by JA Andrews
“Maybe it is possible.”
Lukas pushed the door open and came back in, carrying a light blue stone on a long chain. It was small enough to fit in Lukas's palm and shaped like an irregular, broken column.
“Put in it the idea of metal far north in the mountains,” Killien ordered him. “And make the desire for it so strong they’ll have no choice but to go.”
Lukas shook his head quickly. “We can’t do this. If we give up the power now, they’ll destroy us.”
“The power isn’t what’s important.” Killien anger flared again. “Be ready when Sora comes.”
“No.” Lukas's jaw was set stubbornly. “Negotiate with the other Torches once you own the Sweep. This power is all that will keep us safe.”
“Lukas.” The note of command rang through the room.
“Killien, this is our chance. If we stop now the Morrow go back to being worthless and helpless.”
“The Morrow,” Killien said coldly, “have never been worthless or helpless. This path will see us all killed. Will is right. My father knew that. I knew it before…I forgot it.”
Lukas’s eyes tightened at the words. “One Keeper shows up and the Torch of the Morrow rolls over like a coward?”
Will opened up a sliver toward Lukas and a churning mass of anger rushed into his chest. Frustration shoved its way through and Will clenched his jaw in an effort to push the emotions back. There was nothing servile.
Killien took a step toward Lukas, his hand on his sword hilt. When he spoke, it was deadly quiet. “You forget your place.”
The sharp slice of betrayal Lukas felt cut through Will’s chest, and fury laced with fear bled out of it.
“My place?”
“Ready the stone,” Killien commanded.
The fissure in Lukas split open, pouring out a cold isolation. Betrayal clawed up from deep in the bowels of Lukas's soul, looming over him, shadowing him with black, rending isolation.
Will’s shoved Lukas's emotions out, slamming himself shut. “Killien,” he warned.
Lukas’s face hardened into a mask. “You do it.” He tossed the bluestone and Killien caught it by the chain.
“This is not the time,” Killien snapped. “I need your support.”
“No,” Lukas flung back. “You need mindless obedience.”
“You owe me that!” Killien roared.
Lukas froze.
“You were nothing. I gave you everything. I taught you to read, to use your powers, treated you like family.”
“Until the time comes when I act like I am,” Lukas said coldly. “And then you prove that all I am is a slave.”
Killien’s hand clenched the chain. “Fix the stone.”
Lukas let out a harsh breath, somewhere between a growl and a laugh. “Get your Keeper to do it.”
The Torch stared daggers into Lukas for a long moment. Then he held the stone out to Will.
“I don’t know if I can,” Will said. With a surge of frustration, he realized Alaric probably could.
His fingers closed around the stone and a buzz of energy rushed into his hand, like he’d grabbed a bees’ nest. His hand clamped around the stone and the sensation flowed up his arm. It rushed into his chest like water bursting through a dam.
Yes, Alaric was the Keeper who needed to be here. Or any other Keeper for that matter. It was time Will accepted the idea that he was an utterly mediocre person. Which made him a pathetic Keeper. The words that had always felt painful, now felt…right. They were true. These sorts of heroic things were for other people. It was nice to acknowledge that. Liberating even.
The buzzing from the stone continued, and for a single, panicked moment Will recognized the rush of emotion from that compulsion stone Hal had put around his neck days ago to exhaust him, but this was so much stronger.
But then the world flattened to dullness. The walls of the room were lifeless. The anger on Killien’s face was petty and worn. Lukas’s petulance was wearisome. The rush of the wind and the occasional noises from the window felt distant and unimportant. Nothing was important.
Will sank to his knees. The aquamarine was important. It was warm beneath his fingers. He wrapped his other hand around it, too, and the hum of energy surged into his fingers. His fingers glided over a facet of the stone as smooth as ice. He ran his thumb over a corner and the sharp edge scraped across his skin. A trace of light swirled inside the gem. Not filling it, just swirling in the bottom like molten stone. He tilted the stone and watched the light flow down to the other end slowly, like sluggish water.
There were voices somewhere, but he ignored them. He curled forward, trying to shadow the stone and see the light better.
A rough hand shook his shoulder and Killien’s face was in front of him asking something. The Torch’s face was so intense. All this intensity and scheming was so wearisome. Will ducked down, turning away from the Torch, holding the aquamarine closer to his face.
Killien tried to peel his fingers off of the stone, but yanked his hand back. “What did you put in this compulsion stone?”
“Just a healthy dose of apathy,” Lukas answered.
A slap on his cheek snapped Will’s head to the side, and color rushed into the room along with the sound of the wind.
“Let go!” Killien’s face was only inches away.
Sitting on the floor felt wrong.
Behind Killien, Lukas stood with his arms crossed, smiling. Will blinked to clear his head. Sora was coming back soon. They need to get ready for…something.
Killien shouted at him again, but what the Torch didn’t understand, was that it didn’t matter. The sludgy light had made it to the other end of the blue stone, and Will tipped it back the other way.
Lukas sounded terribly far away. “Let the Keeper rot.”
Chapter Forty-Eight
“We need to get back to the enclave.” Lukas’s voice was faint as he turned toward the door. “The other Torches are ripe for picking. If the fat fool Albech gives us any trouble, I have one more absorption stone. It’ll be harder to fit it over Albech’s fat head than it was over Ohan’s.” His voice took on a twang of regret. “I’d wanted to use it on Will, but I think it’d be put to better use in destroying the Boan Torch.”
“Stop,” Killien snapped. He clenched his fists, visibly trying to control his anger. “You’re not the Torch.”
Lukas froze, turning slowly to look at Killien with incredulous eyes.
Will wanted to tell them it would be easy if they just decided not to care. But it was too much work to talk. The world was dreary. Even the usually glittering gems in Killien’s rings were dull.
Killien turned his back on Lukas. “Get the right stone for the goblin.” He bit off the words sharply. “Now.”
Lukas’s body tightened and Will started to turn back to his aquamarine.
Lukas slid the thin knife out of his belt.
The movement caught at Will’s mind, demanding attention. He shoved at the feelings of apathy crowding into him. Killien was still talking, chastising Will to drop the stone. Lukas continued forward, his face twisted into a silent snarl. He raised the knife.
“If you’re willing to give up the power we’ve gained and let all of us be killed,” Lukas said, his voice chilled with contempt, “you shouldn’t be Torch either.”
Will dragged a word up his throat. “Killien—”
The Torch looked at Will just as the knife plunged down into his back. Killien arched away from it, but Lukas drove the knife in deeper. Killien’s hands clamped onto Will’s arm. His eyes unfocused, and he toppled to the floor.
Will stared, his hands clenching the stone. Shock shoved against the apathy and he leaned toward Killien.
“I’m not giving up everything we’ve learned.” Lukas pulled out the blade and wiped it on Killien’s sleeve before shoving it back in its sheath. Crossing to the shelves, he picked up a small, stoppered bottle. He dumped out some dried leaves and sank down on the floor behind Killien. His face was hard, b
ut something in his eyes tore at Will.
“Did you know,” Lukas said to Killien, his words muffled and dull, “that your ability to nullify magic is carried in your blood? The night of the goblin attack, when you were cut, some of your blood landed on me. It was as though I was touching you. I felt no pain at all. Even when the blood dried it still worked almost as well as you do.”
Will shoved frantically at the apathy inside him, but there was simply too much of it.
Lukas pushed the bottle against Killien’s back and a thin moan escaped the Torch, the noise cutting through Will’s mind. Lukas’s face was drawn, but when he spoke, it was clear. “So I don’t need you anymore. All I need is your blood.”
Will squeezed his eyes shut and listened to the frantic part of himself. There was something about Sora, something important.
Lukas shoved a stopper into the little jar and tucked it into his pocket. “Do you know how long I’ve dreamed of separating your powers from you? Of bottling them up and leaving this wretched land?”
Separate. Bottle up. That was it. Sora shoved her emotions away until they didn’t affect her. She kept them so tightly controlled Will couldn’t even find them half the time.
He pulled himself away from the emotions for a moment, searching out their edges, feeling for the shape of them.
He pressed the apathy out his arms, shoved it back down toward the stone. Color crept into the room again.
Logically he knew he should put down the stone, but he couldn’t quite cut through the deadness inside him.
Beside him, Killien lay pale, his eyes closed and his breathing shallow. Lukas leaned out the window, looking not down at the Sweep, but up into the sky. He stayed there for a moment, before turning back to the room. His gaze fell on Killien, and he clenched his jaw.
“I used to think Keepers were some sort of magical beings that knew everything. They had everything under control. They protected us.” Lukas opened his hand and a faded red scar filled his palm. “Vahe who triggered it. He sent that fire out over the heads of the crowd and everything inside of me…woke up.
“That’s when I knew I would be a Keeper. I just wanted to run home and tell my mother, begging her to take me to Queenstown. I tried to get my brothers to come with me, but they weren’t ready to leave, so I went myself.”
Lukas closed his fist. “Vahe found me before I’d gone far.”
He walked slowly back towards Will. “My mother wouldn’t find me, not tied up in Vahe’s wagon. But a Keeper…I knew a Keeper would come. I believed it until we crossed the Scales and everything disappeared except the grass.” His eyes dug into Will. “For years, I waited for you to come.”
A deep guilt writhed through the apathy inside Will.
“Then Sini came…And still no Keepers.” His face twisted in disgust. “Sini! If anyone deserves a life of happiness, it’s that girl. But they took her, too. At first, I thought you weren’t coming because you were angry, because we’d begun to learn a sort of magic that the Keepers wouldn’t like. But it was worse than that, wasn’t it?”
Lukas’s eyes searched Will’s face. “You didn’t even know we were gone.”
Something sank into Will’s gut, taking his breath away with it. He dropped his gaze to the floor.
“I believed all the lies about you,” Lukas said quietly.
A complicated twist of emotions tore through the apathy and Will yanked one hand off the stone, reaching for Lukas. “If we had known—”
Lukas batted his hand away. “Now that I’ve met a Keeper, I know I was foolish to think they were anything but arrogant, useless men.”
Will’s hand dropped to the floor.
Lukas leaned over Killien and unfastened the sheath from around his chest. He slid the seax out a handbreadth and touched it with his fingertips. A grim smile crossed his face and he shoved it back into the sheath and slung it across his back. “I don’t think I’ll soil the seax with your blood.” His gaze rested on Killien, and his jaw clenched. “This is not how I wanted things to go with Killien. I thought he could remember his anger at being controlled and make the decision to take what he needed. I had thought that together we might...” He blew out a breath and straightened. “His death is regrettable. But you, Will…I doubt I’ll ever think of you again.”
Will needed to move, but the part of him waking up was so small.
A voice rang in his ear. It reminded him of Sora.
Sora.
A wave of relief washed over him. She would come in and…do whatever needed to be done. Because something needed to be done, Will just couldn’t pinpoint exactly what.
Lukas unsheathed his knife, his face filled with pure hatred, and Will knew it was coming. In a moment he’d be next to Killien, dying. The Torch lay still, his face grey. Will’s mind recognized the wrongness of it, that he was going to be killed by a man who should have been like a brother. But there wasn’t room for actually feeling it.
He dragged his gaze to the door, waiting for Sora to come and fix things.
“Why couldn’t you be what you should have been?” Lukas asked in a ragged whisper.
Sora was too late. There was no one here to help. The truth flashed into his mind like a flare of light.
He was going about this all wrong. He wasn’t Sora. She stuffed emotions away. He let others’ emotions resonate within himself so that he could see them. Understand who they actually were. And recognize how much he was like them.
The apathy from the stone still filled him until he thought he might burst with the emptiness of it. He looked past it to his own emotions that had been shoved aside. The bright fear of the knife, the murky shame of what Lukas had been through, the hollow grief that Killien was lying so still on the floor next to him.
He latched onto the grief, and it was for so much more than Killien. It was still there for things long ago. His father. How his mother grieved for her husband and her daughter. The grief he’d carried so long for Ilsa. Even now, there was still a mourning for the years lost to knowing her.
It was his own grief and for the space of a heartbeat, focussing on it rolled the apathy back, making just enough room to open up to Lukas.
The little room left in him filled with bitterness and loss and guilt, a sharp ribbon of fear, and a fresh wound of loneliness.
And Will recognized every bit of it deep in himself.
“Lukas.” He barely managed a whisper. “I see you, what you’ve been through. It shouldn’t have happened. Any of it. But you can come back from all these things that are trying to consume you.”
“You know nothing,” Lukas hissed.
“I know about being alone.” So much churned within Will, that he wanted nothing more than to shove it all out. But he sorted through it, gathering his own emotions bit by bit. Disappointment with himself over the sort of Keeper he was, the ever present loneliness he felt, the old, worn in anger at his father’s death and Ilsa’s abduction. “I know that something can happen that we don’t deserve, and it can break everything.” He gathered all the emotions and pushed them toward Lukas, letting him feel all of it.
Lukas’s eyes widened, then he shrank back. “Get out of me!”
“You’re not alone,” Will whispered. He pulled everything back from Lukas. “It’s not too late, Lukas.”
“It is too late.” Lukas's face was set in a black look. “You don’t know me.”
Will felt a pang of sadness for how often he’d seen him that way. “What about Sini?”
Lukas flinched.
“She told me you’re like an older brother who’s always taken care of her.”
For a fraction of a breath something gentle crossed Lukas's face. But then he shoved it away.
“The best thing that could happen to Sini,” Lukas answered, “is that she grows up far away from me.” He raised the knife and plunged the knife toward Will’s chest.
Will twisted away and the knife bit deep into his shoulder.
Pain exploded in Will’s arm, ripping
through the apathy of the stone. Will’s fingers spasmed open and the aquamarine clattered across the floor.
“Will!”
This time it really was Sora, standing in the doorway, her arms clamped around a thrashing frost goblin. Behind her Alaric and Evangeline ran into the room.
Douglon pushed past them, puffing. “Our way out is not an option any longer.”
“The goblins are pouring into the cave—” Alaric stopped, taking in Killien, Lukas, and Will.
Lukas yanked the knife out. Pain shot down Will’s arm and snaked across his chest. He grabbed his shoulder.
Lukas rose. The room stood still for a moment before the dwarves let out a yell and thundered across the room. Lukas fixed them with a look of pure fury, then turned and ran for the window.
“Stop him!” Sora yelled.
Douglon lunged after him and Will heaved himself up. But Lukas reached the wall, scrambled up into the window and threw himself out.
Will reached the window just as a flash of glittering red raced by. With the whip of a tale, Anguine rose into the sky, the grey form of Lukas clinging to his back.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Douglon barreled up next to Will, scrambling toward the window and watching Lukas and Anguine fly southeast across the Sweep
“Dragons,” he grumbled.
Will sank against the wall, his shoulder throbbing. The room erupted in chaos. Ilsa yanked a door open and ran across the room, falling to her knees next to Killien crying out for someone to help. Patlon and Sora wrestled with the frost goblin, trying to get ropes around its limbs. Evangeline slammed the door to the hall closed, calling for something to barricade it with.
Alaric ran toward Will shouting question after question.
Will disregarded them all. “Help Killien, if you can.”
He sank down next to the Torch and cast out towards him. Killien’s body lay still. The little vitalle left in him sluggishly seeping out of the wound on his back. Will tried to gather some energy when Alaric knelt down next to him.