by Rachel Dunne
Vatri had told him anyone could see their future in the flames, if only they believed.
He had always thought his death—his true death, the end of his last life—would be waiting for him among the snows of the North. That the snow and the ice would swallow him, and would not spit him out once more. Perhaps, when the Parents had given him their fire, they had changed the shape of his death.
Scal had prayed—not for himself, knowing what the fires had shown him. He had prayed for Vatri, and for those who followed the Nightbreaker. For those who had lived in the village and thought death a better chance than the Long Night. For those who still huddled in their homes, doors sealed to the darkness. He had never, in all his life, asked the Parents for anything. But there, kneeling beside Vatri, he had asked them, Let me do this one thing.
The fire had not answered. After a time, Vatri’s fingers had slipped from his. She had said, “The gods ask so much of us, but they never ask more than what we can bear. They want us to succeed. We can’t ever forget that.” She had smiled at him, a tight and brittle thing, a crack in a mask. “I’ll see you after it’s over. Once more, in the light of the sun.” The door had closed behind her.
In the night before the end of it all, she had sought out Scal, and then she had left him to his empty silence.
The mountain rushed closer. The end raced with it. All things ended, and Scal had faced his death often enough that he was not afraid. The ground would split, and mountains would fall, and the sun would rise once more. Scal would not see it—I’ll see you after it’s over—but that did not matter. There was only one thing he had left to do.
To the left, a quiet clash of weapons, quickly silenced. “They have scouts,” Neira murmured, teeth flashing in a grin. “Yours are better.”
It was colder, in the deep shadow of the mountain. Scal had not yet drawn his sword. The fire or the ice that lined its edge would respond to his will. His will was, Not yet.
Neira moved forward, pressed both hands to the side of the mountain. For a long while she was silent and unmoving, as though listening for something very quiet. Or looking for something, with her eyes that somehow saw.
A door into the mountain slid open, and Neira stepped aside. “They’re ahead,” she said softly. “They’re not alone.” She smiled, that way she had of smiling when she should not. “Good luck.”
Scal stepped inside the mountain, and his army followed.
It was a hallway, and it was empty, but sound called Scal deeper. Voices. Footsteps. Screaming. The faintest light, but in the Long Night, any bit of light was not to be ignored. Scal drew his sword finally, holding it before him in both hands as he willed, Not yet. He did not need its light—it would give him away, and the way the distant screams bounced off the walls around him was as good as a map. He wondered if this was how Neira and all the other blind preachers saw with their missing eyes: by simply paying attention.
The light spread, and the screams echoed louder, and the hallway opened, and Scal saw them.
A wide room, and nearby a writhing cluster of people, one of them screaming endlessly. At the far end, a dais, and on it a girl—only she was not a girl. Scal knew it without knowing her, for the way looking at her made the blade want to burn in his hands. There was a boy below her who shared her face. There were swordsmen and witches and black-robed preachers scattered, but they did not matter. Scal fixed his eyes on the Twins, and willed, Now.
Let me do this one thing.
Fire licked along the blade, twisting around the spines of ice that lined its edge, and both the fire and the ice seemed to strain across the cavern, toward the Twins. Scal’s army streamed into the room behind him, ready to fight for their homes and their families, ready to die for the sun. They wasted no time, and the one screaming man was soon not the only one. Scal began to walk across the cavern.
The witches in the room shuddered and stuttered as Neira’s voice called out a single, meaningless word. Every witch as one turned to face Neira where she stood at the entrance to the cavern. They faced her with open mouths and fingers splayed wide, unmoving. They faced her as she began to laugh. They faced her as black smoke began to boil from her hands and mouth and missing eyes.
The Twins both watched Scal’s approach with wide eyes. Sororra with fury, the deep-burning anger that flared within her, so like the fire that Patharro loved in the humans he had shaped. And Fratarro’s eyes were wide with horror and, deeper, with relief.
Chapter Forty
Keiro stood frozen in shock as the unexpected battle swelled around him. The Fallen and their mercenaries clashing with the thin-faced invaders, all unarmored and poorly armed. Keiro would call them common stock, his own brethren who had grown in hovels and fields and on dusty roads. But they were fighting, and they were not losing.
The mages, all the mages that the Fallen had worked so hard to collect and twist—they stood more frozen than Keiro, their backs rigid, all staring eerily openmouthed in the same direction. Keiro didn’t recognize the woman they faced, but she was black-robed and eyeless, a preacher by any measure—save for the terrible, spine-scraping smile that stretched her face as she watched the mages all powerless before her. Even the screaming mage had stopped, pinned beneath a dwindling group of frantic Fallen torn between deciding the greater threat.
The woman who was not a preacher spread her arms, palms up to the peak of Atura, and her echoing laugh turned to a defiant shout. “You have no power over me.” She hadn’t spared so much as a glance for the Twins. If she spoke to anyone in the chamber, Keiro had no idea who it was.
He might have kept watching her, horrified and entranced, if it hadn’t been for the swordsman approaching him.
No—not approaching Keiro. Approaching the Twins.
Sororra had pulled her brother up onto the comparative safety of the dais, where they at least had height, had a barrier from the surging battle. The mages who had stayed to protect them were frozen, useless; the blades for the darkness were occupied, already engaged in their own fights, unable to break free. They couldn’t turn, not even to face the huge swordsman who walked slowly through the fray with an impossible sword held before him, shards of ice and tongues of fire weaving along the blade. No other fighters approached him. He simply walked toward the Twins through the fighting, his steps steady, his face resolute.
And Keiro realized he was the only one who had any hope of getting between the swordsman and the Twins.
Keiro stood frozen to the spot.
Sororra’s face was twisted with concentration and with fury, doubtless reaching with the fingers of her mind to try to shape the swordsman’s will, but his steps did not falter, and the stone of his face did not crack. Fratarro’s hands twitched at his sides, both of them, spastic and frantic, but the battle raging within him looked as much a stalemate as the battle without. The swordsman approached unimpeded.
Still, Keiro did not move. If he could . . . what would he do? He had spent so long keeping his mind a careful blank, so long tamping down any dangerous thoughts. Now, when he was free to do as he wished, he had no idea what he wished.
He watched the swordsman approach, watched Sororra push Fratarro behind her, making herself a shield. It would never occur to her to flee, not from one of her Parents’ imperfect creations. “Stop,” she snarled as the swordsman stood before her, but he didn’t.
The sword went through her stomach with a twist, and she fell as it pulled free. The swordsman was quick: Fratarro had time for only a small, aborted cry before he fell beside her.
Keiro’s legs stuttered forward on their own, hand reaching to do gods-only-knew-what, but it was already too late. It had been too late the moment he had stood rooted to the spot, the moment he had defied them, the moment he had killed for them, the moment he had found them. It had always been too late for Keiro.
“I am sorry,” the swordsman said in a deep rumble. He still held the sword in both hands, but it looked a normal sword now, no fire and no ice along the blade.<
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The Twins’ stolen bodies sprawled at the edge of the dais, empty and bleeding out, the Twins gone, leaving them only the young twins who had filled Keiro with such hope years ago. Avorra and Etarro. Avorra, who was too clever by far, and Etarro, who had a secret penchant for watching the sun rise.
Their eyes were empty, though. Even Etarro’s, who had fought so valiantly to make his presence known, to hold on to a piece of what he had been. But his body was still, blood flowing more sluggish from the mortal wound, and Keiro felt his knees give way as something broke within him.
Chapter Forty-One
The command screamed inside of Anddyr, unlike anything he’d ever felt before; a single word that froze him utterly, rendered him incapable. Stop. It wasn’t audible, it was only in his mind, but it sounded as though it were both screamed in an echoing room and whispered intimately in his ear.
There was nothing, nothing at all, he could do to ignore that command.
His mindless, desperate flailing toward Etarro ceased, and the scream that had been shredding his throat silenced. He twisted his head in sick compulsion, unerringly finding the source of the command: she glowed with the same blue light of humanity, but black ink wound through her like snakes, and the edges of her form were jagged, incomplete.
Even as far away as Anddyr was, he could make out the smile on her face.
The preachers and blades pinning him down faded away to nothingness, the battle around him disappeared, his own body seemed to disintegrate. All that was left was the command, and the woman with her hand like a vise around his soul.
A second command came, just as simple and just as unrelenting: Give.
Anddyr felt all his power, everything he had, begin to flow from his hands toward the woman, a trickle at first and then a terrifying rush. It had been the same in the cellar, when Neira had pushed at the barrier so that it pulled and pulled, drawing his power from him like a thread—
Thoughts raced desperately through his spinning head, frantic and keening, whirling and colliding and dying. His body was gone, his limbs were dead, and all he was capable of was giving her everything that was in him. Dread crawled sickeningly through Anddyr, made all the worse by the knowledge that there was nothing he could do.
Neira glowed with flickering and flashing lights now, blue and black and white and colors that had no names, colors that existed only in the smoke-swirling world of unsight. She was incandescent, coruscant, glowing brighter than gods—lit by a hundred lives, and more and more flowing into her, filling her, overfilling, so the light-spark colors swirled and swelled around her, a tempest, a resplendent and a terrible beauty. Anddyr ached to give her everything he had even as something in him wailed and railed against it, but Anddyr had always been weak.
Dimly—so, so dimly, like little more than a tickle—Anddyr became aware of something pressing into his stomach, right below his ribs, pressing just hard enough to make a hitch in his already labored breathing. And he knew what it was: a stuffed horse that he had been given and had given away and had found again, impossibly. Knowing Sooty was there with him, at least, gave him a shred of comfort—and then a flurry of mind-searing hope.
Anddyr had learned how to fight from the very best. Not with a sword—that was something he’d never learned how to use or wanted to—nor with the magic he’d been given by his god and his blood—with that, he’d only ever been good at destroying things.
No, Etarro had given him Sooty and Etarro had taught him to fight, and the young boy-twin had so much experience in fighting for his own freedom.
The compulsions of Stop and Give pulsed through Anddyr like the beating of a second heart, ceaseless and inescapable—and yet.
Anddyr ground his teeth, and his fingers turned to claws, and tears streamed from the eyes he had taken for a different kind of freedom, and slowly he began to scream, No. He had fought so hard for so long, and he had gotten so very good at fighting.
His body returned to him piece by piece, and the hands pinning him were gone, busy fighting, raging and racing. The woman glowed with more light than she could hold, more life than anything could hold, and still she demanded more. It flowed from inside the mountain and from without, the mages who had filled the room fading or faded, the light gone from their forms; and more spilled into the cavern, seeping through the walls of Atura, pulled somehow from mages beyond the mountain, how—?
A small cry stabbed into Anddyr’s ears, and he twisted to see the dais, and the end of the scene playing out on its stage.
A small body, no longer glowing, sprawled clumsy. Another form, almost identical, still standing and still resplendent. A giant of a man before the much smaller one, and in his hands a sword that devoured the darkness from the world around it, a glow so bright that shadows could not hope to withstand it. And the sword cut through the small form, the shadow-killing light burning through the beacon-glow, and the body tumbled beside the first. Its light was gone, and so was the sword’s, and Anddyr felt a new scream tear from his throat.
His limbs would not move fast enough.
A new light hovered over the fallen forms, bright and furious, twisting into two matching shapes that pulsed with a seeking anger. The Twins, expelled from their stolen hosts, searching for new life, new freedom—
A lance of swirling and varicolored light shot through the cavern and pierced them both, and Anddyr saw their mouths open in fear and impotent rage as Neira, holding unspeakable power, bore them out and away.
Anddyr was part stumbling, part crawling, part dragging himself along the floor. The battle swirled around him, steps and swords missing him somehow, a cosmic choreography that brought him scrape-handed to the edge of the dais. He dragged himself up, his whole body shaking—he felt so weak, she had taken so much from him already—and he grabbed at the small bodies before him. They were identical in death, Etarro and Avorra indistinguishable.
Stop, something in him wailed. Give. It was not a command, but a plea.
Anddyr felt himself pouring from his fingers once more, all his power, everything he had left, a trickle at first and then a relieving rush. “Now fight,” he said, before the shadow-swirling world dissolved around him, and there was only a silent nothing.
Chapter Forty-Two
Rora knew when it all started by the way everything went so still. And she knew when it all went wrong because Aro went too still, like all his blood had turned to ice.
Aro, where he was staked down next to her, strained against the ropes, twisting his head and arching his back, his eyes unblinking, and his face was skull-white. Twisting like he was trying to face the mountain, like something was pulling at him that he couldn’t ignore.
Neira had promised, “When I claim the mages, I can leave Aro untouched. We’ll need him, after all. I’ll ensure he isn’t affected by my command.”
She’d lied. Of course she’d lied.
Rora was screaming, fighting against her ropes, tearing her wrists and ankles to shreds, but the damned ropes held. Joros was swearing, shaking Aro by the shoulders, shouting in his face. He’d taken all of Rora and Aro’s weapons, and now he pulled out one of Rora’s own daggers, the one with the shattered blue stone in the hilt, and he slammed the dagger’s point into the palm of Aro’s hand.
Aro screamed, and Rora’s voice matched it.
“Wake up, damn you!” Joros shouted, his nose nearly touching Aro’s, one hand shaking her brother’s shoulder while the other pressed his thumb harder and harder into the wound he’d made in Aro’s hand. “We need you—”
Through it all, Vatri just kept praying as she knelt in front of her tiny fire.
Rora couldn’t remember who it’d been who had asked Neira what would happen to the witches when she claimed them, but whoever it was had made sure to ask it when there weren’t any witches around to hear. “I’ll need an incredible amount of power to battle the Twins,” she’d said, “even in their weakened state. I’ll need all the power I can hold.” That hadn’t really been an answe
r, which was almost as good as an answer, in a way. Witches were their power, it was in their blood, and if Neira needed as much power as she could get, if she needed to take everything a witch had . . . A witch with nothing left was just dead.
And Rora watched her brother, and she couldn’t see it happening but she knew it was, knew that Neira was pulling out all his power the same way she was with all the other witches. Knew that Neira’d kill him, and it wouldn’t even be for anything except her own stupid revenge.
Neira would kill him, and he’d die thinking Rora still hated him, and that cut deeper than any blade ever could.
Rora could twist her hand, the ropes digging farther up her arm. They were close enough, staked right next to each other, close enough that she could stretch her fingers and wrap them around her brother’s stiff-fingered hand. All she could say was his name, “Aro,” his name that matched hers, their father’s favorite joke, “boy” and “girl” in the Old Tongue.
Aro blinked.
The mountain exploded.
It was like a hundred suns rose at once, all in the same place, a burst of light that made Rora’s eyes burn just for the little look she got before she squeezed her eyes shut. That didn’t block out the screaming, like cats yowling, like people dying, like gods fighting—
Something hit Rora in the chest, and then everything was fire.
She hadn’t ever asked what would happen if everything went right, if Joros and Neira and Vatri’s plans all came together. She hadn’t wanted to know. The rough outline was enough: You’re the bait. You’re the trap. They’ll go looking for new bodies, and—that was enough. She didn’t want to think about what would come after that, because thinking about it would make her run screaming until she found the end of the world.
She figured, if it happened, she’d learn about it when it happened. The best way to learn was by doing.
So Rora wasn’t prepared for the moment when her body wasn’t just her own anymore. She wasn’t prepared for when she had to fight a god.