Oathbound (The Legendborn Cycle #3)

Chapter V

V

I CAN’T HEAR the twins’ sulking trek back to the house, but Erebus can; his head tilts in the familiar listening gesture of demonkind while I wait. After a moment, his attention turns back to me to study my raised chin and stony jaw.

“It should go without saying that there is much that you should not reveal to the twins or to any other demon we may come across in our time together.”

“Why did you let them attack me?”

“To teach you a lesson. You failed.”

“No one has ever trained me to use root,” I protest. “Why did you put me in a position to fail?”

“Because you needed to understand what will happen if you reveal your root by accident. If you do not learn to seal it away.”

I let his sentences roll around in my mind. I can listen for the tricks, just as Elijah did. Finally, I observe: “You don’t call my power ‘root’ in front of them.”

“I do not.” In his face there is a silent invitation to keep going, keep pushing. Unlike the Erebus I know from the Council, this Erebus wants me to keep asking questions.

“What other secrets do you keep from the twins?”

“More than I keep from you.”

“Such as?”

“Where you come from. What title you used to hold. That you are Legendborn. If they, or any demon, were to find out that Arthur Pendragon’s blood runs through your veins, they would kill you without hesitation.”

“Same story everywhere,” I groan. “I’ve been running from demons since before I pulled Excalibur, you know, and I’m not dead yet.”

He counters me in three sentences: “You have often had the benefit of comrades who fight for or with you. You have mostly run from lesser demon isels. You are still human and easy to kill.”

I fire back with three of my own: “Demons of every class are always trying to kill me. I’m here to make sure they don’t succeed. You’re going to teach me how.”

Erebus studies me again, like he is searching for something beneath my skin. Sifting for some detail that I possess and that he cannot ascertain. He blows a slow breath through his nose before he speaks again.

“To demonkind, the earthly plane is an environment rich with food but hostile. The Order, the Legendborn, and its Merlins are our natural-born enemies. You have fought lesser demons who can barely function beyond their dual hungers for aether and human emotions, but you do not truly know the type of demons whose company I keep. Not isel, not uchel, but goruchel. These greatest demons have their own hierarchy, their own rules, their own goals.”

“I know that—”

“The Scion of Arthur is a glorious prize to a goruchel,” he says, speaking over me. “Striking you down could lead to an endless, unchallenged feast for all eternity—and total command over their lesser brethren. This plane would become ours.” He steps forward, eyes gleaming. “To a goruchel, your death is a holy aspiration.”

I shudder and resist the urge to back away. Erebus himself can’t harm me, but the look in his eyes reminds me that even if my joining him has slowed the march to slaughter, I am still on that path. One foot in front of the other, on the way to my death no matter what. And once they kill me, they destroy the Round Table’s might, and once the Legendborn are gone for good, the demons will feed endlessly. Own the human plane as much as they own the demon one.

Erebus’s voice is low with displeasure. “You are not as you once were, when we first met at the Southern Chapter. You are fractured.”

“Well, I was thrown out of my own body and nearly trapped in Arthur’s nightmare,” I say, crossing my arms over my chest. “That changes a person.”

“No, that is not the cause.” He steps closer. “This loss of control, this seepage of your power… This is new.”

Erebus pulls his right glove off with his teeth and, without warning, thrusts his palm toward my sternum, a foot away from my chest.

I choke out a cry as my body reacts on its own, lifting me up on my toes. “What are you—”

“Silence,” he murmurs, eyes lidded. Each time his fingers twitch in the air, my bloodmark twinges in my chest, growing hotter and brighter.

“Let me go!”

“Not yet,” Erebus says, eyes snapping open and flaring bright. With a twist of his wrist, something inside the bloodmark snaps painfully—I gasp. A flood of ancient magic fills my nose: myrrh, oud, saps, and incense. Then, he releases me.

I stumble to the ground, clutching my chest, and watch in horror as the branching bloodmark spreads underneath my T-shirt and out to my biceps and down my arm. When I meet Erebus’s eyes, they are pulsing in time with my mark, bright red and eager. “What did you do?”

“I altered the mark’s spellcraft,” he says, winding his wrist in one hand before he returns it to his glove. “It will still notify me if you are in mortal danger so that I may protect you if I am near. It will still call on your root if anyone attempts to consume it, but if I am to build your strength, then I need to be able to monitor that strength. Now I can.”

He clenches his fist suddenly, and the mark shines, pulsing painfully in my chest, making me gasp once more before it fades again.

“What?” I gasp, rubbing at my sternum. “You can—”

“Sense the level of your root at any time I wish, and at any distance? Call on my mark and hear its answer?” Erebus says with a nod. “Yes.”

My nose wrinkles at the prospect of Erebus checking in on my power levels like a battery he’s charging. I suppose Zoe was right.

He blows out a frustrated breath. “I still do not understand your newfound lack of control. It began at the museum and has worsened with every hour that passes. If you continue like this, you’ll drain yourself to incapacitation within the day. You have already grown weaker.”

That alarms me. I don’t want to be drained here, among enemies.

“This lack of control will get you killed before you’re of any use to me.”

“I won’t—”

“Silence!” Erebus’s voice grows loud, like splitting boulders or thunderous waves. “ Something is generating dire emotions within you in layers so rich that, together with your root, your uncontrolled humanity floods this clearing and my senses. Even now, you radiate a cocktail of suffering so thick that you could draw a passing demon to my home with a stiff wind.”

As I watch, the black of his pupils bleeds away, leaving only glowing red in its place. Erebus—no, he’s the Shadow King now—seems to grow in size, black mist lifting from his shoulders. His fury lashes against my skin, shadows wildly spiraling away from his dark coat, then dissolving before my eyes.

“It is unacceptable.”

I shrink back, reminding myself, again, that he himself can’t feed from me… but it doesn’t make me feel any safer. “I can’t… I can’t stop it—”

His voice is a deadly whisper. “You are the girl who faced the High Council of Regents, whose mind survived a mesmer by the Seneschal Tacitus himself. You are the girl who fought the Pendragon back into his own dimensional prison. What unsettles that girl? That you so easily lose grip of the very same power you fought tooth and nail to harness?”

“I…,” I stammer, not sure what to say. That when I think of certain people, I lose control? Even if I can say that much, I don’t know why it’s happening now, like this—

His next question slices through me. “Will you never truly claim that which you have inherited?”

My silence is met by his low cackle in the darkness. The Shadow King’s laugh ricochets all around me now, bouncing against my ears, breaking against my face, buffeting me from every direction.

“Don’t toy with me,” I warn. “That’s what Arthur did.”

He spreads his hands. “Arthur Pendragon manipulated you, took advantage of your ignorance, and throttled your power for his own gain. Unlike Arthur, I care whether you live or die. I need you to become powerful.”

“You are just another ancient king who wants to use me!”

“And you are a seventeen-year-old girl, a sovereign in her own right, who wishes to use yet another ancient king!” he retorts. The King’s eyes begin to smoke like hot coals. “This is what leaders do, child. Find each other and wring out what only their equal can provide. Remember that you called for me. I was there when the first shadows fell. I was there when humans stumbled their way into consciousness. I was there when the moon and stars were the only lights in the darkness. I know the magic you are so desperate to wield, because I was there to see its first wielder. Human hearts are truly simple things to grasp. And you wear yours on your sleeve, Briana Matthews.” His voice dips. “Just as your mother did.”

At the mention of my mother, at the reminder that he knew who she was when even she didn’t—a Scion of Arthur, a wielder of Bloodcraft—a coiled thread of root escapes from my mouth.

“Is that it?” the King asks. “Is it the thought of your mother that drives your guilt, your shame, and your fear? That loosens your grip on your own power?”

I glower at him. “ Don’t talk about her.”

“Let us experiment.” He steps back. “Forge a construct.”

When I hesitate, he scoffs. “By the age of five, every Merlin can forge a simple construct. Selwyn Kane forged one at three.”

I clench my jaw, unable to fight the surge of root that leaves my body at the thought of Selwyn. Not just the thought of Selwyn but the image of Selwyn as a child. Before Erebus and the Order and his Oath—before his innocence was ground down and out. “I am not a Merlin.”

“No,” Erebus admits. “You could become something much, much more powerful than a Merlin, if you wanted to.”

“I want to.”

“Then consider this your second lesson, since you failed so horribly at the first.”

My fists ball at my sides. “Most teachers would go back over the material before setting their student up for another failing grade.”

“I am not most teachers,” he snaps. “Forge a simple construct.”

Fine.

I call on the aether in the air the way that the Legendborn do, and create a shining blue-silver longsword.

The King tsks. “Your affinity for aether allows you to forge Arthur’s sword and armor, but your root is more flexible than that. Forge something to stop me, not stab me.”

I release the blue-silver sword. Let it go to dust. Call up the root furnace in my chest, open it wide, let the red flames race and lick down my biceps to my forearms and to my hands until the color is reflected in the King’s dark eyes. But I cannot command it into a shape. I grit my teeth and envision a gauntlet. A small sphere. A blade—anything.

He glares at me. “Fight for yourself, Briana.”

My eyes burn. “I am!”

“No, you aren’t.” He paces away, hands resting against his spine. “Why did you call for my aid? What do you wish to become?”

I release my root in frustration. “I told you!”

“Strength, power, and control are what you wish to possess , girl!” the King shouts, coming to a stop. “Not what you wish to become. ”

The King can’t read my mind, but his words pluck at my unspoken ones. Tears of anger streak down my face, because he’s right. Those are things I want, not who I want to be.

What do I wish to become?

Here, in the presence of the demon who took advantage of her bargain with our ancestors, Vera’s voice returns to me: You are the one who decides now how to keep our Line alive, Briana Matthews.

But Vera doesn’t understand that this world has curdled her amazing gift into a curse. After eight generations of fear and soul-tearing grief, of our mothers dying when we needed them most, of losing the knowledge that could have connected us to one another and to Vera herself… the old violence hasn’t died; it has simply found new life. Our bodies break down like clockwork, our mothers die early, our daughters die young, then it begins anew.

Our cycle is death and confusion—and I have not learned enough to break it.

But I will.

My gaze rises to fix on the King’s.

He nods slowly. “Tell me.”

“I will fulfill Vera’s wish. I will honor her sacrifice. But if neither she nor my other ancestors can teach me how, then I must become something they never could.” I gasp twice, then swipe my tongue over my chapped lips. Hoarse words burst from my chest before I can second-guess them. “I must become untouchable.”

The King’s eyes glisten like rubies. “Because…?”

“Because my enemies are everywhere.” I feel my lips pull back, as if I am a demon catching a scent on the wind. As if I am a monster, snarling at the world. “And if they are everywhere, then I will become something they cannot reach.”

The King presses again. “More.”

“If my opponents are relentless,” I say, “then I will become unstoppable.”

“And?”

My words speed up with my breath. “And if they want my power and body and suffering for their own ends, then I will become impervious.”

“To what end?” he asks quietly. “All of this… to what end?”

“So that…” I grimace. “So that my power, and my pain, belong… to me.”

He nods slowly, stepping closer until his gaze turns dizzying. “And what are you willing to do in order to become these things?”

I don’t answer him out loud, but my reply appears in my mind, bright and steady as the sun.

Anything.

I’m willing to do anything.

Anything.

“I see the answer in your eyes,” the King murmurs. “Now I understand what must be done.”

The world turns black, swallowing me whole.