Siobhan. Ishqa. Ashraia. If they were—
No. I didn’t have time to let myself think about that. We just needed to get there.
“Let’s go,” I said. “Now.”
Caduan and I wove through the city, dodging falling debris. It was not easy to get back to the inn. The roads were blocked. Caduan’s magic pulled me in a hundred different directions at once. Humans surrounded us, and though I could not see their faces through the flames, I could feel their vile presence, like snakes coiling in the brush. My blades were out, and I fought through them, one after another after another. How fragile they were. How quickly they fell. I barely felt the wounds they left me as parting gifts.
I wasn’t sure how long it had been when I stumbled, disoriented, and Caduan grabbed my arm to steady me.
“Focus,” he said. “You’re running in circles.”
It was easier said than done. The air was strange and thick. The fire moved unnaturally, as if it were alive. Human magic was capable of so much, so harsh and violent. I had never seen it with my own eyes before, and it made a pit coil in my stomach. Fey magic was powerful, but I had never seen it inflict this kind of frenzied violence.
“There,” I panted, at last, thrusting my blade to our left. I could make out the shape of the inn caught in the trees halfway to the ground, burning but mostly intact. Surely, I told myself, our companions had survived that. We pushed towards it, beginning to scale a pile of debris that blocked it from us, when a fresh set of screams cut through the air.
Caduan whirled around. I felt his attention shift, like someone had yanked on the magic we shared.
In the distance, silhouettes clashed. Humans circled a group of Fey who were trying to escape. One look at the Fey told me they were merely travelers, not fighters. They would not last.
Caduan turned to me, jaw set. His hand tightened around his sword. He did not have to say anything.
“Let me lead,” I said. “You’re still hurt.”
He just shook his head, as if this was a silly statement.
We launched ourselves into the fight side by side. We rose up behind the humans like shadows in the mist. Our midnight training had paid off. Caduan was swift and lethal, and we fought well together, intuitively covering each other’s blind spots and weaknesses. His magic still pulsed in my veins. Our connection ran deep, as if we spoke a wordless language that only the two of us understood.
Bodies fell around our feet like autumn leaves. I relished every single one. I caught Caduan’s eye and the look on his face sent a shiver of satisfaction running up my spine.
We were winning.
I spun, ready to deal a killing blow to another human soldier—
And then, suddenly, I was blown through the windows of a fallen building, shattered glass raining around me.
My back slammed against a wall.
I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move, as if my control over my body had simply been severed. My thoughts felt as if they were moving through sludge. Pain tore through my abdomen. I looked down. For a moment my mind couldn’t reconcile what I was seeing.
A wooden handle. Violet blood.
A spear. A spear in me. A spear through me, pinning me to the wall.
There was a sudden crack. The earth beneath me shattered. It was nearly impossible to see in the darkness, but what I could make out through my blurring vision were several stones hurling at me through the air, and beyond them, a silhouette with their arms lifted.
No. No. If I was to die, I would die dragging them down with me.
But then a voice rang out in a language I didn’t understand. The rocks froze. The silhouette stopped, turning, replying. Two voices spoke back and forth.
A figure emerged from the smoke. It was a human man. His hair was white, though he did not look old, and his eyes so starkly silver that even from this distance, they glinted through the shadows. He was tall and thin, with a smattering of silver facial hair, wearing laced-up battle clothing. He stopped and spoke to the stone-wielding man — and then turned to me.
My hands managed to grab the spear that impaled me, so tight they trembled. Yet the slick of my own blood undermined my grip. I snarled as the man approached me, his eyes glinting with obvious interest. As he drew close enough for the bloody light of flames to catch his face, it revealed a garish scar that extended from the right corner of his mouth all the way to his ear.
It seemed at-odds with the rest of his appearance. I had expected some barbarian. But this man was neat and dignified, the type that appeared better suited to a library than a battlefield.
He muttered a word that I didn’t understand. His fingertips brushed my jawline, turning my cheek. He was so close — I could rip his face from his skull. But my muscles would not so much as twitch.
Was human magic really capable of such a thing?
But he was not the only one with power. I still had a grip on Caduan’s magic. I forced myself to focus.
Focus.
I could see it, feel it — the force that bound me. And I poured all of my stolen magic into severing that tie, into breaking free, pushing past it—
It cracked just enough for one brief opening.
I snapped at the human’s hand, catching his ring and little fingers between my sharpened teeth. His blood, rotten and red, flooded my mouth, and I spat it onto the ground as the man leapt back and howled.
And at that same moment, Caduan swept into the room. His magic roared to life in my veins — more powerful than it had been before, and I knew it because I could feel it burning through me, like a mirror compounding the strength of the sunlight.
At first my mind could not make sense of what I was looking at.
He was surrounded by vines. Moving vines. Tree branches and plants and leaves were unfurled around him, driving through human attackers like spears or encircling their throats.
The silver-haired human lunged. Light sparked to his fingertips, lethally powerful. He lifted his hands and Caduan stumbled back, as if struck.
The hold on my mind released. Temporarily, I was sure. I had seconds.
The spear was not coming out of the wall.
But I was.
With a roar, I tightened my grip around the handle, and slowly — so slowly, too slowly — I pulled myself forward.
Caduan lunged. The vines moved with him, matching every attack, every movement, even every wince of pain. But the human tore his hands through the air, releasing a sudden invisible force so strong that it snapped Caduan’s tree branches into splinters and would have knocked me back to the wall if I hadn’t been holding on to the spear so ferociously.
He descended upon Caduan.
The world narrowed to these precious seconds.
I let out a scream. One pull, two, three and then I was out, and I was running.
I didn’t think. I wielded Caduan’s magic, reflecting it back to him twice as bright. And in the same moment, I grabbed my dagger and drove it into the man’s back.
He whirled to me, ready to counter. But just as quickly, branches wound around his throat. Then his wrists, his arms. Behind him, Caduan descended, eyes cold. The forest was an unstoppable wave, branches and vines and leaves shattering windows and crawling through the wreckage,. I looked down and saw moss growing over my feet.
“Tell me why you are doing this,” Caduan demanded, and I had never heard his voice like this before, raw and agonized. “Tell me why you’re killing my people.”
The human did not answer. Why would he? He couldn’t understand Caduan’s words, anyway. He opened his mouth and blood dribbled out. The vines tightened around his throat.
“Why did you do this to us?”
The human’s face was overtaken by flowers, buds spouting over his eyeballs.
The magic we shared was waning, running too hot too fast. My blood pooled on the ground. I stumbled.
Caduan’s attention snapped to me. Just for a split second, but that hesitation was all it took.
The human’s magi
c rose before he did, a wave of lethal blue light. It lunged for us, and I didn’t think before I threw myself in front of Caduan, pouring all my remaining power into our magic, into lifting my blades, into—
A smear of gold passed over my right shoulder, warmth spattered me, and suddenly the human was a heap on the ground, his face bloody ruin.
A golden owl — Ishqa — swooped down. A puff of smoke, then Ishqa straightened in Fey form. He cast only the slightest glance of confusion at the scene — men impaled by winding branches and smothered by leaves — before his gaze settled back on us.
“We were looking everywhere for you. Ashraia and Siobhan have shepherded survivors to the east end of the city. We need to go.”
“And leave this?” I said. My voice sounded strange, like it belonged to someone else.
“This place is overrun,” he said. “We cannot win.”
“No,” I snarled. “Don’t tell me that there’s no chance.”
I wanted to roar, and scream, and weep. I wanted to kill every last one of them until they forced me down. But no. There was nothing to be won here. We would walk away and leave the bones of the dead with the bones of the city, just as we had two times before.
“Aefe…” Ishqa approached me cautiously, a wrinkle between his brows.
But it was Caduan’s face that jerked me to reality. I wasn’t sure that I had ever seen him look so afraid before.
“What’s wrong?” I started to ask. But then I looked down at myself, at the hole in my abdomen, at the blood that now soaked my clothing.
I did not remember falling.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Max
I had been twenty-one when I was first put in command. Back then, I had been given a team of just thirty soldiers, all Wielders. When I met them, they had been disasters — new recruits, barely trained, some with a lack of control over their magic that was downright dangerous. I’d thought to myself, This is it. My military career over before it even began. Because surely, there was nothing I could have done for that group of people. Utterly fucking hopeless.
Well, it turned out I had been wrong. A month, then three, then six of consistent training, and together, we forged iron into steel. I had loved every minute. There was the egotistical rush, yes, of triumphing over a near-impossible goal. But stronger than that was the satisfaction of studying my soldiers just as carefully as they studied me, helping them turn understanding into competence into mastery.
But I’d been so naive. I lost sight of what I was training them for. How many of those people were still alive today? I understood, now, the ugliness in it — in crafting such tools of Ascended-damned artistry, only to send them off to be destroyed.
This was the only thing I could think about as I ran through drills with my team that day. They had been good when I got them, and now they were phenomenal. Yet there was no pride in this thought. Not with the past feeling so close, and Ilyzath’s whispers still echoing in my ears. I saw its visions all day, no matter how I tried to shake them away.
During a break, sweat-soaked, I sank onto a stool, rubbing my eyes.
Ascended, Max. Get it together.
“Is something wrong, Max?”
Moth’s voice pulled me from my distraction. I looked up to see him staring at me, then too-quickly snapped my head away.
“Fuck,” I breathed.
“What?” Moth asked, alarmed.
I closed my eyes. It took several long seconds for the image of Moth as I had seen him in Ilyzath to fade. When I turned back to him, he looked perfectly normal. Skin intact, unburnt, perfectly unharmed.
Get. It. Together.
“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing. Go take a break.”
I stood and went to the door, leaning against it and trying to force myself into composure. My head was pounding so hard that I didn’t hear footsteps approaching until they were beside me.
“Welcome back,” Nura said. “Been watching the drills. I have to give you credit where it’s due. They’ve gotten good.”
“It’s uncomfortable when you shower me with flattery, Nura. Makes me feel like I’m going to look down and see a knife sticking out of my ribs. Besides, they were already—”
I turned to her, and stumbled over my words.
I had seen her in Ilyzath, too. Crawling towards me, her body scalded and broken, as she had looked in Sarlazai.
I looked away.
“They were already good.” I cleared my throat, but I could feel Nura giving me a perplexed look.
“Ascended, Max. What was that?”
“What?”
“I’ve known you for twenty years. Don’t insult me.”
I dragged my gaze back to her. Ilyzath’s vision was gone, but then again, I didn’t need any magical prisons putting nightmares in my head to conjure that particular image. It wasn’t imaginary, after all. It was a memory.
“Nothing,” I said. “I’m tired.”
She didn’t believe me, and we both knew it. But so much of my relationship with Nura had been built on deliberately avoiding unspoken truths. And so she didn’t press, instead reaching into her pocket and pulling out a little velvet pouch.
“Here,” she said. “I found something for you.”
After a surprised pause, I took the pouch. It was old, the burgundy fabric worn and crushed. I opened it and extracted the contents, and my throat was suddenly tight.
“This is yours,” I said.
I frowned down at the fine piece of metal in my palm, a delicate silver necklace with a single gemstone charm. It looked like a shard of crystalized ice, all hard angles and sharp edges, with flecks of red distilled within it. Morrigan’s Ice, a rare gem from the south.
It had been my mother’s.
“You should have it,” Nura said.
“She gave it to you.”
“A lot has changed since then.” A flicker crossed her face, hidden beneath a wry smile. “She probably would want you to have it now. And besides, I haven’t… worn it in a long time. You should save it for your daughter one day.”
I was silent.
I could still remember so vividly the day that my mother had given Nura this. We were teenagers, home for a few weeks on leave. It was the first time we returned to find that Nura’s grandmother no longer remembered her name. Nura hadn’t said a word about it, no matter how much I pried, but I knew it devastated her to lose the only family she had left. We had been about to leave for the Towers again when my mother had pulled Nura aside and pressed the necklace into her hands.
“This has been in my family for hundreds of years,” she said, “passed from mothers to daughters. Morrigan’s Ice is created in some of the most inhospitable places in the world. It could have been refined into something more traditional, but I’ve always loved that this one is unfinished.” She gave Nura a barely-there smile. “I think there is a beauty in that, don’t you? In being a little different. A little sharper.”
I had never seen Nura cry before, and that day had been no exception. But I could tell that she had to try hard to avoid it, blinking a little too fast, her words rough. “I can’t take this. Give it to Marisca or Shailia or—”
“I think it suits you,” my mother had said, gently, and Nura went silent for a long, long moment before pulling her into a fierce embrace.
It was only later, when we bid our final goodbyes, that my mother had taken me aside. “Keep an eye on her,” she had murmured. “She needs us, that one.”
At the time, I had attributed that to my mother’s kind affection for a lonely, orphaned girl. But now I looked back and wondered if perhaps there was something else my mother saw in Nura. If she saw what she might become, if left alone to bloom in the darkness.
Now I looked down at the necklace and heard my mother’s words.
Despite it all, it didn’t seem right to take it from her. In all the ways that counted, she lost her family that day too. Perhaps this was the only thing left tethering her to them. Hell, maybe she wanted to get
rid of it because it so reminded her of them. I understood that, in a twisted sort of way.
I put it back in the pouch and handed it to her.
“It’s yours. I don’t want it anyway.”
Nura hesitated.
“Really,” I said. “I don’t.”
She reluctantly slid it back into her pocket, her gaze still searching my face.
“I heard that you and Tisaanah took a trip to Ilyzath,” she said, quietly.
I scoffed. “Keeping track of me?”
“It just seemed out of character for you to step foot in that place.”
“We had some questions that needed answering. That’s all.”
“Vardir is insane. Too insane to answer many questions.”
A breath through my teeth. “That he is,” I muttered. The frustration of it still hadn’t eased. If he didn’t have answers, I wasn’t sure who would.
“Be patient, Max,” Nura murmured. “She’ll make it out of this. It just takes time.”
Be patient. What was that supposed to mean? We didn’t have time for that. We didn’t have time for any of this.
But before the words could leave my mouth, a voice cut through the air.
“General Farlione!”
I turned to see Zeryth striding towards us. He looked even worse than he did when I saw him a few days ago, but more terrifying than that was the sheer rage on his face. Something metal glinted in his hand.
When he drew close enough for me to see what it was, my heart stopped.
It was a necklace. A necklace of butterflies.
“We have a very big problem,” Zeryth said.
Chapter Forty
Tisaanah
I dreamt of a wall of black. It was slick, like glass or wet stone, and stretched across my entire vision. There was a silhouette reflected there, one that never quite came into focus, not even when I came close enough to press my palm to its surface.
Someone was calling to me, using a name I did not remember, speaking in a language I did not understand. A ghost that remained forever out of reach.
Children of Fallen Gods (The War of Lost Hearts Book 2) Page 28