Chapter XIX. Domenic
XIX
DOMENIC
WINTER
No matter how many times Domenic scrutinized the front page of the Gallamere Gazette, he couldn’t be sure he’d read it right.
THE CHOSEN TWO, its headline declared, above a photograph of him and Ellery side by side, brandishing their wands and beaming like they were in a toothpaste advertisement.
He didn’t know whether to be proud of giving such a grand performance or embarrassed for the public so gleefully swallowing bullshit.
“You do realize you’ve been staring at that for basically two hours, right?” Hanna groused beside him.
Domenic slapped the paper onto the table of their booth. To their left, the morning daylight cut out as their train hurtled through another mountain tunnel. Automatically, the enchanted sconces throughout their private carriage brightened.
“And why shouldn’t I?” he said. “Look at me! I mean, I’d still rather lose the bow tie, but Iseul must’ve told them to get my good side.”
Across from them, Ellery deadpanned, “Huh. I don’t have a bad side.”
A dirty joke singed the tip of Domenic’s tongue, but he didn’t dare utter it with Hanna present.
“Next time, I think they ought to give us capes,” he replied instead.
Hanna rolled her eyes.
“You should be focusing,” Glynn reminded them, hunched over his work at one of the other booths. Aetherium was balanced precariously at the table’s edge; with every rock of the train car, it rolled closer to falling. Glynn didn’t seem to notice. “We’ll arrive in Undermere in less than an hour.”
According to Hanna’s theory, the next prophecy piece required them to access the magical network of alban roots that spread across the whole country and fortify it against the worsening Winter.
The Council had selected the outskirts of Undermere as their test site because its alban tree was the most remote of any in Alderland, far from settlements that risked damage should their experiments go awry.
And there was a real chance they could, considering no one—not them, not Hanna, not Glynn—had any idea how to connect to the network in the first place.
“Have you found anything?” Hanna asked.
“No, not yet,” Glynn answered, sighing and flipping through what looked like a torturous magical theory book.
Hanna rose into the aisle. “I’m going to keep looking for a memory of Rhodes connecting to the network. See if it—”
“Keep looking?” Domenic cut in, alarmed. “I thought you found one yesterday?”
Hanna tensed. “O-oh. I mean, I want to study it again.”
“But is that wise?” Glynn asked. “You shouldn’t spend so long in Syarthis’s Archives. It’s not good for you.”
Hanna scowled at all of them and muttered, “And here I thought it’s the greater good we’re supposed to be worrying about.” Then, without waiting for anyone to argue further, she yanked open the sliding door and stalked into the adjacent carriage.
No one spoke for some time. They were, seemingly, focused dutifully on their upcoming task.
Glynn returned to his research. Ellery stared at a book of her own, gnawing on her lip.
Domenic’s attention, however, drifted back to the front page, to the photograph of him and Ellery looking so much like a set.
Those times we flirted, he thought, it’s not like we were in our right minds.
Maybe he still wasn’t. Because even if he knew saving Alderland was the only thing that mattered, a traitorous part of him still wanted her. Even more than he always had.
His leg jittered. He glanced at his hideous designer watch.
“Does accessing the Archives normally take Hanna this long?” Domenic asked, making Ellery and Glynn look up.
Glynn peeked at his own watch and frowned. “Hm. Perhaps I ought to check on her.” He picked up Aetherium. At first, Domenic assumed he meant to perform an enchantment. It was only once he pointed it grimly toward the exit did Domenic realize it was for his own protection.
Domenic jumped to his feet. “No, I’ll do it. I’ll check on her.”
Before Domenic could change his mind, he barged past Glynn into the neighboring carriage. It was a sleeping car. Private compartments lined the aisle, each door bearing a window of murky reeded glass. Domenic peered into the first compartment, only to find it vacant. As was the next, and the next.
“What the hell, Hanna?” he hissed, flitting down the aisle. “Why would you go so far…”
Finally, in the last compartment, he spotted a small shadow.
He knocked tentatively. “Hanna?”
She didn’t answer.
Domenic wrenched open the door. Hanna slumped across the cot, Syarthis still clutched in her lap—like she’d been sitting and had toppled over. Both her eyes and the wand’s were clenched shut, and though she didn’t appear to be conscious, her expression twinged with pain.
“Hanna.” Domenic lunged for her, then froze, unsure if it was safe to touch her, if he should call for Glynn. Syarthis’s heat filled the compartment, so humid that sweat broke out on Domenic’s brow.
Then Syarthis’s eyes shot open—pupils focused, as they seemingly always were, on him.
Hanna gasped. Her own eyes opened, and she made a revolted face.
“Wh-what is it?” he sputtered. “Are you all right?”
Hanna’s head whipped toward him in surprise. The cot creaked as she wearily pushed herself upright. “I’m fine. I just bit my tongue. It happens sometimes when I … Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re worried. It’s never looked pretty, Dom.”
Domenic flinched and retreated a single step, knocking into the narrow desk. “I’ve always worried about you.”
Somehow, his words only deepened her scowl. She ignored him as she withdrew a tube of eyedrops from her trouser pocket, then leaned her head back as she applied them, as if she’d done so a thousand times before. Domenic didn’t even know she owned eyedrops.
“Are you mad at me about something?” he blurted. “Whatever it is, just tell me, and I’ll fix it. Because I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’ve spent the past few days trying not to lose my mind, and I could really use my best friend actually having my back.”
“Really? You’d accuse me of not having your back?
” Hanna glared at him through watery eyes.
One of her sclera had burst when she’d been unconscious, making a splotch of red join with her brown iris.
“I’ve seen every past cataclysm, you know.
All of them, even if Syarthis’s memories are cloudier the older they are, even if it’s awful, digging so deep.
But that’s what I’ve done, ever since Valmordion woke.
Because that’s the duty of Syarthis’s wielder.
I’m the historian. I’m the one who has to remember.
But now that you’ve bonded with Valmordion, shit, do you know how many times I’ve watched the Thirty Years’ Chill descend?
Over and over and over again. And I know you, Dom.
I know the way you get your hopes up. But just because you apparently pulled it together so far doesn’t mean this will all be easy.
You can’t slack off. You can’t get distracted. ”
Domenic’s frustration warred with his shame. But as he opened his mouth to refute her, his focus snagged instead on the purple caverns below her eyes. Her choice of the farthest compartment. Her own admission: Over and over and over again.
Warily, he studied Syarthis. Its tongue curled back, stroking Hanna’s thumb. Yet she didn’t shift away, either because she didn’t notice or she didn’t mind.
“When’s the last time you slept, Hanna?”
She seethed and smoothed down her hair. “Just … get out. Please.”
Domenic squeezed the doorknob. Words roiled deep within his chest, ugly and awful and coated in mire. He couldn’t bring himself to speak a single one.
Then, as he opened the door, Hanna murmured, “It’s not as bad as it looks.” She sounded almost apologetic, and Domenic hovered on the threshold, waiting for her to take back what she’d said, to at least acknowledge he wasn’t the same person she’d dragged into the Vault. But she added nothing else.
He wondered what it would take for her to see that he’d changed.
He wondered if it was his own fault if she never did.
After they arrived at the station, it took another three hours by off-road vehicle to reach the most isolated alban tree in Alderland.
It grew within the country’s largest national forest, cradled between two mountain ranges and dappled with frozen lakes and marsh.
Though Winter had stripped away its leaves and smothered the underbrush beneath a hard layer of snow, this wood bore no resemblance to the Barren’s graveyard.
Ice glazed every branch, as if the entire world had been dipped in glass.
The conifers preened in lush green glory.
A squirrel darted up the slope of a trunk.
While Glynn and Hanna debated over a map, Domenic and Ellery wandered off the gravel and into the tree line. Now that they’d arrived, his nerves sizzled like static.
“If this root network really does span the entire country,” he said, “whatever we’re about to try is big. Bigger than any ghast or scurge.”
“Are you scared we’ll mess up?”
“Mess up. Blow ourselves up. Blow the whole damn country up.”
Ellery’s laugh cracked, brittle. “Oh, is that all?”
Domenic pitched his voice at Sharpe’s throaty baritone. “Five million people in Alderland. And you two exploded them. You were too busy frolicking or being happy or whatever it is kids do these days, and you just obliterated them in a single instant.”
Ellery snorted. Then she propped her hands on her hips and, in a bizarre accent, she proclaimed, “‘Breaking news: Everyone dies, horribly.’”
Domenic howled with laughter, wheezing so hard he had to brace himself against a nearby oak.
“What?” she demanded. “What’s so funny?”
“That voice! What were you trying to be, a wind-up toy?”
“I was Floyd Wilder!”
“Wow. Lucky you’re a Chosen One because I’m not sure you’d make it on prime-time radio.”
She shoved him playfully. “You’re the worst.”