I didn’t even hesitate. I didn’t stop to think about what he was saying—my hand was already reaching for the bell before he had finished his explanation. I saw Calder step forward out of the corner of my eye, his blue eye burning with the warning that never had a chance to surface on his lips. As soon as the smooth bronze surface brushed the tips of my fingers, my hand began to burn. I gasped soundlessly, trying to pull away from the case, but the Inquisitor leaned casually forward, his hands notched against the case either side of me, trapping me in. The burn turned to a horribly sharp sting, like a tiny knife digging into my skin, and I held my shaking hand up before my face, watching as a little silver mark took shape on the back of my right hand. It was the sigil of the Inquisitor himself, a simple set of scales, weighted to the left. As soon as the mark was formed, the pain faded away, leaving me to stare at my skin, dumbstruck.
“Our transaction is complete,” the Inquisitor muttered, stepping away from me. “A debt in exchange for my services.”
“She is already serving a life debt,” the Captain exploded, his Vold energy rushing through the room like the crackling of sulphur after an explosion of lightening.
The Inquisitor only smiled. “You are only a spectator in this sport, Captain. Best remember that.”
“I’m guarding her life and you’re tampering with it,” Calder returned. “That makes it my business.”
“If she owes a life debt, as you say, then it’s our life to tamper with, is it not?”
Calder didn’t reply for a moment, his golden eye fixed to the Inquisitor. The Scholar was watching everything with a blank expression, his fingers twitching against his folded arms. Something seemed to peek out at me from behind his eyes. A shadow of him returning my stare. He seemed pleased.
“She wore the Weaver’s mark when I found her, and then the King ordered her to receive another mark. And now you’re marking her for yourself.” Calder seemed to be switching tack, working his voice to a scarily soft tone. “Is this a competition? Am I to assume that she will owe two more life debts as soon as the Scholar and the Warmaster are able to trick them out of her?”
The Inquisitor smiled that strange, slow, mocking smile. “Andel had a chance to do that yesterday, but it seems he didn’t know how to deal with the girl, so I can’t answer your question with any degree of certainty—and a fair degree of certainty is always needed when answering a question, isn’t that right, Andel?”
The Scholar had returned to his normal self, his burning violet gaze directed at the Inquisitor. “I’ve decided to go down a different route. I made the calculations. A formula was decided upon. I don’t need to trick her.”
“Then why are you here?” The Inquisitor seemed delighted. “Admit it, old friend. You’re researching her interactions because you have no clue how to interact with her.”
The Scholar offered no verbal reply, and I wasn’t looking at his face as the room went silent.
I was staring at the bell.
It was the only object in the case, sitting alone on a base of dark velvet. I picked it up, almost expecting the burn to shoot through my hand again. Suddenly, I could feel all three sets of eyes boring into me as I moved away from the case, seeking the closest balcony. The strong mix of energies within the room was making me light-headed. The Scholar’s magic was rough and invasive, glaring down into my soul without him expelling any effort whatsoever, where the Inquisitor’s magic whispered beneath my skin to invade me in a different way. Calder’s electric temper explosions weren’t helping, either.
I took a deep, steadying breath as I stood on the balcony, the curtain fluttering behind me, forming a flimsy barrier between me and them. I stared down at the bell and felt my energy try to surface at my bidding. I could feel the formless shadow inside me, my injured magic. It hobbled, shuddered, and battered weakly against my insistence, until I gave up before I had even really tried.
This wasn’t going to happen today.
I tucked the bell into one of the deep pockets in the dress I wore before turning back to the room.
“You were unsuccessful?” the Inquisitor guessed, unsurprised. He didn’t wait for a reply. “Oh, well. I suppose it’s time to get to work, then. I need you to deliver these packages to Breakwater Canyon. It seems the stewards are taking ill. It will not be long before the sickness spreads to the sectorians and then we shall have a riot on our hands.”
He was wrapping things into a pack as he spoke, his attention on the task.
“Cover your face before you approach the marked house, and do not touch anything. Deliver one vial to each household on the list—no more, even if they beg. Do you understand?”
I nodded.
“And change into something else. You’ll be at work all day. Who gave you that dress anyway?”
“Vidrol,” answered the Scholar, with a slight tone of disgust.
The King?
“Oh?” the Inquisitor turned to the other, his brows rising, the little bronze piercings glinting. “Thinks he’ll win with bribes, does he?”
Once again, the Scholar didn’t reply, and I was beginning to realise just how little he actually spoke, compared to the Inquisitor.
I tapped a hand on the nearest case, drawing their attention back to me. Both of them flashed glares my way, annoyed at being interrupted. I tugged at my dress and then gestured around the room, trying to keep my impatience out of the movement.
“The Captain will find you somewhere to change.” The Inquisitor waved me off, finishing up with his supplies. He carried them over to me, dumping the pack into my arms. He drew a folded piece of paper from his pocket and slipped it into mine, somehow knowing where the hidden seams were in my dress.
“I almost forgot,” he said, his smile gaining an edge that hadn’t been there before. “I have something to bribe you with myself.” He pulled another item from his pocket—a ring with a dark, velvety onyx stormstone. The band was delicate and gold, holding gently onto the stone. It was an exquisite piece of jewellery, more valuable than anything my mother had received from her clients. More beautiful than anything a steward had ever owned.
He slipped it onto my finger. The middle finger. On my left hand. In the position of promise, showing that a woman has entered into marriage to another.
Behind the Inquisitor, the Scholar released a sharp, angry sound.
“This will help you travel between your masters,” the Inquisitor explained. “Turn it around your finger and name the location. As long as you’ve been there before, you’ll be able to return.”
I stared at the ring, reacting with far more dread to the gift than I had to the mark upon the back of my right hand. It was true that the Eloi could bind magic to objects, but I had never heard of this kind of magic. It was similar to the Vold ability to move quickly through little folds of space, but on such a larger scale that it was impossible to tell how much magic had been layered into the object to achieve the result.
I felt for its energy, and reeled back as the true power of the ring smacked me viciously in the face. This was not an object that I would be able to break. It was impossible that this object had been made by one single man, and yet I couldn’t find another source of energy. It was all him. The Inquisitor. Dark and endless, whispering and invading. It had a taste like the stringent sting of liquor. A smell like smoking wood. It coated my tongue and my throat, burning all the way into me.
I found my gaze drifting up to the Inquisitor, the darkness of my eyes mirrored in the darkness of his, simmering fire against shivering velvet, skittering flames disappearing into an endless nothing. I shuddered, stepping away from him.
I hadn’t realised until that very moment just how powerful the great masters were.
He watched me back away, and I quickly turned my attention to Calder, seeking him out through some kind of desperate intuition. He had stepped forward as I stepped back, but unlike my stuttering progress, his was strong, his strides confident. He reached me in a second, and I realised that somethi
ng had switched in his expression. He was containing his Vold energy—I knew it in a different way to how I could feel the other energies. I knew it because I knew him. We were at either end of a string. A string that now fluttered and trembled, taut with whatever need glowed out of his golden gaze, invisible to everyone but me.
Blodsjel, I thought, as he reached me, as we turned together to leave the room. It still didn’t sound right, but it was beginning to make sense to me. He was drawn to protect me. His entire body was vibrating with the tension of the thing that tied us together, with his need to extract me from danger. It reminded me of the way he had burst into the bathroom as I hid myself beneath the water to scream. He was reacting to the swell of emotion inside me.
He led me to a room close by, on the same level of the Citadel as the artefact room, opening the door for me before taking the Inquisitor’s pack out of my arms. “I’ll wait out here.”
I quickly escaped into what turned out to be a lavatory, where I locked the door and changed into riding pants and a soft brown leather corset, pulling on the white cape with the little sword buttons. I should have left then, but it was my first true moment alone that day. I stared at the locked door, my brain overloaded with thoughts. Without realising it, I was undressing again. I extracted a cloth bag from the bottom of my pack, beneath the clothing gifted by the King. Inside was a toothbrush, a hairbrush, and my mother’s wrapped kalovka soap. I washed myself in the basin, where warm water was pumped straight through the tap—a sectorian luxury—and then spent some time making myself feel clean again. With each knot untangled by my hairbrush, my thoughts loosened, falling into place along a rough timeline created by my calmed mind. It all came down to one simple fact:
I needed information.
To get information, I needed my voice back.
I would allow my energy to heal during the day, and then at night, I would find a private place to attempt the soundless incantation.
I was stuffing everything back into the pack when the little maroon book fell out, the spine cracking open pliantly against the cold marble, the pages falling open to show me…
Myself.
I gaped at the sketch, dropping to my knees beside the book, my fingers tracing the inked curl of my hair, the dark simmer of my eyes, burning even through ink and page.
The Final Fjorn was written on the left-hand page in beautiful cursive script, bordered by patterns of vines and thorns. My hand shaking, I turned the page, glancing to the inscription before examining the image.
It was blank, the frame curling around nothing.
I turned to the illustration. It showed a familiar cobbled street with the rolling hills of Hearthenge in the background. The road wound toward the henge itself—a circle of rough rainstone in towering blocks, hugging what had once been the royal watchtower but was now the cultural epicentre of our civilisation. The capitol marketplace encircled the henge, stalls jutting from the base of the stone, with poles drilled into the rock supporting colourful sails. The kynhouses were inside the tower, along with the legal chambers, banks, and the capitol offices of those small council members who preferred to reside in the capitol. The image didn’t depict the excitement of visiting Hearthenge or the bustle of activity always associated with the capitol marketplace.
The stalls were empty, wares abandoned, fruit rotting in crates.
The cobbled streets were filled with bodies.
Horses with foaming mouths and red eyes pulled carts, filled to overflowing with bodies from the tower.
Black sails flew from the windows.
The great big tilrive tree, the only remaining of its kind, cried leaves of burnt pink-gold over the scene, a horrible rot spreading up from a knot on its trunk.
The image was permeated with sickness and death. The darkness. I could feel it in the page, just as I had felt it in the memories of the previous Fjorn. The disease fertilising the soil of our world was there, in this image. It wasn’t just poisoning things anymore. It was taking things away. It had taken away my Blodsjel, leaving nature to stitch together a replacement from spare parts. Calder.
And soon it would start taking lives.
Movement to the left caught my attention, and I watched in shock as ink slowly bled onto the page, crawling out from the centre of the frame and curving into elegant letters.
The Darkness.
Fuelled by fear and adrenaline, I flicked to the next page, but it was empty. Only blank pages remained until the end of the book. I flipped back to the image of me, and then went back further, through sketches of the previous three Fjorn interspersed with scenes of darkness and death. The further back I went, the more I saw our society change.
I found myself stuck on one of the early pages, staring at the image of a man with a multihued left iris, warring purples, greens, blues, and golds. His right iris was brown.
The First Mutation read the inscription, and I realised with a horrible, sinking feeling that the Darkness had been around much longer than I had realised. It had infected the magic of the sectorians hundreds of years ago—the mutations were a side effect of the Darkness infecting their energy. The more they used their magic, the deeper the disease dug. I flicked forward again, opening to another random page.
The Barrening, read the inscription. It showed an entire page of women, stretched to the edges of the page, each of them standing before a child-sized coffin, each of them veiled in black.
With shaking fingers, I snapped the book closed, turning it over to look at the front cover.
The Battle for Ledenaether was stamped in faded black lettering.
For the first time, I found myself truly accepting everything that Calder had said to me. I was a Fjorn. I was a part of this story. I had a role to play, a battle to win, just like the other three … but Calder had been right about something else, as well. I might have been one of the Fjorn, but I wasn’t like them. I was the consequence, the result, the accumulation of failures. It started with them and ended with them. They had failed to keep the Darkness at bay, and now it was free in this world and a new battle had begun.
There would only be one Fjorn in this new battle.
The final battle.
The battle for Ledenaether.
9
Darkness
I didn’t linger or pause to do any more thinking. There was some action-driven part of my brain that was kicking into gear, taking over as the rest of me curled in on itself, overwhelmed by everything. I stepped outside, shoving the book at Calder. I watched as he turned the pages without a hint of emotion, his sharp blue eye scrolling across the inscriptions and images. When he was done, he froze, his eyes on the final page, his brows drawn down, his jaw tight, a small muscle ticking at the top of his neck.
“This is the book from the Obelisk.” His words were forced out.
I nodded.
“The magic of the Fjorn wants you to understand. That’s why we see the memories of the others when we touch for the first few times. The Fjorn energy is like a child. Innocent and eager. It’s pure and purpose-driven, and it wants to win. You must listen to it.”
We both stared at the page depicting the Darkness, and I wondered if he had made the connection between this page and all the others in the book. If he realised that the battle against the Darkness had been lost and a new battle had begun.
“This is the future.” He paused as a pair of sectorians passed, their heads buried behind a huge map. “Does that mean we can change it?”
I touched the page, feeling its elegant energy beneath the pads of my fingers. It felt … proper, formal, knowledgeable. Like the opinion of a stiff, well-informed librarian.
I frowned, shaking my head slightly. It didn’t feel like a malleable future, but maybe I was just sensing the unbending energy within the book. With a frown, I snapped the book closed and stuffed it back into my pack. Immediately, I felt lighter, as though the Darkness had managed to reach me from the very depiction of itself in the book. Calder didn’t exactly look rel
ieved, but a minute amount of tension seemed to leave the stiff set of his shoulders.
“The medicine,” he said suddenly. “If people are falling sick … this future is already here.”
Which meant that we needed to get the medicine out as soon as possible. If it wasn’t going to work against the Darkness, we needed to know so we could try something else. I hadn’t exactly come to terms with the fact that the world was diseased … but that didn’t mean I shouldn’t do what I could.
If we were wrong, no harm would be done.
I held my hand out to Calder, my ring finger raised.
He frowned at the ring. “Can you sense how this thing works?”
I winced in reply. My energy was wounded; it wasn’t willing to venture out to do any more exploring. I pointed to him, and made a talking symbol with my hand. He needed to command the ring. I had no voice.
He groaned. “You don’t just experiment with magical objects, Lavenia.”
I folded my arms, a frown twisting my mouth.
He tilted his head down to me, his expression twitching in annoyance. “We could ride there like normal people.”
I stepped up to his side, linking my arm through his. He stiffened, and I could tell that he was containing an urge to flinch away from me. I couldn’t link my arm all the way through—our size difference was too great. His arm was larger than I realised. I wrapped my fingers around it, and it seemed that even his muscles were unhappy with my proximity, as they jolted slightly. I grabbed his left hand, pulling it up to where my hand grasped him, setting one of his fingers against the stone of the ring. Together, we pushed it, turning it once around my finger.
“Breakwater Canyon,” he said, anger and unease riding his tone.
The marble walkway began to shudder, and then suddenly it was dissolving beneath our feet, stone crumbling to sand. Calder grabbed me as we fell, dropping through the floor into a cascade of sand. I could feel the world trying to rip us apart, a strange force tugging me away from him, but he held tight and we landed with a jarring crash against solid ground. I tumbled away from him, pain shooting up my ankle. The sky was bright above me, the smell of grass against my hair. I rolled onto my side with a groan, trying to catch my breath as I sought out Calder. He was already on his feet, already beside me, already pulling me up. He didn’t look injured at all.
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