Chapter 51 #2
Fadey took in the onslaught, his face cut in rage.
For a moment, a breathless instant, we locked gazes.
Then, we both lunged—Fadey to his sword and me to him.
He reached his blade in the same moment that I swung my own.
He held steady against my sword for a few paces, but his fight was outmatched in skill and steel.
Fadey roared his anger and rushed for me, eyes flashing in hatred. I met his pace. No hesitation, no second thoughts.
The rest of the field fell away.
With a strangled cry, I landed a blow against the edge of Fadey’s blade. A quick strike, one that tossed us apart nearly as fast. We circled each other. The vibration of the steel prickled up my arms.
The melder’s eyes flashed. “We are not them. We do not fight like them.”
“Afraid a woman will slaughter you?”
Fadey yanked something pale and narrow from the pocket on his gambeson. “No. I have already won.”
Pain unlike I’d known lanced across my middle.
A bone. Fadey threw a bone shard against me.
Burning craft spiraled around the piece.
Threads of dark gold I was certain only I could see rose from the piece and pierced through my leather jerkin, my tunic.
They were digging into my skin, drawing the point of the bone into my belly.
I screamed and stumbled backward. Another shard struck my arm. Fadey was melding knife-sharp, jagged bones to my body. Slowly stabbing and shredding my skin. I saw Roark shoving through men, desperate to reach me.
There wasn’t time.
I had only one idea how to unfasten the shards of bone melding into my body. Take me to you! I screamed over and over in my head.
A tug, like a hook on a reel, snatched hold of my chest. Faster than ever before, I was flung into the murky shadows of the mirror.
“Melder!” Skul Drek hissed near my ear, his frigid hands touching the glow of the cruel shards slowly stitching into me. “Make it stop.”
I gripped his hand but looked over his misty shoulder. Surrounded by the blinding glow from endless souls, warriors, wolves, and fallen souls striding toward the distant gates of Salur, Fadey staggered to his feet.
“What have you done, Lyra?” He inspected the dark glow of his palms.
We had no time. I kept one hand on the bone shard half melded to my middle and rose to my feet. “Hold him!”
Fadey’s snarl deepened, and he crouched like he might be readying to strike, but in the next heartbeat he grunted and fell back. Dark, slithering shadows pulled taut over Fadey’s wrists and throat. He bucked and thrashed, but Skul Drek only tightened his darkness around the melder.
“You think you have me?” Despite the shadows on his wrists, Fadey balled one hand into a tight fist.
I shrieked against the shock of fire burning across my middle. Without his even touching me, the bone shards dug deeper into my flesh, my soul.
Skul Drek shouted for his melder. Demanded I keep my soul bright. “Release the bones, Melder,” he hissed. “Release the bones.”
Fadey was powerful. Never did I anticipate his ability of flinging bones like knives with hardly a flinch. He still controlled the threads of his weapons even here. I had to unstitch them.
Hand trembling, I looked down at the bone digging into my stomach. Like serpents the threads wriggled, dragging the point of the bone deeper, deeper. The glow of my body flickered.
Skul Drek hissed and clacked his teeth, and he moved like he was going to abandon the tethers he was keeping around Fadey.
“Hold him,” I pleaded, my voice soft.
Those copper red eyes flashed. But in another moment, heat flooded my chest. The glistening threads of our soul bond ignited into an inferno. By the gods, he was offering me his strength through our connection.
I touched one thread of a bone shard and ripped it out of my body. Fire scorched my soul where it severed, like plucking out small, narrow bones, and the pain was blinding. It was no wonder Kael opted to be dosed with heavy sleeping herbs when I unmelded his soul bones.
This was like the cut of a thousand knives.
Still, hand trembling, I reached for the next thread and yanked it free.
Fadey’s lip curled. He bucked his hips, watching me unstitch every damn thread of his deadly bone shards.
When the glow of the piece fell into the mists of the ground, I rose, quivering against the pain of the shard in my shoulder, but with a restored, wicked bloodlust flooding through my soul.
Perhaps it was from absorbing the strength of Skul Drek through our bond, but a depraved need to destroy Fadey flooded my hopes, my thoughts, to the point of obsession.
“I wonder what would happen to you if I took power from the Wanderer’s bones?” I tilted my head, sneering at Fadey. “What could I do to you if I summoned it, even for a moment?”
“Then you kill those you love. Their blood is needed, and you’ll need to take out their bones.” Fadey kicked. He writhed and tugged. He roared in anger when the ropes of darkness would not free his soul.
“No. You’re wrong. You always were wrong. If I have the blood of the god-queen, then I can summon all the crafts. Only the Wanderer needed to use melding to take power. But the god-queen, she united all, shared craft with all.”
With every word spoken, something burned inside me. There was a draw to Fadey’s bones, like I might be able to reshape the whole of his body and bones.
“Bold princes stand near, Melder,” the graveled rasp of Skul Drek breathed across my neck.
To my side, a mere five arms away, Thane’s soul burned like sputtering kindling.
I grinned. The fervor of bone craft was roving off him. Under my scrutiny, the glow of the prince shifted into a shade so brilliant, I shielded my eyes against it.
In all our acquaintance, I’d never felt craft radiating from the prince. But something within my own craft now reached for a tendril of power within him. As though I’d found a new door within my own power and unbolted the latch, awakening something fierce. Something ancient.
I could take Thane’s remnant for my own use. The thought burrowed within my heart like a spreading plague.
Threads to unstitch the bit of the Wanderer’s claim on bone craft were there in his soul, burning and thrashing.
Beneath my touch, I could unweave them. I could take them for myself. I could leave the prince shredded and bled out of the craft he’d unknowingly carried in his bones.
Or I could use it.
Another thought coated the dark thirst to steal Thane’s remnant. No more seriously than asking the prince to pass an ewer of wine, I felt I could reach for the threads spinning in his soul and draw them to me.
My craft could weave his power with mine for something…greater.
A uniter of all the gods’ magics.
Another flash sparked. I turned and could make out the forms of Yrsa and Emi nearby. They both were crouched, with their feet parted, facing away. Like they stood between me and enemy blades.
Much like Prince Thane, the princess burned brighter, sharper, the longer my attention poured into her soul.
Unlike Thane, Yrsa’s heirloom craft from the Wanderer sparked in a rich crimson, like fresh blood.
Tangled amid the gold of her soul, I could make out the delicate fibers of ancient craft, strands of gossamer webbed around her natural-born blood craft.
Yrsa was wrong. She was a powerful blood crafter. Likely had been all her life. Words of a cruel father, of protective tutors, of the life of a shielded royal, no doubt had led her to think she was of little value save for a marriage alliance with a stronger kingdom.
I reached out my fingertips, and a thick red thread split from the princess, just below her heart. Where her ribs would be.
The tendril was strong and rippled in the darkness like I’d dropped a fraying tapestry beneath the water, flowing and bending on an unseen tide.
Take it. Destroy it.
Or use it.
“Melder.” Skul Drek clacked his teeth. His fists tightened, and the coiling shadows binding Fadey appeared strained.
We were running out of time.
I spun toward the edge of the battlefield. The beat of my heart outside the mirror realm must’ve raced, for the sheen of my soul flickered with urgency.
Between the emerald gleam of two fara souls was the huddled shape of a lanky boy.
Sindri’s body was alight with gold, young and strong. Then, like the others, around his heart—where the breastbone might be—was a tangle of flowing threads of craft the rich blue of a peaceful sea. Brine and smoke filled pockets in my lungs, coating my throat with each draw of air.
Soul craft was heady. I lifted one palm, and a blue thread slithered free of Sindri’s shine, reaching for me.
Fadey roared his frustration and cursed my soul. He kicked and thrashed. He warned me that the power would consume me.
I listened to none of it and first touched Yrsa’s crimson thread.
A bite of pain, like the prick of a thorn, burned over my fingertips. The satin string fastened to me. A stitch waiting to be secured.
Fadey thrashed, new panic in his eyes.
“Melder.” Skul Drek used his chin to point at Yrsa’s soul.
I startled. Endless faces stood behind the Myrdan princess, haunts and spectrals of the mirror. These were folk long fallen into Salur. The bloodline of those who’d gone before the princess. Her kin.
Thin threads of connections webbed across Yrsa’s shoulders, her limbs. Connections she likely did not know were there.
Her folk. Her blood. Her power. They stood by her now.
But with the thread of her power bound to mine, they stood with me. I felt the strength of their souls.
I stood a little straighter, a little stronger.
“You need me, Lyra. You cannot shoulder this alone,” Fadey spat, but there was fear in his tone.
Fear that he’d failed.
“Ah, Fadey.” I chuckled with a vein of darkness of my own. “Who says I was ever alone?”