“How?”
A moment of total silence. At this late hour, even the inn was silent; they might have been the only ones awake. At last Rayen said, softly, “I was beating her.”
Rianna swallowed. “Beating her.” She thought of Lin’s slight frame, her hollowed eyes.
“I know,” he said, as if he could read the muddle of her thoughts. “There is nothing to say. All I can do now is find her and try to make it up to her, if I can. Give her the share of our inheritance that is hers, at the very least. She deserves more than that, but what can I do?” He ran his hands through his hair, hid his face from her. “What can I do.”
Rianna thought he sounded lost, as if for all his decisiveness and commanding manner, he was still a bewildered boy underneath. A boy whose parents had died, she recalled now, when he was very young.
She dared now to approach him, to rest her hand on his arm. He did not move, or lift his head. She said, “You have always been so gentle with me. I don’t understand.”
He laughed, though it sounded more like a sob, wry and twisted. “Someone like you—as beautiful as you—could never understand,” he said. “It is simple enough, I suppose. There was a girl that I loved. Loved very much. She had hair like yours. A smile like yours, though in truth, she was not as beautiful. Soon after my parents died, so did she. One morning she simply—didn’t wake up. Gone just like that.” He lifted his head now to meet her eyes. His eyes seemed very large, very dark by candlelight. “Some men use grief to fuel their efforts to do good,” he said. “I—I retreated into violence. That says something about me, doesn’t it?” He shook his head, back and forth. “Poor Lin, with a monster for a brother.”
“I don’t think you’re a monster,” said Rianna. She felt a warmth spreading through her, from her hand on his arm to all of her, and she longed to wrap her arms around him. Still she held back, thoughts suspended, her heart a rattling beat in her chest.
Rayen’s voice caught in his throat as he said, “Rianna—you make me want to be better.”
When they kissed, Rianna felt the tears on his face. Wave after wave of warmth ran through her, so that she felt, when his hands reached for the fastenings of her dress, as if the waves had crashed over her and left her no choice.
* * *
THE first thing she noticed, when she awoke, was the ache that remained of what had been slicing agony the night before, pain like she had never experienced it, at the core of her. She could feel, still, the sliding wet of blood and of him, seeping from her and onto the bedsheets. An irrevocable change, she realized, not for the first time. It had been exciting as well as frightening that night. Now it was simply frightening.
“Rayen?” she called softly.
The room was empty. She saw that at once. All his belongings were gone. Aware now of her nakedness as if it were an injury, Rianna swathed herself in the coverlet and stepped gingerly out of bed. “Rayen?”
The answering silence was louder in her ears than an answer would have been.
There was a note on the chair beside the bed. Her hands felt numb, as if frozen, and trembled as she opened it. She read,
And at the end what pleases me most is that you succumbed to me not before, but after I told you what I had done. That you gave me love after I revealed myself at my most heinous. That shall ever be my triumph, dear Rianna.
However, unfortunately for you, I spoke the truth. That part, at least, was true.
It was unsigned. But then, there was no need.
A knock at the door. Hardly knowing what she did, Rianna unlocked it, the coverlet slipping from her shoulders and trailing on the floor. If it had been one of the men from downstairs intent on raping her, or an outlaw, she did not think she would have cared.
It was Ned.
CHAPTER
26
CLOUDS obscured the moon the night they escaped Academy Isle; the scissors of low-hanging branches clawed their faces in the dark. But they had one advantage: Lin knew these woods. In this cold, forbidding forest she had returned to her home. In the dark, she reached for Darien’s hand and found it, murmuring, “Stay close to me.”
He did not object. He was still in shock, she knew, from the news of Hassen, and that he himself had killed a man.
They had set the boat adrift after they disembarked, to frustrate their pursuers for a little time.
A curse will fall upon you. The poet who had uttered those words possessed a deep, resonant voice that had echoed in the caverns beneath the castle. That echoed now in Lin’s mind.
When they reached a grove, wind whistling through branches, she said, “We’ll stop here for the night.”
“How do we know they won’t find us here?” Darien said. He was out of breath.
Lin sighed. “We don’t. But they’re blundering in the dark. They won’t move quickly through these trees. We dare not make our way further in this dark, in any case. We could end up going in circles, run right into them.”
Darien sank to the ground. “I don’t think I can sleep.”
“Just as well,” said Lin. She drew her knife. “We’ll need to be ready for them, in case.” She saw that in spite of his cloak, Darien was shivering. “If you like,” she said, “we can sit with our backs together, for warmth.”
His response was a curt nod. Lin dropped to the ground and sat with her back against his, as she had sometimes done with Alyn—as she had even done with Rayen, when they were on the hunt together. A moment passed as Darien allowed himself to be warmed by the contact, his breath to slow. At last he said, quietly, “What are we going to do now?”
Near as he was, Lin felt powerless to reassure him.
She must have dozed, because when she opened her eyes pale dawn was seeping through the evergreen canopy above. Lin straightened, her hand tightening on the handle of her knife, but all she heard was the chittering of birds. The chill air was rich with the scent of pine and morning dew. Darien was awake and studying one of the pages from Valanir Ocune’s box. When she stirred, he glanced at her and said, “Good morning.” He sounded weary. “I hope that wasn’t your idea of keeping watch.”
Lin flushed. “It wasn’t.” Stretching, she clambered to her feet. Her muscles were cramped and sore. “I’ll find us breakfast,” she said, “and then we had best keep going.”
“What do I do,” Darien said dryly, “if the guards come while you’re off killing rabbits? Yell a warning?”
“Something like that,” she said. “I’ll be fast.” Once, I was a hunter, she thought, an echo of her mother’s voice. Here in the woods near home, even the wind seemed to whisper in the tones of those she had known and lost.
“Lin, where do we go now?” Darien said, a note of desperation in his voice. “Guards are swarming the Academy—we can’t do what Valanir Ocune bade us do. We can’t get to the Path now. And we can’t … we can’t return to Tamryllin.”
“Maybe it was never meant for us to find the Path, to recover the enchantments,” said Lin. “Maybe Valanir will realize that now, and find another way.”
“Or maybe there is no other way,” said Darien. “Maybe whatever happens from now on—the darkness, the destruction of our land—will be because we failed.”
Lin touched his shoulder, felt it rigid under her fingers. “I’m sorry,” she said. She was cold inside. It will soon be over. What happened now seemed the logical conclusion to what had begun nearly a year ago, the winter she had fled her home. All that had befallen in between—Leander Keyen, Tamryllin, Valanir Ocune—was a bright interlude of seeming purpose, leading to this moment. Leading to nothing.
In her heart, Lin had always known she was destined for darkness. There was a flaw in her, or in the blood that had gone into her, that no amount of running would escape. No amount of journeying through portals, even with the greatest Seer of their age. But she could feel for Darien Aldemoor, whose life had once seemed like a golden ballad unfolding. That loss, Lin thought, she could grieve.
* * *
IT was when they halted by a stream to refill their flasks that they saw him. A guardsman, bent over the water for a drink, his horse restive at his side.
Darien was instantly at the man’s throat, jumping atop him where he knelt on the ground. Neither of them had time to draw blade, and for some moments there was a struggle in which the guard, not as weary as Darien and perhaps fueled with anger at the death of his comrade the night before, succeeded in pinning Darien to the ground. He was about to draw his sword when Lin was there, her knife pressed against the guard’s back. She barked, “Don’t move.”
Darien scrambled from beneath the man, breathing hard. To Lin, his eyes looked crazed, as if he were in the grip of some fury. Sweat darkened the strands of hair pressed to his forehead. He threw his arm in a stranglehold around the guardsman’s throat. “Are you alone?”
The guardsman closed his lips sullenly. Lin prodded him with the blade, though it almost made her ill to do so. This man was only doing what he’d been told to do. Perhaps he even believed that Darien was responsible for Hassen Styr’s murder. Still: “Answer him,” she commanded. Her mother, she knew, would not have hesitated for a moment.
“The others … are close,” said their prisoner through his teeth. “They’ll find you.”
“Then we’ll have to keep you as a hostage,” said Lin.
Darien shook his head. There was a focused intensity in his eyes as he looked at the man that frightened Lin. “I have a better idea,” he said. “Nickon Gerrard wants people to think I’d use one of my own for blood divination? Well, I’ll give him another song to sing. I’ll use one of his.”
“No, Darien,” Lin gasped. The guard opened his mouth to scream. Lin thrust her forearm against his mouth, though she felt sick.
“Think about it, Lin,” he cried. “We don’t know where we’re going. Only Edrien Letrell knew what to do, and he’s dead. And we have a way … I know a way to bring him back. To talk to him.”
“Darien, listen to yourself,” Lin entreated. “There is no way to bring back the dead.”
“On the contrary, my dear,” he said. “Death is a portal, no more. One of the most final of portals, but just a portal nonetheless. And we have it, right here in these papers left to us by Valanir Ocune. But it takes lifeblood, and the right words. Lin, we are the only ones who might be able to stop the darkness Valanir spoke of. And here we have our chance.”
“Fighting dark with more dark?” said Lin. “That makes no sense.”
“Just this one time,” Darien pleaded. “Once will make no difference, compared to what Nickon Gerrard has been doing for years.”
“I hope you’re right,” said Lin. She brought the hilt of her dagger down on the guardsman’s head, hard. He crumpled in Darien’s arms.
“You killed him?” Darien cried, enraged.
“No,” said Lin. “I got him out of the way.”
His blade outstretched, he was still, his face uncomprehending.
Lin caught and held his gaze. She herself was not sure of the reason for what she was about to do. Again she recalled what the books said of poets who earned the emerald as their gemstone. He is the wanderer, light of heart, ever free. She recalled the night before, when he had brandished a crimsoned blade, that grin she had never seen stretching his face. For an instant and in the torchlight of an underground cavern, she had seen him become someone else. Certainly not the man who had played her a sweet song as she drifted into sleep.
That song, if he does this, will be lost forever. That, and all the rest.
All this flickered in her mind in the space of an instant. So she said only, “You’re not meant to shed blood, Darien. I can’t see you do this.” She took up the page where the instructions for the rite were written, scanned it briefly. “Be ready with the words.” Deftly, she slashed each of her wrists. The pain that ran through her, though expected, was a shock. She sank to her knees.
“Lin … you idiot!” Darien rasped out, and ran to her.
“You’re the idiot,” she said. “Make sure you get … the blood.”
“No,” he said, and began to rummage urgently through his pack. “I’m going to bandage your wrists.”
“Do that,” she murmured, “and I’ll cut them again. Let me do this.”
He gathered her up as if she were a child; she felt very light in his arms. There were tears in his eyes, she saw, but could hardly credit her own vision just now. “First Hassen, and now you?” he said, and she could hear real anguish there. But she saw him take up the papers in his other hand, and only then allowed herself to close her eyes. She had done her part—it would be left to him to finish what she had begun. This last thing.
* * *
DARIEN leaned against a tree. Sunset approached; he could tell by the lengthening of the shadows, the softness of the light. Otherwise there was no view here of the sky, of anything but gradations of quiet dark.
With no one to see, Darien had let himself weep. He wasn’t even sure why, whether it was for Hassen, or for Lin, at what he had allowed himself to do to her. Or if it was an accumulation of all these things, made the more wretched by the futility of it all.
Open now the gate, he had recited. Open here the gate between worlds. Bring forth your darkness to the light.
A gate between worlds.
Lin’s blood, for a story.
Two bodies on the ground: the guardsman, knocked unconscious a second time, draped across the roots of an oak. And Lin Amaristoth, her head pillowed on Darien’s jacket, her face so white as to be transparent, violet branches of veins like cracks in her temples and cheeks. The bandages he had made of his one extra shirt were less white.
For what seemed like the hundredth time, he felt her bony, bandaged wrist for a heartbeat. It was hard to feel anything through the cloth, but he thought she was still alive. Had he a mirror, he would have checked for a flutter of breath.
If she had died, would it have worked?
The thought should have tormented him, but instead he found that he didn’t care. The guardsman was still at his mercy, and yet … insane as Lin’s action had been, seeing her slash her own wrists had soured his taste for shedding blood.
He had used her blood. He had bandaged her before she could lose too much, but … he had lifted her to a nearby rock, where a crevice ran deep, and he had held her cut wrists over the crevice and allowed it to fill with red.
Bring forth your darkness to the light.
If Lin were to die, he’d be no better than Nickon Gerrard had announced to the world. He would be, in truth, a murderer.
He watched her a moment: the taut face, her mouth a drained curveless line. She would slow him down, he knew. She had planned on dying, on saving him from himself. She had not thought to become an inconvenience.
He lifted her very gently, but even so she groaned when her arms left the ground. He smoothed back her hair and began to advance, slowly, away from their makeshift camp. It was sheer luck that they had not been found just yet, and Darien knew better—by now—than to ever again trust to his luck.
* * *
IT took a long time for the dark to arrange itself into shapes. Her arms were heavy and an agony, each one. Although the darkness was absolute, she felt as if she had only just now emerged from a deep cavern beneath the earth and into light. Light and pain. Her mind was reaching back … to something she had just seen or touched. She thought she could still hear whispering, fading now with the fading of sleep.
A shape materialized in her range of vision; she felt the warmth of a hand on hers. “Alyn?” she said. And then her mind took a leap, and she laughed. “Oh Darien,” she said. “I’m not myself.”
He took her hand. He said, “No … I think you’re the same idiot as always.”
“Did it work?”
“No,” he said, stroking her hand.
Lin tried to lift her other hand to touch his arm but quickly gave up. The pain was too much. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It might be because you didn’t let me di
e.”
“Then I don’t care.”
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
Darien snorted. “Lin, you have to stop saying that. Now do you think you can sit up to eat something? I made a stew.”
Lin tried to pull herself up and fell back, dizzy. She heard Darien say, quietly, “You lost a lot of blood.”
“If you prop me up…”
“I’ll do that,” he said. “I’ll feed you. You won’t have to do anything.”
“Darien,” she said, and stopped.
“What?”
“Am I going to die? Because I can’t imagine you being this kind, otherwise.”
He laughed. “My lady, now you’ve wounded me.”
Darien fed the stew to her as she sat against a boulder for support. She felt too weak even to chew and swallow, but he made no complaint as she applied herself slowly to each morsel. The meat was what she needed, she knew, to restore herself. When she was finished, she could hardly keep her eyes open. “I’m tired,” she said.
Darien helped her back to her bedroll and covered her with a blanket. “Sleep is the best thing.”
It was only then that she remembered. “The guards. Darien—don’t stay and get caught because of me.”
“Lin, it’s night, and barely a moon,” he said. “They won’t find us. I haven’t heard a sound all day—they probably lost our trail by now. Sleep.”
She wanted to argue, but the fatigue that rolled over her in a black wave was so heavy that she could hardly even struggle beneath its weight. The night disappeared again as true dark closed overhead.
* * *
HE was back in the dream, again in the hall with its many doors. Darien remembered what had happened here last time—what he had seen—and felt dread. Last time, Rianna had melted into a laughing, gleam-toothed Marilla in his arms.
Rianna. She had no place in the world where he now found himself. The death of Hassen Styr melded seamlessly in his mind with the sickening crunch of his sword through the guardsman’s chest. With Lin’s blood pooling in a crevice. The dark under trees on a moonless night. So much black he had entered into; she could have no part of it.
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