Chapter 35
Present in my own body again, I lunge forward, but Gray holds me back.
There’s a noise from above. Something drops from the sky, through the prison opening stories above us.
Two large, feathered strips of cloth fall fast toward Ivander.
Not fast enough. As if driven by instinct, I call on my spirits to help in any way they can.
A spirit soars toward Ivander, and then time stands still for everything but the falling objects.
A time winder. It occurs to me I’ve never seen a spirit wield their Morphic gift before. Ivander reaches up and seizes the crafter-made wings, his fingers moving over straps and buckles as he falls. My heart fills my throat as he tries to secure them in place.
Only when the wings extend and catch him in midair do I breathe. Then he’s flying, as calm and elegant as ever.
Typical Ivander.
Time speeds up again, and the time winder spirit dissipates.
He pumps his arms, gaining strength and speed.
With each stroke, he propels himself higher.
Lord Damarcus stares down at him, gaping as Ivander flies back to the top level.
Alana and Gray grip my wrists tightly, but out of surprise, not to hold me back.
Suddenly, Isla, Niko, and Zora are climbing down from the crater into the prison, leaping down the narrow stairs until they reach the bridge. Zora watches with pride as Ivander uses her creation to fly.
Lord Damarcus gnashes his teeth, but Isla’s undeterred.
Though she stands at least two heads shorter than my father, Isla walks boldly up to him, Niko beside her.
My two friends share a look and then punch him in the face with more force than I knew they had.
He stumbles backward as Isla, Niko, and Zora run to us.
I throw my arms around Zora. “Thank you,” I murmur. Ivander’s alive because of her.
“How’d you get here?” Alana asks our friends, breathless.
“After we helped as many Morphics off the ship as we could, we took a crafter-made carriage to your estate, Roe,” Niko explains.
“Didn’t leave the ship too long after you did.
It was a bloodbath. Bosses got violent, but we fought back.
When we got to the estate, your mother told us where to find you. ”
Zora nods. “Your mother sent out warnings to the council members in Aryndar to evacuate. She doesn’t know if the message will reach them in time.”
The smell of burning wood singes my nostrils, and I look up. Billowing smoke rises into the sky above. “What happened?” I ask.
“Some of the prisoners were aboveground when we got here,” Isla says in a low voice. “They’re lighting carriages of raw Morphia on fire.”
Lord Damarcus stops dead. He stands unmoving for long enough that I wonder if he’s going to pass out.
Gray grabs Isla by the shoulder and turns her to face him. “What?”
“We couldn’t stop them all,” she insists. “The jars were already melting.”
“They’ve lit a fuse,” Leith says. “They’ve released raw Morphia in Tamarynth.”
Lord Damarcus curses, dragging a hand down his face. “They weren’t supposed to release it. They should have waited for my command.”
Before we can determine exactly how bad that is, the prisoners start moving again.
Many of them are desperate to be free of the prison, but others look to guards for instruction after so long trapped down here. Some have even collected on the bridge near Lord Damarcus, probably out of desperation. They have nowhere else to go. Nowhere they remember, anyway.
Ivander lands beside us, his wings falling from his arms. I want to run to him, but when his feet touch down, my father draws a pistol and a knife.
The group of us huddle toward the edge of the bridge, near the rightward tower. With prisoners below us, clamoring to get out, and prison guards prepared to help Father fight, we don’t stand a chance of overcoming his forces. Not without my spirits.
“My army will leave this prison,” Lord Damarcus says. “Once the council’s gone, it will all be gone. The old way dies, and we remake the world.”
I think back to what Father said to me back at our estate, when he was dismantling my world. His family legacy had become more important than anything—more important than us. He had to separate himself from the adoring father who loved his family. He thinks this is the way to protect us.
I have to show him he’s wrong. I don’t need his protection. Not anymore.
I push my way to the front of the group.
Father’s eyes soften, and his mouth sags as he shakes his head.
“Roe, you don’t know what the world is like.
You didn’t see the homes burning because Malyk thought Morphics were inside, plotting against the council.
” He drops the pistol to his side. “The menders forced to work in infirmaries. The number of times the council looked the other way when Morphics were killed or kidnapped. We are not as far from Gryndar or Correndra as you think. One alchemer on the council has no chance of changing that.”
“You were the one who kept it all from me.” I raise my arms, and the spirits form a dense cloud of floating bodies rising from the bottom of the prison to where we stand.
“Look around you,” I say. “You’ve killed more Morphics than a war could.
All because you were chasing a goal from centuries ago.
The Celestial wasn’t worth it, and a war isn’t the answer.
” I pause. “It’s not my answer. Not when this is the price. ”
Lord Damarcus raises his pistol again. “You think you can do better?” I force myself not to step back. If he was going to shoot me, he would have done it already. “I’m sorry, my daughter, but I’m an alchemer. I pay no price.”
I can’t stop the dull, humorless laugh that rises from the back of my throat. “You have no daughters. No son. No wife. Not after what you’ve done. Have you not paid?”
Without waiting for his answer, I let loose an expulsion of energy. The spirits, with their misery and agony and wasted lives, advance on Father. They form a thick tornado of silvery corpses, their bones protruding through half-formed skin caked with dried blood left over from old wounds.
Father cries out for his guards and his soldiers to defend him.
Confused prisoners race to protect the man they still think is their leader, but they can’t get past my friends and siblings.
The guards shoot from where they stand, unwilling to get too close to my swirling vortex of spirits. Bullets ricochet off the cyclone.
“Stay back,” Gray shouts at us. Leith freezes behind him, unable to tear his eyes away from Father.
Eliza draws an arrow back on her bowstring, aiming for Father. “Don’t come any closer, or I will shoot.”
“I’m not afraid of you,” Lord Damarcus says, swinging his knife at the spirits as they reach out with bony fingers.
He might be talking to the spirits—the deaths he’s responsible for—but I wonder if he’s talking to us, my siblings. Me. For so long, he wanted me to know the world would think my gift was scary. Unnatural. But it wasn’t the world that taught me my magic was the frightening kind.
“You are afraid,” I say, walking right through the center of my tornado of spirits. I glide through the dense cloud, untouched. “You were so afraid of me that you tried to take my Morphia. Twice.”
With a powerful shove of energy, I knock Lord Damarcus off his feet, and he’s sucked into the vortex.
I raise my hands over my head, lifting him high from the prison.
My friends and I follow. They clamber up the steep stone steps and out of the bottomless pit of Malachite as I drift with the spirits.
It’s a bit like floating in water, serene and effortless.
Outside, the prisoners waiting beside the large gargoyles back away from the tornado of energy. When I let my father drop to the ground, the pistol and dagger fly from his hands. I look to the weapons, wanting to hurt him, but I feel a hand on my arm.
Alana stands beside me. Ivander, Gray, and Niko cross to the soldiers waiting by the gargoyles to explain and orient them, to give them the choice Lord Damarcus didn’t.
“Let me,” Alana says. “For a man who’s never felt empathy, I’ll bring him to his knees.”
I nod.
She stares into the distance, unseeing as she concentrates.
The lines between her brows disappear, but Father doubles over.
His raw, tortured screams make me want to stop her, but I recognize them.
They’re the screams of Lysandra when she learned Leith had died.
The tears streaming down his face are mine the night after I was first tortured by the bosses.
His knees hit the ground, and the confusion on his face is the same I’m sure Mother felt learning her husband lost so much of himself to violence and greed.
Lord Damarcus clutches his heart, clawing at his chest. It’s the same heartbreak Eliza and I felt when we learned our brother was never coming home. The same pain Leith felt as a prisoner for almost half his life.
A young spirit approaches my father then.
Despite the corpse-like appearances of the other dead, she appears whole.
Her blue eyes are bright, and her freckled skin reminds me of my own.
Her brown hair, arranged in a tightly woven crown from the day she died, barely blows in the wind from my waning tornado.
Father hunches over, breathing hard as raw emotion overtakes him. The small girl bends over and touches his cheek. When her fingers brush his skin, he looks up at her. His mouth goes slack, and it takes me a moment to realize why.
The expanse of space, aboveground over the prison, devoid of trees and obstructions, begins to shift.
From the slack jaws and wide eyes around me, I gather everyone else is seeing it too.
An illusion takes shape: Burning estates, a leveled forest with animals and trees flattened.
The dirt on the ground runs red with blood.
I hear the pop of pistol fire and the boom of an explosive weapon.
Bodies lie on the battleground, torn apart. Young and old alike.
This young girl’s showing a war neither side is winning. A future.
“There is no victor,” the spirit girl whispers in an echoing voice all of us hear.
As she walks away, her head turns to me. She’s beautiful. Not a single hair out of place in her braids. My breath catches as I look at her.
“Karynna.”
With that, I lose my grip on my spirits. Tears stream down my face, and my connection to them falters. Their forms turn hazy until they start to disappear. One by one and then all at once, returning to the spiritual plane and the world beyond it.
Alana lets go, freeing Father from the emotions racking his frame.
Isla and Zora help Alana stand. Her legs tremble from the loss of energy.
When the scene falls away, Gray lunges forward.
He grabs Lord Damarcus from behind, securing his arms in a powerful hold so he can’t escape.
A Hawk until the end. He’s caught the most dangerous Morphic yet.
Suddenly next to me, Ivander puts a hand on my arm as Niko holds two pistols out in front of him, arms shaking. My friends form a defensive circle. Now that the spirits have disappeared, the prisoners could overtake us.
But the prisoners aren’t watching us. They’re watching Father.
“What do we do now?” Ivander whispers at my ear.
I step forward, approaching my father as Gray holds him in place.
Eliza and Leith stand behind me. Gray pushes his knee into Father’s back. Eliza’s arrow is aimed at his throat, but Leith’s hand grazes my shoulder. “Please,” he says.
I don’t know what he wants me to do with him, but it’s the same desperation I feel. The urge to spare my own flesh and blood. To not end up like him.
“I don’t know what the world will do with you,” I say to my father. He peers up at me through familiar brown eyes, narrowed at me. “But it won’t be by my hand. You will go before the High Council. They will decide your fate.” I hold his gaze. “I cannot kill my father.”
Father smiles up at me. A pained half smile. For a moment, I see the man who raised me. “One day you’ll see this was the only way.”
I pause. “I know you have to believe that.”
Without another word to him, I nod to Gray. Eliza lowers her bow, but she stares daggers at our father. Leith squeezes my hand. Zora crafts metal from the pistols to fashion cuffs. Ivander and I begin to help the rest of the prisoners pouring out from the underground prison.
Many of the prisoners glare at my father, resenting their imprisonment. Others look reluctant, as if they might have followed my father, had he been free. There’s no way of knowing how deeply Father’s potion affected them. Even scarier, how deeply his belief affected them too.
Gray’s eyes narrow as he locks the cuffs around Father’s wrists. “We don’t know what the council will do with him. They might pardon him.”
It doesn’t matter. I won’t stop a war by killing my father.
Even if the part of me buried deep inside, sometimes hidden even from me, wants to leave his lifeless body on the ground.
I won’t kill him, but if I let him go and allow his army to follow him, the council won’t want to hear my side of things.
My province would assume I sympathized with his cause, and I could say goodbye to any chance of sitting on the council myself.
It’s time the council had a new Damarcus, anyway.