Chapter 45
I fold forward over Raeve’s too-limp body before we plunge, spearing through a clot of cloud. We shred free with a flick of Rygun’s wings, the jungle-encrusted mountains rolling by beneath us much slower than I’d like them to.
“ Hast atan , gaft aka .”
Faster, my friend.
Rygun’s raging adrenaline churns in my chest, making me feel like I’m burning from the inside out.
“ Hast atan , Rygun !”
He roars— blowing a plume of ruddy flames through a web of low-hanging clouds, dissolving them.
The mountain range comes to a lofty head, and he chases the updraft with a pump of his wings, slingshotting over the rounded peak crowned with the domed lookout housing several Sabersythes and a Moltenmaw. Their riders blow horns in sharp bursts to hail our arrival, and I finally sight the Loff stretched far as my eyes can see.
I consume the vast, unpredictable body of water like the welcomed relief it is, Rygun roaring to the constellation of spiked Sabersythe moons peppered above the glistening turquoise depths. To the Moltenmaw moons, too—though only a few.
Home.
Relief loosens some of the weight stacked inside my chest.
“Almost there,” I murmur close to Raeve’s hooded head as Rygun cuts so close to the lookout I’m certain his tail skims the roof. He tucks his wings and plummets down the cliff’s sheer face toward The Burn’s sheltered capital packed around the sloping shore. Like Bulder took a blade to the bulbous summit and sliced a cove wide enough to cradle the second-largest city in the world.
Sunshine batters the auburn dwellings rounded like the mountains they spawned from, folk yelling from the veined walkways—waving. Younglings jump up and down, arms stretched as they hoot and roar and pretend to soar across the cobblestones.
Rygun aims for the Imperial Stronghold that oversees it all, protruding from the mountain like a growth pocked with stained glass windows and open archways, clothed in vines heavy with the black ukkah blooms Mah loved so much.
Pah used to have them hacked back, but not me. They have my permission to swallow the city.
The entire kingdom .
Rygun lowers us toward a flat landing patch, the balmy air rich with the smell of salt and braised meat. I brace around Raeve as Rygun drops his weight upon the ground, packing so much heft a cleft forms in the stone I’ll have to patch up later.
I throw my leg over the saddle, my heart dropping when I see Veya jog through a domed doorway, her long brown hair tossed about by the wind. She’s garbed in her ever-present riding leathers I suspect she fucking sleeps in, wearing a broad smile that disappears the moment her stare cuts across the blood I’m wearing … the female tucked against my chest …
“Shit,” I murmur, working my way down the ropes.
I love her welcomes. Treasure them. But for the first time in my life, I would’ve happily gone without it just so I can get inside the door without—
“Who’s that?”
My salvation. And the very reason you’re probably going to gut me with your pocket blade before I even make it into the Stronghold.
I leap down the final few rungs and land upon the stone, scouring Rygun’s lathered hide. “ Glatheiun de , Rygun . Hakar, glagh, delai .”
Thank you, Rygun. Bathe, replenish, rest.
He releases an ear-splitting screech and bounds into the sky, slamming us with a gust of wind that whips at Raeve’s thick black braid hanging free from the cloak I draped her in to protect her from the sun.
“Kaan, who’s in your Creators-damn arms ?”
I turn, storming toward the doorway. “I love you, Veya, but I can’t do this here. I need Agni.”
Now.
I’m almost through when Veya screams at me from behind—her voice so shrill I picture a blade whirring toward me. “Kaan Llúk Vaegor. Tell me who that is, or I will fill your pallet with hurky beetles every slumber for the rest of your long, miserable existence, so fucking help me!”
I blow out a sigh and turn.
Cutting me another sharp look, she steps close, gaze dropping. She tugs back the hood, eases Raeve’s blood-soaked hair aside—
And gasps.
I look down, my heart dropping at the sight of Raeve’s face—her skin so pale it’s almost translucent.
My chest stirs full of flames.
Her features are too lax, thick lashes fanned across bruised cheeks, her plump lips barely parted.
Not pursed with rage.
Not peeling back with a lashing sneer.
Not battling a smile, as it did when I poked my tongue at her.
Veya’s trembling fingers dance around Raeve’s face, like she wants to touch her. Like she’s afraid she’ll disappear if she does.
A feeling I know too well.
I look to where a patch of dressing covers the deep gash in the side of her head. A gash that follows the same trail as the scar I saw via dragonflame.
More blood has seeped through the dressing since I checked last …
Fuck.
Perhaps finally noticing that some of the blood on Raeve’s body has been painted on, Veya cuts me a glance, then peels the cloak farther back, revealing Raeve’s red silk attire. Revealing my málmr draped around her neck, the carving rested upon her blood-slicked chest.
Veya stumbles back a step, her wide, tear-puddled eyes condemning me. “ How —”
“She’s wounded,” I rumble, tucking the cloak back into place to protect her modesty for my impending charge through the halls. “I stopped by a mender’s hut on the way, but they only had the expertise to stabilize her for the journey here.”
Veya swallows, nods once, then dashes a tear off her cheek, not meeting my gaze as she rasps, “Come, I just passed Agni on her way to the feasting hall.”
I charge through lofty tunnels lit with flaming sconces, Veya keeping pace. We storm past mercenaries who flatten themselves against the walls—right fists thumping against their chests.
“ Hagh, aten dah ,” many of them yell as we pass, packing the air with the clamor of welcome and respect.
We barrel down another lengthy tunnel, the Stronghold almost the size of the city itself—a city within itself—tunneling into the mountain range, spilling out in cleverly hidden clefts farther down the mountain range. Enough space to house the entire cavalry, their families, and the dragons of those who have charmed one.
There was a time when the entire place was maintained for the imperial family alone, but I filled it with enough noise to drown out the plague of silence after I tore Pah’s head from his shoulders and took the city haunted by the ghost of her . Blood rained, the Loff blushed, and Rygun feasted that dae.
I thought it would make me feel better.
It didn’t.
We round a corner, storming into the rowdy clatter and chatter of the feasting hall as Pyrok exits the wide-open doorway with a mug of Molten Mead in his big fist. His blaze of rebellious locks is a fucking mess as usual, hanging around his scar-riddled shoulders, black piercings through his nipples, lip, septum, and lobe.
He looks me up and down, whistles low, and spins, charging back into the hall. “Meal time’s over! Grab your plates and get the fuck out. Yes, you too. No, not you—you stay right where you are, Agni dearest. Your miraculous skills are required.”
Nice of him to be helpful for a change. Guess we look worse than I thought.
I barge through the doorway in time to see him reach over the long stone table, using his arm as a sweep to shove everything down the far end—copper plates, cutlery, and chalices clattering to the ground, splashing mead and meat and flaps of spiced dahpa bread all over the stone.
Folk scatter, exiting the vast hall in a silent riot I barely notice, heading for the half-empty table lit by a single jagged blade of sun slicing through the cleft in the roof. I lay Raeve’s listless body on it, directly before a wide-eyed Agni—her white Runi cloak such a contrast to her dark skin, more than twenty gold, silver, or diamond buttons lining the middle seam.
A boast of her vast accolades. Even more than her sister, Bhea.
Agni looks between the still-weeping gashes on my chest and the bloody dressing on Raeve’s brow.
“Her first. Please.”
She nods, tucking a lock of brown hair behind her ear before she peels the cloak away and examines Raeve’s battered body, clicking her tongue.
I look at Pyrok. “Can you find Roan? The extra pair of hands could help.”
“Can’t,” he says, twirling the piercing through his bottom lip. “He’s not here.”
“Where—”
“Bothaim. Trying to get a look at that book again. He’s certain there are more pages that haven’t been transcribed and released to the public.”
I sigh.
Pyrok shrugs. “You ask me, the place has been awfully peaceful without my nagging brother around. And you.”
I glare at him as he chugs his mead.
Agni lifts the dressing to inspect Raeve’s gnarly wound, shaking her head. “The bone is fissured,” she murmurs, poking at the gape of skin in a way that makes me want to vomit. “I’ll have to melt her skull smooth again before I thread her flesh. She’s very lucky this didn’t kill her.”
I would’ve split the world if it did.
Then split my fucking self.
She uses the dressing to blot at the wound. “Someone will need to get me a cloth and a pail of water, and fetch my kit. Pyrok, you look like you need a job. Is this all her blood?”
Surprisingly, Pyrok jogs from the room like something’s nipping at his heels, though not before casting an assessing stare between me and Veya—the latter standing over the other side of the table, gaze narrowed on me like an arrow notched and aimed.
“No,” I say, holding Veya’s stare. “A lot of it is colk blood, my blood, and the blood of another male.”
“You fucking bastard,” Veya growls, then launches across the table at me—arm swinging. I let her get three good hits to my jaw, gut, and the fucking wounds on my chest before I snatch her wrists and shove her toward Grihm, who’d silently eased off the back wall the moment she started speaking.
With a big pale hand wrapped around her wrists, he bands his other arm across her chest, looking at me through a flop of snow-toned hair that mostly hides his icy eyes, the tic in his square jaw pulsing. The only sign the male ever gives that he’s on edge.
Veya snarls, looking up at me with the ferocity of an uncharmed adolescent Sabersythe—eyes blazing, upper lip peeled back from bared canines. Failing to jerk out of Grihm’s hold. “ How could you take her to that place ?”
“The gorge took her to that place,” I growl, wiping a wad of blood off my lip. “I got there just in time.”
“She’s dressed in the garb of a Tookah Trial, Kaan. A Tookah Trial .”
“Well aware, Veya.”
“Who was the male?”
“Hock.”
Shadows cloud her eyes, and she stiffens. “Good,” she fires, no longer wrestling Grihm—not that he lets her go.
Not that she asks him to.
She lifts her chin. “How did she kill him?”
Rage crackles through my veins like crumbling embers as I fail to shake the image of Raeve sprawled on the sand, covered in blood, straddled by a male who had every intention of claiming her as his own. As I fail to shake the image of her laughing, like she was mocking her impending death.
You shouldn’t spend such lovely words on me, Sire.
Fuck.
I crunch my hands into fists. “She didn’t.”
Veya’s eyes narrow on the málmr around Raeve’s neck, then widen. “Creators …”
I grunt, another pulse of stone-crushing energy shooting through my veins.
My muscles.
I intercept Pyrok as he re-enters the room. Taking the pail, I use the damp cloth to clean around Raeve’s wound, then wipe the blood off her face while Pyrok helps Agni spread her tinctures across the table. When he looks up again, he stills, the jar that was in his hand dropping to the ground.
Shattering.
“Who in the Creators-damn fuck is that, and why does she look like Elluin Neván? She’s dead,” he says, looking from me to Veya to Grihm, his skin turning just as pale as the latter. “Am I the only one that thinks I’m going mad right now?”
No.
Agni looks between us like we’re all mad, dabbing some purple liquid on a piece of cloth and patting it over Raeve’s mouth.
“She doesn’t know herself as Elluin,” I mutter, slopping my cloth back in the pail and dragging both hands through my hair, pulling it back off my face. “To her, she’s Raeve, and she has no recollection of anything prior to the past twenty-three phases.”
My words echo through the hall, taunting me.
“Well … fuck,” Pyrok murmurs. “You sure they’re one and the same? That you didn’t just bring some poor stray home because she looks like Elluin?”
“You think I’d do that?” I growl.
He shrugs. “Seen some crazy shit over the past eon. Not gonna lie.”
I clear my throat.
Granted.
“It’s her. Any doubt I might’ve had was squashed the moment she told the High Chancellor of The Fade he has a microcock—and at her own murder hearing.”
There’s a stretch of silence before Pyrok chuckles, snatching some random chalice off the table. “I’ll toast to that.” He drains the vessel, slamming it back on the table. “Hate that dusty old piece of shit.”
“If she has no recollection,” Veya says with slow, steady precision, “how do you explain the fact that she calls herself by her middle name ?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know, Veya.”
“Then how is she here? Alive?”
“I don’t know that either.”
A line forms between her brows—the stain of frustration I feel in my marrow. “Well, what are her first memories of this life?”
Another shake of my head.
Veya finally loosens from Grihm’s grip, the latter crossing his arms over his broad chest, gaze firmly cast on my sister stalking toward me with war waging in her bloodshot eyes. “Do you know anything ?”
Fuck all.
“The only time I tried to pry, she compared my cock to the size of my brain,” I bite out. “ Unfavorably .”
Some of the anger drains from Veya’s eyes, the corner of her mouth twitching as Pyrok chuckles. I slice him a glare, and he drowns the sound in another guzzle of someone else’s mead.
He won’t be laughing when she cuts those sharp teeth on him.
Agni hands Pyrok the purple-blotched cloth. “Wave this in front of her nose every few moments. I don’t want her rousing mid-etching, and your hands look like they need something better to do than drink everyone else’s mead.”
“Agni, you know perfectly well how good I am at multitasking,” Pyrok says, flashing her a grin.
Agni’s cheeks flush, and she shakes her head, muttering beneath her breath.
“Where did you find her?” Veya asks, seemingly immune to the shit coming out of Pyrok’s mouth.
“I stumbled upon her at the Hungry Hollow, but her face was half-hidden. I thought I was going mad.”
Still do.
“I later found her rotting in a cell.” I scrub my beard as Agni paints a bonding agent over the snowy flesh I’ve kissed more times than I can count. “A Truthtune confirmed she had no prior recollection of me before our chance encounter. None.”
“So she doesn’t know about—”
“No,” I say, cutting Veya off.
She opens her mouth, closes it, shaking her head. “And you’re certain you watched Slátra—”
“On her life,” I growl, my words bouncing off the walls like one of Rygun’s rumbling exhales.
Saw it. Lived with the bruising memory for the past one hundred twenty-three phases—while sleeping and awake.
I’ll never outlive the vision nor the jagged cleft of pain that broke through my chest at the sight. Even with her here, on this table, breathing …
I’ll wake up from this utopia eventually. I’m sure of it. I’ll jerk up off my pallet and realize it was all one vicious, beautiful dream.
Veya moves around the table and tucks Raeve’s hair back from her pointed ear—the one that’s clipped into. “She bears the southern mark of a null.” She frowns, inspecting both lobes. “No beads. Not even a hole for them to hang off. Do the Creators still speak with her?”
“Clode and Bulder,” I say, crossing my arms over my ravaged chest. “Though I’m not sure about the other two.”
Straightening, she mimics my stance—twice as fierce but half the size. “Her veins flow with Neván blood , Kaan. And she wears no song-silencing Aether Stone. If Tyroth finds out she’s here, he’ll be blowing flames upon our doorstep before we’ve had a chance to properly prepare. He’d be stupid not to, and we both know he’s far from stupid.”
“I’m well aware of the risks.”
She cocks her head to the side. “Well … what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. But if you want to talk about war strategy, now is not the time.”
I’m tired.
Angry.
Bleeding.
Hungry.
I have a million things to attend to and only one I’m interested in.
My gaze flicks to Raeve, Agni beside her mixing tinctures, preparing for the procedure—
“Are you afraid she’ll see him and … remember him?” Veya asks, her narrowed stare like iron arrows shot straight through my chest. “Leave you again? That the note was true ?”
I don’t let her see how much the words sting. How I feel them punch through one side, shred muscle, sinew, and bone, then burst out the other.
Yes.
Yes.
Fucking yes .
But I lost the right to be greedy with her.
I watch Agni work, Pyrok juggling between his mender-aid duties and guzzling pilfered mead. “She’s a dream come true, but she’s not just my dream,” I say, packing the space full of truth-laden stones. “Not anymore.”
Even the air seems to still, and an eerie quiet blankets the room, gnawing at me from all angles.
I look at my bloody hands, stretch them out, inspect both sides before I crunch them into balls. “She’s so much more than a power play. So much more than the love of my existence. There’s someone out there who needs her more than any of us do, and it’s not our fucking brother,” I growl, looking straight into Veya’s glazed eyes.
She blinks, and a tear slides down her cheek.
“I will slowly, gently ease her into her truth—painful as it is. Then she can choose her own path. Make her own choices.”
Come what may.
Veya drops her stare to the floor as another tear drips down her cheek.
I look away.
She never cries, so when she does, it feels like the world is cracking. Like I’ve failed to protect her.
Again.
My hands loosen, fist again, trembling with a crushing amount of untethered energy.
Agni uses a metal tool to cleave Raeve’s wound wider, giving her direct access to the fissure in her skull so she can first mend the bone—
I look away from that, too—wanting to crush the image from my memory. But its claws are already in.
Digging deep.
“I’ll be back,” I mutter, then jerk my chin at Grihm and make for the door, expecting Veya’s final hit well before it lands.
“Nobody can suffer what she’s been through and not be pitted with a well of dragonflame—whether she remembers her past or not. Tread carefully, Kaan, or she’ll incinerate herself and turn to ash in your fucking hands.”
I growl, charging down the hall, chased by the heavy thump of Grihm’s boots.
I know.