by Alex Raizman
“It wasn’t supposed to what?” Tythel demanded.
“It wasn’t supposed to hit!” The words came out in a frantic rush. “Light and Shadow take you, she’s my sister, and I wasn’t trying to injure her!”
Tythel stared at Leora in shock. Silence fell on the valley in the wake of Leora’s exclamation, silence that was finally broken by the sound of soft footsteps. Eupheme was approaching. “Move, your highness,” Eupheme said between pained gasps. The dagger was still wedged in her hand, but a new one had been drawn in the uninjured limb. “I’m going to end this monster’s miserable life.”
“Eupheme…” Leora said. Tears were starting to stream down her face now, tears that even the injuries Tythel had done to her couldn’t cause.
“I’ll make it quick,” Eupheme said. “I owe you that much, Leora.”
Tythel shook her head. “Don’t.”
“Don’t?” Eupheme asked, stopping in her tracks. “Tythel, she betrayed the order. It’s not for you to kill her. That duty falls to me.”
“Eupheme,” Tythel said, choosing her words carefully. “Catheon came to kill me because I killed Rephylon, who he thought of as his father. Nicandros abandoned me because I killed Tomah. I fight the Alohym because I want vengeance for my father. And this…this is your sister.”
“My sister,” Eupheme said numbly, “is dead. I’m just killing the thing that poisons every memory of her.”
Leora’s tears were flowing freely. “I did it…”
“Quiet,” Eupheme said. “I told you, I don’t care. Tythel…don’t put yourself in the middle of this.”
Tythel’s lips tightened as her mind raced. “Is there a way to stop her from stepping into the Shadow?”
“A drug,” Eupheme said. “It numbs our ability to sense the other side.”
“Do you have any?”
Eupheme nodded.
“Give it to her,” Tythel said. “We need….she’s the last one alive. We need to know what she knows.”
“And then?” Eupheme asked.
“And then I leave you to decide her fate,” Tythel said. She had no right to deny Eupheme vengeance, if vengeance was what Eupheme wanted. But she owed her friend a chance to think through what she was doing before she killed the last remaining member of her family.
Eupheme considered for a moment, then stuck the dagger into the ground. “As you wish, your highness.” She pulled out a vial and walked over to Leora. “Open your mouth.”
Leora did. Tythel and Eupheme both watched her throat to make sure she swallowed.
Eupheme produced a rope from under her cloak and started to bind Leora’s hands to her feet. “Where’s Tellias?” she asked.
Tythel stood up. The motion made her head spin, and she could feel the blood running down her back. If Leora’s dagger had gone any deeper, she would have punctured a lung, maybe even Tythel’s heart. Just a bit longer, she thought. Just a bit longer, and then you can get that dealt with. “I saw him by the lake. He killed the lumcaster. I’m going to go…I’m going to go find him. You all right?”
Eupheme didn’t look at Tythel. Her eyes were locked on her sister’s. “I will be,” she said, her voice quiet. “Thank you.”
Tythel whispered a welcome and began to walk towards where she had seen Tellias. Silently, she begged the Light that he would still be alive when she got there.
Chapter 55
Tythel found Tellias on the banks of the lake. The mud he was laying in had turned black from being soaked in his blood, and it was beginning to soak into the water. Tythel rushed towards him, her heart pounding so hard it threatened to burst out of her chest. “Please, no. Not another one. Not him.” she said. She wasn’t sure who she was begging for him to be alive. The Light, the Shadow, the Cosmos themselves. Anyone or anything who would listen.
No one answered her.
Tellias wasn’t moving. Tythel knelt next to him, her nictitating membrane flashing. It was a reflex from the early days of her transformation. Dragons didn’t have tear ducts, and her transformation had gone to the point where she had no tears to cry.
So she expressed grief the way she’d seen her father show it. She tilted back her head and let out a roar of anguish. The sound was distinctly draconic, a low rumble that built to a sound like blocks of granite being rubbed together, slowly increasing in pitch from there until it blended into a shriek. Birds erupted from trees, moles fled to their burrows, and even the insects fell silent at the sound. In the aftermath of her cry, the entire valley was silent.
And it was only in that silence she could hear the faint sound of his heartbeat, far too faint to be heard normally.
“Tellias!” Tythel exclaimed, hope rising in her chest. She pulled the face mask of his armor, wrenching the damaged plate away with brute strength. I’m not too late, I’m not too late. I’ve got him, I’ve got here in time, I’ve-
The sight of Tellias strangled that hope. Red streaks ran from his mouth, nose, and ears. His head had tilted to the side, which had spared him from drowning in his own blood, but it let her see the side of his temple. It was curved inwards. Shards of bone had to have been driven into his brain. He was alive in the most technical sense of the term, but only because his heart still beat, and his lungs still drew air.
She’d seen injuries like this before, in the aftermath of battles. They were, in some ways, worse than death. His body would linger for days until he starved to death. If they got a hold of the Alohym’s technology, the same ones that had allowed her to survive after that first fight with Tomah, the machines that put tubes into arms and provided nutrients, that could be extended to weeks, maybe even months or years. She’d even heard rumors there were some the Alohym had kept alive from the initial war, now seventeen years past. Their bodies were withered with disuse and they looked like little more skeletons, but they still lived.
Not even rumors suggested those had ever reawakened. Tellias would not return. His body was nothing more than an empty vessel. Or worse – there were some who believed that his soul would still be trapped in his body like this, that it would not go to the Shadow until his body fully failed.
If she still had tears to cry, she would have wept.
Eupheme appeared behind her. “Leora’s bound. We’ve got a day before more of the drug is needed, and with her injuries I don’t think…she’ll…escape…” Eupheme’s words trailed off as she saw Tellias’s injuries. “Light and shadow,” she whispered hoarsely.
Tythel couldn’t respond. Even her own injuries seemed a remote and distant thing right now. “He asked to court me,” Tythel whispered, finally breaking the silence. “Right before we left to come here. He said I was fierce and beautiful and wonderful and that…” Tythel’s voice broke, and she had to swallow a lump to continue. “I told him no. I told him…dragons don’t love the way humans do. Not…not when it comes to romance.”
Eupheme knelt behind Tythel, beginning to work on bandaging the still bleeding wound between her wings. “Was that the truth?”
Tythel nodded miserably. “I still…I should have-”
“No,” Eupheme said. The word was an odd combination of tender and firm, friendly and strict. “That would have been worse. What you did was honest. Hard, but honest.”
“If I had, though…he would have…”
Eupheme pulled hard on the bandage. The sudden pressure cut Tythel off with a hiss of pain. “Tythel, listen to me,” Eupheme said. Her words were as firm and as sure as her hands. “A lie to protect someone from a painful truth is far more cruel than honesty could ever be. You wouldn’t have spared him any injury if you’d told him a lie, you just would have set him up for more pain later. It would have broken his heart to learn the truth – that you’d never be able to love him back the way he wanted – if he’d had time to fall in love with you. Instead, you spared him that, and hopefully set him down a path where those feelings could have turned into loving you as a friend, or a comrade-in-arms, and eventually as his Queen. You saved him from
that anguish.”
“But…” Tythel choked on the words. “Eupheme, he’s gone. You don’t recover from injuries like that. Even a Lumcaster…they’d have to use so much Light that it would turn him into one of those monsters that guards the Lumwells.”
“Does Heartflame create monsters?” Eupheme asked.
Anger rose unbidden, and Tythel snarled the next words. “I don’t know how to use Heartflame. I can’t help him.”
“Not yet.” If Tythel’s anger got through to Eupheme, she didn’t show it in the slightest. “But you learned Ghostflame to defeat Rephylon. You grew wings to survive Catheon. You will learn Heartflame. This is a lingering wound. We have the Skitterer. We’ll get him back to town. We’ll put him in in the care of someone with the Alohym tools. They’ll keep him alive. They can keep him alive for years. And then, when you learn Heartflame, you’ll return, and you’ll restore him. But that only happens if we start moving now. If we don’t get him care soon, his brain will swell with fluids and he’ll die.” Eupheme tied off the bandage. “So…can you move?”
Tythel was tired. She was so tired, and in so much pain. She wanted to lay on the grass and sleep for the next decade.
But Eupheme had given her real hope. And hope is more powerful than fear or love or anger or hate when it comes to finding strength you’d thought depleted.
“Do you have an arccell?” Tythel asked.
Eupheme handed her one. Carefully, Tythel drew a thin line along it with her talon. Light began to leak out of the crack, and Tythel dropped it in the armor. It wouldn’t contain enough to mutate Tellias, and it certainly wouldn’t contain enough to revive him, but it would stabilize him enough to survive the journey. “Stay with him. Scavengers still dwell here, and they might come if we leave him alone. I’ll go get the-”
“You stay with him,” Eupheme said, cutting her off. “I’ll go get the Skitterer and Leora. You stay here.” She stood up and gave Tythel a tired smile. “After all…what is better for scaring off scavengers than a dragon?”
Tythel’s eye flickered in appreciation, and Eupheme vanished into a nearby shadow.
Now, there was nothing to do by wait and hope.
Chapter 56
Edgeminster swarmed with the Alohym’s troops. Nicandros scowled at them. It had been almost a day since Poz had escaped him, and so far there was no sign of Underfolk. At this point, it was very likely he’d fled the town completely. You damn fool, Nicandros growled to himself. If Poz had just given him the egg, he could have let Poz walk away. The Alohym would have what they wanted, and wouldn’t have cared about the fate of a single Underfolk.
But no. Poz had felt the need to lead him on a wild chase throughout the town and vanish. Now, if he was still in Edgeminster, there was nothing he Nicandros could do to save him when the Alohym found him.
Don’t say nothing, Nicandros thought. There was still a hope that he could find Poz first. Get the egg, let Poz escape. He didn’t need to die for this.
“You seem concerned, Nicandros,” a buzzing voice said beside him. “Are you worried that one measly little Underfolk could escape us?”
Nicandros shot the speaker a look. He knew what to expect – a form that blended Alohym and human. She called herself Ashliel, and claimed to be the half-human daughter of an Alohym named Daemryon. Nicandros didn’t know what to make of that, but given that Tythel had thought of herself as the daughter of a dragon, it wasn’t the strangest notion. Is there a human under that somewhere? The Alohym were being maddeningly stingy with information. It was almost like they didn’t trust him.
Which shouldn’t be galling. He had every intention of betraying them the moment he had Thomah back. But they shouldn’t be aware of that.
“Girl, there’s nothing measly about Poz. You underestimate him at your own peril. Or did he not lead you on a chase halfway across the continent.”
Ashliel buzzed in displeasure. “Have a care, Nicandros. You serve us, but your leash is short. You’ve yet to prove that you can be useful.”
“I’ve been dodging you people since before you were born. You want me to think like a rebel, and that’s what I’m doing. Nothing in our deal said I had to put up with mealy mouthed girls making vague threats. I had enough of that from Tythel.”
“You…aren’t like most men I interact with. Most bow and scrape at my mere words.”
“Most of them think your father is a god. They liken you and your siblings to the godlings we had before.” Nicandros shrugged. “I’ve seen gods die. I’ve seen godlings die. I’ve seen Alohym die. I don’t think anything can’t be killed. Makes it hard to be overimpressed by anything. Flath me sideways, you couldn’t even catch Poz when he was in Grubflesh.”
Ashliel whirled and closed the gap between her and Nicandros, leaving only a fraction of an inch between her mandibles and his face. Black liquid dripped from her jaws. “You are bound not to speak of that, human.”
“That wasn’t part of our deal,” Nicandros said levelly. The truth was he felt a shiver of fear down his spine from her implied threat. Ashliel was nearly as tough as an Alohym, and could move like lightning. From this distance, she’d have no problem gutting him.
But that would make her ‘father’ unhappy, and gave him a measure of protection.
“I’m willing to make a new deal,” he said.
“And what do you want in exchange for your silence?” Ashliel asked. Even with the buzzing in her voice, Nicandros knew the sullen tone of a teenager sulking. He’d heard it enough of his life to be able to place it even through alien tone.
Opportunity rarely presented itself so well. “If he can be taken alive, I want Poz alive. I have a fondness for him from the old days, and I don’t want to see him die needlessly.”
Ashliel’s wings twitched. “I can only promise to take that to my father,” she admitted. “The Underfolk are…problematic.”
Nicandros’ eyebrows raised. “Oh? And why’s that?”
Before she could answer, an Alohym soldier ran up. “Sir! Ma’am! We’ve found something.”
“What is it?” Ashliel asked.
The soldier pointed up a nearby bell tower. “Some kind of organic residue, ma’am. It looks like a cocoon.”
Nicandros swore. “Ashliel, you need to take me up there.”
“You don’t give orders-”
“Please, pride later. The sooner we see what’s in there, the sooner I can tell you what kind of flesh Poz has eaten, and what he can do with that. It could be vital for catching him.”
Ashliel clicked her mandibles in irritation, but turned her scythe-like arms back into hands and scooped them under Nicandros armpits. “Have a care how you speak with me in front of the men. It doesn’t do for them to see mortal speak back to gods,” she said as they took off. Ashliel was moving at a more sedate speed, something that wouldn’t blind Nicandros as they flew.
“Why does it matter, girl?” Nicandros said. “He knows you could gut him in an instant, or blast him with unlight, and the most he could do is give you an earache with his screams. So what if he sees me get mouthy?”
“There is a system to how we handle things. There is a way things work. You…wouldn’t understand. You’ve been on the other side for so long, I can’t imagine you’d possibly understand. But you will learn. After all, Tomah did.”
Nicandros went cold at the name. “How dare you speak of him?”
Ashliel scoffed. “Nicandros. You know so little. Let’s just not say it was an accident I was chosen for this mission.”
He twisted to glare at her, and Ashliel sighed. Her voice lowered a bit so she was whispering the words in his ear. “I was chosen because you’re not the only one with an interest in seeing Tomah returned to the land of the living. I knew your son, Nicandros.”