by Spurrier, Jo
Shaking, Sierra got to her feet and began to pace. In trying to convince herself that an Akharian alliance was worthwhile, she’d talked herself out of it instead.
For argument’s sake, let’s say I do this, Sierra said to herself. Cam, Isidro and the others would never forgive the betrayal. It was exactly what they trusted Mira would never do — abandon them when they needed her.
But staying was impossible. Sierra could not bear to live like a jewel in a casket or a sword in a sheath, kept locked away until she was needed, and then returned to safety as soon as the moment passed. That was how Kell had intended to use her, and she would go mad like that. Sierra knew it right down in her bones.
Very well, if I do leave, clearly it has to be after the Akharians come to see the Spire.
But if the Akharians had even the slightest idea she was incapacitated, they would press their advantage. What if they blocked her escape? She couldn’t fight without risking Isidro. And what if they took him hostage, or Cam, or any of the others? She couldn’t put them in that position.
But what if she left before they came? Mira was a master at phrasing matters to her advantage. The Akharians could be told Sierra had finished with the Spire and left to infiltrate the king’s court, with the veiled threat that she would return if her allies were in danger. They might suspect it only a convenient story, but suspicion would keep them wary. Once she was entrenched in Kell’s dungeons, they would be happy to make use of her position. The more she thought about it, the more it seemed to Sierra that leaving would strengthen an alliance, while staying would only create a weakness.
Mira had left the door open, and Sierra’s eye fell on the bolts set into the frame. Just a single piece of metal could keep her imprisoned indefinitely — she would be as helpless as Delphine had been the night of the battle.
There were soft voices down the hall — Rhia and Amaya, watching over Isidro. With a sigh Sierra pulled herself away from the door to pace the cramped confines of her cell. Are you really going to do this?
Now that the thought had kindled, it burned like a fever. She needed to act before she lost her nerve, before anyone realised what she was thinking and trapped her here for her own good. But she couldn’t slip away with so many people around. She would have to wait for night.
As the hours dragged past, Sierra tried to convince herself there was another way. She stood by the open door and listened, waiting for any sign that Isidro had finally woken, but there was nothing but silence. When evening came and a servant brought her meal, Sierra pushed it around the bowl without appetite. Afterwards she lay down and tried to sleep, but only stared at the ceiling as the hours crawled by, until at last she could wait no longer.
She opened the chamber door, and leant against the faintly viscous barrier of the shields. What if Isidro began to fade when she stepped outside? Her ability to feed from people weakened with distance, but what if the link between them was deep enough to overcome that?
Unless she was willing to spend the rest of her life in this shielded chamber, she had to take a chance. Sierra bit her lip and pushed through the shield.
The rush of power that came to her on the other side was dizzying. It felt as though she’d flung off a set of chains. Sierra threw her head back and took a deep breath as energy surged through her. She felt as though she were standing at a crossroads. The road ahead was dark and uncertain, a path she would have to walk alone, but on this road she could be a warrior, not just a pawn for others to control and possess.
Sierra trembled as halting steps carried her along the hall. The door to Isidro’s chamber was ajar, and she peered through the crack to see him lying on a thick cushion of furs, with Amaya drowsing by his side.
The chamber above was silent and deserted. The lights came on as Sierra emerged, and she flinched, afraid someone would come to investigate. She needed a coat, and two were hanging on the rack near the entrance. Moving silently in her felt-soled boots, she lifted one from its hook.
‘Sierra?’
She froze, clamping down on her power as it threatened to spill over. Heart pounding, she turned, but the chamber was empty.
A flicker of light darted across Nirveli’s wall. Sierra stepped back as a faint scene appeared in the dark stone. Nirveli was watching her from the midst of a dark and rainswept garden, while a handful of fireflies danced around her face for light.
‘I heard about Isidro,’ Nirveli said. ‘I’m sorry. Will he live?’
‘Rhia thought so,’ Sierra said. ‘But it’s been days, and he hasn’t stirred.’ Her head ached, and she pressed her forehead against the cool stone.
‘You’re leaving, then?’
Sierra held her breath, waiting for Nirveli to shout and raise the alarm. It’s just my luck, she thought grimly, to be discovered by the one person I can’t silence with a touch.
‘Where will you go?’ Nirveli asked.
‘I … I’m not sure.’ Why did she lie? If this was truly her best choice, why shy away from saying it aloud?
Nirveli cocked her head to one side, sucking on her lower lip.
Spirit of storm, defend me, Sierra said to herself. ‘I’m going to Rasten.’
‘That’s probably your best chance,’ Nirveli said. ‘If anyone can teach you at this point, it will be another Blood-Mage.’
Sierra ground the heels of her hands against her eyes. ‘By the Black Sun herself, if there was any other way …’
Nirveli gave her a soft, sad smile. ‘You’ve done all you can here. When there are no good options left, you have to take the best of the bad ones. I know what it’s like. I watched Vasant make that choice …’ Glowing tears welled in her eyes and began to spill, but as they dripped from her face and fell, they transformed mid-air to pale, glowing moths that fluttered away on brilliant wings. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t help you.’
She’d apologised before, but at that moment, Sierra felt that she’d never truly heard the words, as though they’d flowed right over her like water off a smoked hide. She closed her eyes, and for once, let herself accept them at face value. ‘Can you pass on a message for me? Will you tell them I’m sorry?’
‘I can do better than that,’ Nirveli said. Her image winked out, and in its place a picture of Sierra appeared, a reflection drawn in light. Sierra recoiled from the shock of it.
‘Just speak your piece, and I’ll show them in the morning,’ said Nirveli’s disembodied voice.
It was too close to facing them directly for comfort, but Sierra would not let herself turn away. What she planned was bad enough without denying them an explanation. And so she left her message, stammering through a justification that sounded pathetically weak. By the time she signalled Nirveli that she was finished, she was sobbing again.
Now that the decision was so firmly fixed in her mind, she felt at once both electrified and paralysed as she pulled the coat on with shaking hands and wrapped the belt around her waist.
The world felt unreal as she made her way through the passage. Sierra made herself look away from the motley collection of salvaged tents, and concentrated on the slippery stones as she descended the cascade.
She couldn’t take either of the two main tunnels — the Akharians guarded one and the Wolf Clan’s men the other. But the other passages all led to the surface, and the sealed exits were a small matter to deal with. She crossed the cavern hurriedly, shielding her lamp with her hand and praying the sentries wouldn’t see her. For once the Gods heard her prayers, for she reached the nearest passage with no cry of alarm ringing after her.
Her light was very small, and the tunnel was cold, dark and empty. All of a sudden Sierra realised that her heart was pounding and her breath ragged, but she kept walking, stretching her legs to put distance behind her. She had no way of knowing how long she had before someone noticed that she was gone.
She could only guess when she’d walked far enough for safety, but after an hour Sierra forced herself to stop. They would search for her and, when they found
her trail, they’d follow. With a thin thread of power, she scored one last message into the reddish stone of the cave wall.
I’m sorry, it read, and under it she scrawled, Don’t follow me. Then she set the lamp down, and summoned a globe of blue-white light in its place.
And then, because she knew Cam wouldn’t obey any such command, she brought the roof of the passage down to block her trail.
Chapter 8
Somehow Rasten felt her coming. Sierra knew it by the creeping glow of daylight at the end of the tunnel. He’d cleared the entrance for her.
When she saw the silhouette of a man leaning against the wall, Sierra froze like a hunted deer. The shadow shifted, and she knew he’d turned his head her way.
Neither of them moved as long moments crawled past. In the end it was Sierra who stirred first. She forced herself to take another step and her foot hit a loose stone, sending it clattering across the floor of the cave.
Rasten pushed away from the wall and came towards her with his hands in plain sight, as though afraid she would spook.
Once he was a dozen paces away, Sierra lost control of her power, and it flared from her hands in thick, twisted strands that curled around her feet like a tame storm.
Rasten stopped. ‘Is he dead?’
‘He wasn’t when I left,’ Sierra said. ‘Why do you care? I thought you wanted to kill him.’
Rasten made a face. ‘I know. Isn’t it strange, how things change? I know what it’s like now, having someone to rely on. I’ve … got used to having him around. No one has ever stayed more than a few weeks or a month or two.’ He was struggling with the thought, but then his face cleared as though he suddenly understood. ‘While he lives, it means someone’s defied Kell without dying for it.’
He fell silent, waiting for her to make the next move. Sierra wrestled with her power, and slowly managed to draw it back inside her skin.
She knew what she had to do now. Fear and dread were weapons to Kell, but perhaps she could blunt their edges.
Sierra felt as though she was watching the scene happen to someone else. She caught Rasten’s gaze, and smiled. Taking a step forward, she licked her lips. He went utterly still, and in that moment she knew he’d never expected this.
Just one more step, she told herself. Just one more. Inside she was trembling like a leaf, but slowly she closed the gap between them, and pressed the palm of her hand against his chest.
He smelled like sunlight and rain and the first greenery of spring. His dark curls had grown longer, and his brown eyes were unreadable as he watched her, trembling and wary. She could feel his power pounding through him with every thud of his heart.
Sierra kissed him. She hated herself for it. By custom there could be no infidelity without marriage, and by the Black Sun, she and Isidro hadn’t even discussed such a bond — everything in their world was so uncertain and unstable that thinking so far ahead seemed laughable. But the heart followed its own laws, and in that court she was the worst kind of traitor.
As Rasten seized her by the shoulders and kissed her back, his power rose and brought hers rushing up with it. He pushed her up against the wall, firmly, not roughly. His kiss was fierce and demanding, but in return he fed her a flush of power, rich, heady and golden. It pressed in all around her, welling up within her and lifting her out of the morass of pain and remorse that had snared her. She felt herself fumbling with the buttons of his jacket, but her head was so full of humming golden power that it seemed little more than a dream. It was the shimmering song in her head that was real, not the encircling arms, warm flesh and demanding mouth that washed over her in a confused tangle of sensation.
When he plunged inside her it brought a double rush of pleasure upon pleasure and power upon power as the echo of his sensations joined her own. The rough stone digging into her back, the chill prickle of cold air against her bare skin — all of it was irrelevant as she drank him in. For once, she could release all the constraints and all the hunger she’d held back for fear of overwhelming a mage much weaker than herself.
The climax wiped her mind blank and left her floating in a sea of power. It seemed to take an age to find her way back through the golden fog, to discover herself sitting on the cave floor with her clothing all askew and her coat in a tangle beneath her.
Beside her, Rasten stirred as though waking from a haze of his own. His shirt and jacket hung open, revealing the scars marring his fine, pale skin. Sierra reached out to touch them, but Rasten caught her hand with an iron grip.
‘You know I’m going to need some of that back,’ he said.
She didn’t understand, too engorged and drunk on power to think clearly. Rasten touched his fingertips to his chest, and detached something she could only half-see, something like a sucker-vine latched beneath his heart. It came loose with a brief sting that she felt as clearly as he must have, and that bloated, sluggish feeling began to fade at once.
Rasten pressed his palm to her chest and drew the power out of her. To begin with, it was a relief, like leaving a stuffy, too-hot room for the crisp clean air outside. By the time it began to bite, Sierra recovered enough to squirm away from him and Rasten broke the contact with a shiver, as though he was climaxing all over again. ‘Oh ye Gods, that’s good. Little Crow, you have no idea …’ His power was running higher than before, and yet she had more power than she’d begun with as well.
He rolled away while she was still trying to make sense of it, and stood, straightening his clothing. ‘You’d best get on your feet, Little Crow, before your friends follow your trail and find us. We need to be gone before they get here.’
Cam looked around the chamber in utter bewilderment. Everything was just as it had been the day before. Sierra’s bedding was strewn in an untidy heap; her clothes were in a jumble spilling out of her kitbag. A skewed stack of books lay beside her bed, with an extinguished lamp on the top. Isidro would be annoyed by that — a casual knock could spill the oil over the precious texts — but Sierra hadn’t been raised to have the same reverence for books that their father had instilled. The lamp was cold — it had been out for some time. Shifting it to a shelf, Cam frowned at the book that lay uppermost on the pile. It was the Blood-Mage text, the one he’d found in Sierra’s gear back when she was lying unconscious from hypothermia.
Cam left the chamber to find Rhia and Amaya waiting for him in the hall along with some of Ardamon’s men. Amaya was still weeping, and Rhia had an arm wrapped around the girl’s shoulders.
‘You heard nothing?’ Cam asked her again. ‘Nothing at all?
Amaya looked down at her feet. ‘No, sir.’
‘Are you certain? Perhaps there was a man’s voice — someone Sirri sounded afraid of?’
Amaya shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ she said in a whisper.
With a sigh, Cam turned to Rhia. ‘And there’s been no change in Issey at all?’
‘Not so much as a murmur,’ she replied.
‘Amaya, stay here and keep watch over him. Rhia, come with me,’ Cam said. He turned towards the stairs, and the men scattered to clear a path.
‘You think Rasten came for her?’ Rhia asked in Mesentreian, hurrying to keep up with him.
‘Why else would she leave like this?’ he muttered in reply. ‘If Rasten came, threatening Isidro … Why else would she walk away, Rhia? It makes no sense.’
On the next level, Mira was talking to Nirveli. As soon as Cam appeared from the stairwell, she turned to him, distraught and drained of colour.
‘Well?’ Cam asked her.
‘There was no one here but Sierra,’ Nirveli answered in her place. ‘No one forced her to leave.’
Cam rubbed a hand across his face. ‘Then why did she go? What in the Fires Below did you tell her, you wretched ghost?!’
Nirveli met his angry bewilderment with a calm gaze. ‘I told her what she needed to hear.’
‘Show him the rest of it,’ Mira said. ‘Go on, show him.’
‘What are you talking
about?’ Cam demanded, as Nirveli’s image vanished. Mira gestured to the wall, and a drawing of Sierra appeared where the ghost had stood.
She looked awful, her eyes swollen and her face screwed up with pain. ‘Cam, I’m sorry, but it’s the only way,’ she said. ‘I can’t control my power, and if I don’t do something, the people I love are going to die. If I can’t keep from hurting the people around me, well, then I need to be around the people who need to be hurt. I’m going back to Kell. Either I’ll master my power and finish him, or I’ll die trying and take him with me …’ At last she looked up, and the glowing image of her eyes caught and held his gaze. ‘Cam, do not follow me. I’ll have met with Rasten by now, and there’s no way of stopping this. Just stay safe, and look after Isidro. And tell him …’ Her voice broke in a sob. ‘Tell him I’m sorry.’
Sierra’s image winked out, and Nirveli appeared again.
‘How could you let her do this?’ Cam snarled. ‘Have you lost all your wits? How could you let her walk away without raising the alarm?’
‘Because it’s all I could do to protect you all!’ Nirveli said. ‘She tried her best, but she’s too far gone. Sierra was a lost cause.’
Furious, Cam turned his back on her. ‘Any word from Ardamon?’
‘He’s back, but I sent him down to the camp to eat. She collapsed the cave to block her path, and he thinks it’s not safe to clear it.’
Cam said nothing, just stood and frowned at the stone at his feet.
Mira laid a hesitant hand on his arm. ‘Look, come and have some breakfast and hear Ardo’s report for yourself.’
Cam nodded dumbly, and let her lead him from the installation and down the cascade.
Once they were down in the camp he wolfed down half a bannock. Ardamon was every bit as furious as Cam as he related the tale of the dead-end passage. ‘There’s no cursed way through, she made sure of that,’ he said, scowling. ‘I suppose the next question is, what do we tell our kin?’
When Cam grew weary of listening to them talk in circles, he downed his tea and wandered off to the tent he shared with Mira, now over-large and lonely since Sierra and Isidro had vacated it so abruptly.