Kingdom Blades (A Pattern of Shadow & Light 4)

by McPhail, Melissa

  She laid her fingers across his lips, and her eyes became glassy as she whispered, “Desperation makes fools of us all.”

  He radiated a gentle protest. “Have you ever seen me desperate?”

  Isabel gazed at him for a moment more. Then she dropped her eyes. “I never imagined I would know such desperation as I felt just moments ago, staring at that brave soul lying in agony, watching Malachai being unmade, knowing I could do nothing to help him…”

  Isabel pressed palms to her eyes, then looked away, out into the churning storm, tightly holding back her grief. “Malachai may never find his way back to the Returning.”

  Arion understood now what fear had taken hold of her. “I won’t let that happen to me, Isabel. If I can promise you anything, I promise you that.”

  She turned her tears into his shoulder.

  Arion felt every bit as distraught as Isabel was over Malachai’s fate. Their friend had done terrible things in the throes of his madness, but even he deserved a new chance at life in the Returning.

  The first pattering of rain sounded in the distance. The next storm was blowing in.

  “Please take us out of here.” Isabel’s voice sounded barren.

  Arion lifted her into his arms and murmured against her hair, “Where would you go, my love?”

  “Home. Adonnai.” She pressed her face into his chest. “I just want to be myself for a little while longer, to be a wife to you and a mother to our son.”

  And although she didn’t speak it, Arion heard her concluding thought as though Destiny Herself had spoken it.

  …before you’re both taken from my arms.

  *—*

  As sunlight sliced across the Shadow-world, Ean struggled to wake. A lassitude had settled over him during the night, as though the life had been draining from him all the while.

  In that incognizant state between waking and dreaming, Ean reached out to Isabel, for she was and always had been his heart’s greatest desire. He knew that elae was beyond him, that she should’ve been beyond him, yet he sensed their connection, or…at least some connection, an ethereal link to an awareness not his own. His mind, struggling towards consciousness, clung to this link desperately.

  Isabel…?

  An icy pressure on his shoulder roused him.

  Ean forced his eyelids apart and focused blearily on Darshan’s three faces until they combined into one. There was a tightness behind the man’s eyes that hadn’t been there before. He squeezed the prince’s shoulder again. “Daylight has claimed the world, Ean.”

  Ean managed to push himself up, only to have to immediately brace his pounding head in his hands. His arms trembled; his breath came shallowly and with pain. His eyes felt full of sand and kept shying away from the sun.

  He’d parted with Pelas excited by the prospect that Balance might lead him. But had his path really been leading him here? He couldn’t understand why Balance had pitched him into this improbable hell.

  Oh, he understood that it was surreal. He understood the complete inconceivability of everything Darshan had confessed to him last night. And he understood that his inability to envision greater realities such as Darshanvenkhátraman’s indecision, which Isabel had surely foreseen, limited him profoundly. But he didn’t understand where it was all leading. The pattern of consequence just…dead-ended.

  And yet…he now recalled that Isabel had made a promise to him all those centuries ago—‘I swear to you that you will know your son, and he will know you; you will see him grow and become a man…’—and despite every reason not to, some part of Ean clung to the hope that she’d somehow kept that promise. That meant his path couldn’t end there in Shadow because he hadn’t yet met his son. But if she had followed through as promised, then where was his son?

  A hand appeared in front of his face.

  Ean looked up at Darshan.

  By what strange twist of fate had his enemy become his ally? He let the man haul him to his feet. Then he grabbed onto his iron arm until his head stopped spinning, except…it never fully stopped spinning.

  Ean drew in a ragged breath and looked around, finding naught but empty moors furred with sparse grass as far as his eyes could see. The sun had already burned off most of the frost, and the day was growing hotter by the breath. He tried to ignore his hollow stomach; likewise the hollowness that was the haunting reminder of a missing part of his essential self.

  He scrubbed at his jaw. “How far did you say to the next tavern?”

  Darshan almost smiled. “Just a world or two away.”

  “Yeah…” Ean tugged his jacket down and adjusted his sword belt wearily, “that’s what I thought you’d say.”

  They headed off.

  The sun never rose more than halfway to its zenith and was somehow always directly shining into Ean’s eyes. As they were trudging across the flat expanse, which was becoming more sand than grass, Ean proposed, “Why don’t you work some deyjiin magic and shield us from the sun?”

  Darshan turned his head and assessed the fiery orb angling its heat at them. “I’ve experienced worse.”

  “You unmake stars.”

  A smile twitched in one corner of the Malorin’athgul’s mouth. “Encasing us in deyjiin might lessen the sensation of heat, but it would not benefit your constitution.”

  “It would certainly benefit my disposition towards you.”

  Darshan flicked the shadow of a smile in his direction. Then he clasped his scepter behind his back and gazed off, and his eyes narrowed slightly—an expression Ean had witnessed him make several times that morning. This time he concluded its meaning. “What is it? What aren’t you telling me?”

  The Malorin’athgul eyed him sidelong. “We’re being followed…tracked. I’m summoning them from across the linked worlds.”

  “I take it they’re unfriendly, whoever they are.”

  Darshan’s gaze became pinched. “You could say that, yes.”

  “Then might I ask why you’re summoning them?”

  “They sense my lifeforce on this plane, Ean.” He looked around, giving the impression that he was seeing far further than the boundaries of moors and sky. “I’m drawing them from…everywhere.”

  Ean shook his head sadly. “Just when I was starting to like you.”

  The sun paced their travels like a loping wolf, shedding its blistering light across a world without wind or water.

  “About these things that are following us…” Ean had been brooding on the topic for much of the morning. “I’ve seen the power you command. What could possibly pose a challenge to you here?”

  “Shadow operates on different rules, Ean. The problem is less the breadth of power available to me than how it may be used. I am not the god of this universe.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Darshan glanced at him. “He who makes the world, makes the rules—unless you can coincide the starpoints and gain equal control.”

  Ean dragged both hands through his sweat-dampened hair. “But you can’t coincide the ones here—whatever that means?”

  “Coincidence is a form of duplication, and yes…and no.” He lifted his gaze to the pale sky. “I’ve been able to match this canvas’s starpoints enough to draw power through them—duplication—but I cannot completely coincide them—which means to make them my own. Something is preventing my doing so.”

  “Something…your brother?”

  “Indirectly, perhaps. Shail wouldn’t have put me here if he expected an effortless return.” He arched a rueful brow. “I’m fairly sure he expects me not to return at all.”

  The lassitude Ean had felt upon waking only intensified in the relentless heat. By the time afternoon arrived and the skyline of a distant, glimmering city came into view, Ean was having to focus every ounce of his will just to make one foot move before the other. The grasslands had long given way to desert. It had been hours since he’d found the breath for speech.

  It was difficult to maintain hope amid that sea of sand, in an alie
n realm made by an unknown being, with nothing living and no glimpse—barely even a memory—of elae. Even the heat felt wrong. But he clung to something, even if it was only a shadow of hope, the tiniest seed of it planted in a dream…the hope of meeting his son.

  If they could meet somehow, well, it would at least redeem one of Arion’s mistakes—the one Ean found the hardest to bear.

  He’d come to recognize a certain equity in Arion’s and Isabel’s choices; they hadn’t betrayed each other, even if Ean had felt betrayed, because their troth had always been first and foremost to the game.

  But for Arion to have abandoned his son, who shared no such promise with him…this Ean couldn’t stomach.

  Perhaps that’s what fueled his will in those enervating hours—the determination to survive Shadow and reunite with his son. This purpose hugged the core of his being, more personal than any aspect of the game. He even found a whisper of faith that this couldn’t be his end, because Isabel had made a promise to Arion, and Isabel always kept her promises.

  This is what it means to walk your path: to trust in your decisions, to have faith in the future, to see possibility despite all reasons not to.

  It almost sounded like Isabel’s voice encouraging him. What he wouldn’t have given to hear her in true in that moment, to tell her everything he’d realized, to beg her forgiveness for not trusting her more…to ask her about their son.

  The ache behind his eyes made it difficult to see anything clearly. Ean cast a pained gaze at the endless sands, the too-bright sky. Behind him, the planet they’d seen last night was blocking out half of the horizon. How could there be all of this and not a whisper of elae?

  Lady’s light, Isabel…

  His vision spun. The world tilted—

  Darshan caught him as he fell.

  Ean’s head lolled against Darshan’s body. His right arm hung limply at his side, unwilling to budge even to push the hair from his eyes. “Is it the heat,” he managed weakly, “or…?”

  Darshan’s gaze tightened. “It is not so simple as that.” He hefted the prince into his arms and started walking again.

  Ean summoned breath enough to whisper up at him, “What’s happening to me?

  He saw the Malorin’athgul’s jaw tighten. “Shadow is killing you.”

  The next many hours became a blur of too-bright light and silence, the odd feeling of floating in Darshan’s iron arms, and the paradox of a cold heat that had no relationship to life. At one point Ean roused to find that the mirage of a distant city had resolved into saucer-shaped towers with glittering spires that scraped the sky.

  The next time the prince came aware, he was lying in a bed—at least, it was soft like a bed. Beyond the translucent walls, the onion domes of the near buildings seemed strung haphazardly, as toy tops dangling on a child’s mobile. Varying shapes and sizes populated the view, glimmering with metallic iridescence in the orange light of the setting sun.

  “Where…?” Ean’s voice scraped painfully out of his throat. His body felt fashioned of fragile parchment.

  “This was the Warlock’s domain.” Darshan stood in dark silhouette before the sunset, his tall, broad-shouldered frame well suited to a palace constructed for a demigod.

  It might be said that Death when He arrived extended lassitude in one hand and peace in the other, for Ean was having trouble summoning the defiance he ought to have been feeling as he lay there facing his end. Anger’s heat seemed a remote, cold star and far beyond his reach. Even grief hovered distantly, an alluring fisherman’s ball bobbing on dark waters.

  To think that after everything he’d endured, everything he’d relearned, all that he’d planned—the radiant hope of actually succeeding—that he should still find his end as inexorably as the sun setting on another day; that the dark foreshadowing which had forever haunted his path could once again prove true, that nothing he’d done had changed any of it, had mattered in the least, but that he’d walked to another inevitable, brittle end…

  Since Arion’s first misdeed—whatever it truly had been, for Ean trusted Shail’s version not at all—Balance had stitched his brilliant thread in the tapestry away from a glorious course and had begun sewing his strand among tragic and misshapen patterns instead. A part of Ean had always feared that his life pattern remained lost there within those dark whorls, each time recalled into the same spiral to walk its dwindling path anew; each time reaching the same twisted endpoint. How could he ever find again the tapestry’s bright threads?

  All this time he’d thought he’d been fighting Geishaiwyn and Whisper Lords, Dore Madden, Malorin’athgul and monsters made from men, but in reality he’d been fighting against Balance.

  …And that was a battle he could never win.

  His throat was too dry even to swallow, but his eyes at least still worked. He shifted them to the dark form that was Darshan and scraped out, “Did you know?”

  The Malorin’athgul turned his head. “That this place would destroy you?” He left the window, trailing shadows. A somber solicitude cloaked his manner. “I had hoped I would find an exit sooner. I was naïve to imagine my brother would make it that easy.” He sat down on the bed next to Ean with apology darkening his gaze. “This is not the end I had envisioned for you.”

  Ean dragged breath into his lungs; the air weighed too heavy in his chest, so that he could hardly push it out again to ask, “Who will do it, if I don’t?”

  Darshan laid a hand upon his thigh. “Do what, Prince of Dannym?”

  Ean whispered, “Make right everything I’ve done…all the mistakes, the battles I’ve left unfinished.”

  “Battles…” a slight frown marred his brow, “as with my brother?”

  Ean grimaced. “I have a role to play. It can’t end here, only to do it all again when I Return—if I Return…who knows what happens when you die in Shadow?”

  Darshan studied him with a focused intensity behind his dark gaze. “Could you not choose some other course, some other purpose?”

  Ean gave a laughing wheeze. “Could you?”

  Darshan frowned deeply at this.

  “It can’t end here.”

  …This is what it means to walk your path…to see possibility despite all reasons not to…

  Ean closed his eyes. As Arion had experienced while battling Shail on the Pattern of the World, Ean’s choices had narrowed to two. Incredible, the paths a man was willing to tread to avoid death.

  No, it wasn’t fear of death that drove Ean to possibility’s precipitous edge. It was unwillingness to fail everyone he loved yet again. It was determination to know his son. It was his own conviction to achieve the outcome that Arion and Björn had envisioned, and which Björn and Isabel had been continuing on towards while Arion floundered in the shadows of the Returning.

  Ean shoved intention into his fingers and fumbled them towards Darshan. With surprising gentleness, the man took his hand in his own.

  Still not quite believing he was choosing this path, Ean met his gaze. “I see a way.”

  Darshan tilted his head. “A way…?”

  “Bind me to you.”

  Darshan drew back, staring at him. “Ean, you cannot mean—”

  “I do.” He gripped the Malorin’athgul’s hand with everything he had. “If you bind me to you, I’ll live.”

  “You’ll live bound to me.” Darshan looked him over severely. “Can you truly live with that?”

  The prince managed a grim smile. “Can you?” He wanted to say more, but the effort had stolen the last of his energy. He lay there instead, his vision stained now with dark veils, the colors of the tapestry’s whorls that had trapped Arion in their pattern.

  Then the world started spinning, weaving darkness amid the light. Ean’s fingers twitched against the immortal’s hand.

  He cast farewell on her name.

  Isabel…

  Sixty-seven

  “Be careful what you wish for.”

  –A joke among Warlocks

  Isabel…? />
  Tanis woke to an echo of his father’s entreaty.

  Less the sound of his voice, it was more a perception of him, a sense of him reaching out to Tanis’s mother, or…at least, it felt like his father calling from the other end of their bond; but Tanis had been so young when last Arion had spoken to him, mind to mind. He couldn’t say for certain that he’d perceived anything at all. He may have simply dreamed it.

  Whether dreamed or real, however, the experience left him feeling unbalanced. That disorienting sense of the world tilting beneath his feet hadn’t bothered him since binding with Sinárr. His first inclination was to wonder if the feeling was Alorin calling him back…but when he set his intention in that direction, the disorientation only got worse.

  Tanis wished he better understood the peculiar sensation that he might more effectively interpret its message; the only conclusion he’d reached about it was that it heralded change—momentous change. Understanding this in no way made the feeling less formidable or his stomach less queasy.

  Tanis slid a foot out of bed and rested it on the floor. Fynn was always explaining this was the best way to stop the world from spinning around you when you were nearly passed out drunk. He tried breathing deeply, which his Lady Alyneri had always said was the better hand of patience, a phrase which Tanis had never quite understood.

  While he waited for that unbalanced feeling to calm, Tanis thought about the world-building he’d been doing with Sinárr.

  The Warlock had promised him that creating worlds would offer a joy unlike any other, and so far he’d made good on that promise. In fact, Tanis knew an impossible joy in the activity; the pure joy of creating provided a thrill beyond imagining—far beyond even the rush of wielding. A compelling, intoxicating, addictive exhilaration that made it hard to think about anything else.

  At least…that had been the case until that unbalanced feeling had shaken him awake. It was so dramatic that Tanis began to wonder if it was his feeling at all.