idea whose.
I had to stay on task, to focus on the energies rushing through me. “Veil’s energy can be drawn through this stone, should he will it. They want us to douse the darkness, to end it before it can spread farther.”
Chevelle shook his head. “You’ve no idea how vast that energy is. There’s no way he can—” Then Chevelle’s blue eyes flicked to Liana’s, realization clearly dawning that Veil was not meant to make it out alive.
“We have no more time,” Liana told him.
“You knew all along.”
The changeling did not defend herself against Chevelle’s accusation.
“And now you risk it all,” Chevelle said in a level tone.
Liana’s chin came forward a fraction, but she spelled no further words to life.
Chevelle’s mouth was hard when he turned back to me. “You know it will kill him.”
I swallowed. “It is either him or all of the fey.” It was even worse than that, because if the fey lost their access to the base energy, if the darkness spread, we would all be in peril.
Chevelle gave me a long look before he bent to a knee before me. He placed a hand to the earth and took hold of my waist with the other. The fighting behind us faded to a dull thrum as power welled inside me. Bodies moved past us, fighting and falling and flying as the rumble of broken and shifting stones rose through the clearing.
Ruby had explained how the weaving would work, but she did not tell me how I might hold myself together. She did not know how the power and the weaving would affect me. My limbs felt light, prickly, and barely there in the overwhelming presence of power gathered in my chest. The heat in my palm was searing, the stone sending too much power through me, an energy too strong and too strange to control.
I tried to force it back into the staff, to use Chevelle as my anchor and let the dragonstone be the conduit to send the energies toward the fissure beneath the chasm of darkness. But it was drowning me. It was too much, too immense. Through the haze of sound and pressure, the fey lord came into view. He was being helped, carried beneath his shoulders by Anvil and Grey as blood spilled from the wound in his abdomen. Anvil’s side was soaked with the fey lord’s blood, my guard’s sword nowhere to be seen. Grey slid from beneath Veil’s arm, whose wing seemed to be hanging at an off angle. The fey lord did not look at me. He only pressed a hand to his side as he was lowered to the ground. When he was settled, I felt the warmth rise even more before it focused into a pinpoint of fiery heat.
Blistering, tortuous pain seared my palm, and I screamed, feeling as if the energy trapped in that staff and its stone might explode and take the entirety of Hollow Forest with it.
Then Liana’s cool and slender fingers brushed my flesh, her whispered words cutting through the madness of what we were doing. “Focus,” she purred. “Weave.”
I gritted my teeth against the pain, staring hard into the chasm of darkness before us all. But we were too late. From the pit of broken earth rose four spires of darkness, ghastly shapes that shifted from smoke into oily spikes of arms, blades, and wings. Nightmare raptors of spellcast darkness welled up from the thing that was the antithesis of the source, the pit that wanted to devour the fey energy. Liana’s grip tightened on my arms, her words still and steady, though no part of her could have possibly been calm.
The spellcast beasts rose higher, their ashen forms splitting from the tendrils of darkness rising from the chasm below. Their sharpened wings drove upward, and then the beasts broke free to dive toward the fey lord. Veil attempted to rise to his feet with Grey and Anvil scrambling for weapons as Rhys and Rider lunged forward. The fey lord stumbled, scattering loose rock into the chasm, falling at the ledge with his wings crumpled beneath him and covered in ash. His hands, thick with blood, slid across his bared flesh as the darkness ascended. The spellcast beings speared into him, their sharpened wings and claws tearing new wounds even as the lot of my guard and Veil’s own fought them off.
The energy that ran through me slipped backward, spreading sharply and violently into my form. I threw my head back and shrieked, the dragon roaring with me, and Chevelle’s hand slipped from my waist. Liana dragged me backward, away from the spellcast beasts, and I drove the dragon toward them with no capacity for an order more than kill. Chevelle threw something dark toward the figures, his gaze desperate as it met mine. The fey lord called out, and it was not the cry of victory. Veil’s control slipped further, and the energy inside me felt as if it would burn through my very soul.
“I can’t,” I managed in a broken whimper.
Liana wrapped her arms tightly around my chest, as if she could hold me together by sheer force, as if her changeling form could protect me from the spellcast beasts and the energy breaking me from within.
Chevelle’s eyes closed, his chest rising and falling in a long breath. When his eyes opened again, they flashed with something dangerous.
I tried to croak out a no, but my voice was gone. Veil was covered in blood, my guard in smoke and ash. The dragon’s claws tore into a nightmarish figure, ripping it from the fray into the chasm beyond, but the bird only shifted to smoke and ash, reforming around the dragon’s wings in tendrils of slick darkness. The dragon screamed. Ruby’s whip snapped. Anvil’s lightning cracked. Then Chevelle drove his hands through the shattered rock and into the earth below.
The rumbling of power beneath us rose to deafening thunder, spreading from the land at our feet through the forest bordering the chasm. Trees shuddered before falling from view, apparently sliding into the darkness of the widening pit. I fell to my knees before Chevelle, dragging Liana with me as she tried to hold on to my trembling form.
Chevelle’s face was distorted in pain, with blood and ash smeared from his dark hair over his temple. I couldn’t know what he was seeing behind his blank gaze, but it was not focused on me or our surroundings. His eyes had gone as black as pitch.
“Chevelle—” My voice broke off in a painful cough, and Liana’s arms tightened around me, keeping me back from Chevelle. Keeping me safe.
With his arms covered in ash and his fingers in the dark earth, Chevelle spoke words I’d never heard in a tone that was not his own.
I gasped in a breath and choked on a sob, but the changeling only held me tighter. “Still,” she whispered. “Steady.”
You knew all along. Chevelle’s words echoed through my broken thoughts, my own power wanting to tear free of me but tied to the staff and its stone, to the relentless ocean of power and the clash and pull of energy to energy.
Chevelle had the ability to reach the darkness. He always had. He had thrust his hands into the earth of Hollow Forest. He was going to attempt to direct the fey energy into that endless darkness. Veil had known. Liana had known. They’d brought us there to end the deadening one way or another.
I pressed my eyes closed, my mind brushing the fear of the dragon as it struggled against the spellcast beast that had wrapped around its wings, my power fighting to gain any sort of control or release, to end the state it could not settle into. The energies of each of us were not interchangeable. But I was of both
light and dark, and I was connected to Chevelle through our bond. Veil intended sacrifice, and Chevelle was diving into a darkness that none of us truly understood.
None of us but him. I bit down hard on the pain lancing through me, tasting blood and ash and the hopelessness of regret, then reached out to Chevelle via that connection between us. It felt as if his presence had been stolen, as if he’d been swallowed by the empty hollowness of the chasm beyond. It was the darkness, the energy that was spellcasting, that felt to my own power like a void. And it was terrifying.
I pushed forward with every fiber of my being, with conviction I had no right to have. Chevelle’s power took hold of me, and with it, the unstable, unbearable feeling that I might lose control. A sound escaped me, and Liana whispered words to which I could afford no attention. The rush of power filled every part of me, leaving no space for understanding, for any action other than one: to reach the darkness and heal the fissure.
It felt as if I might be torn apart, as if I’d made the entirely wrong decision, but I bore down, pushing harder into our connection. Something in the darkness that had pressed against me shifted, and I remembered Chevelle was a conduit. He could direct it.
The mass of darkness, the thing that felt like energy to Chevelle and the changelings but like a void to Veil and me, fell back, suddenly and sharply. I sucked in a ragged breath, finally able to draw air, finally getting a sliver of relief from the pain, and realized what Chevelle had done. My eyes flashed open to find him, his face turned upward and twisted in agony. We could not fight the darkness. It was too immense. He’d only pushed it back. He was holding it there until I could use the energy gifted by Veil into the dragonstone to weave with my own. I had to create a seal that would prevent what the spellcasters had broken free from escaping.
The Frey Saga Book VI Page 12