Heart on Fire (The Kingmaker Chronicles Book 3)

by Amanda Bouchet

  With only Beta Team within earshot again, I say fiercely, “I did everything wrong.” I’m livid at myself, at my own irreversible choices. “I had the magic. I had a weapon. I could have ended her—ended all of this. Fifteen years ago, I could have stopped her. At Frostfire, I could have stopped her. Here, I could have stopped her, but I didn’t! I never do!” I ball my hands into fists. I want to beat them down on myself. “Instead of ending it like I should have, I gave up the magic. I lost the bloody weapon!”

  Griffin grips my shoulders, looking at me intently. “You did what you had to do, Cat. What you felt was right. You saved everyone you could.”

  “I sacrificed the win.” I wrench from his grasp. “You know I did.”

  His eyes search mine, their steely strength battering my divided soul. “Would you do it again?” he finally asks.

  I turn away. And that’s the damn hard question, isn’t it? I don’t know.

  For a few moments, I was a terrifying instrument of truth and vengeance. I saw the fear in Mother’s eyes. But instead of wielding the whip of justice against her like the Furies clearly meant me to, I used all that power to erect barriers in everyone else’s minds instead.

  Why? Why did I do that?

  “I should have ended it,” I say, my mouth as dry as ash. “It was the obvious choice. The objective one.”

  Griffin doesn’t agree or disagree, but his eyes hold no censure, when I know they should.

  Next to me, Kato reaches out and lightly touches the arch of one of my dark wings, drawing his battle-roughened finger down the fluttering edge of a bold, black feather. “Maybe you make other choices because it’s not your role to end it, Cat. Maybe that’s someone else’s job.”

  Not my role? His words make hopefulness and disbelief grapple inside me, both of them trying to gain the upper hand. Doubt wins out since the burden seems to fall squarely on my shoulders. And I’ve done a bang-up job so far with a resounding tally of fail, fail, fail.

  Still, I can’t help asking him, “Then what’s mine?”

  The smile that spreads across Kato’s handsome face breaks my heart, and I don’t even know what it means. He seems to light from within, so bright he’s almost blinding.

  “Thea mou,” he whispers. My Goddess.

  My breath catches, but I shake my head. “Adelphe mou,” I whisper back. My brother.

  Heartfelt words spoken in the old language always hold power, and I gasp as they squeeze my chest. Kato looks like he’s been struck by a lightning bolt. Then his eyes flick to the side, and his expression changes entirely. He rams into me, sending us both crashing to the ground.

  My injured shoulder jars painfully, and I cry out. Before I understand what’s happening, I see the knife in his throat, feel his blood on me.

  No! I rear up. Kato stays down. Blood spurts from his neck.

  My mind refuses to believe what I’m seeing, but my heart instantly does. It shatters beat by beat. I press my hands around the blade. It’s my knife, the one I threw at Mother before she flew away. A Metal Mage must have thrown it back at me, but Kato intervened.

  Blood gushes between my fingers, running in hot rivers over my hands. So much! Too fast!

  People shout for a healer. Griffin is there. There’s noise and chaos all around me, but I only hear one thing—the wet clicking in Kato’s throat as he desperately tries to breathe.

  I shake, tears blinding me. A wound like this leaves no time, no time to make it right!

  Kato’s cobalt eyes dim, losing their wonderful light.

  “Selena!” The scream rips from my throat, but even as I yell for her, I know it’s too late. If she showed up right now, it would still be too late.

  Every moment Kato and I have spent together is a kernel of warmth in my heart. I want a thousand more like that. He’s deep in my soul. He makes me laugh. He never judged me. He kept me sane in the dark.

  The others surround us, but Kato doesn’t look away from my face. I don’t think any force in the world could make him. The final pinpricks of light fade from his eyes, and I can’t breathe at all.

  “Stay with me!” I plead, grief wrenching my soul. Griffin’s hands curve around my shoulders, but somehow I don’t feel them at all.

  Kato’s big frame settles. The last tension dissolves from it, and a shuddering breath rattles my aching chest. He shielded me with his own body. He traded his life for mine. It’s Eleni all over again. It’s too cruel. This can’t be Fate.

  I crack straight down the middle, and there’s no way I’ll ever fit back together again. Magic explodes from me, disjointed and out of control. It throws everyone else away from us as I drop forward onto Kato’s chest and sob. He’s still warm and pliant, still here, yet not. His life force begins to swirl around me, his warrior’s soul heading for the golden path. It brushes my skin, and I could swear it whispers over me that he doesn’t regret a thing—and that he’d do it all again.

  I grip him harder. But I regret. I would change everything.

  I can still feel him—with me, around me—and I want so badly to keep him that my magic condenses into an entirely new thing, so blindingly powerful that at first I don’t even recognize it as coming from me. But then…

  My head snaps up, and I take a startled breath. This is what Mother was talking about.

  Conceive. Believe.

  But it’s immeasurably more than that. It’s the reality that has always been written in my bones, but that I could never read. Ares tried to tell me at Frostfire. Even Artemis said it way back in the Ipotane vale. I am more a child of the Gods than I ever realized, than I ever dared to believe.

  True understanding thuds into place like the building blocks of my own past, my now, and my tomorrow. I had all the pieces. I just didn’t know how to put them together before now.

  Mother wields magic so expertly because of our Olympian bloodline—and because she has no conscience to interfere with her desires. I have more than the ancient bloodline in my favor. I have actual parts. My outside is a combined shell of my human parents. My insides are a stew cooked up by the Gods—Elpis, Nike, the Furies, and who knows who else, with Zeus’s own blood as the binding broth.

  I can do anything I want, anything I put my mind to. Griffin knew it all along. Probably everyone did. Ares as good as told me I’m the idiot who second-guessed myself into near-total magic loss when I have the power of the Gods at my fingertips. The only thing ever stopping me has been me.

  My magic storms around Kato and me. He’s the brother of my heart. I will not lose him.

  With Kato’s unmoving chest beneath my hands and not even a twinge of regret in my conscience, I shed my second skin, the armor that wasn’t so much protecting me as protecting everyone else from what I could become. That mantle falls away, and a cold, hard sort of determination takes its place. I gaze down at Kato’s bloodless face. Stubble on his jaw. His blue eyes open. I’ll make them see again.

  “Stay with me.” This time it’s not a supplication. There’s compulsion in it, strength of will. It’s a command.

  My power grows, raging within me, outside of me, everywhere. Lightning webs through shadows. I let the storm turn wild and use the first bolts to seek out the Metal Mages, not knowing which one of them threw the knife. With only a thought, I annihilate them all. Then I pull the storm back in, tightening it around us until Kato and I are cocooned in a cyclone of dense magic shot through with crackling bolts. My power weighs on my back and blocks his soul, keeping it with me until I can figure out how to bring him back. I won’t let him go.

  I pull the knife from Kato’s neck and drop it on the ground. I can’t heal him with that in there. But it’s more than healing him, isn’t it? I have to go beyond the realm of any magic I’ve ever known and do what only the Gods are capable of.

  Large hands grip my shoulders and pull hard. Griffin yells my name, his voice frantic and
hoarse, but I shake him off, the storm pounding out of me in gusts. Only Griffin can get through to us, but he can’t stop me. No mortal can.

  My power turns dark and deafening as I grip Kato tighter, trying to search out and understand the magic I’ll need in order to give him back his pulse. I block everything else out, pushing the world away from me, pushing even Griffin back, far from my fractured heart. Somewhere in the infinite cosmos is the answer I seek. All magic begins to unfold for me, revealing its secrets one by one. I sift through the endless possibilities for the only thing I need or want. I’ll find it. I swear to the Gods, I will.

  But suddenly, an unstoppable force takes my lightning from me, ripping it from my control. The bolts change direction and then crash straight down, forming a blinding column of light that cuts Kato and me off and makes Griffin reel even farther back.

  I cry out in pain and shock, knocked sideways across Kato’s chest. A second surge of unimaginable power overcomes my storm completely and delivers a scorching blow to the air above my head. For a moment, everything is warped and white and blazing. Then a hot, heavy hand seems to press down on me, crushing. Crushing until I know I’ve done something terribly wrong.

  A punishing blast of lightning turns the already charred circle around Kato and me into a deep crater of boiling dirt and stone. Heat cooks me where I lie, and I can’t move a muscle, paralyzed by the unending, catastrophic boom. If the city weren’t already flattened, the God Bolt would have leveled it. The merciless strike deafens me, hollows me out. No one is left standing. Not dead, I somehow know, but knocked out. Limitless and vast, foreign and final, the magic overloads my senses and without any words explains to me just how puny and powerless I really am.

  The cold determination I felt just moments ago burns away as my helplessness to alter Kato’s destiny sinks in. This is a lesson in mortality, in humility, delivered by Zeus himself. The message is brutally clear in the monstrous amount of power still searing me through deep layers of my skin: my human side is no small part of me, and I can’t seize from the Fates their ultimate control over the tapestry of life and death.

  My eyes burn from the heat. Bitter tears evaporate before they can fall. Lying over Kato, I grip him to me, trying to shield his body from the scorching, angry, roaring power of Zeus. I hold on to him, because how can I ever let go?

  A sharp crack hits my ears. A flash blinds me. With a sudden lurch, I drop face-first onto the battered cobbles of the street. Gasping, I push back up and stare in horror at the empty space beneath me.

  I lost him. I lost Kato. He’s gone!

  Only the ancient and crushing magic remains. Suddenly, that vanishes as well. Stillness replaces everything, a shocking backlash to the raging storm. My ears can’t adjust. They throb for sound, but there’s nothing to hear except for the heavy pounding of my own broken heart.

  I turn my head, and my eyes meet Griffin’s. He’s on his knees, mouthing something to me from across the still-boiling circle around me. He lifts his hand, reaching for me, his lips moving frenetically, his face full of pleading and devastation and panicked fear.

  I shake my head. I can’t hear him. I don’t understand a word.

  My hair lifts straight up as a great force abruptly pulls at me like a breath sucking me in. I clutch the blood-slicked cobbles, suddenly sick with fright. My nails break, my grip slips, and my fingers pop off the stones. Screaming, I shoot upward, still reaching out and kicking as I go.

  My desperate shout makes no noise. Griffin, Sykouri, then Fisa and all of Thalyria spiral away, tunneling to a point beyond my vision. A vast and quiet darkness inhales me, swallowing me whole. The stars and I whirl in an endless loop, their far-off flickers of light the same gold I saw reflected in the swirling depths of the Chaos Wizard’s timeless eyes.

  There’s no breath. No light. No sound. I don’t hear my heartbeat anymore, or feel anything at all. Somewhere in the ether, I close my eyes and go weightless, anchored only by the terrifying realization that I didn’t just lose Kato today. I must have lost myself.

  CHAPTER 23

  I come awake to shadows. That’s all I see. Around me. In me. I still can’t hear, and my head pounds like it’s been kicked and kicked and kicked and will never recover. Not from this.

  I look around, but I already know that Griffin isn’t here. No one I love is, except for the tiny person I carry inside me.

  I lower my hand to my belly, and for the first time ever from the outside, I feel Little Bean kick.

  Her tiny life force flutters steadily as I stare blankly at a horizon of granite and cloud. I’m high up on a cliffside with a somber valley below. The cliff continues upward, sheer and soaring above my head, and my shelf of rock is small—no more than a few paces in any direction. There’s no way off.

  Well, there’s down. But my wings seem to have disappeared again, and without them, down isn’t much of an option. At least my shoulder is healed.

  I can’t be dead or else my daughter would be, too. And I’ve seen the steps a person takes to the Styx—a series of events that had nothing to do with this. The dreariness here reminds me of Asphodel, but there’s neither the same sense of finality for what once was nor the implicit potential to move on to the next phase of existence. This feels stagnant and stale, like nothing ever alters in this place.

  I fit right in with the bleak landscape, just another shadow along with the rest. I breathe and have a pulse, but there’s no hunger or thirst. I doubt there ever will be. This doesn’t seem like a place for mundane, mortal needs. This seems like a place where scary things crawl out from under rocks.

  Even that thought doesn’t bother me. I’m numb except for the very real physical ache in my head. Numb even to Little Bean’s tender stroke.

  A cool, damp breeze sends my hair swirling around my head. It’s shorter than I remember, and the ends look like they’ve been burned off. For some reason, there’s only one dagger left in my belt. I slide it free, fist my hair in my other hand, and then shear it off at my nape. I open my hand, and the light wind takes the scorched ends away, sweeping them off into the deep, dark gap. I drop the dagger by my knee. It hits the stone shelf in total silence.

  No sound. No needs. No emotion. Maybe the three go hand in hand.

  I stare blankly ahead into a thick bank of clouds. Across the valley from me and on both sides, they drape the hills and craggy mountains like colorless garments and misshapen hats. Fog clings to rock, obscuring the closest peaks and even the cliffside right next to me. My shelf is open and clear, though, just like the valley below. There’s a path right to me, cut through cloud. There’s nothing natural about it, but I can’t bring myself to care.

  I sit and watch, although there’s nothing to see. At some point, a swarm of small black birds swoops through my field of vision, breaking the monotony with the brisk fluttering of hundreds of wings. I don’t startle at the unexpected sight, or wonder at the utter silence of it. Dulled inside and out, I watch the birds dive back down into the valley and out of sight.

  Staring into the endless gray, I eventually debate letting feeling back in—if I even can. It’s the only way for the rawness of loss to settle into me, like a stepping-stone. My existence is built on them. On these blocks of death. If I climb it, then I’m accepting losing Kato, like I eventually accepted that knife in Eleni’s heart. I don’t want to do that. Not when I could have brought him back. If Zeus hadn’t stopped me, I would have brought Kato back.

  But he did stop me. Zeus wrenched from me all that power I was finally ready to embrace. He took my wings. He brought me here. And now I’m a shadow, like everything else. Gray rock. Gray ground. Gray sky. Gray me.

  It’s better that way. To see in color would be too painful. To live in color would be a betrayal of those I couldn’t save.

  A lot of time must pass while I sit there on the side of the high cliff, my legs dangling over the ledge. It feels like a lo
ng stretch to have no needs, no desire to rest, or speak, or move. I don’t try to explore my surroundings—not that there’s much to see or anywhere to go—or to modify anything about my strange new circumstances. There’s no sun that rises or sets, no changing of weather, no passing of days. It’s neither too hot nor too cold. It just is, and that’s the best anyone can say of me, or this place.

  The monotony is soothing. It doesn’t require thought. Or memory. It doesn’t poke at dormant emotions like a child prodding a snake with a stick. Nothing uncoils and strikes without warning. Nothing makes me feel. The gray doesn’t conjure the faces of those out of my reach, and it’s better that way. There’s almost peace.

  The clouds remain as thick as ever, except for right in front of me. There’s nothing to see, far less even than on the Plain of Asphodel. There are no despairing souls, no angry evildoers. There’s no ferryman, no River Styx. There’s no Kato to send off to a glorious afterlife.

  A spasm bursts beneath my ribs. It seems I can still feel. It’s awful. The spasm fades, replaced by gray.

  I eventually lie down on my shelf of rock, looking out and letting my hand dangle over the edge. Hanging it over the side hides my wedding ring from me, because Griffin is starting to bump his way into nearly all my thoughts. He’s stubborn, not leaving me alone. With my thumb, I spin the metal band round and round on my finger, my mind straying to the lone figure who was still conscious in Sykouri, his bloodstained hand outstretched to me, his grief-stricken eyes pleading, his mouth moving on frantic words I couldn’t hear, trying to call me back from the brink of my own destruction.

  Each blink solidifies the image, so I stop blinking. My eyes stay open, gritty and dry. I wish I could sleep. Sleep is the only real escape, especially from this thing inside me that keeps poking at that snake and trying to wake it up. Emotion stirs, bubbling inside, bubbling up. Closer and closer to the surface. If it boils over, it’ll leave me in a place I’m desperate to avoid. I need to shut it down, shut myself down. But it’s getting harder and harder, and sleep doesn’t appear to be a requirement here—wherever here is.