by Mary Weber
I peer at her guards again who are watching us in silence. Then turn and stride to the open window overlooking the airship pad. “How much can you see?”
“Enough to know that you went with Myles and took on an ability that’s not your own.” The bed creaks beneath her weight. “I can’t see it clearly, but it looks dark. Oh Nym, what were you thinking? Why didn’t you come to me first? I warned you and everything!”
I flip around. “And what would you have told me? That it wasn’t a good idea? I knew that but I had to do something. And so far it’s been fine.” I curl my nearly perfect hands to show her. “Better than fine actually.” I look up with a grin. “I almost freed him tonight. Another day and I should be—”
“I would’ve told you it was more dangerous than you imagine.” Her face has grown serious. She slips her feet onto the floor and stands to stare at me with both hands on her hips.
Did she not hear me? I almost freed him. “You think I didn’t weigh the cost? My Elemental power was dangerous too—the most dangerous Eogan once said—and I learned to control it. I can do so with this one too.”
“A nice sentiment, but—”
I start toward her. “But what? You would’ve wanted me to give up? How could I? And now—now it’s almost worked, Rasha. We’re going to do this!”
She pauses and, after a moment, nods in resignation. “Perhaps you would’ve chosen differently if I’d trusted you with more information on the airship.” She reseats herself on the bed. “And I understand why you made your decision, Nym. I just don’t know that in this case the end result will justify the means of getting there.”
“Then we should’ve just killed him when we both had the chance.” I look away, at the door. At the ceiling. At anything but her concerned frown as a stab of discomfort pricks my spine. Why do she and Eogan not see what this can do?
A moment longer and I sigh. “Eogan agrees with you if that makes you feel better.”
“Agrees how?”
“That this power I’ve taken is dangerous. He says it’s what created Draewulf.” I dig my foot into the carpet and swallow hard to shore up my suddenly quaking throat.
She gives a single, sad dip of her head. Another half-minute and she lifts her gaze to one of her Cashlin guards. “Ask them to tell Sir Gowon that the Elemental and I demand to speak with him. If he refuses, tell him I’m aware of a defining choice he made eighteen years ago.” She hesitates. “And if the Bron guard outside refuses, tell him I’m aware of what he did last evening.”
The guard clicks his heels and unlocks the door to speak with the Bron soldiers out in the hall.
I furrow my brow.
She looks at me and bites her lip. And admits with a subdued smirk, “I have no idea what he did last night, but it’s worth a shot.”
I grin. “And Sir Gowon?”
Sadness flashes through her expression and into her tone. “You are aware of Bron’s rite of passage for their boy soldiers?”
When she doesn’t continue, I nod. Mainly because I suddenly don’t trust my voice. All I can picture is Kel.
“When Gowon’s own son was ready to take it, Eogan’s father used it as a test of loyalty, giving Gowon a choice—have the boy prove his and his father’s fealty to the crown or be demoted. When it came time . . . The young man the boy was made to kill in combat was his best friend. A child barely a year younger than himself.”
My chest hardens. “You read that?”
She nods. “Although it’s now in the far past, I’m certain it’s still an area of shame for him.”
An area of shame yet he inflicts punishment on those who would disobey? Or perhaps that’s why he allowed Kel to live the other night.
She clears her throat and drops her gaze to my wrist. “So who gave it to you?”
I glance down as she fluffs a pillow and leans back.
“The ability.”
Oh. “Myles took me to a woman.”
“How did she do it?”
“Through a drink.”
“Can you go back and get rid of it?”
I don’t answer that. I won’t answer. I merely walk over until I’m facing her spot on the bed again. “Like I said, it’s been fine. I don’t need you to worry about it. I think we should be concentrating instead on what we’re going to ask Sir Gowon and how to stop the Dark Army.”
She eyes me. “In that case, that’s all I’m going to say on the subject aside from warning you that the moment you get scary with this ability, I will not hesitate to do everything I can to take you out myself. And the next time I see Myles, I will most likely rip his head from his neck.”
I nod. Fair enough.
“Now about Sir Gowon and the wraiths . . .” She casts her gaze over the bloodstain on the carpet, and for a second I’m certain her eyes go misty. As does her voice. An odd ripple of guilt goes through me—not for her grief over her loss, but that it didn’t occur to me to even wonder how it would affect her. More than that, that I never even wondered about those killed. What were their names? Did they have kids? The thought digs into me that normally I’d be moved by something like that.
Instead? I feel nothing.
“I’ll get you some water.” I grab a cup from the morning’s food tray to take to the water closet. I rinse it before filling it with water from their pipes in case someone poisoned the pitcher on the table. Not likely with her men standing there, but still . . .
Her faint smile quivers along with her chin when I return. She sniffs. “She was my maid for the past six years.”
I put my hand over hers and squeeze.
“Our kingdom is full of life but our palace . . . can be a bit lonely.” She clasps back. “With the Luminescents living in it, there’s not much need for conversation. Everyone can read everyone else.” She twists her mouth wryly and glances back over to the bloodstained carpet. “But Fara wasn’t one. She couldn’t read my intentions. She was my friend.”
“Oh, Rasha.” I sit on the bed beside her.
She scoots over and closes her eyes as if in a daze. “At first I thought maybe the murders were to get at you but . . . I’m beginning to think they’re targeting everyone.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know—either a Bron Assembly member or the wraiths. But those monsters are too hard for me to read.” She shudders. “It’s like they don’t have souls to decide things on their own. And the way those murders were done . . .”
I nod. “Do you think . . .?” But I stall at the grief plaguing her face. Unable to bring myself to ask if perhaps the wraiths were in need of more body parts . . . “What about Draewulf or Isobel?” I say instead.
“Possibly. Although I didn’t see it in Isobel, nor do I see how it would suit their needs.”
“Except that we don’t actually know what their needs are. On the roof with Myles, Draewulf, Isobel, and a commanding wraith said they were waiting for Draewulf’s vessel to be prepared. And Eogan kept saying that he and Sir Gowon were wrong—that Draewulf is taking the blood of kings in order. That he needed Eogan’s blood and block to protect Draewulf. He keeps talking about Elegy 96. Do you know of it?”
No answer.
When I look down, she’s curled up, eyes shut, as if attempting to block out all thought.
I slide up to sit beside her and tug the blanket higher on her shoulder. Patting her arm, I listen to her breathing slow.
After our silence has melted in with the room’s atmosphere, her gentle snoring picks up, and her bodyguards quietly begin discussing the murders. I listen in for a bit but they’re no further in understanding them than Rasha is.
Soon the men switch to discussing the larger predicament we’re all in. Their accented words all seem to boil down to the same question:
Will we make it out of here alive?
Slowly, eventually, Rasha’s snoring settles into a deep rhythm, like the patter of rain lessening into a steady, comforting drip.
I pull my arm from around her shoulder and rest my
head against the wall.
And eventually doze off too.
CHAPTER 29
Enormous paisley designs stare back at me from the wallpaper. Black with thousands of tiny glittery eyes. Moist eyes. One shifts. Then another. I watch their legs pop up from the white wall, followed by their bodies, and they’re no longer decorative paisleys but spiders. Hundreds of them. Covering the room, watching, waiting.
For what?
I twitch my hand into a fist. Maybe I can create a wind tunnel to destroy them, to make them leave—but my body freezes in place. I glance down at my chest and at the vortex swirling there. It’s dark, powerful. It’s sealing me down, anchoring me into a whirling pool of grief and anger and hope.
The spiders’ sound picks up and blends into the hissing outside. Clack, clack, clack. They’re coming for me. Oozing down the walls like mugplant to land in blobs on the floor. They pop up again and scramble toward the bed, the blankets, clawing beneath them, crawling for my skin, and I can’t move, oh hulls I can’t move as their teeth find me.
They chew into my flesh and force the last of their venom into the very roots of my veins, until my blood is pooling around me in red circles, spreading to join that stain in the carpet as the hissing from the hall grows louder. The hissing that for whatever reason sounds eerily like words. “Come closer, closer, closerrr,” they’re whispering.
Closer to what? I look down at my body that is being eaten alive by spiders. Except it’s not me anymore. It’s Draewulf.
Morning sunbeams flutter against the wall, dousing the crisp black-and-white paper in yellow light, dissolving all dreams of spiders. I squint. I’m huddled, shivering at the foot of Rasha’s bed, and she’s sprawled out across the rest like a giant moth with silken-robed wings.
Jolting up, I flex my hands, my toes. And exhale relief to discover they are my own skin, pale and real. I am not a wraith. I am not Draewulf.
In fact, aside from the dull throb in my head and the chill clamped like an iron sheet to my bones, the rest of me feels normal.
I shudder. Please let everything be normal.
Sitting up, I scoot over and lean against the warm wall to absorb some of its heat into my bones. When that doesn’t work, I wrap my thick cloak around my shaky body and get up just as one of the guards nods to a pot of tea and a platter of food on the desk.
“It’s safe.”
I nod and walk over to pour the tea and poke at the tiny fruit and purple-fleshed meat. I sniff them. No subtle scent of almond or rind.
A quick bite tells me it tastes fine as well, and abruptly my stomach is reacting to the awareness that I’ve not eaten in far too long. I’m shoving food in my mouth when Rasha stirs and looks over at me. She raises a brow, only to utter a real, true, Rasha-style giggle.
I resist mentioning that she looks even more like a moth the way her hair is standing on end, and by the time she’s up and taming it, I’ve finished my food and am giving her an account of last night’s roof encounter.
A knock sounds on the door. One of Rasha’s guards unbolts it and a Bron soldier steps in.
“Sir Gowon has agreed to see Princess Rasha.” The man’s gaze falls on me. “And the Elemental.”
I watch Rasha from the corner of my eye as she and I and all five of her Cashlin guards follow the Bron soldier down a maze of hallways. Behind us trail wisps of muffled hissing from two of the Dark Army wraiths. I refuse to look back or acknowledge them, or the alarming sense that just like in my dream, I can almost decipher what they’re saying.
As if the words are trapped on the edge of my tongue, but for the life of me I can’t recall them.
It makes my skin itch. I glance up at the Bron soldiers leading us far from the Main Hall, then look around for any of the Faelen bodyguards. It’s a full moment before I realize they’re all still locked away with the delegates.
I look down at my hands. Did any of the murdered guards have families?
I don’t want to think about it.
The jittering cold now moves to my jaw, making my teeth chatter. I clench them and try to focus on the fact that Sir Gowon didn’t believe me about Eogan and the Elegy. Will he this time? And if not, how do we make him?
“Did Eogan give you any other clues on what the Elegy refers to?” Rasha says.
A flare of irritation surfaces. Is she jesting? Wasn’t she just listening to me recount in her room last night’s scene with Eogan? If he’d said more I would’ve told her. “Nothing else,” I say tightly, and keep my gaze on the hall in front of us until the guards stop at a door.
Three of Rasha’s men go in with the Bron soldiers to search the place, and suddenly the wraiths are hovering too close, suffocating the air with their sounds and scent of decay. I’m tempted to plug my nose and ears so maybe my veins will stop trying to echo them, but instead I force myself to turn around and study what I can see of them beneath their cloaks. To see what they really are and how they were brought into existence.
What I find is as sickening as what I saw the other night at the banquet. Physical conglomerations of humans and beasts somehow pieced together and brought alive. Human torsos and heads emaciated to skulls, blended with animal parts and bolcrane claws.
Did they bring the plague with them, or is the plague a form of magic that turns people into them? Either way, the monsters hissing in front of me with sunken-in faces are as bloodless and cold as Rasha’s maid lying somewhere in this Castle.
As soon as the guards are done, I stride past them into the room only to find we’ve arrived before Sir Gowon. The space is dim inside with hall lanterns illuminating it just enough to reveal it’s some sort of chapel. My gaze scans the simple floor rugs and a beautiful, intricate table facing what appears to be a landscape mural before I stop at the painting hanging over it. It’s an artist’s rendering of a man who looks very much like Eogan. Only older and more calloused.
His dead father, I assume.
I give a low scoff. Apparently arrogance runs in the family.
The Bron guards nearby say nothing, but their faces sour as I walk over to it. Even with that awful portrait, this room has more personality than anything else I’ve seen in this metal castle. It has a sense of history. I run my fingers across the intricate altar and imagine Eogan sneaking into here as a child.
On the wall beside it is a smaller portrait of a woman holding two identical children. The woman has a gentle face but the small boys aren’t smiling. The next moment I’m peeking back up to his father’s overbearing painting, then lift it to peer behind it to the landscape scene of a valley.
A Faelen valley.
Inhale. Exhale . . .
It’s a mural of the Valley of Origin Eogan and I visited.
The brushstrokes and coloring make it clear even to me that this painting is far older than anything else in the room. And not merely older—more delicate. There’s a distinct sense of reverence in the edges and lines that suggest this was more than a mural. It was regarded as a place of honor.
I frown. Is that how Eogan knew to go to the Valley when he was in Faelen? Did his ancient ancestors once worship the Creator there too?
I’m just reaching out to finger a dust-covered edge of it, when a Bron guard says, “Sir Gowon for you,” and the old man is standing outside the door, his bushy brows furrowed in suspicion.
“I trust this is important, Your Majesty, seeing as it’s a highly inconvenient time.”
Rasha smiles at him. “I assure you it’s of the utmost consequence.”
“In that case, I caution the both of you not to test my patience. You have ten minutes.”
He glances my direction before stepping into the room. Rasha nods to her guards who, albeit reluctantly, leave with the Bron men and close the door until there’s merely one sliver of light.
Sir Gowon walks over to twist a knob on a lantern set into the wall, and the room springs alive with golden beams. “Well?”
Rasha tips her head to me. The floor is mine.
&nbs
p; My hands are beginning to shake harder. I wrap my fingers around the insides of my cloak and eye him. “I asked you the other night about Elegy 96. Now I’m asking again.”
“Is this what you summoned me for?” He snorts and waves a hand as if he doesn’t have time for this, then turns on his heel for the door.
“Eogan trusted me enough to have me ask you about it.”
“Which only begs the question, why didn’t he tell you himself?” he throws out. “And since he didn’t, I can only assume you tricked him for the Elegy name.”
“You consider his character so weak? Or perhaps you find me so dangerous a threat.”
He stops. Flips around. The muscles in his soft throat clench.
My smile goes cold. “Draewulf has taken over Eogan, whether you trust me or not, and Draewulf is about to destroy you all. The last moment of clarity I had with Eogan, he said to tell you to take a closer look at the Elegy because it’s begun. He said Draewulf took him first but is going in order of blood. Something to do with his block and the land.”
Surprise surfaces in his eyes.
It’s followed by fear.
Before I can press him though, his face hardens and that protective expression I saw the other night flares. “And yet, if your claim was true, he’d have just as easily appeared to solicit help from me himself rather than send a message through you.” He glances back and forth between Rasha and me. “And for one supposedly having intentions on him, you insult his honor most easily while he’s done nothing but protect you.”
I give a caustic chuckle. “Like he protected his generals? Or perhaps like Draewulf’s daughter, Lady Isobel. Did you know she’s decided she wants to turn your entire Bron army into wraiths? I’m curious, how do you think she’ll go about doing—?”
“I swear to you it’s his honor we’re trying to save,” Rasha interrupts. “As well as Bron’s. Because Draewulf did take your king. You saw him in the meeting yesterday. Is that the man you knew—willing to use Draewulf’s army? Even Odion wouldn’t have done so.”