War of the Bastards

by Andrew Shvarts

  “We’re not leaving you,” Lyriana pressed, her eyes watering with golden tears. “We’ll find a way…”

  “I’ll slow you down, and you know it,” Ellarion said, and I could tell he was trying to sound resolute even though his voice was quivering. “Besides. It’s only a matter of time before reinforcements come barging through the main door. I’ll hold them off and buy you time.”

  I leaned forward, biting my lip, trying to focus on the pain in my body because it was better than the pain in my heart. I pressed my palm to the wall behind him as hard as I could, and as I did the shimmersteel glowed underneath it, the glistening metal texture thawing away like frost to reveal a window. For the first time, I looked closely at the city beyond. And my breath caught in my throat. “Lyriana,” I whispered. “Look.”

  From the distance outside the city walls, I’d seen the towers of smoke and assumed parts of the city were on fire. But looking out now, from within, I realized it wasn’t parts. It was all of it. As far as the eye could see, the city was a blazing ruin. The beautiful mansions and ancient temples, the bustling markets and majestic gardens, were all gone. Looking out that window, I saw crumbled buildings and sprawling rubble, raging fires and scrambling little shapes I knew were people. Flickers of light went off all over, like crackling fireflies, and it would’ve been pretty if I hadn’t known they were bursts of bloodmagic. The city, the whole city, home to so many innocent men, women, and children, was a war zone. How long had it been like this? A day? A week? A month?

  I’d been dwelling obsessively on how many people the plague would kill. But how many would die just today if I didn’t use it? How many had already died?

  I saw the shock cross Lyriana’s face as she looked out, and I knew whatever I was feeling, she had to be feeling a hundred times worse. Lightspire was just a city where I’d lain low for a few months, but it was her home. Every happy memory of her childhood, of her parents, of her life, had happened inside these walls. And Miles had destroyed it, like he’d destroyed so much else.

  “Please,” Ellarion said. “Don’t make me beg.”

  Syan knelt down by Ellarion’s side, her zaryas gently levitating over his wound. “I can stay with him,” she said to us, a hitch in her throat. “I can’t save him but…I can make sure he’s warm and comfortable. Make sure he’s not alone when…” She trailed off, cleared her throat, and looked down. “You three go. Use the crystal. Save the world.”

  “Okay.” Lyriana turned away from the window, her chest heaving, and she did that thing where she stiffened up, that thing where she was steeling herself to do something she wasn’t ready for. “Just…give me a second.”

  Zell nodded. He crouched down by Ellarion and grasped his shoulder, squeezing it tight. “It’s been an honor to fight alongside you,” he said. “And an honor to call you friend.”

  Lyriana wasn’t moving, so I guess it was my turn, even though I hated this, I hated this so much. I leaned down and hugged him as gently as I could. “Look at you. A hero after all.”

  His eyes met mine, and for once, the glowing crimson didn’t look angry or dangerous. It looked warm, inviting, kind. He smiled, a real smile, and a single glowing tear streaked down his cheek. “When they build the statue of me, make sure it captures how handsome I was.”

  I smiled, and realized I was crying, too. “It’s a promise.”

  Then I stepped away and Lyriana came up, crouching by his side, pressing her head to his. “I love you so much, cousin,” she whispered.

  He reached up and held her, then craned his head up to gently kiss her forehead. “You’re going to be the best damn Queen Noveris has ever seen,” he said. “I know it.” Then he coughed, a painful scraping cough that made the lance heave and sent blood to his lips. The light in his eyes was fading. I could tell it was taking all his strength just to stay lucid. “Enough. Go. End this.”

  Syan squeezed his shoulder, and nodded to us. It was time.

  So we left. Even though my heart felt like an anchor in my chest, even though it took every ounce of strength I had in me, we got up and turned away, leaving Ellarion and Syan, and heading across the sea of corpses toward the doors. Lyriana balled her hands into fists, magic flaring around her. Zell tore his shirt into a sling and stumbled forward, clenching and unclenching his good fist. I jerked Muriel out of that one soldier’s chest and blinked away my tears, swallowed the pain, focused on the floor beneath my feet, the door in front of me, the fight ahead, the choice beyond. Anything but Ellarion, lying slumped against the wall, watching us go, that distant look in his eyes.

  THE DOORS BEHIND THE THRONE gave way to the quarters where the royal family lived. We passed through a lovely private kitchen, a library covered with notes in Miles’s writing, a bath with a heated shimmersteel tub. These rooms were as elegant and clean as they’d been back when I’d lived here, perfectly maintained. In these rooms, you could actually pretend the world was normal, that life was good. In these rooms, you could almost forget the Kingdom was burning.

  The last room before the staircase up was the royal bedroom, a massive chamber with the biggest and fluffiest bed I’ve ever seen. The rest of the rooms had looked pretty much the way they had under the Volaris, but this room had been redecorated in the Western style: redwood panels on the floors and walls, candles affixed in iron holders, a heavy wooden desk. Paintings of Kents adorned the walls. I could recognize my grandfather, my grand-uncle, my stepmother and her three daughters. Closer to the bed was a mess that had to be Miles’s. Just like him to move into the King’s chamber at the first notice. Bottles of wine lay empty on the floor, along with crumpled clothes. A row of spent syringes lay alongside the bed, their glass tubes still stained with flecks of the bloodmage serum.

  I’d assumed the room was empty, just like the others, but a small voice gasped as we approached. Hand on my blade, I peeked behind the bed, and inhaled sharply. Huddled there were three young Western women, about my age, maybe a little younger. They were in their smallclothes, the fancy silk kinds that noblewomen wore, with the garters and the lacy trims. They all had auburn hair, pale skin, green eyes, and freckles.

  They all looked like me.

  “Royal concubines,” Lyriana said, looking over my shoulder. “A practice long forbidden.”

  “Apparently not anymore,” I replied. My stomach turned, and I felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time, a fury toward Miles that wasn’t just political, wasn’t just about avenging the people he’d taken. It was a fury that came from my very core, a fury that was all about me.

  “Please don’t hurt us,” one of the girls begged. “We’re just here for the money. I swear.”

  “Go,” I said, my voice a dagger’s edge. “Get out of here. Now.”

  They turned and ran. The world grew red at the edges, and my knees trembled, and it took Zell reaching out and grabbing my shoulder to snap me back. “Let’s end this,” he said. “Once and for all.”

  The King’s bedroom had a private staircase up to the Heartstone, a small winding screw of delicate shimmersteel that led to a heavy closed door. We made our way up together and stopped at the top. I leaned against the door, and through the other side, I could hear voices: soldiers, I thought, bloodmages maybe, and a commanding bark that I was almost certain was Miles.

  I turned to glance back at the others. We looked like absolute hell. Zell’s left arm hung in a sling. Lyriana bled from a long cut along her arm, and the gash in my side made every step flare with pain. We very much did not look ready to take on the world.

  But what else could we do? We’d come this far. There was only one option left. My plan, the one I’d pitched to Galen back in the camp, the one that had cost me a good chunk of my soul. We all looked at each other for one long moment, breathing, preparing. “I’m ready,” I whispered. Lyriana nodded. Zell did, too. I pulled the heaviest, deepest breath of my life into my lungs. And then I threw open the door.

  The chamber of the Heartstone was a wide, round room with a do
med ceiling. The stone itself, the Heartstone, the source of magic, was in the center, enclosed in a second smaller dome of incredibly thick shimmersteel. I couldn’t see the stone itself now, because the dome was in its hardened nontranslucent state, but also because there were about a dozen men standing in the way. They were Westerners in loose robes, their skin pale and veiny, the veins in their eyes pulsing unnatural colors. Bloodmages. The best of the best. And standing in the middle of them was Miles.

  The bloodmages raised their arms and opened their palms. Magic crackled in the air. I sucked in my breath and stepped forward, right onto the front line, my arms raised.

  Everything came down to this moment. To this gamble. To my plan. And I didn’t blink. Because if there was one thing I was sure of, one thing I knew to my core, it’s that Miles would hesitate before shooting me down.

  “Wait!” Miles yelled.

  The bloodmages froze. And I dropped low to one knee, which let Zell step up and hurl his sword. It was a perfect shot, and it streaked through the air like a missile, plunging right at Miles.

  And froze, midair, an inch from his face. Miles’s hand was up, fingers unfurled, palm wide. His eyes glowed gray, and the air hummed around him with the dull grinding of stone scraping on stone. The sword hovered there, useless, stopped. Miles looked past it, at me, with a look at once pitying and full of contempt. “Seriously, Tilla?” he said, waving a hand to spin the sword around, so its blade pointed right at Zell. “This was your big play? You do remember I can control metal, right?”

  “Oh, I remember,” I said, stepping back behind Lyriana. “I was actually counting on it.”

  Then Miles blinked, and his eyes flitted to the hilt of the sword, and I saw the exact moment he realized what was about to happen. Because there was something built into the hilt of the sword, a round metal ball attached to the end of the pommel. And inside that ball, behind a glass screen, there was something else: a gemstone crackling with trapped magical energy, flaring and flickering, a hurricane trapped in a bottle.

  A mage-killer.

  Many things happened at once.

  Lyriana flared out her hands, and a purple Shield rippled out, filling the doorway’s frame like a makeshift wall. Miles screamed and hurled himself to the side. A few of his mages sprang forward, trying to throw Shields of their own. The gemstone cracked, shattered, and burst.

  The room rumbled and shook with the blast, an explosion of light and flame and energy that flooded the dome with a deafening roar. It hit Lyriana’s Shield like a crashing wave, and she gritted her teeth and planted her feet, holding strong as it buckled and trembled. I couldn’t see what was happening in the room beyond, because all I could see was swirling fire and crackling pulses of light.

  Then it passed, the energy dissipating like a breeze. The room went still. I finally exhaled, my whole body trembling, and next to me, with a cautious pause, Lyriana dropped the Shield.

  The chamber of the Heartstone, once so pristine and shiny, was now a charred ruin. Every surface was blackened, coated in ash. Strange crystalline growths sprouted from the shimmersteel, taking on the metal’s glistening fish-scale look. The bodies of the bloodmages lay everywhere. Some, the closest to the blast, were in pieces, while others were still alive, barely, crawling and moaning across the floor, their skin scorched and cracked.

  I’d hoped it wouldn’t come to this. Killing so many just like that. Using the weapons of our enemy. But it was done. It was done.

  None of us spoke. Zell took point, pacing over to the wounded bloodmages, and ending each with a single merciful thrust. Lyriana crossed to the dome and pressed her hand to the surface, causing the metal to turn transparent around her touch. The Heartstone was there, all right: a boulder that quivered like a liquid, that bent itself into impossible geo-metric shapes, that was somehow a half-dozen colors at once, that gave you a headache if you looked at it. I’d deal with that in a minute. Right now, I had a more pressing task.

  Miles lay against the room’s far wall. He’d managed to throw himself behind enough of the bloodmages that they’d taken the brunt of the blast, enough to keep him alive. But just barely. Whatever Shield had protected him had only blocked the left side of his face; the right was a blistered ruin, the skin blackened and raw, his eye a dripping socket. Little corkscrews of blue crystal twisted out through the skin of his forehead. His right arm had been taken clean off, and his chest rose and fell with ragged heaves, each sounding worse than the last.

  I hunkered down next to him, and his one good eye flitted to me. When he spoke, his voice was a choked whisper. “Mage-killer,” he said. “You made a mage-killer.”

  “I did,” I replied quietly. There was only one way to make a mage-killer: by brutally torturing mages, breaking their minds and capturing their anguish within the Rings on their fingers. It had taken us six of the captive bloodmages before we got it right, six men dragged kicking and screaming into Galen’s tent and carried out wrapped in sheets, six times Galen emerged with his hands stained red and a grim look on his face. It was unthinkable, unimaginable, the choice that separated us from our enemies, the line we never crossed. And I’d crossed it six times.

  “I never thought…” Miles tried. Given that I’d just blown off half his face, you’d think he would’ve been angry, but he just looked sad, crushed, like he was so disappointed in me. “I never thought you’d do something like that.”

  “That’s because you never really knew me, Miles,” I said. “You just knew your idea of me.” I had to say, for a moment I’d spent two years dreaming of, it felt weirdly sad. Lying there like that, totally broken, Miles didn’t look like a cruel tyrant or a sinister bloodmage or the hateful little shit who sold me out back in the West. He just looked like the boy I’d once known, the boy I’d grown up with, the sweet boy who brought me mulberries, whose cheeks turned pink when he kissed my hand.

  “It’s over, isn’t it?” he choked out.

  I leaned forward and pressed Muriel’s tip to his chest. “It is.”

  His eye met mine, and a single tear ran down his cheek. “All I ever wanted was you.”

  “I know,” I replied, and pushed the sword in up to the hilt.

  Sixty-seven.

  With the world’s longest exhale, I stepped away. Miles lay there, cold and still, but he didn’t matter anymore, because it was time for the next step, the final step, the moment when I’d change everything. The shimmersteel dome was now translucent, and inside, the Heartstone thrashed and writhed like a wounded beast, tendrils of grappling rock that slurped against the surface of the dome like hungry eels, flashing thousands of different colors at once.

  “Do you know what you’re doing?” Lyriana asked, and like, at this point, it’d be pretty bad if I didn’t.

  I closed my eyes and slipped into that other me, into the power that lurked behind my eyelids, the thoughts whispering beneath the running of my brain. The Nightmother. I let her take over, guiding my hands, pushing the power to the foreground. The world blurred, grayed at the edges, and I felt time slow to a crawl. Energy flared around me, colorful ribbons and dancing bands, tendrils of light and fury stretching out of the Heartstone, stretching into me. Shimmering green panes, just like the Nightmother’s, hovered around me, covered in sliding runes and glowing symbols. I looked down at my palm and the crystal was there, yellow, spinning, so beautiful and pristine, almost like it didn’t contain the deaths of thousands of people.

  The room was silent and still, every eye on me, as I walked toward the Heartstone. This was the moment. The end of the line. All I had to do was press my palm on the shimmersteel frame, press the crystal through it, and let this bloodmage nightmare finally end. It was that simple.

  But I couldn’t bring myself to move.

  The Heartstone sat there, waiting. The crystal spun in my hand. The tendrils of magic glowed around me. And outside, all around the tower, the city, the world, burned. I could end it. I could end it all now. I could save the world.

 
And still. I just stood there.

  “Tilla?” Lyriana asked.

  Zell just shook his head. “Let her think.”

  I wasn’t thinking. Not really. I was just…feeling. Feeling the weight of the moment. Feeling the significance of what I was about to do flooding in around the edges of my vision, like I was drowning from the inside, like the world was a fist clutching me, squeezing tight. Their faces swam in my head, all the people I’d be killing, the men and women and children, anyone even remotely touched by magic.

  I wanted to do it, to end this, but I couldn’t will my body to move no matter how hard I told it to. I just…couldn’t.

  Do it! the voice inside me screamed. You have to!

  And I could see her, the Nightmother, I could see how she’d done this, how she’d hunched over her own Godsblade, how she’d sentenced her own kind to death. I could see the hesitation and fear in her blank face, could sense her uncertainty, could feel her guilt and trepidation. She’d felt exactly like this, but she’d done it anyway, because she had to. Because she didn’t have a choice. Because it was the only way.

  Her choice had killed the Titans. It doomed her race to annihilation. It killed hundreds of thousands. And it led to the rise of mankind. It led to the triumphs of humanity, to the reign of the Volaris, to the Kingdom of the West, to my father, to me. Every moment of our history, every King and rebel, every child playing in the street and mage commanding the elements, all of it came from her choice.

  Her choice that created my father. Her choice that brought me here. Standing in front of an identical Heartstone. Holding an identical crystal. Ready to do it all over again.

  My knees trembled. My hand shook. I could feel the overwhelming weight of the cycles of history. Growth and death, conquest and rebellion, war and peace and war and peace and war. We just kept doing this, again and again, each generation bearing the burden of the one that came before, every child reliving her parents’ mistakes, all of us doomed to repeat and relive and die praying our children will be better. And at the end of the day, it always came down to the same justification, the same pressure, the same sense of inevitability. We never wanted this. We just accepted it. For the good of our people. For the good of the world.