In the distance a lone body loomed, a single, ominous silhouette illuminated by billowing flame. Together, hands clasped, two walked through the battlefield, toward the doom awaiting them. Lorelei turned her head to look over at him, her face smudged with ash and dust, skin carved with scars. He saw something in her eyes that made his heart wrench inside him.
Unfathomable distance, unspoken resentment for a past he had the power to change, but did not. There was love there, but it was hollow and wound tightly with something so unexpected it shattered him inside.
Hatred.
She hated him, just as much as she loved him because he let it happen.
Gwendoliir loosened his fingers and Brendolowyn withdrew his hand as if he’d been burned. Dizzy, he felt the magical energy of that vision swarming through him, receding but leaving its residue in his soul so he might pluck at the strands of a truth he didn’t want to face.
He knew it was what awaited him if he failed.
Love fueled by hate.
“That is the price you will pay if you make the same mistake you’ve made countless times, the price we will all pay for your refusal to allow her the one thing in this world she feels is worth living for.” The severity of the seer’s tone carved through the guilt of his conscience, provoking shame over actions he had not yet taken.
He attempted to block that memory out, but when he closed his eyes he could still see the accusation in her eyes, the resentment she felt toward him. He could still feel the burn of that world, as though he’d truly been standing in it, and he shamefully knew in his heart it was a world he saw in another life, another time. A world he willfully chose so he could have her, a world that suffered the consequences of his selfishness so he might revel in the power of her love and her hate.
“Time and again, this world pays the price for your ego, for the selfish love not designed for you, yet you refuse to live without. Before you think with your heart again, ask yourself this: Is that a world you wish to condemn her to?”
“No,” that single world choked from his throat as though a strangling hand released its grip just long enough for him to protest in harsh whispers. The heat of tears spilled down his cheeks, rushed on by the furious blinking of his lashes to rid himself of things he could not unsee.
He loved her so much he’d condemned her.
“You have promised to do everything in your power to make sure this curse is broken, and you know exactly what needs to be done in order for that to happen. Yet you make the same mistake each time you return to the moment that decides it all. You let him die, Brendolowyn Raven-Storm, instead of using the power you possess to save him. Do not make the same mistake again, or we will alter events in such a way that ends it all.”
“You… you can’t do that,” he protested, shaking his head. “To all those people, they deserve a chance…”
“A chance you continue to deny them to satisfy your own petty needs,” Jonolov said bitterly. The amicable respect Brendolowyn witnessed in his gaze at the conversations beginning was gone, replaced with contempt and loathing he made no attempt to hide. “You are one elf… not even an elf. Half an elf, and yet you’d doom the entire world for the love of a woman who will die hating you because of what you’ve done to her.”
The seer held out a hand to silence the angry king. “You are not evil, Brendolowyn Raven-Storm.” He was as surprised by the softness of Gwendoliir’s voice as he was by the words he spoke. Knowing what he knew, what he witnessed, how could he say he was not evil? “You are driven by your heart, and in so many notable cases the heart is a noble guide, but if you follow it again you will doom us all. Her heart already belongs to another. Her soul is bound to his. She has already fallen in love with him, and to lose him before his time will destroy her again.”
“Then I should stay behind… Remove myself from the equation and let them go on without me…”
“No,” the old seer shook his head. “You must be with them. It has been written. Without you on this journey, they will both perish and the end of all things will follow. The cycle will begin again.”
It was a fact, one he sensed the certainty of the moment the words left Gwendoliir’s mouth. The task required all three of them. If he was absent, both Finn and Lorelei would die.
He wrestled inwardly for a long time and felt all three of them staring at him, the seer more than likely experiencing his thoughts from across the table and sorting through them to judge if he was truly capable of doing that which he’d failed at so many times before.
His feelings for Lorelei were irrational, brought on by circumstances he never should have endured. She never should have saved him, never should have given him a glimpse of the lapsing joy they share on their journey to the end of it all.
“I know you can do this, Brendolowyn,” Jonolov declared. “You may be a bristalv, but when I say that it is with a sense of reverence you may not understand. You are only half-Alvarii, and yet the power you possess within you is legendary. You survived Bok’naal…”
“Bok’naal was nothing compared to this.”
That actually made the king laugh. “Only because you had no hope in that place. You felt you had nothing left to lose. Perhaps you might do well to readopt that philosophy in this instance, Brendolowyn. Because if you fail to do what needs to be done, you will lose everything and there will be no opportunity to make amends and set things right in another time.”
“As you can imagine, we take great risk revealing this information to you,” the seer began. “Its revelation is not something that has ever been attempted before, and as I said the certainty with which I’ve seen the future has grown murky.”
“You cannot tell Lorelei about her sister,” Jonolov shifted the tone of the conversation. “We don’t know how such knowledge would affect her, but we presume it wouldn’t sit well. She must not be distracted from her present task. Only when the Horns of Llorveth are in her hands, can she know what transpired here.”
Appalled as he was, he knew in his heart how damaging the information would be to Lorelei and her quest if she learned about her sister. She might very well abandon the path to search for the girl, and though it made him feel dirty—the thought of keeping something like that from her—he would keep it from her until the time was right. Tilting his head back, he closed his eyes and pleaded for guidance. For the first time since she’d passed from the world, Yovenna’s voice inside his mind was silent.
He was on his own.
“I will not tell her until she holds the Horns of Llorveth in her hands.”
A smug smile twitched at the corners of Jonolov’s mouth, and then he leaned across the table, extending his hand in a gesture meant to seal their agreement. Brendolowyn studied the hand.
“I know you won’t let us down this time, Brendolowyn. I have faith in you.”
The King Under the City pushed his hand closer and Bren reached out to take it, silently agreeing to what he’d promised even though it made him feel as if he might throw up.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Lorelei stood at the edge of the shore watching the illusion of the sun nuzzle comfortably into a false horizon. Never in her life had she imagined such places existed, that so many incredible things could be conjured with magic.
Magic was life, the very essence of sustenance. How could anyone forcibly deny its use when it could help so many people? Magic was the very essence of the Alvarii world; it sustained them, fed them, just as it did the people of Dunvarak. It seemed senseless to forbid its use, no matter how frightening that power.
Being denied as a child, magic always fascinated her. She bothered Pahjah with endless questions her nurse could not answer for fear of invoking the wrath of the king.
“But what could you do if you weren’t wearing that collar, Pahjah? Could you make lightning shoot from the tips of your fingers?”
“Yes.”
“Could you hold fire in the palm of your hand?”
“Of course.”
&
nbsp; “Could you…”
“Stop pestering me, girl, or you’ll get a lashing the likes of which you’ve never had before.”
“But I just…”
“Enough!”
Standing before the illusion of all Pahjah and her people lost the moment they’d been stricken down, collared and enslaved, she understood why such questions angered the woman. But she’d been just a child, curious and eager to understand things Aelfric had no wish for her to know.
Aelfric no longer held governance over her education and she wanted to know everything. Theory, application, capabilities…
One adept in the art of magic could hold the world itself in the palm of their hand.
She supposed that was why her father…
Stopping mid-thought, she shoved aside the notion of Aelfric being her father. She really needed to stop that. He was not her father, had never been her father, but she was still angry with Rognar for offering her up like some sacrificial lamb to the slaughter and committing her to things he had no idea if she’d even be capable of carrying out.
The illusion she’d been clinging to since she learned of Rognar, the belief he might have loved her if he lived faltered and faded. Replaced by bitterness, it threatened to nibble away at her heart until she felt nothing about her parents at all.
Aelfric was a father to her all her life. Perhaps not the best father, but he looked after her, provided for her, kept her alive and protected her from the world. She’d even seen a hint of fondness and pride in his eye the day he bid her farewell and unwittingly sent her to her death. She remembered thinking how much she would miss him, her father. She would miss defying him, butting heads with him and arguing through dinner about a young woman’s rights to choose her own path.
Ironic, she thought, how all those arguments seemed to be in preparation for the things laid out before her on the path. She’d wanted the right to make her own choices, to decide for herself who she would be. She’d gotten her wish, but the autonomy to forge her own path didn’t offer much in the way of choice at all.
The gods determined her fate, Heidr in particular, positioning her like a piece on some game board and strategically moving her through life to see his own agenda actualized. He was a god, the first of the gods. Why couldn’t he just… do it himself? Why did he need her as a vessel?
Without notice, her hand lifted to the warm bronze of Rognar’s amulet around her throat, fingers curled against the smoothed edges of the wolf, moonstone crescent edging along the throbbing cuts the charm carved into her skin in an impetuous act of defiance hours ago.
She spent the afternoon with Finn, trying to forget things she could never unlearn. He did his best to distract her, dragging her through the lively, elegant shops of the underground city and making her laugh at every turn. Each time he grabbed her hand to whisk her off to the next store, the cuts on her palm tingled and itched, throbbing just a bit, but she never winced or let on how much it still hurt. The healer said it would be little more than a memory come morning, but she almost hoped it scarred because she never wanted to forget the pain it caused or the moment she woke up and realized the truth: she was on her own in the world and had been since before she’d been born.
She couldn’t rely on her parents to see her through anything. The only thing she could rely on was herself, and maybe Finn. She was really starting to want to rely on him.
He stepped up behind her, the nearness of his body provoking the illusion of safety she was becoming all too familiar with. She leaned her back into his chest, rested her head against his shoulder and closed her eyes. The sound of the waves rolling in along the shore soothed her, carrying her confusion and fear out to the sea every time it withdrew.
“That sound is the most beautiful thing in the world,” she muttered, turning her face slightly upward to look at him. He shaved the day before, but stubble already darkened his cheeks and chin. He was roguishly handsome, but she swore the journey was aging him. Short as it was, in retrospect, he didn’t look like the same boyish young man who sat beside her bed in the healer’s room in Drekne watching over her as she slept.
“You’re the most beautiful thing in the world,” he muttered, not looking down at her, but training his eyes on a gull swooping in the distance. His lashes drew together as he squinted, and then he relaxed his gaze.
“Sometimes I wonder how you can even say such things and mean them.”
“Really? Have you looked in the mirror lately?”
She had, but she was starting to believe she didn’t even know the young woman staring back at her. It was her sister’s habit to preen in front of the mirror, poking at her features and assigning each one of them to a parent. “I have Mother’s nose, Father’s eyes…”
Since she woke in Drekne she discovered she, too, had her father’s eyes, but looking in the mirror didn’t provide her with a basis for comparison. She could look at her brother and imagine the man their father was, but it was not the same.
“Is it stupid for me to be angry at him?”
“At whom?” he asked, then quickly added, “And before you answer I’d just like to state for the record it’s nice for you to be angry at someone other than me for a change.”
“Maybe if you weren’t such an infuriating…”
Her hand slid from the amulet at her neck, dropping to her side and lingering there while she waited for him to respond. He didn’t. She followed his squinting stare out to sea, watched a circling flock of birds rise and twine along the wind.
“I meant my father.”
“Rognar?”
“Yes.”
“I understand why you’re mad at him, but I thought we agreed this afternoon it was impossible to guess the reason behind the things he did. Maybe you did come to him and tell him what had to be done, the way Yovenna says you came to her.”
“Maybe,” she huffed the strands of hair from her forehead and then added, “it all just seems so…”
She didn’t know how to finish that sentence, as there were at least a hundred words to describe all the things it seemed like, and none of them really fit.
“We aren’t meant to understand things, at least I don’t think we are, anyway. Whatever our purposes in this world, they are ours and ours alone. Maybe the gods hold sway over them, maybe they even pull our strings like little puppets, but I really don’t think they’d give us things to do unless they were certain we could handle them.”
“But that’s just it, isn’t it?” She started to draw away from him, but he reached for her hand and drew her back, turning her around so they were face to face. The settling light of a disappearing sun washed across his face, golden and illuminating, and for the moment his eyes shone white and perfect as diamonds. “Clearly I can’t handle this if I’m forced to keep repeating it.”
“Well, maybe that’s not your fault,” he shrugged. “Maybe you handle it all just fine and it’s the rest of the world who can’t handle things.”
“Maybe.” Though she wasn’t sure she believed that either.
And maybe, in some small way, all the things Aelfric kept from her over the years, the truth about the world he’d hidden from his daughters, was why it was all so difficult for her to come to terms with everything. Knowledge was power.
She didn’t exactly like the sudden awareness of that power waking inside her, tingling in the depths of her body and stretching toward the light. It was dangerous, an uncertain thing she wasn’t sure she could control. One part human, one part wolf and one part something else she didn’t even know how to put into words… She didn’t like the notion edging at the back of her thoughts… part-god.
No.
She didn’t like that at all.
Why couldn’t she just be…? Lorelei?
Shaking her head, she took a step forward and felt the nudging wetness of the sea roll in to touch the tips of her boots. Every time she took a step, the sand was so unstable beneath her feet, heels sliding, boots sinking just a little deeper, but she
loved it. It was so new and intriguing. Unlike anything she’d ever experienced before.
“I’ve felt so…” she paused, trying to find the right words to express the sense of awakening she’d been experiencing ever since she’d come to on the healer’s table in Drekne. “I don’t know, it’s hard to explain, I guess. Never mind.”
Without even looking up at him she could feel him staring at her. She could always feel it when he was watching or looking at her; a warm certainty edged in so many inexplicable feelings washed over her, and she tried to find a place for all those emotions inside her, but it was impossible to organize them because there was just too much for one person to handle.
If only she just gave into them, she thought, if she acknowledged she felt them too, things might make sense. Or, at the very least, she’d have someone to share the burden of them with. But she was so afraid. She didn’t want to give herself to him, and then lose him, only to spend the rest of her days longing for something she could no longer have. And yet, if she did lose him before she understood just how much she’d given up before he was hers…
They’d known each other only a short time, and yet a life without Finn was already difficult to imagine no matter how she played it out in her head. She only knew she didn’t want to lose him, or ever be without him.
“Try to explain, Princess,” he urged.
“I can’t,” she muttered.
Didn’t want to was more like it, and she quickly shifted subjects to avoid the one thing she was beginning to think was the most important of them all: her feelings for him.
“Do you know anything at all about drakorens? Anything other than what the seer said?”
Gwendoliir told them all he knew before leaving them in the garden, Brendolowyn hurrying off to follow. They hadn’t seen their half-elven companion since, but they hadn’t exactly stayed in one place long enough to be found that afternoon.
Sorrow's Peak (Serpent of Time Book 2) Page 36