by JA Andrews
“You’re in no condition. Move over.”
Will nodded and sank back.
“Please help him,” Ilsa whispered.
Alaric glanced up and his attention caught on her face, but he only nodded and then set his hands on Killien’s shoulder and bowed his head. After a long moment he met Will’s gaze and shook his head.
“He needs to live, Alaric,” Will said. “He’d be an ally on the Sweep.”
“The man who rode a dragon and sucked the life out of his enemy?”
Will paused. “You met him on a bad day.”
Alaric’s eyebrows rose. “What do his good days look like?”
“On those, he might be able to get the Roven to quit fighting. Maybe even reconcile the Sweep and Queensland.”
Alaric looked skeptically down at Killien. The Torch’s shoulder barely moved with shallow breaths, the ground behind him soaked with blood. Ilsa knelt behind him, tears on her face, pressing a rag to the wound.
“He’s lost too much vitalle,” Alaric said quietly.
“Give him some of mine,” Will offered, holding out his hand.
Alaric waved his hand at Will’s blood-soaked arm. “You don’t have enough. None of us has enough—” He stopped.
“Whatever you’re thinking,” Will whispered, “do it.”
Alaric shook his head, his face stricken.
“Alaric, please.”
Alaric let out a long breath. He swung his bag off his shoulder and pulled out the swirling orange stone Killien had used to kill the Torch of the Panos.
“Is that still Ohan?”
Alaric shook his head. “Who we are isn’t held in our vitalle. It’s something more…intrinsic to us. What was Ohan is gone. This is just some of the energy that animated him. There isn’t enough here to bring back Ohan, but there may be enough to save Killien.”
Alaric rolled Killien onto his back and set the stone on his chest. Then, closing his eyes, he set his hands on Killien and tendrils of orange light snaked out of the stone. Ilsa gasped and pulled her hands back. Douglon stood behind her, watching Alaric with an unreadable face.
Evangeline called for help and the dwarf blinked. She stood with her back pressed to the door. “They’re coming!”
Douglon ran to one of the tables along the back of the room and pushed it toward the door.
“Goblins are swarming into the caves,” he said to Will. “The dragon flew off.” He nodded towards the window. “Now we know why. And goblins poured into the tunnels from somewhere down below. We thought it might be time to gather you up and go. Which is when we found Sora fighting three of them, hollering about not killing one.” He shoved the table against the wall and stomped back for another. “I assume this means you have some sort of plan.”
Will glanced over to where Sora and Patlon had succeeded in tying up the goblin. The creature lay squirming on the floor, making a hoarse screeching sound. “We did.”
Patlon went to help Douglon and Evangeline barricade the door. Will left Alaric to heal Killien and walked over to Sora. She grabbed a cloth from a nearby shelf, wrapped it around Will’s arm.
“Do we have the stone we need to control the goblin?” she asked.
Will shook his head.
Sora pressed her eyes for a moment. With a tired sigh, she drew the knife out of her pocket and turned toward the goblin.
“Wait.”
She glanced back at him. “They’re pouring into the caves. This one will only draw more to us.”
The goblin lay on the floor, pounding its bare, bony feet against the stone, eyes wide and feral. Its thin, wiry arms strained against the ropes, its leathery greyish-green skin scraped and raw from rubbing against it.
Will sank down next to the creature and the goblin twisted toward him. Sharp yellow teeth gnashing near his arm. Sora knelt down, pinning it with a knee to its chest.
Will opened up toward it. A howling mass of hunger and anger rushed into him. Nothing defined, nothing nuanced. It was an animal, less complex than even Talen. It was consumed with a driving hunger and…something else.
Above it he felt Sora’s tightly controlled fear.
Will reached out to touch the goblin’s arm. The creature hissed and squealed, but Will wrapped his hand around the loose, leathery skin.
He needed to send them back into the mountains. He’d sent Talen places by imagining a picture. But it felt more complicated than that with the goblins. Talen’s mind was calm and focused. The goblin before him was savage, and Will had no idea what the mountains looked like where the goblins were from.
Will closed his eyes against the goblin’s thrashing. Almost everything was hunger. Gnawing, consuming hunger. He tasted the tang of metal on his tongue and it drove an insatiable need to possess it. Will tried to swallow the taste away and dove deeper into the hunger, searching for the anger he’d felt. Maybe he could redirect it.
He found the thread of the anger and focused on it. This wasn’t one goblin’s anger at being bound. This was a communal anger at…being controlled.
The goblins knew what Killien had done. They knew they were here not because they’d chosen to be, but because someone had forced them. And it was unraveling them.
Dimly he heard crashing and shouts from the door.
“Will.” Sora pressed the goblin down. “Could you commune a little faster?”
“Shh.”
Will focused on the anger. How could he change it? The goblin in front of him felt angry and desperate.
And hot.
Will caught the one emotion he’d missed.
The goblin didn’t want to be here. The feeling was so familiar he’d passed over it as his own. The frost goblin was in a place it didn’t want to be.
A loud crack came from the door and the mass of tables in front of it shifted. Long green fingers rooted through a gap in the door, scrabbling against the wood.
“Whatever you are doing,” Sora hissed at him, “you are out of time.”
Her words scattered the idea growing in his mind. “Stop talking!”
“Me stop talking?” Her voice was indignant. “I only talk when there’s something important to—”
The door split with a long, tearing crack and a goblin wriggled through, clambering over tables. Patlon’s axe swung down and the goblin collapsed on the table, but another took its place.
“I have to let go.” Sora shifted her weight. “Don’t let it bite you.”
Will clamped his hand down on the goblin’s arm just as Sora lunged off it and ran for the door. Pain ripped across the knife wound in his shoulder. The creature went mad, spinning and biting. Its teeth caught at the side of Will’s pants and he shoved its head away. He grabbed the sides of the goblin’s head, trying to still it enough that he could focus, but it was like trying to hold a thrashing fish. If the fish had thin pointed teeth and a great desire to eat him. Pain lanced through his shoulder and his hand loosened on the goblin’s head. It twisted and bit into his arm.
A heavy weight fell onto the goblin’s chest, pinning it down. It snapped its head toward the new foe, its teeth tearing across Will’s arm. Hands pinned its chest down onto the floor and Will pulled back.
He looked up into Ilsa’s face. She knelt on the creature, her face pale. Her terror echoed in his chest and he tried to shut her emotions out while still feeling the goblin’s.
It took him a breath to find his voice. “Thank you.”
Her eyes were wide with fear. “Whatever you’re doing, hurry!”
Will dragged his attention back to the goblin. It wasn’t the anger or the hunger he needed to work with.
He gripped the creature’s arm and pulled out his own emotions. It was right there, the one he’d been living with for a year. The aching longing to go home. He thought of Queensland, trees, hills, farmland. The Stronghold, the library, the other Keepers. His mother’s face that first moment when he showed up after being gone for too long.
He had found Ilsa. He could go home.
The yearning rolled through him like a wave, flattening everything else.
He let it grow until it filled him entirely, then he opened up toward the goblin and pushed the emotion toward him. Freedom to go home.
The goblin froze, its eyes wide and glazed. For a moment the longing warred with the hunger and the anger. Will pushed more of it in, letting it develop into its own sort of hunger for the familiar, the comfortable.
Will looked into Ilsa’s terrified face. “Do you miss home?”
A flash of shock crossed her face and he let her longing pour into him, raw and frenzied. Will shoved her emotions toward the goblin, too.
The creature’s anger dissolved, a wild freedom taking its place. In moments the craving for home was the only thing filling the creature.
It stopped straining to reach Will and stretched itself toward the window.
The door snapped and a wide gap opened. Greenish corpses were piling up inside the door, but more came every moment. Will cast out toward them feeling their hunger. But then one paused on its way through the door, a surge of homesickness filling it.
It snapped its attention to the window.
“Let it through!” Will yelled.
The dwarves and Sora paused, weapons raised. Sora stepped back and the goblin scuttled through the door, long, bony fingers grabbing the edge of a table as it scrambled over. It raced past, nails scraping on the stone floor, and clawed its way out the window.
Sora and the dwarves stepped back, leaving a clear path to the window. Goblin after goblin poured into the room, teeth and eyes glinting as they screeched and raced across the room.
Ilsa shrank back against the wall, and Will yanked at the knot holding the rope on the goblin in front of him, and threw himself over next to Ilsa. The creature thrashed itself loose and dove into the mass of goblins pouring out the window.
Chapter Fifty
Two final goblins straggled through the room and outside. Will followed them to the window.
Down below the goblins that had been clawing their way through the Roven camp turned back on themselves like a school of fish and drained back into the gaping warrens. Hoping Rass was smart enough to stay out of the goblins’ way, Will turned back to the room.
Killien groaned. Alaric had dragged him over against one of the walls, leaving a streak of blood across the floor. The last of a thin orange haze sank into the Torch’s body. Killien’s face had regained most of its color and he blinked slowly up Alaric, scowling. Will came over and knelt next to him.
Killien reached a shaking hand toward Will. The moment Will touched the Torch’s hand, a burning anger smoldered up in Will. He slammed himself shut, but the anger continued. He dropped Killien’s hand and it faded.
A glint of blue caught his eye. The ring with the blue stones, the one Killien had taken from the traitor early in the trip north. The blue of the stone perfectly matched the aquamarine Will had just spent so long enthralled with. He reached out tentatively to touch it and the anger seeped back in.
Will twisted the ring off Killien’s fingers and threw it into the corner. Killien stretched his hand, and started to take a deep breath, but cut it short with a grimace.
“What was that?” Killien looked up at Will, confused. His gaze traveled through the room and horror spread across his face. “What have I done?”
“How’d you get that ring?” Will asked.
“Lukas gave it to me,” Killien said weakly. “Said it could hold magic and we should find a use for it.” He shook his head, as though trying to clear cobwebs, and winced.
“It certainly held magic,” Will said. “He turned the gems into compulsion stones to keep you angry. It looks like Lukas was against your plans to spread peace.”
“That doesn’t make sense.” Killien’s shook his head gingerly. “The stones wouldn’t work on me—no magic works on me."
“If Lukas just used it to store emotions it would,” Will answered. “He learned that emotions have their own resonance so once he created the anger in the ring, it wouldn’t take any magic to transfer it to a person. The natural resonance of the emotions would do it for him. You just had to be touching it.”
The Torch pressed his eyes shut. “The goblins…What have I done?” Killien breathed a long, defeated breath. He looked up at Will, stricken. “Ohan. I didn’t mean to kill him…I was just going to threaten him. I…” He ran his hand over his face. “I couldn’t hear anything inside of me but the anger.”
The aquamarine Will had held for so long swirled with a light blue light from the floor. “I believe you.”
Killien’s eyes sank closed. “What have I done? I’ve ruined everything. I can’t build peace on a murder and a goblin attack.”
Will set his hand on the Torch’s shoulder. “You have created a few more obstacles.”
Killien opened his eyes and noticed Alaric. “Who are you?”
“This is Alaric,” Will said. “Another bloodthirsty, evil Keeper.”
Killien grunted. “The one I should have captured.”
Alaric raised an eyebrow.
“Yes.” Will picked up the now dark stone that had held Ohan’s energy. “And the one who just saved your life. With this. Which feels…ironic.”
Killien drew away from the stone. “You healed me with…Ohan?”
“It wasn’t him anymore.” Alaric’s eyes glittered with an anger that surprised Will. “It was just the leftover energy that you didn’t waste during the murder.”
Killien stared at Alaric for a long moment. “So it’s safe to say the healing wasn’t a sign of friendship?”
“It was a sign of his friendship towards me,” Will said, “not you. Alaric just saw you fly on a dragon, command an army of goblins, and kill a man in a way he’s unusually sensitive to. You didn’t make a great first impression.”
Killien let his eyes slip closed again. “If you didn’t want to save me, why did you?”
“Will seemed to think it was important. And I trust his judgment of people.” Alaric pushed himself up to his feet, taking the empty stone and tucking it into his bag. “Even when I don’t understand what he sees.
“And I didn’t heal you, not completely. Your body won’t let me. While you were weak I could pour energy into you, but the stronger you grew, the less you would let me. You’re strong enough now that no magic is going to work on you. You’re not going to die, but you still have a lot of healing to do.”
Killien squinted up at Alaric. “Thank you.”
Alaric walked across the room toward Evangeline without responding.
“You Keepers are complicated.” He tilted his head and strained to look around the room. “Lukas?”
Will opened his mouth to answer, but couldn’t decide what to say.
“Your man, Lukas, stabbed everyone he could, stole your sword, then flew away on your dragon,” Douglon said, tossing some broken table pieces out of the way.
Killien grabbed for the strap that had held his scabbard on his back, but found nothing.
“How did he get the dragon?” Will asked. “I thought we took the compulsion stone off.”
Alaric shrugged. “Maybe he had a second one?”
“So Lukas was prepared to escape on the dragon all this time?” Killien asked.
Douglon let out a snort. “People don’t control dragons because they might need a quick escape. Dragons are for destruction. Who does Lukas hate?”
“Me,” Killien said, his voice heavy. He pushed himself up to sit. “Obviously.”
Douglon shook his head. “He already killed you. Who else?”
“Keepers,” Will answered.
Douglon leveled an annoyed look at him. “So if I stay with you Keepers, I’m going to see that dragon again?” He shook his head and stumped back over towards where Sora and Patlon were clearing debris from the doorway. “I need different friends.”
Killien shifted his shoulders, stretching his back. “I almost died, didn’t I?”
“I thought you w
ere dead.” Will paused. “I couldn’t put that compulsion stone down. I’m sorry. I wanted to, but…”
“You don’t have to explain to me.” Killien turned to the window. “I didn’t think Lukas would…” He fell silent for a moment. “I trusted him.”
“Do you…” Will paused, wondering if it were even possible now that Lukas was gone. “Do you want to know why he did it?”
Killien’s attention snapped to Will. Interest warred with trepidation on his face, but he nodded hesitantly.
Will brought back the memory of Lukas’s emotions and let the echo of the feelings fill him again. They came back surprisingly easy, and he opened himself up toward Killien, pushing the feelings toward him.
The sharp slice of betrayal. Fury and terror bleeding out.
The fissure split open and the cold isolation flooded him. Betrayal clawed up from the deep, shadowing him with black isolation.
Killien’s breath tore out of him and he threw his hands over his face. Will closed himself off, letting the emotions fade until they were just a heart-breaking echo.
The others had cleared the broken tables away from the door. Alaric had found a stack of books and sat against the wall poring over them. Ilsa stood with her back to the wall, watching Killien and Will with a troubled expression.
“Ilsa.”
Will jumped at Killien’s voice, and Ilsa, after a short hesitation, came over to them.
“As far as I can tell,” the Torch said to her, “Will really is your brother. What he told me matches what Vahe said.”
“I know,” she said quietly.
Will’s heart clenched.
Her eyes flickered up to his face. “You were right about the doll. I had her until she fell apart.”
He opened his mouth to say something, but there was too much.
“Enjoy this,” Sora said from behind him. “It’s almost impossible to get Will to stop talking.”
Ilsa laughed a short, nervous laugh. Her face, smiling like that, was so much like it had been when she was tiny, he couldn’t breathe.