The Obsidian Tower

by Melissa Caruso

I’m not a vivomancer, I tried to say, but a numbness spread through my veins, making my tongue too thick and clumsy. I could barely twitch my fingers, and my head drooped. Poison. Robbing my strength to move or speak.

  It made sense, I supposed, through the haze of agony. He would hardly enjoy listening to his enemies shout insults down at him as they slowly perished on his walls.

  Like I was doing.

  The anger drained out of me, replaced at last by bone-deep, crushing despair. My grandmother had abandoned me, Severin was no help, and the Rookery was far away.

  And now my life was trickling slowly away while the court of Alevar pretended not to see me, and the Shrike Lord watched with glittering malice in his white-ringed eyes.

  A long, red-tinged time later, someone spoke my name.

  “Ryx. Wake up.”

  I dragged the ragged shreds of my awareness up from whatever murky pool of suffering they’d dissolved into for the past several hours and raised my head. The hall had emptied at last, the courtiers and even the Shrike Lord himself going off to bed. Severin had left with his brother, pale and downcast, blood still smearing his mouth.

  The only people left in the hall were a pair of guards on the main door, presumably set there in case I tried to escape. They studiously avoided looking at me; neither of them had spoken. Oil lamps alternating with luminaries shone in niches around the throne hall, bathing the room in a mix of shadows and golden light.

  “You don’t have time for this, Ryx.”

  Whisper sat in the center of the floor, tail lashing with annoyance as if this were all somehow my fault.

  The guards didn’t seem to hear him or react to his presence in any way. I stared down at him, blood stiffening my clothes and the taste of copper in the back of my mouth, and wondered if he was a hallucination.

  “By all means, carry on dying if you wish,” he said, “but it seems rather self-indulgent given how much work you have to do.”

  The urge to wring his furry neck kindled sufficient spark in me to rasp out a few words. “This is… not my idea.”

  His ears twitched to catch my voice, though the soldiers on guard didn’t react. “So you don’t want to die here?”

  It was a good question. Everyone I cared about had abandoned me. Everything I’d tried to do to help had only made things worse. Eruvia might well be better off without me. I had no reason to believe that survival would mean anything but more suffering.

  But even with every breath making the thorns cut deeper, even with my blood running down the walls and pooling on the floor below me, even with every moment costing monumental effort just to make it through, I wasn’t ready to let go of this life. Whisper was right; I had too much work to do. I was the Warden of Gloamingard, and my castle needed me.

  And that wasn’t the only reason. I didn’t deserve to die here, curse it. I was worth more than this, too.

  “No,” I managed. “Not yet.”

  “Then you’d better stop lazing around.” Whisper cocked his head, as if listening. “It’ll be too late soon. Human bodies are so fragile.”

  So this was how it would end: bleeding to death while a chimera mocked me. My eyes drifted back shut. I should have known.

  “Ryx.” Whisper’s indifference dropped like a shed cloak. “Don’t fall asleep. You won’t wake up. I can’t rescue you—I need to stay neutral. You have to do this yourself.”

  And how do you expect me to do that? I wanted to ask, but it was too much.

  “Fine.” An edge of frustration came into Whisper’s voice. “I wanted to avoid doing this at all costs. But if you’re going to insist on being difficult, let’s see if this wakes you up: Severin didn’t send your message.”

  My eyes flew open. “What?!”

  “The fool is too distracted trying to find a way to save you.” Whisper watched me carefully, tail working behind him, measuring my reaction. “If you die here, the Rookery will destroy the seal, and the rest of the Nine Demons will come through and most likely possess them, since they’ll be closest to the gate. Gloamingard will fall.” He fixed me with his yellow gaze. “Your friends and your family will die.”

  The words seemed to break open something inside me, as if he’d spoken an incantation to shatter a seal. A vast, seething lake of fury and love welled up, driving out my pain and exhaustion and despair.

  “I can’t allow that.”

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to do something about it, then.” He rose and stretched. “Good luck. I’ve got my own business to attend to.”

  And in the blink of an eye, he was gone.

  This surge of wild, desperate energy couldn’t last long; all the damage done to me was still there, sure as the blood-slick thorns protruding from my left shoulder and wrist as I weakly turned my head to gaze past them toward the guards on the door. I had to get free somehow, and quickly, before this final burst of strength faded.

  I could think of only one tool I had left.

  All my life, I’d strained to hold back my broken magic. To keep it sealed away, like a hand balled tight into a fist, or an eye squeezed shut. My parents and my grandmother had done everything they could to train me to contain it; ultimately, they’d been unsuccessful, but that didn’t mean all my striving had been without effect.

  I took in a deep breath, ignoring the sickening stab of pain from a thorn in my side. And then I let it go, doing everything I could to uncurl that tightly clenched power within me.

  Fractures ran along the briars, quick as forking lightning. A great rustling and crackling filled the room. The soldiers let out startled exclamations, reaching for their pistols.

  For the first time in my life, I pushed my power outward.

  The luminaries winked out, one after another, rapid as popping bubbles. The rush and tingle of magic raced through my limbs.

  “Whatever you’re doing, stop it now!” cried one of the guards, drawing her pistol and pointing it at me. The other whipped around, searching the room for an intruder.

  The torches flared, then guttered out. Warmth flooded me, banishing some of the pain. Shards of wood rained to the floor as the briars began to crumble. The branches holding me sagged, and I cried out as the thorns twisted in my wounds.

  The guards suddenly dropped, one after the other, limp and vacant. Dead as stones. Their lives flowed into me in a heady rush of strength.

  Holy Hells. I’d gone too far.

  In the distance, thunder rumbled.

  Something vast and awful was unfolding in me, stretching tattered wings that had been cramped and caged for my whole life. I’d made a terrible mistake. Fear sang along my nerves, and I struggled against the crumbling briars that held me.

  They shattered like sugar glass, cascading down in a great clattering wave of wood and dust. I fell, landing more or less on my feet—but they skidded out from beneath me, slipping on my own blood. I hit the ground, breathing hard, and couldn’t get up. No, no, no. Stop. This is too much.

  A deep, awful trembling started in the floor. No, not the floor—in the earth beneath it, far below. It ran up through me, through the walls, shaking every stone in the castle. Magic shivered through me in response.

  “No!” I cried aloud, terrified.

  “Ryx?” called a muffled voice from beyond the door, alarmed. Severin. If this kept escalating, in a moment I’d kill him, too.

  I struggled to pull my magic back inside me, where it belonged. But it was raging free, awake and angry, stirring the earth and the sky to violence. It resisted, furious at being tamed for so long.

  I won’t let you kill anyone else.

  With every ounce of will I possessed, gasping at the effort, I slowly clamped the fist of my power back shut.

  The earth stilled. A dim spark flickered back to life in the luminaries. I lay on the floor, my breath coming quick and shallow, surrounded by scattered bits of dead wood.

  Severin burst into the room, a slim dagger in his hand. He recoiled at the sight of the dead guards, then saw me and hur
ried over.

  “Ryx! Hells, you’re a mess.”

  “What else did you expect,” I muttered hoarsely.

  I tried to get up, but my left arm wasn’t working, and my right was too weak to so much as lever myself up on one elbow. The edges of my vision crumbled like the brambles had, and everything seemed fuzzy and distant.

  “Ash and ruin, you’re covered in blood.” He knelt by my side. “You’ve got to get out of here. Can you walk?”

  I laughed. It took too much breath, and my head swam. “I can’t even stand. I think the only life I’ve got left is what I stole from those poor dead bastards over there.”

  Severin glanced at them, then back at me. He bit his lip.

  Before my foggy brain realized what he was doing, he laid his hands along both sides of my face, his touch warm and gentle. And he bent and placed a light, dry kiss at the top of my forehead.

  A giddy rush of strength poured into me. Severin gasped in shock, his hands going rigid on my cheeks.

  I rolled away from him, blurting panicky curses, but he caught my hand. Warmth and tingling energy surged up my arm.

  “No, wait! It’s all right,” he said. “I won’t let you take too much, I promise.” He was doubled over on his knees, voice ragged with pain.

  “Don’t be a fool!” I yanked my hand from his. He was too drained to stop me. He barely caught himself from falling to the floor, with trembling arms.

  “See, you’re better already.” He forced blue-tinged lips into an alarmingly vague and unsuccessful smirk. His eyes shone glassy and unfocused, and he swayed as if he might pass out.

  “You idiot. You could have died!”

  But he was right. My bleeding had stopped, there was strength in my limbs again, and the world didn’t seem so far away. He’d taken a reckless risk, but it had worked.

  “Come on,” I said grimly, staggering to my feet. “Your brother is bound to have noticed what I did here.”

  Severin’s smile widened. “In his sleep, perhaps. I drugged him.”

  I stared. “You what?!”

  “Of course I did. Why do you think I played along with him? It was the only way I could think of to buy time to get you out of Alevar and beyond his reach. I don’t know how long it will last, though.” He dragged himself upright, leaning on the wall; he looked almost as bad as I felt. “We’ll have to ride quickly.”

  “I can’t ride horses,” I pointed out grimly. “They’d die.”

  He let out a gust of breath. “And I don’t know how to harness a carriage. All right. We’ll have to run.”

  “This isn’t going to work,” Severin gasped, falling to his knees in the muddy road.

  Branches tangled above us, knotting their fingers against a dark, mottled sky. It still felt wrong that I couldn’t sense the life in the trees, or in the mud beneath my own stumbling feet. Everything hurt, and I was breathing like I’d run a hard race, but we couldn’t have made it more than a few miles from the Shrike Lord’s castle.

  “You shouldn’t have touched me,” I muttered, leaning against a dead tree to keep from joining Severin on my knees. My more-wounded leg trembled; I wasn’t sure how much longer it would support my weight at all. “It’s not like you’re a cup of tea I can delicately sip from the top. I was unraveling your life.”

  “I’m feeling that,” Severin groaned. Even in the darkness, he was too pale, his face gone the sickly ivory of the moon above us. “I’ll admit I don’t think I’d do it again.”

  There had been too many times when I’d briefly brushed against someone through clothes or gloves—a touch too fleeting and muffled to kill, but still enough to make my poor victim drop, their heart stuttering, gasping for breath or losing consciousness altogether. It inevitably took days of rest for them to fully recover. Severin had been trying to hide it, but I could tell he was in bad shape. If he kept pushing himself like this, I might kill him yet.

  “You should go back,” I said, worry knotting the words harder than I’d intended. “Pretend you were asleep the whole time. No one saw you help me escape. You’re too badly hurt; you’re never going to make it to the border.”

  “Neither will you,” he said stubbornly, and dragged himself to his feet. “My brother is bound to wake up soon. He’ll set every living thing in Alevar to find you and kill you. These swamps are full of deadly venomous snakes; you won’t stand a chance.”

  “Then there’s no point drawing you into it.” I tried to cross my arms, but my left one still wouldn’t move well enough; I winced at the stab of pain from my shoulder. “Besides, you need to warn the Rookery not to destroy the obelisk. We can’t risk that information dying with us.”

  Severin’s mouth twisted bitterly. “I finally do something to defy my brother, after all these years, and you’re telling me to go back and pretend it never happened.”

  “Yes.”

  “To leave you to die, after I spent the past couple of days agonizing over how I could save you.”

  “I do plan to try my best to survive,” I said wearily. “We don’t have time to argue about this. Severin—”

  His finger flew to his lips, eyes widening. I broke off and listened, every muscle tensing; if his brother had awakened, the next thing I felt might be the tree I was leaning against ripping my head off.

  Hoofbeats. And voices, and rumbling wheels, perhaps a quarter mile distant.

  Someone was traveling the Alevar trade road in the middle of the night.

  “And here I thought spotting figures on the road ahead meant bandits, and I was finally going to get to stab someone,” said a voice from the darkness, quite close by.

  My heart jumped in startlement at first, but it kept going up and up, surging with joyous exaltation to reach the stars. “Ashe!”

  The Rookery had arrived.

  “I see our rescue plans will be unnecessary,” Foxglove said from the high seat of a cabriolet I thought I recognized as belonging to Lady Celia. “A pity. They were remarkably clever and daring, if I do say so myself.”

  I barely heard him. I was staring past him to the person riding beside the cabriolet, wrapped in a warm cloak and looking more wan and tired than I’d ever seen her.

  “Kessa!” I cried, wishing more than anything that I could fling my arms around her.

  She waved and smiled, a little tentatively. “I’m back. Thank you for saving me.”

  I blinked. “Saving you? I almost killed you!”

  “From the demon.” She shuddered, and Ashe moved instinctively toward her, hovering like a fierce-eyed hawk.

  “I’m sorry we didn’t come sooner,” Foxglove continued, his voice grave. “We were rather focused on making sure Kessa didn’t die, and it was a near thing. I’m glad you’re all right—I was afraid we’d be too late.”

  Bastian slid off his horse, approaching me with a frown. “I wouldn’t say all right. Graces, Ryx, you’re covered with blood.”

  A sharp, hissing rustle passed through the branches above, like a sudden wind—but the air hung heavy and still. I stepped away from the trees, nervous. Pattering raindrops began to drip down from the leaves overhead.

  “Just rain,” I sighed with relief.

  The trees thrashed more violently, and something cried in the night.

  Severin swore. “No. He’s awake. And he’s angry.”

  Ashe whirled, her sword in her hand, and pointed it down the road behind us. A figure stood there, a mere black silhouette in the darkness, a cloak flowing from his shoulders. I didn’t have to see his face to feel the weight of power upon him, so great it seemed the whole world tilted dizzyingly toward him.

  “Quite,” said the Shrike Lord.

  The twin lines of trees flanking the road shifted with groans and creaks, shuffling to cut off our retreat should we have been foolish enough to think there would be any point in running. The Rookery horses shied and whinnied with alarm; only Kessa’s stayed calm, from the soothing touch of her magic.

  Every inch of me strained to bolt and run,
but there was nowhere to go. All of Alevar was an extension of the Shrike Lord’s will. I was like a mouse who had slipped through a cat’s claws and made it halfway across the room only to be caught again. And now I’d drawn the Rookery into this mess with me.

  The Shrike Lord advanced toward us, slow and menacing as the inexorable slide of time toward death.

  “I am disappointed in you, Severin, that you would help my enemy. I thought you were a more loyal brother than that.”

  Severin stood frozen, his eyes wide with terror. He shook his head, his ready supply of sharp words apparently depleted at last.

  “He’s a more loyal brother than you deserve,” I said fiercely.

  “The words of the dead are meaningless,” the Shrike Lord replied.

  Ashe rolled her neck and stepped forward. “I’ve got an answer for that.”

  “Rule Four, Ashe!” Kessa hissed, clinging to her horse.

  “He’s not here to talk,” Ashe protested.

  “He’s a Witch Lord,” I whispered, wishing I could pull her back. “He’s immortal. We’d better hope he’s here to talk.”

  “I’m here for one purpose,” the Shrike Lord said, still advancing. Damn it, I’d forgotten how sharp a Witch Lord’s hearing could be. “To complete my vengeance. The rest of you can go.”

  He could have killed me without stirring from his bed. He must want to do it with his own hands.

  Anger raised its weary head in me. I’d tried reasoning with him, and I’d tried diplomacy, and I’d bled out the last ounce of restraint I had on his wall.

  “You want vengeance against Lamiel’s killer?” I snarled. “Take it against yourself. You’re the one who encouraged her to go looking for immortality anywhere she could find it, with no regard for the consequences.”

  A swinging tree branch struck me hard in the back, knocking me gasping to my knees. Mud oozed through my fingers as I struggled to get my wind back. The Shrike Lord didn’t so much as blink.

  Foxglove half rose in the rain-slick seat of his cabriolet and managed to pull off a credible bow even as he strove to control his carriage horse. “My lord, we came here to retrieve Exalted Ryxander for a reason. She is part of the Rookery and essential to our work. The Conclave gives us the right to—”