“You need to get out of here. I can’t hold back so many.” Roen shook off his unlocked bonds and took a sword from the man on the floor.
“You can. I’ll help.” She knew there would be fighting, one way or another, and this was part of her plan that she could still do. Eloryn spoke more words of magic. Roen guided her behind him, backing her up against the nearest wall, parrying away blows from the men who followed.
“By the fae,” Roen wheezed when her behest took effect. His next strike ripped the sword from his opponent’s hand with enough force to lodge it into the wall where it flew.
Will smiled, teeth bared like a predator. Her words reached his body too, taking his strengths, making them stronger. He leapt across at the next wave of guards, pulling the first of them into a spinning tackle that tumbled the rest of the row.
The Wizards’ Council stood between Eloryn and the chaos of fighting. Unprepared, they used simple magic, anything they had that didn’t require being read. Roen and Will fought back those who made it through to threaten Eloryn. She kept a steady stream of words flowing, renewing the energy they spent.
A cacophony of painful cries, clashing weapons and rumbling magic filled the ornate hall, a hall made for dances of a less violent nature. Bodies fell, but the resistance won ground.
“This might actually work. I thought she... I can’t believe Memory did that,” Roen yelled over his shoulder, the confidence from the power Eloryn gave him clear in his voice. “Just up to the Council and resistance to get everything under control now.”
Eloryn took a breath and a moment away from her words of behest. “Can you see her? Is she coming back to us?” The scarring white light that erupted from Thayl’s severed wrist had gone, but the roaring battle now obscured that end of the hall.
“Can’t see yet.” Roen frowned, starting to lose the ease with which he kept more than one man at bay.
Eloryn raced her magic words back out again, keeping him strong. Will broke away from their side. Eloryn’s eyes locked onto his back. He forced through a new surge of guards, cracking his still shackled hands against attacking swords.
“Will, come back!” Eloryn yelled between behests. He kept going, moving out of her reach of influence.
He pushed a man down, climbing him like a ladder. Stepping across other men’s shoulders, he raced for the other end of the hall, clearing half the room before falling into the crowd again.
Eloryn followed his path with her eyes. Through a gap in the blurred motion of battle she saw a heart-shattering tableau.
Thayl still lived, still stood, wounded but awake. Memory lay beneath him, unmoving, collapsed on the dais.
Thayl tore a silk banner from the wall, pulling it with one hand and wrapping it around the bleeding stump where the other had been. Feral anger showed in every movement, in the twist of his face. He spoke words Eloryn couldn’t hear and spat on Memory. Keeping hard eyes on her, he bent and picked up the sword still wet with his own blood.
Eloryn’s pulse beat so fast it burned. There’s no one there to help her. A line of guards held others back from the dais, protecting Thayl as the Wizard Council protected her. The resistance focused on blocking new waves of castle troops that headed toward the clearest enemies in the room – the Council, Roen, the defensive line around Eloryn. Everyone, everyone fought for her and no one fought for Memory.
Thayl examined the sword coldly. He stepped with menacing purpose over Memory’s slumped body.
Eloryn’s magic words faltered. She saw Will in the crowd, the only one fighting against the tide. He tore bodies out of his way, pushing through toward Memory. None of Eloryn’s magic reached him any more. He fought with desperate strength as though it still did. Outnumbered, unarmed, already bleeding, the guards overwhelmed him, bringing him down.
Eloryn watched Roen fighting for her for a painful moment. I’m sorry.
She changed the meaning of the ancient words she spoke.
Roen pushed a pair of disarmed men, knocking them back with the last burst of strength she gave him. In the second of time that bought him, he turned to Eloryn. The confusion and concern on his face wrenched her insides. He knows I’ve abandoned him.
Eloryn’s knees folded, life seeping out of her. The sound of the battle dimmed.
Through clouded eyes she watched the two thrown down guards get back to their feet, pulling at Roen. He shook them off. He called out to her but she couldn’t hear. Feather slow she drifted to the floor, sight flickering out like a finished wick. Four, five more men latched onto Roen and he thrashed to reach her. They forced him down onto his knees, stomach, pushing his face onto the floor, pinning down each limb. His fingertips outstretched in front of her face were the last thing she saw as her eyes closed.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Eloryn found herself in a strange and horrifying world. She tried not to regret her decision as she blinked wide eyes and calmed her breathing. This was not like a normal healing. Even for being out of her body she didn’t expect this. She’d been channeled right into Memory’s dreaming consciousness. Like calls to like.
A hard grey ground lay beneath her. Machines of grey metal lined the streets and grey buildings towered nightmarishly high up into a grey sky. Even the air tasted grey. A world full of metal and dust, all grey, everything grey. It pounded like a ravaged heartbeat. The whole world pulsed, crumbled, being torn down and built up again with each beat, shaking and shifting. Eloryn put a hand to her mouth and fought the urge to be sick. She reminded herself she wasn’t even in her physical body.
Images all around twisted and tore like burning paintings, blending the nightmare into a mess of malformed scenes. Streets led out in every direction further than she could see. She screamed out for Memory.
The movement of people down one street caught Eloryn’s eye. She broke into a run toward them. The street became an open park, appearing under her feet and before her eyes. Strange contraptions jutted from the ground that a group of children swung and stood on.
“Memory.” Eloryn breathed out in relief.
The dark haired girl didn’t react. She had Memory’s face, but younger, a different hair cut, half black, half blue. She mouthed off at an older boy backed by a group of his friends. He called her something that almost made Eloryn faint to hear. Memory broke his nose with her first punch. Then she kept hitting.
They vanished before Eloryn could blink or move.
She spun, disorientated, finding herself alone on the street again. She jogged back for the crossroads, calling out Memory’s name every second step. Desperation burned in her.
Her next step brought her into a dark hallway. A looming shadow stood in front of her. The wide-set man leant on a mop and grinned in a way that twisted Eloryn’s insides. He stared right at her and she lost a shaking breath before a sound behind her spun her around. Memory, now with blood red hair, backed into the shadows against the wall and ran away. Eloryn ran after her.
She caught up with her in a new hallway lit with a strange crisp brightness. A different Memory, different age, different hair color. She stood by a door left slightly ajar, sneering and picking her nails. Words floated out from three adults within.
“I’m sorry. We thought we could handle it. But she’s...” said a woman on one side of a desk.
“She’s too much for us to deal with. She’s just too old, too troubled,” the man next to her said, holding her hand. An older man across the desk nodded and smiled as if he heard nothing new.
Eloryn reached for Memory. “Mem, please, can you hear me?”
A flash of a storeroom filled with brooms, mops and colored containers jumped in front of Eloryn, snagging the breath in her throat. A large silhouette approached her, making soothing noises.
Then Eloryn was alone in darkness. No, not alone. There was a bed next to her with someone in it. Body curled as tight as any could be. Suppressed whispers of sobbing came from the youngest Memory Eloryn had seen yet. Tiny and blonde, she looked just like Elory
n had when she was ten, except for the hair being cut short around her ears. The scene shifted before her eyes, but remained the same. Only Memory’s age, Memory’s hair changed. Then again, older still. A small boy with dark hair sat awkward and silent at the end of the bed. He reached a hand out toward the huddled, weeping Memory, but pulled it back without touching her. Staring at his hand, he clenched it into a small fist.
Eloryn pressed both hands against her chest. She struggled a slow breath from the stabbing quick gasps that were overtaking her. The first time she’d tried to heal Memory, she couldn’t get in at all, blocked by a barrier of distrust and fear. Now she understood why. These visions made no sense, but sheer grief overflowed from them. Is this the suffering that made her what she is? We were born just moments apart. If I had been first instead...
Eloryn’s heart beat an erratic shiver through her body. She backed up against a wall, the next fragment of vision taking her completely off guard.
Memory, the Mem she knew. Sixteen years old, black and pink hair, wearing the very same clothes she first appeared to Eloryn in. Her open knife dropped on the floor. The wide-set man yelled and scowled and beat her and beat her and beat her until the world exploded around them.
Eloryn was back on the street.
She rolled forward and heaved terrified sobs. This is no good. These aren’t Memory, they’re just visions of her past. Caught up in these nightmares she wasn’t going to reach Memory in time.
Again, a black and pink haired Memory appeared, running down the street with a wild look of glee on her face. Her pockets were filled and heavy. Eloryn didn’t chase this time, but young Will did, struggling to keep up. A man came out of the doorway they’d run through, bellowing at them as the stallholder had in the markets where they met Roen.
She followed them with her gaze and saw a flash of strange blackness in an alleyway they passed.
Reaching for hope, she ran into the alley. She saw another Memory, backed into a corner, huddled into herself. Memory in a dress, hair flickering between blonde and black. Eyes achingly wide but lacking awareness. Shivering but not moving.
Eloryn raced to her. The world shook with another heaving beat, building and falling. A void of blackness pushed outwards from Memory. A nothingness, forcing the world away, forcing the visions away, forcing Eloryn away.
“Mem, please,” Eloryn cried. “Please hear me, let me help you. You have to wake up. You have to get up or you’ll die.”
Memory remained unmoved, uncaring.
Eloryn had come looking for something she could heal, some wound she could fix, to wake Memory up and save her; leaving her body behind since she wasn’t able to reach her any other way. But there was nothing here she could repair. No wound, no physical blow had caused this.
Eloryn reached for her. The expanding darkness struck her back. Flung against the opposite wall, she slumped into piles of grey refuse. “Mem, I can’t lose you too. I don’t know what to do. I knew by coming here I couldn’t leave again without your help. But I wouldn’t leave you anyway, even if I could. Not to this. Not alone.”
Memory’s mouth opened a crack. Her bottom lip quivered. Eloryn tumbled on top of her and held her, no longer pushed away.
Squeaking, hysterical whispers flowed from Memory’s mouth. “It’s too much, too much, all at once, everything, it’s too much, I can’t, everything, I can’t.”
The memories. A lifetime of memories, all at once. Eloryn cursed herself that she hadn’t realized, in all her theories and planning, what that would mean. But how could she have known the nightmare these memories held?
Squeezing Memory in her arms, she tore over options and outcomes, racing through them. She could not slow the intake of these memories, or help Memory accept them in some other way. Neither would be fast enough to save her body as well. Maybe she could force them all away again, but if she did, they might be lost forever.
“I’m so sorry. I promised you I would get your memories back, but more than that I want you to live,” Eloryn said. Her tears dripped into her sister’s hair.
Memory looked up at her with a shaking mouth. “I don’t want to, I can’t like this...”
Eloryn hesitated, even while knowing any moment could be their last, unsure how time flowed here or what happened outside. “I’ll make it stop. But then you have to wake up, you have to wake up now!”
Something dripped on her face and she tasted the metal of blood. Memory’s chest burned, inside and out, the knife she kept stashed there heated to scalding. Deafening sounds of battle smacked into her, thrumming through the floor she lay on and ringing in her ears. Memory’s eyes snapped open. Her gaze raced up the wet sword pointed at her chest to an arm that lifted and tensed and a darkly handsome face torn with a gruesome snarl.
She rolled across the floor and the sword stabbed down into the carpet. Thayl roared.
Throwing her legs off the edge of the dais, she stood from a crouch in time to duck again when Thayl swung the sword at her, screaming violently. She stumbled away from him.
“You lost it all. It was better left with me!”
Memory raced to fill confusing blanks in her mind propped between raging panic and anger. She’d cut off Thayl’s hand, then only blind pain filled the next gap. Did I faint? Likely. I did just sever someone’s limb. Blood drained from her so quickly she almost fainted again. Oh my God I severed someone’s limb. Memory gritted her teeth. She did what she had to do, to stop Thayl, to get her memories and soul back. So where were they?
Something else was happening that she didn’t understand. Her mouth spoke of its own accord, a language she didn’t even know. She could feel a familiar presence inside her, another consciousness she’d tasted before. Eloryn. My sister. How?
“Soulless demon!” Thayl hissed at her. One of his arms ended in a bound and dripping stump, the other with the sword lunging into attack again. Memory did not step back.
His sword stabbed left and she shifted right, moving smoother and faster than she knew she could. Magic from Eloryn’s words, spoken with her own mouth, flowed through her and made her stronger. She took Thayl by his sword hand with one of her own. Twisting the wrist, bones crunched under her fingers. The sword dropped. She forced her other palm up under his chin with teeth shattering strength. Thayl slammed onto his back.
She snarled and picked up the sword.
“Guards, guards to me!” Thayl screamed.
A dozen of his closest men scrambled toward their King. Memory’s hand shifted, her mouth still moving rapidly. A solid rush of wind blew the soldiers back into the wreck of battle.
Memory choked on the words. Her own blank hole of pain was being filled, flooded. Eloryn’s grief and rage poured in, overwhelming her. Her hand around the sword twitched and lifted mechanically. She stared at it open mouthed, not having willed the action herself. She could feel her face turn feral, fighting with her own emotions and Eloryn’s.
“Lory, please stop.”
He deserves this. The words screamed inside her, but weren’t her own.
She shrieked so madly Thayl froze where he’d fallen, staring at her as though he saw a real demon.
The bronze sword swiped across as if drawn to a magnet within Thayl’s neck. The tip pressed into the soft flesh. Thayl gagged, waiting with wild, terrified eyes.
You’re not a murderer Lory, not you.
Her body shuddered, battling against a will not hers. She screamed aloud, “ELORYN!”
The sword fell from her hands.
Memory and Thayl stared at each other for a long moment. Thayl brought his bandaged stump up against his chest, grasping it with his hand.
Memory grimaced then forced her face still, staring down at him. “Game over.”
His eyes flickered across to the sword that lay on the ground beside him.
“Don’t think I can’t take you out with this if I need to,” Memory hissed, pulling her hand into a fist in front of him. She kicked the sword out of his reach.
Memory turned to the brawling chaos of the hall. Seeing their King lying prone on the dais, more castle guards rushed at her.
“Stop!” she bellowed, in a voice loud enough to crack plaster scrolling from the walls.
Throughout the hall, fighters stumbled in shock. Some turned from their battles and were taken advantage of by those not distracted by the loud interruption.
“I said stop. Now. Everyone!” Words continued to flow from her, from Eloryn, feeding on the fire within her. She crumbled every blade, every piece of armor and metal held by men in the room.
The fighting stopped.
Men stumbled out of motion, confused. Despite wary glances to others around them, all attention turned her way. The small girl, standing over the defeated king, looked out at the sea of blood-spattered faces. She didn’t know which side was which. She didn’t think half of them knew either.
What now, Lory?
You know.
Memory pulled herself up straight and called out into the hall. “Thayl is finished. The Maellan heir is back. If you’re not happy with that you better get the hell out of here now.”
A brief moment of stillness passed then a third of the men in the hall turned and fled. They pushed away through the shell shocked crowd, running in blind panic. No one tried to stop them.
The remaining men turned to her with the look of awaiting their next order. A dozen or so pushed to the front, approaching her. She tensed, but they stopped below the dais and made the hand symbol she had seen Eloryn make. The resistance.
All eyes on her, Memory stuttered under the pressure. She pointed to Thayl. “Someone, come tie him up already.”
A wiry man with sweat soaked sandy hair came forward, scooping a dropped pair of manacles from the ground on his way. He gave her a short bow. “If you serve the Maellan heir, then I serve you. I am Peirs. I’m what you might call the leader of this mob, if they’ve ever been enough to lead.”
Memory's Wake Page 24