Runebinder
Page 26
He ate. And while he did, he couldn’t help but feed the tiny flame of hope that fluttered inside of him. Jarrett might still be alive. Jarrett might be waiting for him.
And Tenn was going to do anything he could to get him back.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
DREYA CAME IN only once more, Devon at her side.
Tenn had drifted in and out of uneasy sleep. It wasn’t nightmares that plagued him, but memories of Jarrett—some real, some imagined. Dreams that stuck with him even when he woke, so that every time he opened his eyes he felt the man beside him. In his cold sweat, he felt the absence like an ache.
Dreya had Tenn recount everything he’d seen and everything Matthias had said. Devon said nothing when Tenn was finished, but he shared a look with his sister that spoke volumes.
It was clear that neither of them believed Matthias.
It was also clear that neither could risk the chance it was true.
“We’ve spoken with the Witches,” Dreya said. “With Rhiannon and Luke gone, there is no one else to teach about the runes.”
Tenn’s heart sank.
“So what do we do?” he asked.
Again, the twins shared a look, though brief.
“There is a way,” Dreya said. She took a deep breath. “Rhiannon said the spirits wanted to speak through you. If that is the case, we should bring you to a place where you can meet them.”
“How?”
“You can find out. Tonight.”
* * *
The bonfire was ready at dusk.
Dreya came and helped him from his bed. He’d spent the afternoon sleeping fitfully, and every time he’d opened his eyes there had been fresh warm food on the bedside table. Every time, he’d eaten the whole meal. Even then, however, he leaned heavily on Dreya. His heart hammered in his chest as she led him out the trailer and into the cold evening air.
He was scared.
He didn’t want to admit it, not even to himself, but his fear was a living thing, a rabbit chasing through his veins.
It was one thing to be at the mercy of Water, or to be told he was important. It was another thing entirely to be told you were going to speak to the powers that created you.
The world outside was quiet, save for the crackle of flames. Everyone in the clan had assembled around the bonfire, firelight making them all glow orange and red in the coming dusk. Their expressions were solemn, expectant. He wasn’t the only one worried about what he’d find.
Dreya silently led him to a space beside the bonfire, to where a few blankets had been laid out on the ground. Room enough for one. For him. Dreya went and stood by her brother.
Mara stood beside the blanket. She gestured for Tenn to lie down, and then picked up a bundle of herbs resting beside the blanket. She thrust them into the flames and, once they’d caught, blew out the fire. Heavy smoke wafted from the incense. It smelled of sage and cedar, and with it she began to walk around the fire, leaving Tenn to stand awkwardly on his own.
“We call to the spirits,” she said as she walked, “to the Ancestors and gods. We call to the earth, to the sky, to the flame and the streams. We call to the Mystery that binds us all, hear us!” When she reached Tenn again, she wafted the fragrant smoke over him, from his toes to the top of his head. The scent made his head spin. Inside, he felt the Spheres flicker in response, the smoke pulling some magic out of him he hadn’t known he possessed.
“With this smoke I purify you,” she said. “In body, mind and spirit, you are clean.”
If only it were that easy.
She drew the smoke about her, smudging herself, and then raised her hands to the heavens.
“On this night, we call to you and beg for your guidance. Like a fire in the dark, we seek to bring light to this world. Let us be the flame, the star. Let us be the way to wholeness.” She swept her arms down and looked at her clan, then gestured to the blanket on the ground. He just stared at her before realizing she wanted him to lie down. He did so, staring up at her as she continued waving the smoke over his body.
She knelt by his side and placed the herbs on a patch of dirt, then whispered in his ear, “Close your eyes, Tenn, and let the drums guide you. Delve deep into the earth, to where the Ancestors sleep. They will guide you from there.”
For the briefest moment, she rested her hand on his temple, the lightest butterfly of a touch. Then she stood.
The drumming began.
It reverberated in his bones, made his whole body vibrate. It was a pulse, a heartbeat, the very hum of life. He had worried he wouldn’t know what to do, that this was all some smoke-and-mirrors bullshit, but the moment the drumming started, he felt himself fall. His body became heavy. His Spheres flared into life. And like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole, he felt his consciousness sliding into the soil.
Stars streaked across his closed eyes as the tunnel took him deeper, deeper, his mind or spirit or whatever it was riding the beat of the drums like a horse into the underworld.
The tunnel seemed to stretch on forever, and soon he forgot that he was actually lying on the ground beside a bonfire. It was like a dream, that world, and it slid from his mind as another reality woke him.
After an eternity, or no time at all, the tunnel opened before him. He stepped into a cavern that glowed white as snow, light coming from every crystalline surface. Water swirled at his feet, but it wasn’t cold or warm or wet. It had a presence, a vibration like static, and it made his whole body hum. He looked around at the vast expanse, at the great stalactites dripping down from a ceiling that glowed the dull gray of a wintry night sky. Something splashed at his feet, a ripple that drew his gaze down to the shimmering waters.
A tiny fish swam against his calves, its scales glinting silver and light. He knelt down. The fish didn’t swim away, and in that moment he realized the fish wasn’t reflecting light, but creating it. The creature glowed like a platinum star.
He reached into the water. It felt like sifting through electrified smoke. He cupped his hands.
The fish swam between his fingertips. It tingled, sent chimes flurrying across his skin. Its light grew.
Light spiraled through his arms, twisted around his chest. He felt his skin dissolve, his body unraveling into tendrils of radiance as he floated, hovering above the water in a cave that was more than a cave. It was a body, a womb, a heart.
He looked down to the water that shone like a mirror, at the fish that was a constellation of stars. He saw his reflection as fluid as smoke, as luminescent as moonlight. It glimmered like a thousand dancing fireflies.
It changed.
The face that stared back was no longer his. The waters now showed a boy his age, a boy with burnt hair and rings in his lower lip. His eyes breathed galaxies, a thousand suns whirling like the lights that swam across the water’s surface.
Tenn reached out to touch the boy and felt the entire earth hum with need. Find him, find him, and for a moment, he forgot himself, why he’d come there, all of it replaced by the one need to reach out and touch this boy he had never seen. But that movement caused the water to ripple, and the boy’s face vanished in the dust of stars.
How do I find him? Tenn asked, or thought he asked.
The lights kept moving, tracing patterns over the water, tracing a pattern that burned into his mind. Over and over the lights moved, the runes glowing so bright it was blinding. Nearly a dozen of them, each thick with meaning but becoming so much more in sequence. He could barely keep up with them. Could barely figure out their meaning as they flashed over and over—he caught only whispers, only traces of meaning, and he prayed that recognition was enough. They filled him, burst through his senses—the rush of vertigo, the thunder of hoofbeats, the exhilaration of wind in his hair and the horizon opening, opening, expanding and contracting as he sped to meet the ri
sing sun. The sun burned through him, the runes seared to memory. Light was everything, everything, light and movement and an ecstatic, shimmering truth.
Find him, the spirits sang. Find him and be whole. Find him and make the world whole.
Then he felt the drumbeat change.
He didn’t hear it, but he felt it. It tugged at his bones, pulled him up by the scruff of his neck. Like a puppet on a string, the drumbeat dragged him away, light fading as the tunnel reappeared, whirling around him in shadows and tremors of sound. All of it vibrating, vibrating, a second heart to echo his own. The tunnel went dark. And, like a diver bursting from the tide, Tenn broke back into the world of firelight and sound.
He sucked in a deep mouthful of air, his whole back arched as though possessed. One inhalation, and he fell back to the earth. His body was weak, spent, like it had been inhabited by something else, something that had used him up and left him lying in the dirt beside the fire. But he felt good. Ecstatic. The power was faint, but the light of the cave still hummed in his veins.
The drumming shook and fell apart, cascaded into a cavalcade of beats that faded to the hiss of rattles. Then silence. The crackle of fire.
Mara was at his side, one hand on his shoulder, the other holding a rattle of bone and rawhide. Her eyes were shadowed, expectant. He could only lie there, staring up at a sky that was uncannily clear, the stars above mirroring the cosmos in his mind.
“Welcome home,” she said. Then she stood.
Tenn couldn’t pay attention to the words she spoke next, only caught snippets of “thanks” and “gratitude.” He spun with ecstasy, weighted to the world that slipped and swam beneath him. Holding on to the memory of the vision was harder than holding fast to a dream. Like the fish, it slipped between his fingertips, shining and beckoning and impossible to grasp.
The rest of the Witches dispersed. He knew it, dimly. But he was too busy spinning in the vision. The runes. And the boy. And the need.
“What did you see?” Dreya asked. When had she knelt beside him?
“Runes,” he whispered. “For travel. They need Earth and Air to work, but they will take us...” He almost said to Jarrett but faltered. “They’ll take us to Leanna. To wherever we need to go.”
“That is all?” Dreya asked. She almost sounded disappointed.
He nodded. For some reason, he didn’t want to mention the boy. Not out of shame or fear, but because something about the vision felt intensely private. Not even he understood it, and voicing it to the world felt sacrilegious. Besides, he already had a guy to search for. Jarrett was out there. Waiting for him.
“Then we should be off soon,” Dreya said. “If you are strong enough.”
“I have to be,” Tenn said. He pushed himself to standing and did his best not to waver. “We leave tonight.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
THEY WERE READY within the hour. There wasn’t much to pack—just extra rations and layers of clothing. Tenn sat by the fire for most of the preparations, staring into the flames and watching the runes flash over and over again in his mind. With every trace, he felt his understanding shift deeper, as though it were slowly sifting away layers of confusion. He knew the runes would transport them wherever they desired. He knew they needed Earth for grounding, Air for speed. And he knew they were a power the world hadn’t seen in hundreds of years, a language the gods had long ago stopped speaking. The weight of that knowledge settled on his shoulders with every crackle of the bonfire. Once more, he was entrusted with something he had no right to possess. What made him worthy of this knowledge? Why was he the one the spirits or gods were entrusting with their secrets?
And perhaps most important, would it be enough to save Jarrett?
One must be godlike...
At the moment, he felt terribly small.
“How does this work?” Dreya asked when they were ready. She had a small bag on her back, and wore a necklace with the symbol he’d seen above Rhiannon’s door, the seven-pointed star within a horned moon. He didn’t ask how she’d come across it.
Dreya’s was a question he barely had an answer to. Each of the dozen or so runes and symbols from the vision had a meaning. Each layered atop each other to create a sentence, a spell. In a way, he had whispers of meaning from each rune. But he didn’t know the individual powers, just as he didn’t fully grasp the individual meanings of the runes he used in the protection circles. He just knew they worked as a whole.
Until he had time to experiment, that would have to be enough.
Thankfully, his time in the vision, or whatever it was, gave him enough of a hunch on how to use the runes.
“I need you to channel Air into the runes. Each of you. It will only carry someone using the magic that fuels it. That’s it.”
They nodded.
“Ready?”
Another nod. That was enough for him.
He knelt and traced the runes into the cooler ashes by the fire, let the grit sift around his fingertip. There was a small voice in the back of his head screaming that he was getting it wrong, that he needed to give up now, that there was no way he was the one meant to channel this power. But with every rune, the voice grew weaker and the hum of power in his head grew stronger. Every scratch of his finger, and resolution grew. When the runes were completed, he looked up to the twins. They stared at the runes with...trepidation? It didn’t help his confidence.
He pressed his hand to the center of the runes and opened to Earth.
Magic swirled through him, blossomed from his fingertips and twined around the ash, billowing and fluttering like a butterfly, a fold in the fabric of the world.
“Now,” he said. The twins opened to Air.
The runes exploded in light and ash, funneled up and around the three of them in a cocoon of soot and wind and brilliance. The world shifted, swirled, sank. Power was everything.
Then the cocoon collapsed around them, and the trailers vanished to light and the sound of hoofbeats.
* * *
When the dust cleared, they were no longer in the Midwest.
Mountains rose on all sides, peaks silhouetted in dark blue and starlight. The moon was hidden, but the stars were bright enough to see by, glittering off snow that blanketed every rise and sweep. Light bloomed in the valley below them. Violent. Orange. Electric.
Leanna’s compound glowed and smoked in the night. The sight of it made Tenn’s head whirl. It looked so...out of place. The streetlamps, the swept streets, the houses with their plumes of smoke. Exactly like before the Resurrection, save for the wall that surrounded the city and the warren of ramshackle houses splayed about just within the perimeter.
“It worked,” Dreya said. Her voice was breathless, thin in the mountain air. Tenn glanced at her. She stared with wide eyes at the city below them. It looked like the way life once was, a city of life and energy and sound. Yet every human in there served the Dark Lady, willingly or not. It wasn’t like the Farms he’d seen in the Midwest. Those had just been giant kennels for holding human livestock. This was almost worse. Here, the Howls and necromancers feeding on the innocent lived in the same pen.
“Yeah,” Tenn whispered. “It worked.” He had no other words. He still felt the magic swirling within him, the runes an after-trace in his vision. He was too preoccupied with finding Jarrett to be surprised by his own skill.
“What...what do we do now?” It wasn’t Dreya who asked, but Devon. He stared down at the compound with narrowed eyes. His voice was tight, and even though he wasn’t using Fire, Tenn could practically feel the impatience in him, the need to avenge. Tenn felt it, too.
“It could be a trap,” Tenn said. “Matthias might have been lying, just trying to get me to come here. I don’t want you two to be in danger if that’s the case.”
“But we are already here—” Dreya began.
The twins shared a long, silent look. Fire flickered in Devon’s chest, just the slightest flare, and Tenn fully expected him to speak out.
“Do you propose we just sit and watch you, then?” Dreya asked when she looked back to him.
“Of course not,” Tenn said. “Once I get Jarrett, you’re in charge of getting us out. I’ll need a distraction. And everyone down there is going to need a rescue.”
“Just like with the Witches,” Devon said. There was a level of hurt in his eyes. Tenn didn’t blame him. They didn’t want to sit around and watch the show. They wanted to be in the ring. He wasn’t the only one trying to avenge his bloody past.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t risk you two getting hurt. You’re more valuable alive and out here. Besides, I don’t know anyone else whose magic can reach as far as yours.”
He caught Dreya rolling her eyes, but she didn’t fend off his lame attempt at pacifying them. There was logic in his words, even if their desire for revenge was stronger.
“What happens then?” Dreya asked. “When the prisoners are freed? No one has successfully overthrown a compound before. Ever. What chance do we three have?”
“No one has had the runes,” Tenn said. He hoped it was the truth, that the small advantage was enough. If he thought about the fact that he only had a handful of runes, ones for hiding and travel, the task seemed even more dire. His plan had worked on the necromancers, but this? Matthias may have been powerful, but he didn’t hold a candle to the Kin.
“How will we know you have succeeded?” Dreya asked.
Tenn shrugged. They were too far away for Earth to reach like last time. Which meant there was only one way to show that he had Jarrett, and was safe.