“Speak to my body like you spoke to the stones,” she said. “Tell it to dissolve, to join these waters. The rift will open like the waterfall in Fairmist, and you will push the slinks through with the gathered forces. It will be like a great wind at your command. The magic of the temple knows what to do. The Faia will be with you. I will be with you.”
“How do you know all this? How can you be sure?"
She pulled him down and kissed him, their last kiss. He tried to look into her, tried to see her true desires, but she had closed herself off to him.
“Make the empire safe for every other girl who loves a boy,” she whispered. The dagger seemed to vibrate in his hand, and her fingers slid over his. “We’ll do it together.” She guided the tip of the blade to her chest, just under her ribs. Her breath came faster. “Upward,” she said. “To my heart. Quick and strong.” She gave him a nervous smile. “Don’t miss.”
He clenched the dagger hard. The chill in his legs seeped upward, through him. He would become like the rest of them at last. The delegate. The emperor. Selicia. He would do the horrific for a chance at a better life.
He put his skeletal hand behind her neck, bunched his shoulder. Her fingers tightened on his, ready to add her strength. One thrust. He would not miss.
He felt the tension of the sharp tip against her thin dress, her taut flesh.
“No,” he whispered.
“Grei—”
“I can’t,” he said, forcing the dagger away from her, pulling it from her grasp. He dropped it into the water and hugged her, pressing her body against his, his cheek against her shaved scalp.
“You must,” she said. She was suddenly sobbing. Her shaking hands lifted his head away so she could look into his eyes. “No, no, no.” she said. “You have to. We have to.”
“I can’t,” he repeated hoarsely. He had never felt so weak. “I’m not that man.”
“It’s not just us. It’s—” She cut herself off, looking past him.
He turned.
On the far side of the courtyard, a tall slink emerged from the double-doors of the palace in a flurry of smaller flying slinks. He had wide shoulders, thin arms and a small head with jutting teeth, and his legs worked backwards like a dog as he strode into the courtyard. His gaze locked on them.
“The Lord of Rifts,” Grei murmured.
“No!” Adora said frantically.
Grei watched the slink named Kuruk move toward him. Kuruk, the one who had slaughtered innocents. The one who needed to die.
“Do what must be done!” Adora begged. “Before it’s too late!” She grabbed his shoulders, but he shrugged her off.
He leapt out of the fountain in a shower of water and screamed his rage at the Lord of Rifts. Kuruk pointed a finger and fire exploded toward them.
Chapter 54
Adora
“Grei!” Adora cried as the inferno engulfed them. She fell backward into the icy water, blistering heat all around. Then the flame was past, red turned blue again, and she surfaced, spluttering.
Cloaked within the roaring flame, Kuruk crossed the courtyard and slammed into Grei, pushing him out of the shelter of the temple. Somehow, Grei was still alive. He had kept the flames from burning him, had kept the slink’s claws from rending him apart.
She snatched up the dagger lying at the bottom of the shallow pool and took a step toward the battle, but she stopped. That wouldn’t help him. The dagger was no more than a twig to Kuruk. She—
“Princessss,” a slurred voice said from behind her.
She spun, sucking in a shocked breath. “By the Faia!” She stepped back.
A hideously burned man stood at the edge of the fountain. Sizzling fat and muscle hung on bloody bones. His head was a grinning skull with patches of red, canted to one side. Tufts of black hair stuck out from the glistening scalp. White eyes looked unblinking at her.
“Thisss isss your prophessssy?” the burned man said, his words barely coherent through the ruin of tattered lips and charred tongue. He gestured at the fountain.
“Who are you?”
“Noooo longerrr a ffffat man.”
“Blevins!” she gasped.
Milky eyes slid inside the charred head, as though they could still see. “The daggerrr,” he said. “Yourrr life?”
She turned to Blevins, the dagger tight in her hand.
“You,” she said, feeling the cold clarity of it. Jorun Magnus was a killer. He could do what must be done. “It has to be you.”
He paused, his grisly frame so perfectly still she thought perhaps he had died standing upright. Then his milky eyes rolled to the dagger.
“Grei can’t begin the spell,” she said. “But you can.” She held the dagger out to him. “And then you make him finish it.”
“Nnno,” he slurred.
“Yes. You didn’t save me at the cave, but you could save Grei now.” She held out the dagger. “Activate the spell. Save him.”
“I cannnot killl you. Nnnot twissse.”
“I’m already dead. This has been my destiny since I escaped the Debt. But I understand this time. Please,” she said. “For what you owe me.”
“Miaaaa...”
“Kuruk is killing him!” She sobbed. She grabbed his sticky hand and slapped the dagger’s hilt into it.
“Miaaaa, donnn’t—”
“If you ever loved me. If you ever felt for me at all—”
His fist hit her ribs, rocking her body, and he roared like a wounded beast. She looked down, saw the dagger’s crossguard flat against her chest, the icy blade inside her, a shaft through her heart. A perfect strike. She couldn’t breathe. Red blossomed around his burned fist.
Her fingers and arms went limp. Blevins held her up, and his howl shook the temple.
“Thank you,” she whispered. Cold slithered into her like a snake. “Thank—”
Chapter 55
Grei
Grei whispered to the air, making it hard as stone. Kuruk slammed into it.
“We won’t bow to you any longer!” Grei yelled at the slink.
Kuruk rebounded off the defense and stumbled to a stop. He calmly recovered his balance and stood as he had before, towering over Grei, blotting out the rising sun.
“You’re done killing people!” Grei promised.
Kuruk laughed, high-pitched and mean. “What do you know about your ‘people’? About the bloody price paid for your empire? What do you know about the mute monsters you worship as goddesses and call the Faia? You know nothing!”
“I know you pushed my brother’s soul out of his body,” Grei said in a low voice. He reached out to the slink like he had done with others and felt the monster’s rage.
“And what of my brother?” Kuruk asked. “What of Malik?”
“Was that his name? He gave me this.” Grei held up his bony forearm. “But he won’t burn anyone again.”
Kuruk’s lips curled back from long teeth, and he launched himself at Grei, a blur. Grei whispered to the air again, making it stone just before the slink slammed into it. Kuruk’s scaly claws broke through the half-made spell and raked across Grei’s shoulder.
Grei cried out, scrambled backward.
Kuruk spat fire at him.
“Water!” Grei shouted to the air. The fire hit the barrier and became hissing steam. It scalded him, deadly hot, and Grei staggered away.
Claws raked his back again, and Grei crashed to his knees. “Hard!” he breathed. The air around him went solid, and he heard a second claw screech across it. The muddy feeling coated his mind. He didn’t have time to move with the elements, to make a request. He had to end this quickly.
Grei rolled out of the steam, trying to ignore the excruciating burn from the scratches. He looked for Kuruk and caught a glimpse of the slink’s silhouette at the edge of the steam cloud. He envisioned the air around the monster turning to water, then a box of solid rock around that, trapping the slink in a cage of death.
Grei mustered his focus. It took longer thi
s time, and Kuruk charged through the steam.
“Water!” Grei shouted at the air. “Rock!”
The water splashed to the ground behind Kuruk. A cage of stone formed out of the light breeze, but the slink scrambled over it, so quick that the top crunched together as he leapt free. He landed on the ground next to Grei.
“No!” Grei shouted, his mind numb. He couldn’t think of what to do next. Kuruk reached down with his claws, red eyes raging.
Then the slink jerked, screamed, and the claw barely scratched Grei’s face. Kuruk spun around. A black arrow protruded from his back, feathers quivering. Beyond Kuruk, a young woman stood with a bow that looked like it was made of long thorns lashed together. She wore a burned cloak that dragged on the ground, shadowing her body. Her honey-colored hair glinted in the light. She nocked another arrow smoothly and quickly. To Grei’s left, in the direction of the temple, an inhuman howl burst over the screams and growls all around them.
Kuruk hissed at the girl, leaping behind Grei. She kept the arrow trained on the slink, but did not release. Kuruk reached for Grei’s neck, claws tickling his skin, but he spun away.
A black blade swept over Grei’s head. It caught Kuruk in the side, adding to his momentum and spinning him in mid-air. The slink shrieked and crashed to the ground.
Grei looked up into the charred face of a horribly burnt man. The man lunged forward, moving with blinding speed, and swung the sword again. The blade crunched into stone, and Kuruk leapt away. Another black arrow whistled past Kuruk’s shoulder. The woman with the honey hair ran forward, nocking another.
With a scream of rage, Kuruk backed up and circled. “It won’t be that easy, Magnus.”
Magnus?
Grei looked at the burnt man.
“Blevins?” he said.
“The battle isss not won, prinsssse,” the shambling Blevins said. “Your ssspell isss ready. Your sssacrifissse made. Finisssh it.”
Sacrifice?
Grei spun around. Adora was no longer standing in the pool. Instead, her body floated in the water.
“No!” he screamed.
Chapter 56
Grei
“Adora!” Grei shouted, splashing into the pool. Blood flowed into the icy water, a long red cloud snaking into the twisted channels. The dagger lay on the bottom of the pool beside her.
“No!”
He wanted to scream at her, to rage and tell her that he would have found another way, but he knew it was a lie. If Blevins and the girl archer hadn’t shown up, he would be dead.
He bowed his head over her body. Make sure it’s not in vain, he thought. Send the slinks back. Do what she gave her life for!
The water glowed silver where her blood had spread, and he could feel the spell’s prepared power. It had been created long ago. Different sensations and images came to him, smells and colors, emotions. An insidious sentience drove it, sucked Adora’s blood out of her body and into the labyrinth of water. He saw images of the rift in his mind, bright flames beyond it, immense heat. The spell knew what it was doing. He could send them back. The rift longed to open.
But something stopped it.
He concentrated, following the source of the barrier, and he heard singing, the same song from the Jhor Forest. The Green Faia’s song. It created an implacable shield, holding the blood-hungry water at bay. It kept the rift closed.
But if the Faia had created it, why would they create a barrier to stop it—?
A thin hand grabbed his face from behind, yanking him backward.
He cried out, struggling, but his attacker kicked his legs out from underneath him, pulling him over the small wall of the pool. They fell to the cobblestones. Grei swung blindly. He spun around, ready to fight—
And stared into Ree’s face. She was gaunt, skin sunken beneath the bones of her cheeks. Her right arm was severed at the elbow, a wrapped stump, but her eyes burned with purpose.
“No time. No time,” she mumbled, flicking a glance at Kuruk, who circled slowly around Blevins, looking for a way to get to the temple. “Words can’t get past the rhyme. Listen, Grei. Listen, please. Listen close and set us free.” Her scabbed hand fluttered around his face, smearing blood. She leaned into him, put her cheek to his like a dog desperate for affection.
“Get off!” He threw her to the side. He remembered Selicia’s words. Ree has been taken by the slink sickness. “I need to finish—”
But she leapt on him again, wrapped her arm around his neck, entwined her legs with his. He fell to one knee.
“No!” she wailed. “Look, look. Open my book!”
“You’re mad!” He lurched to his feet, tried to pry her off. She was skinny as a stick, but strong. With a grunt, he threw her to the ground. “Get off!”
She clawed at the front of her black tunic, ripping it open and bearing a swatch of bony skin between her breasts. “Prince, look inside! Deep inside the truth will hide. You must look! Open my book!”
A sudden chill ran through him, and he paused. Ree was crazy, her eyes wild, her speech like that of Rat Mathens.
Like Rat Mathens, who talked about secrets no one understood.
Something clicked in his mind. The true abomination of the Blessed was hidden: humans possessed by foul spirits from another world. But there were other secrets, questions that didn’t have answers, like why a spell supposedly made by the Faia was being prohibited by the Faia, like why the slinks would trade the sure destruction of the empire for a monthly sacrifice.
Like why those who thought too much about the slinks went mad.
“You know something,” he hissed.
Ree gasped in relief, reached for him again, and he didn’t draw back this time. Her bloody hand touched his cheek, his neck. She leaned in, put her forehead against his chest. “Listen. Look. At all they took.”
He reached into her with his magic, and she opened like doors to a sunrise.
He heard the voice of her heart, uninhibited by the stumbling rhymes. This was the Ree he had known in the Lateral House.
Look deep, Grei, she said. See all that I have collected. The Slink Lord tried to scramble it, but I saved what I could.
Grei staggered back under the onslaught of images and emotions. He bumped into the edge of the fountain and sat down heavily.
The Lord of Rifts was a boy named Kuruk, taken in sacrifice from Benasca a hundred years ago; he was the boy from the Faia’s memories, the one who had screamed “Lie” at the emperor.
Kuruk’s mind was inside Ree’s, twisting, warping, making it so she could never speak of what she had learned. But she was in his, too, and Grei saw everything the Slink Lord knew. Velakkan spirits taking over the bodies of the Blessed, breeding with humans, making more monstrosities.
But the real secret, the one that Kuruk destroyed hundreds of minds to keep, staggered Grei’s imagination. The slinks hadn’t devoured the empire during the Slink War because they couldn’t.
They were a lie.
“He’s the only one,” Grei gasped, looking at Kuruk. The image of the towering slink flickered, and Grei suddenly saw the truth. Kuruk was a little blond boy, and there were no other slinks. Not thousands. Not hundreds or even dozens. There had only been three little boys. And two of them were already dead, killed by Baezin’s Blade. The slinks were illusions.
“He used our fear against us,” Grei whispered, gazing at the carnage all around. It was impossible to encompass it, so strong was the fear that this slink boy pushed into his mind, into every Thiaran’s mind. Those who had been “killed” by phantoms weren’t killed at all. The grisly deaths were made real only in the minds of the observers. In the moment of the victims’ “deaths”, their minds were overthrown, and they were given a burning command to go north to Benasca and never return. Rat Mathens had babbled it over and over: his wife had gone to the north.
Grei forced himself to stagger upright, and Ree gasped as though someone had lifted a house from her shoulders. She smiled weakly, her eyes rolled back in her hea
d, and she collapsed.
The rest of the slinks weren’t real, but Kuruk was a being of staggering power. He had bent the minds of hundreds of Thiarans all at once.
And suddenly, as though Kuruk had sensed the exchange of knowledge, the slink boy was in Grei’s mind, slamming heavy hands everywhere. The statue from his childhood screamed at him. The slink from the South Woods charged him, rainbow eyes swirling. The dark, smoky spirits from the Dead Woods came at him with their claws.
Grei cried out, staggering back. The fists kept pounding, pulling at the foundations of his sanity. The slinks would devour him. They would destroy everyone he loved. He had to—
Stop it, he told himself, clenching his fists against his head.
“Out,” he whispered, gesturing with his palm toward Kuruk. Grei was master in his own mind, not this child monster.
The fear fell away like rotting curtains.
He straightened and faced the fight between Blevins and the slink, but Kuruk had backed out of range. He pressed a hand against the wound that Blevins had given him, fire glowing between his fingers. Blevins waited, still as a corpse, sword ready. The girl archer moved sideways, arrow nocked, waiting for the renewed attack, but Kuruk only glared at Grei.
Kuruk opened his mouth and flames spurted out, engulfing Blevins. The girl spun, crouching away from the inferno.
Blevins roared and charged forward, but Kuruk ran to the courtyard’s wall and climbed it like a squirrel, his clawed hands cracking stone as he went up and over.
Grei watched, feeling Kuruk’s rage echo in his mind, then spun back to Adora. She floated just underneath the surface, her mouth open and her skin ashen. Her eyes stared sightlessly upward. Glimmers of silver light clung to her body like seaweed, but the spell was fading. The useless spell. There were no slinks.
He fell to his knees and keened, clutching her cold skin. The blond archer let out a wail behind him as she saw Adora.
Grei pulled Adora onto the flagstones beside the pool and cradled her cold body against his chest. “Don’t,” he cried into her cheek. “Don’t go...”
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