by Morgan Rice
The man shook his head. “I’ll tell you this: if you ever want to see your daughter again, there is only one place to go now. You need to complete your journey to Monthys. Chase, and you’ll lose your daughter. Hesitate, and you’ll lose your daughter. This is the only way that fate works with you seeing her.” He smiled. “I wonder if you’ll like what she becomes?”
Sebastian had put up with enough. He lifted his sword, and brought it down sharply.
He stood there in the wake of the blow, trying to decide, trying to think past the pain that was rising up inside him now that the rush of battle was done. What could he do? Where could he go?
There was only one answer to that, no matter how much he hated it. If it truly was the only way to see his daughter again, he had to go to the place he’d been heading for all along.
He had to get to Monthys.
CHAPTER THIRTY
All Lucas could think of, all he could feel, was Elanora’s touch. Her lips were on his, her skin brushing his flesh, and those small moments of contact seemed to fill his entire world.
Dimly, he could remember that there was a world beyond that touch. He’d been doing something, fighting something… a tree, he’d been fighting a tree, although how trees managed to fight, Lucas couldn’t remember. Beyond that fight…
He was sure that there must be other things beyond that, but Lucas couldn’t remember what they were. Elanora was all he could think of, all he wanted. He’d come here wanting something else, but how could he possibly have wanted anything other than her.
“I love you so much,” he whispered, in a brief moment when Elanora pulled back from him.
“You’re very sweet,” Elanora said. “So delicate too. So unreal now. Soon, this will be the only place you can be.”
“It’s the only place I want to be,” Lucas said.
Elanora smiled at that. “If only you’d said that before.”
Lucas held one of his hands up to the light. It seemed strangely translucent, like the wing of a butterfly flying too near to a lamp. He had the vague feeling that he hadn’t always been this way, just as he had the feeling that he shouldn’t be kissing Elanora, but it was impossible to remember why.
He wanted to lose himself in her. He wanted to lose everything except this.
Brief flashes of memory came to Lucas: him sitting with a fat man, learning lessons that seemed to make no sense, him with two girls he felt sure he knew well, him fighting against a thing that looked human, but that hadn’t been human in a long time. Each memory seemed to shift and fade, pulled out of him through a slender stream of soul stuff that connected him to Elanora.
Lucas hadn’t even noticed that until now.
“What’s this?” Lucas asked her.
“Nothing important,” Elanora assured him. “I want to be as connected to you as possible. You want that too, don’t you, Lucas?”
Lucas nodded. Of course he did.
He was about to resume kissing Elanora when he heard something that didn’t seem to fit with the place where they sat. Music drifted in from some unseen place, and Lucas couldn’t see where it might be. There was a stringed instrument in the music somewhere that he recognized, although it took Lucas a moment to focus on it enough to remember that it was called a harp.
“I know someone who plays a harp,” Lucas said.
“Ignore it, my love,” Elanora said. “It is nothing but a distraction from the two of us.”
Lucas did his best, because he didn’t want to displease Elanora, but it was hard to do when his mind insisted that there was something important about this music, something familiar.
There was a voice too: a woman’s voice, soft and melodious, swooping and soaring, pure and rhythmical, all at the same time. Lucas knew that voice. He knew it as surely as he knew anything in this place. He knew the words to the songs she was singing. He’d heard them before in a place of ice and mountains. He knew this voice.
“You don’t need to remember, Lucas,” Elanora said. “You need to forget.”
Lucas felt the pressure of something around his mind like a giant blanket enveloping everything. Just moments ago, he might have given into it, but now, he found himself remembering something the fat man in his memories had shown him: how to close himself off and control himself, how to be secure in the only place that mattered.
His mind.
“You’re pushing me out, Lucas,” Elanora said. “Don’t you love me?”
“Of course I love you,” Lucas said. “It’s just… the music.”
He let the music flow through him, focusing on it, filling the space that he’d created inside himself and letting it pull up fragments of other things. He let it fill out the space that seemed to be so empty, and he found it connecting to memory after memory.
Rika. It was Rika singing.
“Lucas,” Elanora said, less than gently. “I told you to forget.”
Instead of forgetting, though, Lucas remembered. He remembered Rika in the halls of Ishjemme, along with his sisters. He remembered the war against first the Dowager’s forces, and then the Master of Crows. He remembered his parents, and the stones they’d sent him and the others to find. He remembered the moment of their death…
“You don’t have to remember the pain,” Elanora said, but Lucas ignored her.
He looked around, and now, it felt as though he could see the world layered, one spot atop another. He saw the space where the stone lay, and the space where he’d fought the tree, and a dozen layers below that, each stacked atop the next. He could see it now, and he could see how to pull back from it.
“No, you can’t! I won’t allow it!” Elanora said.
Lucas could feel her pushing magic into him, pushing away what made him who he was. Lucas focused on the music he could hear, latching onto it like a drowning man clutching at a rope.
“If it’s the music, I’ll deal with the stupid girl making it,” Elanora snapped. Lucas saw her hold out her hand, and the soul stuff around her coalesced into crackling lightning.
“You can’t touch real people,” Lucas said. “It will pass through her.”
Elanora smiled like a shark. “Oh, no, Lucas. That was before I absorbed so much of your reality. Now… now I can send her screaming to her death for interfering. For stopping be from touching your world.”
Elanora drew more lightning into her palm, until it was a crackling ball of the stuff. She drew her arm back, and it seemed that she was only waiting for enough of it to gather before she threw it at Rika. Lucas knew he needed to stop her, but he didn’t know how. He couldn’t see a way…
And then he did.
The sword Elanora had made for him sat there on the floor, close enough to touch, close enough to reach. Lucas reached out for it, his hand crawling across the floor an inch at a time when he didn’t have the strength to do more. He felt his hand close around the grip.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
He didn’t have much strength left, but Lucas put all that he had into the thrust. It passed into Elanora and through her, the blade real and unreal all at once. It might not touch the flesh, but it carved into the soul easily, plunging deep into the insubstantial stuff that Elanora was made of and piercing through her heart.
She screamed once, and dissipated like smoke.
Lucas felt his strength pouring back into him, along with his memories. He reached out, taking the insubstantial round form of the spirit stone and holding it in his hand. Holding it there, he could feel it trying to lure him into going deeper into the spirit realm, but Official Ko’s lessons let him hold it. Rika’s music helped too.
Lucas stepped through the layers of the spirit isle, coming back to himself and standing, just in time for Rika to throw her arms around him.
“Careful,” he said with a smile. “This sword is sharp enough to cut the spirit.”
“I saw,” Rika said. She hugged him tighter for a moment. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Lucas said. “You didn’t ma
ke her try to turn me into spirit. How are you here though, Rika? How did you know where to come?”
“I dreamed it,” Rika said. She looked down for a moment. “I dreamed more than that, Lucas. There’s a battle coming, against the Master of Crows, and… and I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
“We’re going to win,” Lucas promised her, even though it didn’t feel like a promise that anyone could truly make.
“I hope so,” Rika said, “but we’re so far away from Monthys, and I don’t even know if my ships will get us all there in time.”
Lucas only worried about it for a moment, because the spirit stone gave him an answer. He understood then how the layers of the Spirit Isle could connect to anywhere he wanted.
“There’s another way,” he said. “Get the men together, along with their weapons. There are paths that have nothing to do with water.”
“I’ll do it,” Rika promised.
Lucas held out the spirit stone. He thought he understood how to use it. If he did, then they had a chance. They could get to the battle in time. If he didn’t…
If he didn’t, they would probably all be lost in the realms of the spirit.
CHAPTER THIRTY ONE
Kate stepped from the cooling embrace of the shadows onto one of the hills above Monthys. From here, she could see the estate that had formed her family’s home for so long, spread out and only partly rebuilt by Ulf and Frig’s efforts.
They were two more to add to the list of the dead. The Master of Crows would eventually pay for them, but so would her sister. So would everyone. The shadow stone let her see the ways that all the individual decisions of the past interconnected, showing her who was truly at fault; who deserved to pay.
In the distance, Kate could see the columns of dust approaching as armies vied to get there first. The shadows showed her the approach of the New Army, grinding forward across the countryside with horse and foot and cannon. They showed her Henry d’Angelica’s forces, following close enough behind that if the New Army halted too long for rest, the battle might not be where Kate anticipated.
There were spots that were harder to see, blocked off by the powers and the deceptions of others. Kate could see Emeline and Cora, still kneeling as the crows came to them, and on impulse, Kate turned a strand of shadow near them into something sharper, slicing the barest flaw into their ropes. The shadow stone didn’t seem to care either way, so long as it got chaos and trickery, betrayal and all the dark emotions of human life.
“That’s what you want, isn’t it?” Kate said aloud. She wasn’t such a fool as to think that the shadow stone wasn’t trying to affect her; that it didn’t have its own more than human need for the things related to it.
She could feel that need, but it didn’t mean it was in control of her, the way the foolish priestess had thought. It had merely shown her the truth of things. Briefly, Kate suspected that she should have felt worse about cutting down the woman by accident like that, but Lisare had been the one trying to stop her from getting her powers back. She had been the one to run into the wrong place at the wrong time. Looked at like that, it was her fault really, not Kate’s at all.
There had been so many other deaths in the time since this had started, but now, Kate could see the way that they all fit together in a pattern. She could see the way that others had put those deaths in front of her too, from the first woman Siobhan had made her kill, to every soldier sent against her. All so that they could hurt her more.
“It will be all right, Kate.”
Will was there, and even though Kate knew that it was just a shadow version of him, it still made her feel better to see him there.
“I know you’re not real,” she said.
“I’m as real as you want me to be,” the shadow Will said. “And this seems like a good conduit to use to speak to you.”
“You can’t give me Will back,” Kate said.
“I can give you something so close that it doesn’t make a difference.”
Kate shook her head, reaching out for the shadow and pulling it back into the stone. She was in control, not it. Everything she was doing was because she wanted to do it, not because it made her. If she ever summoned back that shadowy form of Will, it would be because she wanted to, not because it gave him to her.
Below, Kate could make out people in Monthys. Reaching out to look through the shadows showed her that they weren’t the Master of Crows’ men, but a combination of ordinary looking people, soldiers of the free companies, and clansmen from up in the mountain lands to the north. There even seemed to be some warriors of Ishjemme and Stonehome among them.
“They must have decided that Monthys was a safe place,” Kate murmured.
Or they’re a trap set by your sister, in case you come by, a whisper within said. Kate dismissed it. She could recognize the shadow stone’s lies now.
Is it a lie? Look.
Kate looked down the slope to the estate, and saw half a dozen men coming out, heading up towards her. All of them were armed and armored. All of them were heading her way.
“They must have seen me,” Kate murmured.
And now they want to kill you.
Kate didn’t believe it yet, but even so, she made sure that her sword was loose in its sheathe, just in case.
They will want to take you back. They’re afraid to face you alone. They will want you where you’re helpless.
“Who goes there?” one of the advancing soldiers said. “Answer, or we attack.”
“Kate Danse,” Kate said, stepping where they could see her.
The men looked at one another, and while a part of Kate said that it was shock at seeing her there, another pointed out glances between them, told her that they were plotting something. She couldn’t even touch their minds, since one of them seemed to be shielding the others, and that only made her more suspicious.
“Your Highness,” the man who had spoken said, “we didn’t realize that it was you. You should come down into the buildings, where it’s safe.”
Mistrust flared in Kate. This was exactly what the small, suspicious part of her fueled by the stone had suggested would happen.
“I’m happy up here,” she said.
“But Your Highness, there are soldiers coming. I have to insist.”
The soldier reached out for her, and in that moment, Kate understood that they truly did mean to kill her. In an instant, her sword leapt from its sheathe, and she buried it to the hilt in the man’s chest.
The men cried out and grabbed their own weapons, but by that point, Kate was moving, all her old speed and power flowing through her veins. She rolled between two men, hamstringing one as she went, then used the power of the stone to step from one man’s shadow to a second, coming up behind him and stabbing him in the back.
A soldier tried a cut at her, only proving that they were there with murder in mind. Kate swayed aside from it and brought her sword across his throat, then caught his weapon in her off hand as he dropped it in death. She slashed both blades in a complex pattern through one of the remaining soldiers, then plunged them down into the one she’d only wounded.
That left one, a Stonehome warrior who was frantically lifting a pistol as if that would stop her.
“Why?” he demanded.
“Why?” Kate countered. “Do you think I don’t know what you were planning? What my sister has been doing all this time? They took Will from me, and now they were going to kill me. Well, the battle that’s coming will change that. It will scour all this clean.”
“That’s…”
Kate didn’t let the man finish. Instead, she threw herself to the side, and came up with a dozen shadow versions of herself moving in every direction. The warrior picked one and fired, the ball passing through the shadow self harmlessly.
Kate moved forward in one smooth motion, snatching up the sword that she’d dropped and thrusting it home in her enemy. She held him there for a moment, feeling the strength that let her do it, and then let the man
tumble to the floor.
She sat there for a while among the bodies, waiting for the first of the carrion birds to come to them. She looked at them almost the way that she might look at a friend, even though she doubted that the Master of Crows would ever be that.
“Tell your master to hurry,” Kate said. “There are so many people coming to the battle, and I would hate for him to be late. I would have to start killing without him.”
For the most part, the birds ignored her, but one took to the air, flying in the direction of the advancing armies. The New Army would be here soon enough, Kate guessed, and Henry d’Angelica, but it was the others who were coming who were of more interest to her.
“Where are you, sister?” she said to the air. “It’s time for this to finish.”
This would be where it ended, the shadows promised, and Kate would be the last one standing.
CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
Sophia could barely see through her grief as she and her makeshift army marched north. It seemed to take all the strength that she had to keep putting one foot in front of the other along the small roads and across the fields along the way. Only one thing kept her going:
The need to see the Master of Crows dead.
She had not thought that anything could make her hate him more than she already did, yet the sight of her daughter’s power winking out like a candle flame had done it. It had set a fire of anger burning inside her that was almost enough to satisfy the stone she carried, and that turned the rain that fell to steam before it hit the ground.
The fire stone wanted more than that, of course. It wanted to burn the kingdom around Sophia, wanted to turn it all into a funeral pyre for her daughter. Sophia pushed back that urge though, because her love for the rest of her kingdom outweighed even her grief. Burning it would just make her feel more pain, more anguish, even than this.
“How could there be more than this?” Sophia asked aloud.
Someone put a hand on her shoulder. She didn’t know who. It wasn’t Lani or one of the twelve. Right then, there were so many people around her, so many strangers, who had chosen to travel with her because she was the queen, and because they felt that she knew what to do to make things better for all of them.