“Halvor—what happened, boy?”
The shout from his master came from behind us, but he didn’t respond or slow. I clung to him, the muscle in my leg still wound as tight as my mother’s yarn on a skein, and though my power flared again and again, it seemed unable to heal this pain—a muscle pushed to the brink but not truly injured. I longed to tell him to put me down, afraid he was going to hurt himself trying to bear my weight up the trail, but he resolutely gripped me and marched up, up, up. Sami’s and Barloc’s cries of concern drew closer and closer until, at long last, Halvor turned one last corner and the hedge rose before us, bursting out of the foliage to soar above our heads, and beyond that, the citadel hunkered against the cliffside it had been built on, a dark, hulking beast of a home. I’d never realized before how truly massive it was—I’d never seen it from this angle, the whole thing rising past the hedge.
“You … have … to … open it … again…” Halvor was the one gasping now, as he gently set me back on my feet. “Can … you … walk?”
“Where is she?”
“Stop her before she gets through that hedge!”
The villagers’ shouts were echoes through the swaying, reaching, gnarled trees, far enough away to seem almost as if they were no more than cries carried on the wind, but close enough to be understood, which meant our time to escape was nearly gone.
“Yes.” The scorching pain exploded through my leg with each limping step, but I grit my teeth together and stumbled up to the hedge, reaching out to its emerald leaves. It fluttered beneath my fingers, welcoming me home. My power flared within, but I didn’t even have to ask; I’d barely even run my hands over it when the vines and leaves separated, rushing back from the gate, like it understood the impending danger—as if it were eager to gather me back inside its protected domain.
Just as I grabbed the gate handle and yanked it open, Sami and Barloc burst through the trees at the top of the trail, half stumbling, half jogging toward us, both red-faced, sweaty, and dirt-streaked.
“Go! Go now! They’re coming—they’re right behind us!”
“I’m not closing it without you!” I shouted back, waving my arm at Sami.
In the few moments it took for them to cross the distance between the start of the trail and where Halvor and I stood, the trees behind them glowed crimson, the fires of a dozen torches igniting the forest with wavering light.
“Hurry!” Halvor shouted unnecessarily; we all knew we were out of time.
He slammed the gate shut the moment they crossed through, missing Sami by inches. We caught a glimpse of the first few villagers’ faces breaking through the trees, their anger and the firelight turning their expressions grotesque, before the hedge rushed forward, closing over the gate, blocking them out.
I sank to the ground next to the hedge, emitting a little noise that was half sob, half gasp. Sami bent forward to grab her knees, sucking in deep breaths of air; Barloc was little better off beside her, his cheeks and neck puce and his gray hairline nearly black with sweat.
“Come back out!”
“Burn it down!”
“Get the Paladin witch!”
The hedge could protect us from their hands and spears, but not their furious words. I sat in a puddle of my torn, dirt- and blood-encrusted nightgown and Sami’s robe, my face wet, everything inside me flayed and raw.
“Don’t touch it!” someone warned, but the others must not have listened, because the hedge moved once more, a mere flutter on our side, but it was met by a howl of pain on the other.
“It’s alive!”
“It attacked him!”
I glanced over my shoulder in alarm at Halvor, Barloc, and Sami.
“Let’s go in. There’s nothing we can do for them,” Sami suggested, her voice quiet and heavy. “The hedge will protect you now.” She tilted her chin up, her eyes following the foliage to where it met the sky, a new respect on her face that had never existed before.
“But that person … the hedge is poisonous.” I climbed painfully to my feet, whispering so as not to draw the angry villagers’ attention.
“They knew that when they made whatever foolish attempt that was to get through it.”
I still stared at the thick green leaves that hid barbs as long as one of my fingers, struggling against the urge to offer to heal the person who’d been hurt. They want to kill you, I reminded myself. If you go out there, you will die.
And still, the desire—the need—to heal that person, beat with every thwump of my heart.
A hand on my arm pulled my scattered thoughts back, homing in on the shouts, the yells, the fear that slicked my palms with sweat even now, behind the protection of the hedge. “Inara, come on. Let’s go.”
“Sami? Inara?”
I sucked in a breath. The names were spoken with a tremor; her voice achingly familiar for one I’d heard so little in my life. But I’d grasped onto the rare sound of it, treasured it, hid it away deep within me, beneath the roar and Zuhra’s gentle refrain She’s inside that we both knew was an evasion of the truth. The truth that she evaded me.
Until now.
I’d run away from her. I’d left her here, in this place, alone. Some part of me had thought—hoped—that she would follow; that I was enough to carry her past the walls she’d been bound by for so very long. The few things she’d spoken of to me had always been of escape, of leaving. But when the chance had come, she hadn’t—she’d stayed. Why?
Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw when I turned to face my mother.
She stood barefoot, hair askew, in the same nightgown she’d been wearing when I’d left her behind the hedge, yelling for me. But now she was silent and the villagers were the ones yelling. Grooves I’d never seen before had been etched into her face, lines that creased the skin at the corners of her mouth and eyes, a map of … grief? Anger? Despair? Maybe all of those and more. There was a wildness in her eyes as they dashed among the four of us, bouncing from Sami to me to Halvor to me to Barloc and back again, that raked ragged nails down the ridges of my spine.
“Cinnia?” Sami breathed and it took a beat before I realized it was my mother’s name she’d spoken in that fearful tone.
“Burn it down!”
“Cut it down!”
“You can’t escape us this time, Paladin witch!”
The shouts still continued, but they were muffled now, dampened by the thunderous realization that my mother wasn’t as immovable as the citadel, as I’d always believed. This broken version of her, trembling and pale and sunken, was proof of how wrong I’d been. Her eyes finally stilled on Sami, but then something even worse happened. They filled with tears.
“They left me, Sami. They all left me.” The words were low, almost guttural, torn from the deepest recesses of her unfathomable heart; like the rare times I could remember eating chicken, how we’d tear the carcass apart, ripping the bones and tendons away to strip the very last vestiges of meat and then boiled the bones for days and days until they were completely sucked of all marrow and flavor … Somehow, though I’d spent the majority of my life buried in the roar, I still recognized that this admission—this spectral version of my mother—was the days-old bones, stripped bare and boiled dry.
In the end, she was unable to leave the citadel, because everyone else had left her first.
Including me.
“Mother,” I whispered as I—for the first time in my limited memory—crossed the distance between us and wrapped my arms around her, offering her the comfort she’d never given me. Comfort I still wasn’t sure how to give. “I’m … sorry.”
She stood in the circle of my attempted embrace, unmoving, except for the trembling in her shoulders. But I refused to let go. I’d needed her. All my life I’d needed my mother. What I’d been given was Zuhra … and now she was gone and we two were all that was left of our family. And I wasn’t going to let go until she responded, until she acknowledged me, until she saw and felt and heard me. I was no longer lo
st in the roar and we only had—
Her hands fluttered at her side, an uncertain spasm of movement. And then, slowly, finally, she lifted her arms and loosely circled them around me.
“They all left me,” she repeated, her voice muffled in my shoulder—I’d never realized how much taller I was than her, how small she was, until that moment.
I responded, “I’m not gone. I’m here. I’m right here.”
She pulled back suddenly. “Where’s Zuhra? Where is she?” Her eyes moved wildly again, darting and wide.
My guilt was a pit of vipers, but the vipers were the veins in my body and the venom was my blood, burning beneath my skin. “She’s … she’s gone. Through the gateway.”
Mother’s gaze flickered to the hedge and I shook my head.
“No, not that one.”
Mother shrank back, curving into herself with a violent shake of her head; her lips twisted, a muscle ticked in her cheek.
“About that.” Barloc took a step toward us. “I have an idea on how we can find out if she’s … if she survived.”
I turned to the older man, a tiny ripple of uncertainty breaking over me. Could he be serious? He was Halvor’s master—he was the true expert on Paladin.
“What do you mean?” Halvor flinched at a particularly vile epithet shouted through the hedge at the same moment as his question.
“I think I know a way for Inara to open the gateway again,” his eyes locked onto me, “so that we can go after her sister and find out if she made it or not.”
Hope, painful in its resurgence, clawed its way up from the depths of the despair that had been drowning me from the moment she’d been dragged through that glowing door. Zuhra. Was there any possibility that she had lived through whatever horrors had awaited her on the other side of the gateway? If there was any chance of finding her alive, no matter how remote, I had to take it.
“Tell me what I need to do.”
THIRTY
ZUHRA
It was dark when I yanked the door back and slipped out of the stable, Loukas right behind me. Only a sliver of crimson limned the jagged western peaks; the rest of the sky was slick black velvet, dusted with stars that gleamed their cold light from so very far away.
“You can’t just storm into a council meeting,” Loukas warned as he followed me across the field toward the castle. It somehow glowed, as though the very walls emanated light, even at night.
“Watch me,” I muttered, lengthening my stride. Raidyn was already nowhere to be seen, even though he’d only left a few moments before I’d spun on my heel and rushed after him—immediately following Loukas’s revelation that his friend was actually on the council. On it. He’d been offering me no more than little cryptic “suggestions” on how to sway them when he could have just admitted he had the power to speak for me, to fight for me—and Inara—the whole time.
I’d been furious before in my life, mostly at my mother, but I’d never experienced anger like this before. It was hot blood rushing in my veins and my heart thumping with an alarming ferocity, but also icy hands and sweat-slicked palms and the most awful crushing sensation in my chest. Even though I’d tried to warn myself that he wasn’t necessarily my friend or ally, I’d obviously still clung to the hope that perhaps Raidyn was … something like that, because now that his deception was laid bare, it was so painfully obvious that he wasn’t and I … I didn’t understand why it hurt so bad to now know what before I’d only feared to be true.
“Zuhra, wait.” Loukas jogged past me and turned, so that he continued to move when I did, except he was now moving backward. I doggedly kept going, forcing him to keep jogging. “I admit I don’t know you well, but if I had to guess, I would say you are quite mad at the moment.”
“Goodness, what gave me away?” Mad was a much better guess than anything else he might have assumed about my reaction to his news. I liked mad. It was much better than the unsettling, creeping bleakness that had begun to worm its way through my anger, the closer we got to the castle and the council … and Raidyn.
“Listen, I know you are new here, and all of this”—he gestured to the castle, but I knew he meant more than just the luminous building—“is completely foreign to you. I wasn’t lying when I said I wish to help you. And the first bit of help I’m going to offer is advice. Before you continue that eye roll”—he held up a finger—“let me finish. I meant what I said about Raidyn earlier, though not quite the way I made it sound. The first thing you told me about him was that he’d healed you … and that is exactly why you need this advice. There are many Paladin who have the ability to heal, but Raidyn is one of very few who are as powerful as he is. And when he has to heal someone with injuries as extensive as yours were—”
“He already told me about sanaulus,” I cut in, a rash of heat rising up my neck.
“He might have tried,” Loukas said, gentle but firm, “but I know him too well, and I’m sure he left out a few key details.”
“Such as?” The heat crept higher, even as my stomach sank lower.
“Such as,” Loukas continued, “the fact that sanaulus creates a, ah … bond … of sorts, between the healer and healed. One that is often felt far more strongly by the one who was healed than the healer. He has trained himself to withstand it, to recognize it for what it is, and reject it. But you … This is all new to you, and you have no such training, and I’m just concerned that, perhaps…”
I could barely swallow the sticky-thick lump in my throat before I interjected, “I’m fine. I don’t feel a bond with Raidyn. I just want to get back to my sister—and he could have been helping me this whole time. That’s why I’m so upset.” But even as the declaration left my lips, the weight of Loukas’s words pressed in on my beleaguered heart. A bond … because of the healing. Because of sanaulus. I was alive because of Raidyn, and miserable because of that. “I’m fine,” I reiterated, realizing too late that repeating myself did nothing to convince Loukas of my fineness, and in fact probably only served to convince him otherwise.
“It does pass, with time. If that helps at all.”
I glared at him. “It doesn’t matter whether it passes or not, or whether he’s rejected it or not—all that matters is getting back to Inara. So either do what you said you came to do and help me, or get out of my way.”
“You don’t even know where to go,” he pointed out.
“I’ll find it.” Eventually. Even if I had to open every door in that massive place.
Loukas shook his head, but one corner of his mouth quirked as though he were trying to suppress a smile. “Has anyone ever told you you’re a bit stubborn?”
“No,” I answered honestly, because though I knew he was probably right, no one ever had.
Loukas’s eyebrows lifted. “I find that hard to believe.”
“And I’m done wasting time here.” Attempting to hide the trembling in my hands from my daring—daring I didn’t even know I possessed—I shoved past him, marching the last few steps to the massive doors I’d come out only a short time earlier on my ill-fated attempt to find a way to the gateway on my own. I had to yank on it with all my strength to get it to budge, slowly groaning open. “What is it with you people and your doors?” I muttered as I strained to make a space wide enough to slip through.
Loukas’s hand closed over the handle directly above mine, and with one strong tug, he pulled the door open far enough for both of us to walk through.
“Heavy doors are harder for rakasa to break through,” he said as he yanked it closed once more. “If they somehow made it past the custovitan, these doors are the next line of defense.”
“The what?”
“That huge, living wall out there. It’s a custovitan—very rare and very powerful. In your language it means Guardian of Life.”
“Oh.” I flushed and turned away, resisting the urge to chew on a finger, painfully aware of my lack of knowledge, yet again. Is that what surrounded the citadel? It had to be. But there was no time to wonder abou
t it when my goal to get back to my sister hung in the balance. I deliberated which direction to start searching for the room where the elusive council was meeting.
Loukas started walking left, leaving me there. Or so I thought … until he paused with a glance over his shoulder.
“Well, do you want me to show you where they are or not?”
He strode away without looking back again, rightly assuming that I would follow. We hurried through the curving hallways, passing door after door, before he lightly jogged up a flight of stairs (pausing only briefly on the landing until he heard my footfalls behind him) and then continuing further into the castle. I was hopelessly lost once more, and the sensation of the luxem magnam beckoning to me grew stronger and stronger the closer we got to the center of the building. I began to wonder if that was actually our destination, picturing them standing in a circle, hands on the balustrade, their faces lit by the bluish-white light; until, at last, Loukas stopped.
“Here?” I whispered, with a jerk of my chin toward the simple wooden doors—no carvings, no embellishments, nothing to mark it as the entrance to a special room—the place where the council would decide my fate … and Inara’s.
Loukas nodded and bent forward to murmur, “Just don’t tell them I helped you. They won’t punish you for doing this, but me, on the other hand…”
I drew back, alarmed. Loukas winked and then sauntered off, his hands pushed into the pockets of his pants, leaving me to wonder if he’d been serious or not. He was so hard to read—though not as hard as Raidyn. I wondered, if I’d been around more people in my life, whether I would have been able to deconstruct them more readily … or if they were just difficult no matter how much experience one had.
It didn’t matter whether I understood him or not, so long as he’d led me true and I would find the council to plead my case to when I walked into that room. With a deep breath, I faced the doors, my hands resting on the double handles. Raidyn was in there. And my grandmother. And who knew how many other faceless Paladin who held the power to trap me here as they had my father.
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