Chapter XXXIX. Domenic
XXXIX
DOMENIC
WINTER
By the time Domenic and Ellery arrived at the Citadel, the scurge had worsened.
Frost hurled through the wind in whole, daggeredged shards, and blackness choked the city like a dense smog.
The figures who sprinted throughout the Citadel’s atrium resembled specters, their shapes blurs, their fluorescent-orange NDC gear rendered sepia within the gloom.
Nature magicians positioned themselves at every entrance.
Enchantment magicians cast extra protection atop armor, extra fortifications across the Citadel’s grounds.
Corporeal magicians readied healing stations, while battlefield medics bundled to follow soldiers into the storm.
Domenic and Ellery bolted past them all, cloaked from sight. They couldn’t afford to slow down, not for morale, not even for aid. The Order’s only true hope of surviving the cataclysm was the Chosen Two obtaining the next prophecy piece and learning how to defeat it.
They ducked inside an empty elevator. But as Ellery reached to press the top button, Domenic immediately slammed the lowest.
“Wouldn’t Hanna be with the Council?” Ellery asked.
“She isn’t,” Domenic said. “I can feel her.”
He fixed his gaze on the closing doors to avoid the suspicion in Ellery’s eyes.
Whatever reason Hanna had to be in the subterranean levels while the rest of the Order prepared for war, it was a legitimate one.
Hanna would help them find who the real traitor was.
Then they’d stop this nightmare. They’d save everyone.
As they descended ever deeper, Domenic glanced at his hands. He was trembling.
He reached for Ellery’s own. They locked their fingers tight.
The doors opened into the damp tunnels of the Citadel’s underground. They ran past the vigil chamber until Domenic slowed at the Vault’s entrance. Even amidst all the magic within it, he could sense Syarthis’s suffocating, feverish heat.
“Hanna!” he shouted. “Hanna!”
Silence.
“Dom,” Ellery said warningly. “Why is she here? What could she possibly be doing?”
Domenic had no answer. He stalked across the aisles, his thudding footsteps disturbing the Vault’s reverent quiet. Then he halted at the final one. In the distance, a small figure slumped upon the floor.
“Hanna!”
Every candle flared as he ran past. But as he neared her, something slowed his pace.
Hanna was not collapsed but rather sitting cross-legged, utterly still.
He cringed as Valmordion’s light flooded over her.
At the celebration this morning, Hanna’s hair had been swept back.
Now it hung stringy around her face. Tracks of dried blood streaked down her cheeks.
And her eyes gleamed with a glossy sheen, rolled back so far they were nothing but white.
As he approached, her irises slid down like slots. Until they froze, locked directly on him.
Hanna rose, swaying, and a sudden pressure crushed against Domenic’s muscles, his bones, his windpipe. He knew he was only imagining it, no different than the red he blinked from his vision. But his body couldn’t be sure.
“Wh-what is it, Hanna?” he stammered. “What are you doing down here?”
Ellery slowed to a stop beside him. She pointed Iskarius.
Domenic seized Ellery’s forearm and wrenched it down. “Don’t hurt her.”
“I’m not trying to,” she hissed. “I’m trying to disarm her. Look at her wand.”
Domenic whipped back toward Hanna. Her grip on Syarthis was so tight that her knuckles had paled to match the aspen wood. And as he peered closer, he realized Hanna wasn’t simply holding Syarthis—her skin had fused to it, the tips of her fingers crusted with bark.
“Hanna,” he said desperately. “Why won’t you say anything? What’s wrong with you?”
Still, Hanna gave no answer, made no expression at all.
Then, with a jerky hand, she raised Syarthis.
This time, when Ellery lifted her wand, Domenic didn’t stop her. Yet when he tried to do the same, he couldn’t. He was paralyzed, aching, petrified.
“That’s not her,” Ellery murmured.
Domenic already knew that, yet he still struggled to piece what was happening together.
He’d never heard of a wand possessing its wielder before.
But even if Hanna had insisted otherwise, she’d been pushing herself to the limit for years.
Still, however much Hanna unnerved people, her perpetual scowl, her crassness, her unkempt appearance, Hanna was unmistakably good.
She’d never hurt anyone on purpose, let alone Alderland, let alone him.
It couldn’t be her. It wasn’t. It wasn’t.
Then, as Syarthis’s gaze bore at him and only him, the full awful truth clicked into place.
“It’s not Hanna who’s the traitor,” Domenic rasped. “It’s Syarthis.”
Ellery hitched her breath. “Could a wand really be capable of that?”
“Syarthis isn’t like the other wands,” he answered, and shame throbbed in his chest when he thought of how terrible Hanna had looked all Winter, how exhausted.
How she seemed to snap in and out of focus.
How often she’d hovered silently in the corner of the room, holding Syarthis, always holding Syarthis.
It had been possessing her on and off for months.
She was his best friend. How couldn’t he have seen it?
A glow gathered at Syarthis’s tip, and immediately, Ellery conjured a shield between them, glimmering with prisms of light.
But before Syarthis cast anything, Hanna’s left hand shot toward its hilt.
Her arms shook as she tried to wrest it down, fighting against her own body.
One of her eyes thrashed, like a prisoner trapped.
Domenic’s exhales stuttered out in spurts. Syarthis’s corporeal magic might’ve been unparalleled, but it still was a Living Wand. And like all the Living Wands in this room, it answered to Summer. To him.
“Tell me what you’ve done,” Domenic commanded. “What treason did you commit?”
Suddenly, Hanna’s free hand slackened, falling subdued to her side. Her other rose higher, until the tip of Syarthis pressed against her throat.
“Don’t…” Domenic croaked. “Don’t hurt her.”
“I don’t think it will,” Ellery said.
“We don’t know that. It could—”
“Look at its eyes. Look at it trembling.”
She was right. The hand gripping Syarthis quivered, and sap trickled like tears from several of its eyes.
“I don’t think it wants to hurt her,” Ellery said.
A sound escaped Hanna, a quiet hiss, “Take … risk?”
At first, Domenic was certain he’d misheard. But of course Syarthis had to be capable of speech. It knew humans, had bonded with dozens of wielders and devoured countless memories from countless minds.
He couldn’t risk it hurting Hanna, but he also couldn’t waste time deliberating. Every second he squandered brought them closer to Alderland’s doom.
Yet before either he or Ellery reacted, another glow shined from Syarthis, searing Hanna’s throat.
Immediately, Domenic raised Valmordion.
Invading Syarthis bore no resemblance to invading Maltherius. Despite the two entities being counterparts, Syarthis had spent a millennium as a wand. It was more human. It knew how to defend itself from another’s mind.
It knew how to fight back.
At once, a terrible pressure pulsed within Domenic’s skull.
Memories he hadn’t dwelled on in years were suddenly pried open: thirteen-year-old Hanna dragging Domenic along for an abominable Saturday at the Aldrish History Museum; Domenic lying that her first train ticket to Gallamere had been paid for by the Order when really it was his parents who did; the week Domenic had lurked alone and unsure in Iseul’s home, after he’d been discharged—and she hadn’t.
Domenic whimpered at the pain of it—his skull pounding, his heart breaking. He wrenched open his eyes, and the memories faded. But so, too, did his tether to Syarthis.
“Dom, are you all right?” Ellery asked.
“I-I…” he sputtered, but he was too ashamed to answer.
He couldn’t do this. He couldn’t save her like she’d once saved him.
“How can I help you?” Ellery urged.
Domenic swallowed. It felt like a betrayal to need her to.
But as he closed his eyes to try again, another memory shuddered through him: the spit on his and Hanna’s hands as they shook them, a solemn vow.
You and me, twelve-year-old Domenic had declared. We’re going to be great together.
“I-I need you to hold back Syarthis’s power,” Domenic gasped. “Please. I’m Summer. I’m connected to Syarthis, just like all the wands here. But I can’t focus enough to subdue it if all I’m thinking about is … is how much this feels like that day.”
“I’ll block the worst of it,” Ellery said. And though Domenic didn’t see her cast her spell, at once, he felt the relief of it. The pain drilling into his temples eased to a subtle pinch.
Domenic pushed against the pressure of Syarthis’s magic with all the force he had.
And, like sediment collapsing, the pressure caved in.
Suddenly, though his eyes were closed, he saw things.
Roots that extended in all directions, thousands and thousands of them—like the entire vastness of the alban network contained in a single wand.
Countless spider-thin hairs sprouted from the roots, twitching, and the longer he stared at any particular one, the more it unraveled.
As he touched a finger to one in his mind, he saw images. He saw memories.
He was in Syarthis’s Archives.
It was so different than the pilfered hoard Domenic had always imagined. It was wilder, more primordial. But of course it resembled a tree, when Syarthis itself was crafted from—
Distantly, he heard a thump. With effort, Domenic opened a single eye to see Hanna lying limp in Ellery’s arms. Hanna’s skin had gone flushed.
Blisters peeled across the hand that held Syarthis, just as the invasion of Valmordion’s power had burned Tej Kumar.
But no sooner did terror seize Domenic than Hanna’s wounds receded.
“Syarthis is healing her,” Ellery said, her relief a mirror to his own.