by Evie Manieri
Vrinna’s head swiveled around like a hawk’s until her eyes fell on Kira. Then she thrust her sword aloft and gave a silent Norlander scream that turned Rho’s blood to ash.
Chapter 37
The hate-filled battle-cry stopped Kira in her tracks just in front of the dais.
Kira looked down at the spot where Vrinna’s blade had gone, but she didn’t see anything except a rip in her beautiful lagramor coat. It had been so lovely just this morning, and now it was covered in filth and sticky with the still-glittering slime from Eowara’s tomb. Aline would scold her when she got home.
Then Kira cried out as a strange, twisting pain pounced on her like a crag-cat, grabbing hold of her limbs and contorting them in ways they were never meant to go, curling her spine into a tight hunch. Something took hold of her: a fistful of rage like nothing she had ever felt before, as if Vrinna’s madness had burrowed inside her, seizing her body for itself, wrapping around her heart and twining down into her limbs. Its strength coursed through her, whether she wanted it or not, and the weight of Virtue’s Grace dropped to a feather’s lightness in her hand.
Vrinna’s black blade flew at her again, and this time Kira swept up Virtue’s Grace to block. The shock as the blades met shimmered through her body and the thing inside her writhed with pleasure as they fought. She might be holding Virtue’s Grace, but it was like having a lagramor by the tail as the sword darted here and sliced there with sinuous menace, entirely of its own volition. Vrinna’s blows came down like sledgehammers but Kira’s arms had turned to steel: she could go on like this for days—in fact, she never wanted to stop. Once she killed Vrinna she would have to find someone else to fight, and someone else after that.
Trey danced around on the edge of her vision, calling out to her, but she had no time for him now.
She made a break for the steps of the dais. Vrinna swiped at her legs as she leaped up to the second step, but she blocked the blow and went for a quick follow-through, aiming to hit Vrinna’s side under her right arm—the captain couldn’t get into position to block in time and instead jumped back. Kira had her now: she aimed her blade, ready to charge down the steps and finish Vrinna once and for all.
Then the thing twisting in Kira’s limbs suddenly snapped back, like someone yanking a fishing line out of the water, and the power and strength she had thought would last forever gushed out of her all at once. The wave of euphoria she had been riding crashed back down again, taking her with it. She clutched at her head as Vrinna’s bloodlust howled inside her, trying to squeeze the madness out again, and staggered back in terror until she latched on to the smooth bones of the throne behind her for support.
She could hear them fighting in front of the dais, but she had something in her eyes that was making it hard to see what was happening. Most of the other people in the room had fled, but through the now-unguarded throne room doors she could hear a frightening uproar coming from the main part of the castle. She cast around and found Virtue’s Grace on the floor next to her and used it to try to get up. She had just managed it when Trey pushed Vrinna back to the foot of the dais.
Something had changed: Vrinna’s blows weren’t coming as hard now, or as fast. Her boots were stumbling over the ink-stained stones and she only just turned aside Trey’s next thrust, staggering sideways, with her sword arm drooping. Kira would have found that more heartening if she had not been able to see the stiffness in Trey’s shoulder making every movement a misery.
Kira pulled off one of her gloves and wiped the thick fluid from her swollen eye, then pulled back her fingers to look at them. They were coated with silver.
He staggered back down the steps but then hesitated, as if he was trying to decide whether to grab Trey and haul him away, or jump in between him and Vrinna and take over the fight. Then Vrinna lost her balance and fell back against the wall. Trey rushed toward her, but as he raised his arm for the thrust his shoulder finally seized up completely and he stopped short with his arm shaking, desperately trying to transfer the sword into the other hand.
Kira’s eyes clouded over again and she ground the heel of her hand into the swollen sockets, trying to clear them. The room came back into view again, but everything was swimming behind a veil of smoke. Trey appeared to her in front of the throne, in the same place she had seen him for the very first time, when she could not have conjured a more wonderful specimen of Norlander perfection. The gray smoke drifting around him now hid his scars and he looked just the same as she remembered. She could finally forget the bitterness of that day in the forest, with the snow and the blood … so much blood.
So much blood now, too, because Vrinna had just pulled her sword out of Trey’s chest before melting away into the nonexistent smoke.
Kira couldn’t move or say anything, even though her body screamed to go to him. It was Rho who rushed forward and caught him as he fell. Somehow she got down the steps to them, but by then Trey’s eyes were closed and she could feel his mind a long way off.
He tailed off as his despair swept him under, and her with him. She sank to her knees beside her husband.
Trey suddenly drew in a gasping breath and his eyelids fluttered. She leaned in closer; he couldn’t open his eyes completely, but he could see her. She saw him trying to reach his hand out to her, but he couldn’t lift it high enough. She took his warm, limp fingers in her own.
Kira stood up, forcing her weakened legs to move, and smeared her eyes clear again—and saw Vrinna leaning against the wall with her head cradled in the crook of her arm. The captain stag
gered forward, coughing in wheezy hacks and with her bulging, dripping eyes sparkling like a fish’s scales, until she finally fell over ten paces shy of the throne room doors. Kira picked up Virtue’s Grace and went to her, watching her twitch like a bird with an arrow through its wing.
Kira took Virtue’s Grace in both hands and raised it up over Vrinna’s helpless body.
Then she found something left of herself, tucked up in a little corner that the other thing hadn’t yet found and rooted out. She should have guessed that the last thing left of her wouldn’t be her love or her intellect or her compassion: it would be her sense of irony.
She sheathed her sword and turned her back, instead joining Rho as he carried Trey through the room toward the terrace. Snow was blowing in, along with the last of the daylight. Outside, Gannon and the Mongrel were still fighting in the corner next to the now-headless statue of Eotan. At least a hundred people remained on the terrace, and a good half of them were displaying some variation of Vrinna’s symptoms—her own symptoms—and the rest were trying to battle them back. Kira wanted to tell the healthy people to get away while they could; the sick would be no threat, not once their mad strength ended, and that lasted only a little while. They should just be left to die.
A single flake of snow pricked her cheek like an icy finger as Rho knelt down on the threshold with Trey dying in his arms. Kira could hardly feel the stone beneath her numb limbs and her coat weighed down on her shoulders like a lead collar. She managed to open it, though her fingers felt dead already, and let it fall on to the ground.
Do not go down into the deep places.
Trey couldn’t speak now, but Kira could feel a light at the very center of him, glowing brighter and brighter until it burned some of her darkness away. It held her, that light, and made her a part of it; a part of him.
Kira lurched over and fell beside Trey, pulling him into her unfeeling arms and resting her cheek against his head.
They both felt the moment when he left them. Rho’s grief burst open, and she would have taken some of it for him—she would hardly notice it, mingled with her own—but it was his, and he didn’t want to give any of it up. Kira felt like they stayed that way for hours, but when Rho stirred, she realized no time had passed at all.
She felt the touch of his hand on her head for a brief moment, then he disappeared back into the darkness of the throne room. She held Trey in her arms and watched her world crumble to bits through the wavering green-glass, like a dry leaf crushed in a gloved hand.
Chapter 38
The floor bobbed up and down and Isa could see her sister Frea in the water, trying to pull off her dented helmet.
“Isa.”
“It’s the cape, Frea. It’s pulling you down.”
“Isa. Wake up.”
With her eyes still closed, she felt the tightness in her throat and realized she had spoken aloud, in Shadari. She kept her eyes closed, trying to remember where she was. The stables: that was it. She had tried to ride a triffon again and she had fainted. Eofar would come and carry her back to her room and put her to bed. No, that wasn’t right. The stables were gone, along with the temple, along with Frea—along with the pain.
The pain was gone.
That creature that had been gnawing at Isa’s insides since the day she’d lost her arm had unfurled a pair of great black wings and swept up out of some lair deep inside her. She gasped aloud as it passed through her, shocked that something so big had been crouching down inside her all of this time, and so lightened by its passing that she felt like she was floating up into the air. The pain was gone: all of the pain.
“It’s working, yes?” asked Ani, when Isa finally opened her eyes. “I knew it would.”
The old woman was placing a few selected items inside a leather satchel, deliberately, as if she had no need to hurry. Her voice sounded different—quicker, and somehow further away—but Isa wasn’t worried. She wasn’t worried about anything now, because she trusted in what Ani had promised.
Everything was going to be all right.
Isa rose with ease now, carrying her full weight on her injured leg without feeling a thing. She rubbed the stump of her left arm and felt nothing. Even the heat of the fire didn’t make her uncomfortable. She went closer, thinking how it was odd that she’d never really looked closely at a fire before. Beautiful colors danced in the flames, so varied and alive.
Still one problem nagged at her.
“I don’t know if it’s safe for you in the Shadar,” she admitted to Ani. “Things are very bad there. Someone’s been killing all the ashas.”
“Yes, I know,” said Ani. Her voice never rose any louder than the soft desert wind, but something roared underneath, like an inferno somewhere just out of sight, on the other side of the dune. “I’m in no danger.”
“How do you know that? Because of the elixir? Is that how you knew I was coming? Did you see who’s killing the ashas?”
“Ashas,” said Ani, with a little sound like the one Daryan made when he spoke of Binit and his band of pot-stirrers. “They dared call themselves that, though they were nothing but puppets, always doing the same dance. There have not been any real ashas in the Shadar for three hundred years.”
Dramash crawled back out from under the covers. “Are we going?” he asked dully.
“We’re going home,” Ani told him. “We’re going back on the Nomas ship.”
“Do we have to?”
“Put on your coat,” Ani told him, still without raising her voice, but with the fire beneath it burning a little hotter. She had paused in her packing and was holding a small scroll in her hand. Isa stared at the Shadari woman, a little perplexed. Something was wrong with the picture before her, but when she tried to concentrate on it, the bad feeling slipped away. “I have been waiting a very long time for this—for you, Isa. So has the Shadar. A dark age is ending, and you’re going to help me begin a new one. My people have completed their penance at last.”
“Penance?”
“Yes. They had to be punished.”
“For what?”
“Their fear.” Ani was sorting through a box of ordinary-looking stones and carefully choosing one for her sack that looked exactly like all the others. “Their hubris, for thinking they had the right to set limits on me.” Her mellow voice dug into Isa’s head like a hot knife, carving deep grooves into her consciousness. “For starting a war they knew they couldn’t win and destroying everything I had built for them. They needed to understand just how helpless they are without me.”
“But they didn’t start the war.” Isa stepped away from the fire; the heat had started to creep up on her again. “My people started it after you told them about the ore, and how to make swords from it.”
“Not the war with the Norlanders,” said Ani. She stared at the wall for a moment as if she could see all the way back to the Shadar. Her voice dropped so low that Isa could hardly hear her. “No, the war the ashas started against m
e.”
The scroll. Now Isa knew why it had bothered her: the Shadari never wrote anything down. It was forbidden by their religion, ever since …
“You know who I am now, yes?” Ani asked her, coming toward her. No more than three paces separated them, yet Isa felt hours pass as the old woman crept closer. The red firelight was glowing at the ends of her wiry white hair. “I know Harotha told you all about me; I could see everything she saw when she took the elixir. She even sensed I was there, the clever thing; I’m a little sorry she’s dead, but she served her purpose. She told you how the ashas betrayed me, and how I jumped from my temple. She saw, but she didn’t understand.”
“That couldn’t have been you.” Isa shut her eyes for a moment. She felt a little dizzy, but no pain; the pain was completely gone. “That was hundreds of years ago.”
“That’s why you see me like this, old and weak,” said Ani. “I’ve needed to use my powers to keep myself alive. I’ve had to do my penance as well, but that’s all finished now. The way has been prepared for me. I’m coming home, thanks to you, Isa.”
Ani went back to her table, opened a wooden box and drew out a bottle.
“Is that the elixir?” asked Isa. Something in her mind tapped out a little rhythm; something it wanted her to do; something wanted her to know that everything was not all right. “Can I take some?”
She needed to know if she and Daryan would ever really be together again. She needed to know if there had been a point to all of this. No, more than that: she needed to know if bringing Ani back to the Shadar was the right thing to do.