Skykeeper (The Drowning Empire Book 1)

by S. M. Gaither

  Someone else beats me to it.

  An arrow hits his arm and he cries out, slipping back into the water.

  “Seal it!” I hear a voice shout, the sound still a distorted warble in my one good ear. I look up to find Coralind standing on the opposite side of the opening, her crossbow still raised. The arm holding it is dark—blood and burned flesh that I try not to let myself be distracted by.

  I force the magic out from my center. Tears mingle with the sweat and blood in my eyes, and I shut them and give up on seeing the same way I’ve given up on hearing properly. I may never do either of those things again, but it doesn’t matter right now. All that matters is that I can feel it. That solidness of the magic in front of me, stretching like that great shimmering net we tried to patch the sky with so long ago. But instead of the sky, it fixes over the scarred lake now.

  And when I wearily blink my eyes open again, I see it smoothing over the edges of that scar, trapping Varick beneath an opaque gloss of green.

  I wait until long, long after his shadow has sunk away from sight before I dare release the hold I have on the seal. Part of it stays even then, my magic strong enough now to leave a permanent mark, even on its own.

  The battle still rages around me, most everyone still unaware of what’s just happened. But the sky looks as if it’s lightened a little already.

  Perhaps blood loss causes these sorts of delusions.

  I slump down beside what’s left of the lake’s opening, listening to the gently rolling water underneath as the weaker traces of magic seep back toward me. They peel in bits and pieces away from the more permanent parts of the seal, and I call them back—thinking I might still need them to form a shield around my broken self—and watch them drift to my body in a wistful, unhurried sort of way. It might hurt, the way they settle and push so heavily against the fresh gashes on my chest and neck, but I don’t feel it.

  I think there must be a limit to how much pain you can feel, and I have crossed whatever that threshold is.

  So whatever happens now, I am as prepared for it as I will ever be.

  Chapter 35

  “Aven? Can you hear me?”

  Coralind, whispers a tiny voice in the back of my head. I’d forgotten about her.

  Cold water hits my face a moment later, handfuls of it pouring down over my eyes, washing away the blood. Some of it trickles down into my mouth. I choke on it, sit up coughing and spitting and quickly realize that I was wrong about having met that threshold for pain. My world reels with it all over again.

  Coralind is crouched beside me. I take in her appearance slowly, trying to force it to make sense. The skin of her arms is raw and bleeding like mine, and her face is streaked with still more blood and tired shadows. She is still strangely beautiful, but in a less whole, less ethereal sort of way. My eyes drift from her to what’s left of the battle around us. A group of keepers that I recognize as old friends of my brother are circled around us like sentinels, blocking bits of stray fire as I regain my consciousness.

  “How long have I been out?” I ask.

  “Not too long,” Coralind says, “but things are already beginning to shift. Look.” She points up, and with some difficulty, I manage to lift my head and see what she’s talking about.

  It wasn’t a delusion before.

  The sky is lightening, easing into a pale greyish-blue.

  “Varick’s destructive magic faded with him,” she explains, “and his followers are starting to lose heart, too. Not all of them, of course—but we’re not outnumbered anymore. Not even close to it.” She wraps an arm around my waist and gently helps me sit the rest of the way up. “We’re going to win this time, Aven.”

  I lean into her and try to make her words sink in.

  Can it really be over? Is this really what victory feels like?

  It’s much more painful than I was expecting. And I’m still surrounded by too much destruction for it to feel like I’ve won anything. “I want to find my sisters,” I say. Because I won’t believe this is over until I see them, until I know they’re alive, that they’re laughing again.

  But Coralind disagrees, pointing out the blood covering my chest and neck. “That seal was massive,” she says. “Summoning that amount of magic all at once could have—should have—killed you. I’ve already sent for a medic, because I’m fairly sure you’ve got some broken bones, so how about just be still for once? Because I can’t do anything about broken bones.” I try arguing, but I can’t seem to get to my feet on my own. And since she refuses to help, I have no choice but to lie and wait, to focus only on ignoring the pain.

  Most of the cuts across my chest have been healed—by Coralind, I’m assuming—and the bleeding has slowed to nearly a stop, at least. And as long as I don’t move, the hurt is only of a dull and aching sort. The blood has been washed from my eyes, but the hearing in my right ear is still mostly gone.

  Not far enough gone, though, for me not to recognize the voice that calls my name a few minutes later.

  Brynn.

  I sit up again. More pain spasms through my ribs, but I fight through it and rise all the way to my knees, my entire body shaking as I meet my sister’s eyes. Something is wrong. I may be half-deaf, but I can still hear this much in her voice. She reaches my side and collapses next to me, panting. She’s still talking, but it’s difficult to make out exactly what she’s saying in between her gasps for breath.

  But all it takes to make me understand is a single clear word.

  West.

  It isn’t the last word she says. My mind blanks, but I am still aware of her lips moving. Of her talking on and on, long enough that she is still speaking when my stunned mind finally manages to start making sense of words again, and I finally hear what she is trying to tell me.

  I shouldn’t have been standing where I was. It was my fault. I tried to heal him. It was my fault.

  “It wasn’t your fault.” Somehow, my voice is still strong enough to rise above her frantic rambling, at least to tell her this.

  Coralind stops trying to force me to be still. Between her and Brynn’s help, I manage to get back on my feet, and once I’m there, my adrenaline takes over, and then I am walking away from the lake the same as I walked onto it. One foot after the other, everything fading away except for a single thought: I have to reach him.

  And somehow, I do.

  I push through the trees and into a small clearing, and he is there, lying on his back and wrapped in makeshift bandages of torn cloth, soaked through with blood. I move numbly to him, and my body simply collapses at his side, because I am too tired to kneel properly. His eyes flutter open as I lean over him. He seems panicked at first, but then his gaze finds my face, and he manages a halfway normal breath. He follows my hand as I reach up and swipe away the tears streaking down my cheeks.

  “You look awful,” he says.

  “Me?” I attempt to laugh, but the sound dies a horrible death in my throat. “Have you looked at yourself lately?”

  His gaze has already turned distant, and for a long, terrible moment, I’m convinced that he can’t hear me anymore, that he’s already gone too far for my voice to reach. But then he shakes his head. “At least I’m not crying,” he says with a cough that rattles his whole chest. “Which I wish you would stop doing, by the way.”

  “Be quiet,” I say, because I can’t think of anything else as I’m angrily wiping away more tears with the heel of my hand.

  And then, of all the things the idiot could do just now, he smiles. “And her last words to him as he faded off to death were ‘Be quiet, West.’”

  “That is not funny. You aren’t fading off to anywhere.”

  He doesn’t answer me. The smile stays plastered on his face, but after a minute the corners of it begin to go slack.

  I don’t have to call it. The magic just rises in me, desperate to heal, to pull him back somehow. Strand after strand of it flows from my body and wraps around his, sinking through the bandages wrapped across his c
hest, lighting the space around his heart, where most of the blood seems to be collecting.

  If I can stop the entire ocean from drowning this city, it seems like I should be able to stop a single life from sinking away.

  I hear Coralind’s voice, a vague echo in my mind telling me to stop. Telling me I’m going to kill myself if I don’t stop summoning. That you can only take so much of yourself apart to put someone else back together. But I can’t—I won’t—let her pull me away. I’m strong enough for this. I know I’m strong enough, now.

  So why, why doesn’t he answer me when I say his name?

  High above, the sky is growing bluer.

  But down here, his body is growing colder, and his breaths are trembling slower and slower from his mouth.

  And then, when I lay my head against him and close my eyes and wish myself someplace far, far away, they stop altogether.

  Epilogue

  The world is healing a little more each day.

  A larger, grander army rose after hearing of our victory—keepers and civilians from all corners of the empire, rising up against the north kingdom and its followers and marching, working to contain the evil whose face we revealed.

  It may not last. We know that. Because for every person who has joined us in the name of our good, somewhere in the empire is another who sees a different sort of good in the things the Alturian army tried to accomplish. I worry about what Varick has done. About the sort of things he’s set in motion, and how long it will be before another rises to take his place.

  But for now? Our drom is shining, his beams reaching far across our calm blue sky and bringing warmth back to the kingdom of Garda.

  My healing has been slower.

  The girl who held up the sky, they’re calling me. And there have been feasts and balls in my family’s honor, and the once-harsh whispers that used to follow me through the hallways of the palace have softened, and taken on a sort of reverence instead.

  Still, I don’t feel as whole as I once did, and I don’t know if I ever will. Too much of me is a part of the rest of the world now. Too many pieces of myself given up to try and keep everything else together.

  But I don’t regret any of it. Not deciding to fight, not giving every bit of magic I had left to try to pull the hole in West’s heart back together. I would do it again if I had the chance.

  Because I don’t think we are meant to keep all to ourselves. And maybe we’re even meant to be torn apart sometimes, so that we have a chance to find the ones who can put us back together—who can make us whole—again.

  Of course, it isn’t always easy putting things together again. Especially not people. Sometimes the pieces don’t fit. Sometimes they’re a little too crooked, a little too bent, a little too late, and then all you can do is seal up the wounds as well as you can and hope for the best.

  I have been hoping—occasionally praying again, even—for weeks now.

  It feels all but useless today as I am pacing, pacing back and forth in the garden, the train of my gown sweeping up fallen river blossoms as I go. I have been told, over and over by almost every doctor that has seen him, not to expect West to wake up. To start letting go now, they imply, because it will be easier this way, when the end finally, officially comes.

  I don’t want to hear anything those doctors have to say today, so I leave the garden behind, and I tell Coralind I am going out for a walk.

  “If he wakes up…,” I begin, but I don’t have to finish, because this has become as familiar as a well-practiced dance by now. She knows I am going to the lake. And she promises to come find me if anything happens, even though we both know it never does.

  Nothing happens.

  The light of day begins to fade, and even then, the only movement is my own as I stand beside the burial lake, stepping closer to the water and letting it wash gently across my bare feet. I feel closer to my brother here than anywhere, and so far away from everything else. It’s nice. I want to lie down on the shore and just fall asleep, let the water push a blanket of sand up around me and maybe not wake up for a few days.

  But instead, I reach into my pocket.

  “I have something of yours,” I say. As though the lake is my actual brother, and not just the constant memory of him ebbing and flowing with the breeze. “Something I’ve been holding on to for you.” I glance down at the stone in my hand, at the symbols I carved into it. I clench it tightly. This fragment of him that I’ve clung to for so long, and that I’m not sure how to release, even now.

  It has become a part of me, engraved as deeply into my heart as those symbols into stone.

  Not the only part, though.

  I’ve spent so much of these past months living through it, through that life I borrowed from my brother, that maybe I forgot for a while who I was outside of him. Maybe we all do that sometimes. Because we’re all made up of those fragments, after all, of bits taken from the people close to us. The ones who have moved on, and the ones still by our sides. But after we take the pieces, I think it’s up to us to decide which to keep, and which to let go of, and how to rearrange them into our own person.

  So I pull my arm back, and I throw the stone. It skips one time before sinking beneath the surface. I stare at the spot where it disappears until Drom is almost set, until something else soars past me and plops into the water.

  I turn around, and West is standing behind me.

  Solid and warm looking, but I would still have thought him a ghost. Except Coralind is there too, looking equally warm and solid as she supports his weight against her shoulder, and except for the fact that I know he doesn’t believe in ghosts.

  My heart suddenly, quite literally hurts, torn and open and pounding as hard as it is to send oxygen to my shocked brain.

  I take a few trancelike steps forward.

  “What did you throw?” I ask him. It feels silly and pointless the moment it leaves my mouth, with all the other things I could say, but that’s the question that comes out, so that’s what I ask.

  He shrugs. The movement looks painful for him, but he quickly smiles the grimace away. “Just something I’ve been meaning to let go of.”

  I am determined not to let myself cry. So I don’t speak anymore. I just move silently to his side, to Coralind’s side, and standing in between them it feels as if—at least for now— the world is truly back together again.

  And that night I fall asleep in West’s arms, and I dream that I am standing on a hill covered in white flowers, while far below me, the waters finally begin to recede.

  Thanks for Reading!

  If you are enjoying The Drowning Empire series so far, please consider leaving a review—on any or all of the books— and tell your friends about them! I love sharing this world and its characters with you, and reviews help me sell more books, which allows me to spend more time on writing these sort of books :)

  Also, the second book in the series, CURSEBREAKER, is now available. Click here to get it!

  Also also, to be notified of all my book releases, you can either sign-up for my newsletter by clicking here, or you can follow me on Bookbub by going here!