Chapter 26
26
Lyra
Darkness bled into itself, drawing me deeper than before, consuming me whole. The chamber transformed into inky shadows that slithered from corners like spreading rot. Gentle flakes of wispy snow kissed my cheeks now, and the only light came from the golden bones in every direction.
Beneath my hands the soul bone burned like it was wrapped in flames. Slender threads tugged it deeper against the Stav’s rib cage. My fingers moved without thought, like Kael promised. The more I accepted the power in my blood, the more instinctual it became.
Each movement became a trance.
With one bone placed, I gathered the next, the pale heat of cold alight in my palms, then drifted to the form of the next Stav Guard.
Those present for the melding drifted like they did outside the mirrored land. Bones shifted when folk leaned in to whisper, to gossip. Some people lifted horns and goblets to parted jaws for more wine, and others returned to seats near the front.
Again and again, I stitched the bone to the Stav, forgetting the unease of this place, of the magic here.
Until the cold came—sharp and jagged. I quickened my fingers, securing the bone against the third Stav’s upper thigh.
I’d only pulled my hand away when the darkness coiled around my shoulders. I closed my eyes. There was the urge to flee, to fall out of my own power, but I was here to find more. King Damir required it of me.
The king carried a demeanor of gentility, but there was a cruelness behind his eyes. A man not above threats and brutality to get what he desired.
I could face the haunt of the shadows. This was fashioned through my power, and I did not need to fear it.
I released the breath in my lungs and spun around.
Sunken copper eyes filled the dark cowl over the shadow’s head. Ribbons of darkness radiated from the places where shoulders and arms ought to be. In the dim light, the rope keeping the phantom tethered had frayed, like something started to unravel his chains.
Fear. He was nothing but a nightmare built from the uses of my craft. There were always consequences from craft, after all.
“To harm the living,” I whispered, stepping back from the phantom and focusing on the glow of the Stav Guard in front of me. I had to meld. I had to break free of this place. “Craft mirrors the pain.”
A low rumble, some sort of dark laughter, came from the haunt at my back. No doubt, he mocked me for my fear.
Still, I repeated the ramifications of each craft, as though it might prove to my fearful mind the creature standing watch at my back was not real. Until I reached the consequences of melding. “To bind dead and living…” I lifted my hands off the fourth guard in line, a man who’d chosen to be melded between the blades of his shoulders. “Craft corrupts the heart.”
“Am I your heart, Melder?”
I peered over my shoulder, summoning whatever thread of courage still burned in my veins. “Leave me be.”
Refuse to fear, and he would leave.
I heard the glide of steel. A dark misty blade lifted, ready to strike at me again. Another clack of teeth, another growl, and the blade lowered to strike.
This time I didn’t bend. I didn’t try to run. I held up a hand and shouted, “Stop!”
A rush of air rippled from my palm. The shadow blade halted against the gust. Some of the mist peeled back to reveal a true steel.
I kept my hand out, for protection or to feel powerful when I feared I was helpless.
“Stop,” I said again. “I do not fear you.”
For a moment the burning eyes tilted, as though the billows of darkness truly had a head. As though it was lost in a touch of stun itself.
Then the low, cruel laughter followed. “Liar.”
Its voice was low and raspy, like it was a strain to speak. It was a voice I felt thread through my veins, stitching deep inside me, as though it were part of me.
“What do you want?” I took a step closer. More satin-black skeins of mist pulled away from the phantom, shaping a defined figure with a hood and thick, sturdy boots over true feet. “Tell me and be gone, so I might finish this.”
“I warned you, Melder. Take the souls, and I take the same to replace them.”
“Yes, you keep saying it, but I’ve yet to understand what you mean.” I squared my shoulders. This specter had to be a manifestation of my own hesitations toward soul bones.
Speckled throughout the darkness were faint, flickering gleams of gold. Bones of the fallen were there in the distant hills, and the strength of the power they once had beckoned to me, a moth to the flame.
A ghostly shape of the palace surrounded me, but it was as though I could see it from all sides, nearly omniscient. With the slightest lean to one side, all at once, lawns, courtyards, and palace towers flowed into view.
Near the queen’s wing was a mist of shadows, darker than the rest.
“I do not want to do this, but I must. It keeps those I love alive and safe. It protects our people.”
The phantom let out a rough laugh like broken glass. “The lies you tell your heart. Melders craft monsters.”
I frowned. “I am no monster. I never wanted to be here, but if it keeps my family alive, I will meld every damn bone the king places at my feet.”
“Hmm.” The shadowed spectral took a step closer. More like a man now. Legs wrapped in darkness, arms, the cowl over his face. “Your soul smells familiar.” With a long draw of breath through a nose I could not see beneath the cowl, the phantom breathed me in. His hellish eyes snapped open. “Why do the gods let you come here to me?”
I followed his steps, twisting the more he prowled. “I don’t know. I’ve been ordered to find more soul bones. Perhaps they are allowing me to search. You can’t argue with the gods, can you?”
The phantom barked a rough, throaty laugh. “The gods left this land to tear itself apart long ago. Look how selfish thrones have corrupted the power of those gods they pretend to worship.” He stopped his prowl. “But never has a melder faced me here. Until you. Why is that, I wonder?”
I faced away from the palace chamber. Instead of ferns and trees in clay pots, thick darkness flowed over crumbling walls of the outer gates, and opened to the eerie shapes of the distant knolls tucked behind the line of trees on the edge of Stonegate.
This place held no barriers. If I desired to look elsewhere, the mirror would adjust, it would shift; the cold would pull back shadows until I found where I wanted to be.
Bones were in the knolls facing Myrda. As Damir said, there was a sense of where old burial mounds might be unearthed.
“My craft pulls me toward bones of the fallen. We must forage them.”
The phantom said nothing, merely followed me with his gaze.
Beneath the shadow of the hood I could make out a sharp jawline, skin like gray stone. Lips, colorless and pale, were drawn tight. A man of sorts, a demon, perhaps. He stepped in front of me again. Cold rose from him, adding a puff of white in front of my lips with every breath.
“Who are you?” The question came out in a whisper, rough and edged in fear.
“I am he,” his rasp of a voice frosted against my cheek. “And we are we.”
“Yes, you said that before. It explains nothing.” I stepped around him. He allowed it, studying my movements with a harrowing curiosity. Like he might still be considering using his blade to cut me down, but was a bit more intrigued than bloodthirsty.
I flexed and curled my fingers once, twice, and kept my spine rod straight. If he was an illusion of my fears, of my own mind, why was he not fading?
If anything, he’d damn well gotten more solid.
The shadow’s silky presence followed me. Sometimes a cold strand of mist would curl over my wrists and shoulders, as though he were tasting me with his darkness.
“Screams.” The phantom’s eyes closed into blackness for a breath, then sparked open, almost with a strange touch of humanity when he pulled back. “I remember your screams.” With a quick motion, he drew me against him. I struck a cold, broad chest, and a shriek split from my throat. “How are you doing this?”
“Doing what?” I pushed back. “Leave me be.”
With a rough snarl the shadow recoiled, fastening us together. Left in the space between us was a thin thread of sunlight gold. I screamed and tried to step back. The thread only stretched, and the phantom groaned as if unsettled.
His hellish eyes locked on me. “What are you? What have you done?”
“Nothing! You touched me, now…break this away.” Gods, what if I was trapped here, chained to this creature. I stepped back. The thread between us only stretched longer. “I-I-I don’t know what this is.”
He pulled me closer, his shadowed nose cold and dry along my cheek. “What cruel games the Norns play.” His nearness sent a tremble dancing up my arms, and the whisper of his rasp bit like a frosted wind. “You will not claim me with whatever dark casts you’ve spun.”
“What?” My eyes darted between his. “I don’t want to claim you. Craft is pulling me toward you. Let me go and it will break.”
“Yes. This thread is doomed to be severed. It must be or it was all for naught.”
He made little sense, but there was an odd touch of melancholy in his hissing tone.
“Continue taking the bones, Melder, and the Thief King will corrupt everything,” he snapped. “There will be no voice but his, and you will force my hand to end you.”
I struggled against him. “Soul bones add strength to an army, they don’t corrupt everything.”
A sort of low rumble rose from his chest. “With you, the Thief King will find the one he wants. Let the ancient one rest.”
“Ancient one?”
In the distance something snapped, like the crack of a heavy tree bough. The shadow tilted his head and sniffed. He took an abrupt step back. “Let him rest. Tell the Thief King to do the same. I will see you again, Melder. It would seem fate demands it.”
He flicked the weak thread sewn between us.
“Let who rest?” Another crack echoed in the distance. The shadow drew his blade, those thin lips curling into a snarl. I held out an arm. “Wait. What or who are you?”
The phantom paused. When he turned to look back at me over his shoulder, shadows billowed like silk in the wind around his shoulders.
“When your enemies ravage, what name do you whisper?” A low, throaty chuckle followed. “You have seen the signs of me in the darkness of the wood.” Again, the phantom sniffed the air, then flashed sharp, jagged teeth when he grinned. “Remember, a soul for a soul.”
Signs in the wood? An enemy who ravages with a whispered name?
All at once, my blood went cold. Gods, no. It…it wasn’t possible.
I trembled and lifted my gaze back to his vicious eyes. “Skul Drek.”
He gnashed his teeth.
No, Skul Drek couldn’t be here. He was a creature, an assassin, not a shadow of a being. I was so lost in the horror, the confusion, I did not notice he rolled the sword in his grip.
“Four were stolen this night, Melder. So, four I will take.” Skul Drek paused, his mouth tightening. “Ready your blades.”
“Whatever you plan to do, please don’t. We have little choice and—”
My words choked off when Skul Drek drifted deeper into the smoky, thin mists. “Ah, but this is what we are made to do, Melder. Battle until we destroy each other.” His fingers twisted around the thread of craft drawing me into him. “But this is cruel, and this time it will hurt to kill a melder.”
Darkness devoured his horrid eyes, and in the next moment, I was flung backward into the salt of the mists.
My head was lost in a haze and it took a moment to realize I was moving, but not walking on my own. I was pressed against something hard, warm, something that breathed of smoke and oakmoss. I tilted my chin.
The dark stubble on Roark’s jaw scraped against my brow. The Sentry had me in his damn arms.
My cheek was pressed to the steady cadence of his heart. I bit down against the urge to nuzzle against his throat. It was wholly unfair for a man so stoic and harsh to smell like a spring morning after rain.
If Roark knew I was awake he made no show of it and shouldered into my bedchamber.
His long strides took us across the sitting room, a gentle crackle from the inglenook the only sign of life in the room, then into the bedchamber. With care, the Sentry placed me on the edge of the bed.
I pressed the heel of my hand to my head, vaguely aware Roark was pulling back the furs and quilts over my bed. “What happened?”
He paused and raised a hand. Parchment or hand speak?
I gestured at his palms. “I told you, I’m a quick study.” With his words, at least.
The Sentry stepped back, giving me room to settle against the goose down pillow before he spoke again. You fell from the melder’s trance, and didn’t wake until now. Four soul bones was too many .
The way he formed his words was sharp, almost like he was spitting them through his hands. A true show of repulsion for the soul bones—perhaps for me—but written in the groove between his brows was something akin to concern.
Roark hovered over me. How do you feel?
I forced a grin, a weak attempt to mask the pain of exertion, the way my fingertips were frigid in numbness, the bone-deep ache from using such a force of power. The fear of the phantom’s name I could not stop repeating in my head.
“I feel as though I have raced the length of every corridor no less than a dozen times, but I am well enough.”
His vibrant eyes were narrow, but he did not back away as he gestured slowly, Liar .
I ought to send him back to the ceremony, keep our distance and disregard, but a sob broke free when I shifted too swiftly on the mattress.
Ashwood stepped closer, lowering to one knee. Overcome with the pain of the meld, the fear of the mirror, I hid my face against his chest, tears soaking his tunic.
When his hand cupped the back of my head, letting me break, I’d never felt safer.