Chapter 20
Lyra
“I don’t even know how to search. This is not helping.”
Bright copper eyes locked with mine in the mists. All around, rot and decay peeled from trees and stone pillars. A frosted breeze kept raising my skin. I nuzzled deeper into Skul Drek, the burn from the endless stitches of our bond warming me from the soul out.
Instead of threats and snarls, I was enrobed in his darkness.
Dravenmoor was far more expansive than the tighter forests and peaks of Jorvandal. To walk in the rotted mirror realm, there were fewer places to hide bones of the fallen but more empty space to wander without much to show for it.
In nearly a week of foraging in the mirror, I’d found burial mounds for fara wolves whose souls were gamey on my tongue, like my craft could reach out and taste them without melding. Another find belonged to a few tiny birds that must’ve fallen from their nest not so many months before.
Asmund’s bones were added to a small burial ground for Dark Watchers. His execution was swift and public. Elisabet’s word traveled to the whole of the clan that the same would be proffered to anyone who brought harm to me, for it would now be treason against the royal household.
I found Draven burial mounds but did not search too far before Skul Drek practically growled at me and urged me to let them rest.
Today, there was even less. Misty, blackened riverbanks and crumbling courtyard gates, but no new bones. No matter how often I closed my eyes and imagined a new land, somewhere in the distance, like back near the Black Fjords or the Red Ravines.
Landscapes were always shifting in the mirror, almost as though I could stand omniscient, but I could not find a single thread with any difference from the fara bones or fallen Dravens.
“If I could see over the Night Ledges…” I shook my head and knelt to unstitch the melding I’d done to squirrel and pheasant bones.
To fall into the mirror with Skul Drek shouldn’t require melding, according to Gunter. The soul bond between me, Roark, and his shadowed soul ought to pull us to one another. With the sealing so fresh, at times I could only find the tether with my craft as I’d done before.
Small creatures served well enough for now.
I curled my palm around the burning cord between me and my phantom and used it to stand again. When I touched the bond, I let out a hiss through my teeth. Good gods, a rush of blood flooded my lower belly, nearly bringing me back to my knees with a surge of pleasure.
When Skul Drek grunted and yanked me against his iridescent form, no doubt he’d felt the same.
I chuckled and touched the cold shadows of his face. “You felt it too.”
His words were a lash, harsh and quick, but his frigid grip tightened around my waist. “Stay your hands, Melder.”
My brows raised and at once I let my palms run down his murky chest. “Why?”
Ribbons of shadows pulled my hands away, tethering them behind my back, and in the next breath, my body was enfolded within the cloak of mists of his form.
His gasp caressed my cheek. “Cruel, Melder.”
“I’m not cruel,” I said, a little breathless. “I just happen to enjoy touching you.”
Skul Drek flashed his teeth. “I am he, we are we. A melder’s touch burns with pleasure.”
“Gods. Sorry.” I recoiled and covered my mouth with one palm to hide the laugh stuck in the back of my throat.
Every touch to Skul Drek would be felt by Roark, likely driving him a little mad while we spoke soul to soul. The glow of Emi’s form was in the distance, along with Gunter and Brynn. Auki had fara duties with a young pack preparing to bond with new Dravens.
Roark would be suffering silently, perhaps twisted up in frustration, in front of everyone.
Skul Drek narrowed his eyes into bloody slits. “Cruel, Melder.”
The laugh squeaked out. “I’m not trying to be, I swear it.” I cleared my throat and forced myself to take a step back. “Can you sense the souls like I see the bones?”
“Pieces of the first king and his soul are in the lands, this I sense. But the sight is my melder’s alone.”
He could feel the power of the Wanderer’s soul, but not where it was. I was the one who could see the craft of the soul. Two gifts with the potential to be of use, but we had to find a way to entangle them. Bonded or not, it seemed our crafts remained our own.
“The time is nearly spent.” The brush of his shadowed hand ran down my cheek.
Skul Drek or Roark, the man did nothing but fret over the melder’s trance that brought me to the mirror. Without the power of soul bones, I did not stumble so fiercely after each meld, but it was disorienting should I remain in the darkness too long.
“Wait. You sense souls.” I swallowed with effort and looked in the direction of distant gates, faraway spires. “Can you sense him? Kael? Can we see if his soul is still bright?”
Tears would not fall here, not from my soul, but the vibrance dimmed.
Skul Drek pulled me close. “Lead the way, Melder.”
I imagined Stonegate. The smell of evergreens, of the smoke and leather and roasted meats in the market. I imagined Thane’s laughter, Yrsa’s satin gowns. I tried to draw up the reek of the Stav units, with their rancid trousers and stockings.
“We don’t go closer.”
My eyes blinked open. The mirror shifted. We stood outside a peeling, cracked, debauched version of the walls around the Jorvan fortress. “What do you mean we don’t go closer?”
“The dark one waits for my melder.” Skul Drek’s lip curled. “Tricks and spells sense your soul. You brighten the night, and they will take it.”
This edge of Roark spoke with such venom, such rage, it was odd how I’d come to recognize the shifts in his tone, to tell his loving possessiveness from his bloodlust. The way he spoke of Fadey’s presence was harsh and hateful.
With me, it was nearly desperate, like he could never get enough and it angered him.
“Do you sense something here at the gates?” I asked.
“Blood spells.”
Dammit. “The queen is a blood crafter. She’s warded the gates, no doubt. But how can we feel it here?”
“Traps of the soul and the body lie in wait for my melder. The dark one knows my melder comes to me here. He hunts you where the souls speak as well as where the living walk.”
Shit. Fadey and Ingir had managed to place spell casts in the mirror?
I looked to the gates again, dark, dreary. I did not know how to get beyond them. “Souls have connections to other souls, do they not?”
His hot eyes narrowed, and Skul Drek curled one of his misty hands around the endless gilded tethers binding us together. “Bonds with the melder only belong to he and we.”
“I’m not talking about a soul bond. Good gods, you’re rather jealous in this state.”
Skul Drek merely growled in response.
“I mean connections. We feel drawn to certain folk. Like Emi says, some souls understand each other. I was just hoping I might feel Kael.” I peered up at the hooded face at my side. “You sense souls. Can you find him?”
Skul Drek paused for a long breath, then closed his eyes. I didn’t move, didn’t speak. Beneath his murky cowl, his features twisted, contorted. When his eyes snapped open again, the copper had deepened to a fierce red. “There is light in the soul you seek.”
“Kael’s alive?”
Skul Drek tilted his head. “There is light…and darkness. There is pain, my melder.”
The burn of bile rose in the back of my throat.
I hugged my middle. Kael was suffering in his soul.
My brother, my friend. The boy who first saw my hair stand on end after sleeping, only to laugh until he nearly retched.
The man who loved easily, and was a bit of a rake, but would take a knife for anyone he kept in his heart.
“I must get to him.”
“A vow to find a trapped brother remains,” Skul Drek breathed next to my ear. “But now time is spent.”
True enough. The weariness of the mirror was settling in. But the moment I turned to go, something harsh, like a tangle of barbs, curled around my arm and pulled me toward the gates.
“Melder!” A long, feral hiss sliced through Skul Drek’s sharp teeth. His darkness enrobed me, every strand of shadow he could muster laced around my body, limbs, even my throat.
I cried out and reached for him, but whatever blood spell was at the gates fought harder. Something had me in its grasp, something dark.
In the fetid darkness of the mirror, laughter echoed. First it was low, nothing but a whisper in the breeze. But it grew, louder, crueler.
I clung to the skeins of night from Skul Drek, frantically grappling for his hands until I curled my golden palms around the ice of his skin.
“There you are.”
A sharp gasp slipped from my lips when I looked over my shoulder. Buried in the mists near the gates, sharp, burning eyes and a cruel, poisonous smile met me there.
Fadey.
A thin, frayed tendril of an ashen rope slithered across the smoky ground of the mirror. My eyes widened. The tether was knotted around my ankle, and across the meadow, where Fadey’s ghostly form stood near the crumbling gates, he twirled the other end around his long fingers.
“Lyra. I found you again.”
In Stonegate, Fadey insisted that the blood craft of Queen Ingir had tethered us, that he could slip into my mind and thoughts, that he could find me here in the mirror.
Fadey pulled on the weak rope, and my leg jerked painfully behind me.
Skul Drek hissed and clacked his teeth, gathering me in his arms and surrounding me in his shadows. Cold whipped against my cheeks. The blaze of our sealed bond cast out the darkness and blurred the moldy gates of the Jorvan keep.
I felt my body torn away, a rough wrench of my leg snapped the tie of Fadey’s haunted rope, and in the next breath, I landed in a heap atop the murky form of my husband’s soul.
I leaned into his shadows, desperate for something to numb the wretched pain. My brow pressed against his chest, and in the next moment, a warm palm cupped one side of my face.
Roark looked down at me from the long wooden bench. Somewhere in the trance, I had dropped to my knees.