“General!” The female shouted in my language this time. “The rakasa are nearly here!”
“Zuhra, if we stay here, we could die.”
I still resisted, everything in me screaming to get back to Inara—to Halvor, Sami, even my mother. I had been trying to find a way to escape, but I’d never wanted to leave her trapped in the citadel with a monster—I’d never wanted her to die.
“We’ll come back—I promise! But we have to go!” My father looked as panicked as I felt and finally, with tears burning in my eyes, I let him pull me from the gateway toward his gryphon, who had closed the distance between us and waited only a few feet away.
He made a gesture, and all the Paladin swung onto the backs of their gryphons.
“You’re small enough to ride behind me,” my father said, leading me to the side of his mount. “Hurry!”
“To ride … on that? On, um, her? Him? It?” I eyed the creature with newfound trepidation. It was one thing to stare in awe at the murals and carvings of Paladin riding on the backs of their magical creatures, and quite another to find myself being helped onto a small saddle attached to the back of a living, breathing gryphon, just behind its massive wings.
“Him,” my father supplied as the creature craned his neck to look at me, and snapped his beak in a show of either aggression or welcome—I wasn’t sure which. “His name is Taavi. He’s plenty strong enough to carry us both back to Soluselis. Give me your leg!”
This was really happening. After a lifetime of imagining myself climbing onto the back of a gryphon, I was actually doing it. There was a lot more trembling and fear involved than I’d expected.
One of the other gryphons who had remained airborne the entire time, circling above us, swooped down and the Paladin riding it whistled, two sharp bursts of sound.
“Grab on!” My father shouted over his shoulder. “That’s the signal—more rakasa have been spotted. We must go—now!”
I wrapped my shaky arms around his torso and buried my head into his back as the gryphon took two bounds forward and then spread his wings and leapt into the air, leaving my stomach somewhere between the earth below us and the gryphon’s beating wings on either side of my body.
“We’ll come back,” Adelric shouted over his shoulder as we rose higher and higher and the ground dropped further and further away. “I promise!”
“Where are we going?” I yelled back, unsure if he could hear my words before the wind ripped them away.
“To the High Council,” he shouted over the whistling wind and the beating of Taavi’s wings. “To petition your grandmother to open the gateway!”
TWENTY-ONE
INARA
I gripped the door handle for several moments before I was forced to admit that nothing was going to happen. It remained cold, dark, nothing more than a round knob of steel beneath my hand.
“It wasn’t your fault.”
Halvor’s quiet voice startled me and I spun to face him, standing two steps below the frustratingly lifeless door. It took all my strength to remain on my feet, to not crumple to the ground in defeat.
“It didn’t work.”
“No,” he agreed. “It didn’t. Maybe you used too much of your power to open it the first time and then healing me.”
And myself, I added silently. It was true, I was tired in a way I couldn’t remember ever feeling before—a bone-deep exhaustion that weighed me down so heavily I could barely force myself to move, to go back down the stairs and walk to where Sami stood in the center of the room, watching us with solemn, shadowed eyes. Not even the honeyed glow of the dawning sunrise could warm the sallow shade of her skin.
“Here,” she suddenly said, shrugging out of her robe and wrapping it around my shoulders. “Your nightgown is ruined.”
I glanced down at the bloody shreds of the garment I’d worn to bed for so many years, at my exposed belly and legs beneath the rips—drenched with half-dried blood but not even a scratch visible on my skin. With a shiver, I pulled the robe tight around my body, concealing the evidence of what I’d done beneath it.
“Where’s my mother?” It was the question I usually asked Zuhra when I surfaced from the roar, when my mind cleared and I could speak and hear and see. It had taken me far longer this time to get to it, but at long last there it was—the world had been ripped apart around us, and my mother still hadn’t come.
Sami shifted on her feet, her eyes dropping to the ground. “She’s asleep.”
“Still? How?” When the roar ensnared me, I could barely think, could barely function. It might have drowned out what had happened here. But I knew that Mother didn’t suffer from the same problem—no one did. It was just me.
So how did she sleep through such a horrible—and loud—ordeal?
“I … I gave her a sleeping draught,” Sami admitted softly.
“Draught?” I repeated, glancing at Halvor to see if this announcement meant something to him. But he looked as uncomfortable—and guilty—as Sami.
“Special herbs that made her sleep. Heavily.”
“Oh.” I glanced between the two of them, hoping I didn’t look as confused as I felt. It was one of the worst parts of drowning and surfacing and drowning again and again—the confusion, the disorientation. “Why did you do that?”
“Because Zuhra—”
“It doesn’t really matter now,” Halvor spoke at the same time, overriding Sami.
A distant roar, so far away it was barely audible, echoed over the mountains, carried on the wind that still blew through the broken window. All three of us whirled to face it. The first edge of sunlight had crested the distant, jagged horizon of the eastern mountains, and silhouetted against those brilliant, hopeful rays was a shadow that sent a scrape of dread down my spine.
The monster that had almost killed me and Halvor was coming back.
“We have to warn Gateskeep,” Sami breathed.
“Warn them? Did you forget we’re trapped here?” Halvor turned away from the window and the shadow that was winging its way back across the canyons, slowly but steadily growing larger.
“Of course I haven’t forgotten that! You have only been trapped here for a week. I have spent years and years in this place.”
Halvor’s shoulders sloped inward slightly at her sharp retort.
“There’s a bell in the top floor of the east wing,” she continued. “The Paladin used to ring it to warn the villagers.”
“A bell,” Halvor repeated. “So we ring it and then what? Wait and watch as that thing destroys their homes—kills them?”
“Do you have a better idea? At least they’ll have a warning—a chance to hide or escape.”
Their words—their tension-ridden bickering—hurt my head, almost like the roar. Though I wanted nothing more than to curl up on the floor and sleep for hours, days, forever … instead, I turned away from them and slowly moved toward the windows, staring not at the beast winging its way back toward us, but at the hedge below—the reason Halvor and Sami believed us to be trapped.
Always there, always in the back of my mind—the breathing, living soul of the looming captor surrounding us. All things—wood, glass, air … everything—had at least a tiny flicker of life within. Even the stones beneath my feet held a whisper of it. And plants were second only to animals and humans. But no plants in my garden or trees in my orchard could compare to the might of the beating life force within that hedge. Its call had always been there, though for some reason it had always terrified me.
But today … today, I would go to it, at last.
“Inara! Get back from there!”
I stood on the edge of the broken glass, looking down, shards of it piercing my toes where they curled over the ledge. A hairsbreadth from falling. We were so high up that the top of the hedge was far below where I stood. It called to me, in a voice without words, a tendril of sensation that reached out to me through the earth, the stones, the very air that connected us to one another. I knew Zuhra’s fear of it, re
membered Sami’s stories of it being dangerous—poisonous. But it would listen to me. As all my plants did.
It would listen.
“We’re not trapped.”
When Halvor grabbed my arm, it startled me, and only his quick jerk, yanking backward, kept me from losing my footing and falling. “What are you doing?”
I cocked my head, confused by the panic on his face—the fear I could feel through the strange new connection between us.
“We’re not trapped,” I repeated. “It will listen to me.”
Halvor stared at me for a long moment, his warm hand still wrapped around the space between my shoulder and elbow, his grip solid, reassuring. In the warm morning light, his eyes were changed to honey, something I’d only seen once but had never forgotten because it had been so beautiful and sticky and sweet. “Do you mean…”
I nodded. “Take me down there. It will listen to me.”
Halvor looked past me, meeting Sami’s lifted eyebrows with an uncertain expression of his own.
“It’s too risky … If Zuhra were here…”
I winced. But she’s not.
“It’s their only chance,” Halvor argued. “There’s no time to spare on the bell—and then hope that someone knows what it even means. If she thinks she can do it…”
“I can,” I insisted, staring at the door that had stolen my sister. “I can.”
Another roar trembled across the cool morning breeze—closer, louder. Time was running out.
“Follow me,” Halvor said and released my arm, but only momentarily before grabbing my hand in his and dashing for the door, dragging me alongside him. He paused only to lift a wicked-looking weapon off the wall, and then we entered the belly of the citadel, our bare feet slapping across the stones in time with the pounding of my heart, Sami a step behind us.
All around us, Paladin watched our progress, their jeweled eyes unmoving, their mounts frozen in the air, captured by thread or paint or plaster. My father had been one of them. My father had given me his power—my ever-present captor, but also my savior.
It had driven my mother away.
It had lost Zuhra forever.
It had healed Halvor.
And now, I would have to find a way to use it to protect the village that had always feared me.
* * *
The soil was dew-damp beneath my feet; the morning air raked misty fingers through my sweaty hair. I was unaccustomed to running, unaccustomed to panic that wasn’t carried away by the rushing roar of my power returning. But there was no time to dwell on the burn of lungs that had never needed to work so hard before, or to take note of the trembling exhaustion in my legs. I released Halvor’s hand to dash forward, though he lengthened his stride and easily kept pace with me, leaving me to wonder if he’d been holding back for me through the entire headlong dash through the citadel.
We halted a few feet from the living wall. The hedge soared above us, magnificent and thrumming with an ancient, otherworldly omniscience.
“How do you know it will, um, listen to you?” Sami panted behind us.
“Because it knows me—what’s inside me.”
I didn’t have to glance back to see the disbelief on her face—even after all she’d witnessed in this place—I could feel it rising between us, a barrier invisible to the eye but as tangible as the one in front of us made of vines, thorns, and leaves. “This hedge is different than all my other plants. It thinks, it listens.”
“It can hear what we’re saying?” Halvor’s hair fell away from his forehead as he tilted his head to look all the way up to the top of the hedge, rising far out of our reach in the ever-brightening sky.
“Not the same way I can hear you right now. But … in a certain sense of the word, yes. I can feel it straining toward us—trying to decide if we are a threat or not. And when it senses me…” I took a step forward, disregarding Sami sucking in a sharp breath through her teeth, and stretched my hand toward the heavy green leaves, still slick with morning condensation.
I’d done my best to convince them I could do this … now I just had to convince myself. It was true I’d felt the hedge’s presence, I’d felt its awareness, but to try and bend its will to mine? I stretched out a trembling hand to it. A ripple shuddered through the hedge when my fingers brushed one of the leaves, and a simultaneous thrill ran up my arm. A flicker of heat sparked within me. Magic calling to magic.
You know me, you know what I bear within me. I stared up at the vines, the leaves, the many parts that combined to make a mere plant into an impenetrable wall. Always on alert, always stretching, sensing, protecting. I felt the strain within the plant, the will to maim, entrap, gauge any threats.
You know me. As I ran my hand gently over its leaves, the initial tension within the massive entity waned. My power was depleted, the core of heat deep within little more than an ember. Was it enough?
You have done your job, and protected us well. But we must leave—you must open for us. I urged the tiny flame within me to slip into my veins, through my arm, out to the hedge. Not to heal, not to nourish, but to make it move. Somehow, an instinctual knowledge rose from deep within me—just as when I touched a dying or injured plant and knew how to coax it back to life. I closed my eyes, feeling only the earth beneath my toes, the air on my cheeks, and the hedge beneath my hands. A trickle of my power slipped out of me into its waiting embrace, and, as I bent all my thoughts on the need for it to part, to let us through, it began to move.
The vines uncoiled, slipping apart like a den of snakes dispersing; the thick, heavy leaves retreated, revealing the iron gate hidden behind them.
I stepped back, letting my hand drop to my side, as Halvor rushed forward and grabbed it, wrenching it open as if he were afraid it would disappear again before he made it through.
“You did it,” Sami whispered. “All these years … all that time … and you had the power to free us. You could have…” She trailed off with a sharp glance my direction, perhaps having forgotten that I could hear her perfectly—that I was no longer lost in the roar of the power that had held us all captive here, not just me after all.
A terrible, burning heat coalesced inside my chest—a different kind than my power, that twisted my innards and made it feel as though the air had suddenly grown thin.
Shame.
A low ripple of sound trembled across the sky, not so different from thunder—except there were no clouds, no storm. Only the looming threat of the beast beating its way back toward the citadel—toward Gateskeep.
Halvor had already disappeared from sight, sprinting down the trail toward the village. But even though my heart thudded a determined beat, my body wouldn’t respond. I stood on the precipice of the small world I had known, a ledge as terrifying as the broken window I’d balanced on to peer down at the hedge earlier.
Sami’s warm hand on my arm was little more than a brush of her fingers across my skin as she passed, but it jerked me out of the sudden stupor that had seized me. Perhaps she understood, or perhaps she meant to urge me into motion.
Before my lips could part to speak, she’d hurried past the open gate—the hedge’s leaves fluttered in a phantom breeze, as if unable to keep from fidgeting as it allowed her to pass by—and then she, too, was gone, her age-stooped body moving faster down the trail than I would have thought possible. Desperation did that to people, I supposed—made them move faster, speak words they’d held inside too long … or, in my case, held them captive as surely as if the hedge still blocked my path.
I stared at the trail, frozen, trapped, useless, as the shadow of the beast passed over me.
It had reached us, but instead of the citadel, it soared straight for Halvor. For Sami.
For Gateskeep.
TWENTY-TWO
ZUHRA
I was surrounded by a battalion of gryphons and Paladin, soaring up into the sky, a world I’d never seen before dropping away below me—and I had never been so overwhelmed and terrified in my life. After a lifeti
me of dreaming of an existence beyond the citadel and the hedge, I was suddenly, unexpectedly far beyond it—but this wasn’t how it was supposed to happen.
I’d never been swimming before, but I’d read about it in one of the few books Mother had willingly let me read. A story of a sailor who thought himself strong enough to battle the tides of the ocean—and had been wrong. The description of his drowning haunted me for months.
For the first time, I felt I could relate to what he had gone through, except that I was being dragged up to the merciless sky, rather than down to the deep, silent bottom of the ocean floor. With every beat of Taavi’s wings we were carried further away from the gateway—from my only hope of getting back to Inara and Halvor and the rakasa—and I’d never felt more helpless. My last sight of them had been the Scylla diving toward Halvor … Was there any possible outcome where Halvor survived an attack like that? My stomach twisted as I pictured his long, narrow body ripped apart, blood dripping into his rich, earthen eyes. And Inara … What if she was already gone—what if the beast had already killed her and I was too late? The question was too terrible to consider, but the memory of all those teeth serrated my hope until it lay in ribbons deep within me, an internal wound far worse than any I’d sustained from the Bahal—and a kind that no amount of Paladin magic infiltrating my body or mind could heal.
Her chances of fighting off such a beast and surviving were … none.
Was there any remote possibility she could have survived being trapped in there with that beast? Or was Inara … dead? My lungs capsized; it felt as though my rib cage were caving in, crushing my heart; I could barely breathe.
The icy wind buffeted my face and whipped the tears from my eyes. For some reason I’d assumed the closer we got to the sun, the warmer it would be, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. As the world below grew smaller—an entire new world, massive in its breadth and so different from the tiny corner of the previous one I’d known, all rolling hills and thick copses of trees instead of peaks and hedges—the air turned colder and colder, until I wasn’t sure how much of my increasingly violent trembling was from grief and panic and how much from my muscles freezing and rebelling.
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