24. Crossing the Threshold
CROSSING THE THRESHOLD
TALIA
Thyss weeps for his brother, and I stand here. What is there to say? We planned for this, but I never guessed the world could burn that fucking fast. I’ll never again smell luriel flowers at midnight, and I didn't know until this moment that I cared for them at all.
VAEL LAR VARLOHEIM, PERSONAL JOURNAL, YEAR OF THE CROSSING. TRANS: T. SALAREN
The quarry road was barely that, more like a stretch of loose gravel and shale pointing at the hills. Talia pressed low against Jonquil’s neck, just trying to hang on. Every jolt of the mare’s hooves felt like it might tear her loose.
Behind them, Gateway screamed awake. Horns cut the night in quick blasts, three at a time. She didn’t know what it meant, but it couldn’t be a coincidence that the sound was chasing them.
A sharp crack split the air, then another. Stone chips started spraying up from the ground near Jonquil’s feet. Bullets. The little mare leaped forward, and Talia’s jaw slammed shut, her teeth knocking together painfully. She wrapped the reins around her wrists and held on as tight as she could.
“Let’s go!” Dawn’s voice cut through the wind somewhere ahead.
A flash of silver light filled Talia’s vision, bright enough to hurt. She heard yelling and the clamor of metal striking metal. She tried to twist in the saddle to see, but she was leaning too far forward. The commotion kept getting louder. Between the crashes, a wet thunk and a scream.
Who was fighting back there? She tried to sit up again, but just as she pulled back, Jonquil lost her footing in the loose shale. She felt the mare pitch to the left, felt herself tip to the right. Talia grabbed for the reins and got a handful of mane which slipped between her fingers.
She hit the ground hard and skidded. She’d thrown her arms around her head, palms out, and she felt the little rocks slice her hands open as she slid.
Her hip struck something solid, a root or a rock, and her body spun to a stop.
Hooves thundered past her head, and hot panic flooded her as she imagined being trampled.
“Talia! Tally!” Several overlapping voices called her name.
Jonquil was bolting ahead down the track, reins whipping in the dark. Talia watched, dazed, as Dawn spun Brimstone, snagged Jonquil’s reins one-handed, and hauled the mare in.
“I’m fine,” Talia said. She could feel the blood, sticky and slick in her palms, and a deep pulsing drumbeat in her shoulder and hip.
That should hurt. Why didn’t it hurt? Footsteps crunched through the gravel, and Holloway was there, standing above her.
His beautiful gray gelding sidestepped, and he clicked soothingly, then knelt at her side.
“We’ve got to get moving, Tally,” he murmured as he wrapped an arm around her waist. Then, with a dizzying lurch, he lifted her and spun her around onto his horse.
He mounted quickly in front of her and reached back to pull her arms around his waist. The heat of his back seeped into her, cutting through the cold deepnight air.
“Hang on to me,” he said.
She did, tightly, and his emotions flooded in with the contact.
His reactions were clean, like a steady drip of water into a clear fountain.
Her fingers relaxed as the hoofbeats below them fell into a rhythm and the sounds of fighting pulled away.
Her breathing slowed to match his. She pressed closer, let his calm sink into her until it was all she could feel.
“Half a league to the crossing,” Dawn shouted over the wind.
They rode hard. The gorge appeared without warning, stone arches spanning black water that roared below. In faerie stories, crossing water at night could wash away the past. Talia wished that were true.
Torchlight flared on the far side, and Talia could make out a new line of enforcers across the bridge, rifles raised. Then horns sounded again behind them as their pursuers closed in.
“Shit,” Dawn cursed. “We’re pinned.”
Lore’s stallion shied, hooves scraping stone. He steadied the horse with one hand. Talia squinted to make out Lore’s face in the dark. He didn’t seem rattled by the trap springing shut around them, enforcers ahead and behind.
“There’s no other way. We have to break through the line.” Lore spoke, silky slow, like he had time to spare.
On the other side of the bridge, the enforcers’ rifles caught moonlight as they lowered into shooting position.
The horns behind them screeched, so close now, Talia flinched.
That silver light flashed again—and then she saw him.
It was Riven. Her stomach lurched with relief, then confusion.
He wasn’t riding to meet them. He was standing between them and their pursuers and turning back to engage.
It was dark, but she could see blood running down his face, glinting in the glow of his silver swords.
The enforcers’ rifles didn’t work at close range, so they’d drawn blades too.
He parried three attacks at once. Talia looked on in awe and horror as bodies fell in his path, rifles clattering off the stone.
The gorge walls threw the sound back in layers—steel clashing, shouting, the crack of gunfire.
“Go ahead!” Riven’s voice broke through the clamor.
Ahead of them, the sentries on the bridge were faltering, lowering their guns and shouting in confusion.
Dawn spurred forward, rushing the line, with Lore just behind.
Holloway held back for a moment, and Talia looked over her shoulder.
Riven stood in the mouth of the pass, blades cutting through the dark in silver arcs.
Too many enforcers.
“We can’t leave him!” She pulled at Holloway’s shoulder.
“He’s buying us time. We can’t wait.”
She held Holloway tighter and turned again just as a blade caught Riven’s side. He fell to one knee. His glowing swords dimmed, then flared.
“Riven!” The sound she made was more scream than anything, tearing out of her throat.
But they were galloping through the scattered line of enforcers, across the bridge. Pulling away from the fight. She felt the roughness of Holloway’s jacket. The sting of cold night air, laced with gunpowder, in her throat.
She looked back one last time to see a wave break over Riven’s head. Green cloaks surged, and he was gone.
“Eyes forward,” Holloway said roughly. “Make it worth it.”
They turned a corner and lost sight of the battle. Talia couldn’t breathe. Her throat prickled and tightened, and she buried her face in Holloway’s back.
Dead or captured. Either way, he’s gone.
It didn’t make any sense. She’d been avoiding him; she hadn’t seen him all day. Riven hadn’t been with them at Starfall. Why would he be on the quarry road, attacking those enforcers? She couldn’t work out the logic, and that made her feel unmoored.
“How did he—” Her voice broke, and she coughed. Tried again. “Holloway, how did he find us?”
Holloway’s back went rigid, but he didn’t reply.
Dawn’s voice carried back on the wind. “We need to keep moving!”
Right. Questions later. Let’s just survive.
But the questions didn’t stop spinning just because she told them to, and one question above all kept rising to the front of her mind. Had Riven died thinking she was angry at him?
They rode in silence. Time felt strange, stretched thin. It could have been minutes or hours. Talia squeezed Holloway’s firm torso with her shredded hands and felt the pain cut through at last, throbbing in time with his breathing.
Eventually the land changed. The ground beside the road got rockier, wilder. The trees grew twisted and strange.
“There.” Lore’s voice cut through the darkness. He pointed ahead to where a stack of stones rose against the stars.
A cairn stood at the head of a narrow valley, taller than a man on horseback. She could see the carvings even in the dark, spirals and lines cut deep into stone. Not Starscript. Something older.
“A boundary stone,” Lore said solemnly. “They won’t follow us past here, at least for tonight.”
Talia remembered talk of boundary stones in field reports. They marked the transition to fluxborn territory, and patrols had to follow special protocols if they ventured beyond them.
The air shifted the moment they passed the stone. It was thinner, almost brittle.
“What is this place?” she asked, her curiosity spiking.
“Hundreds of years ago, these marked the edges of fae territory.” Lore pulled his horse next to the marker and ran his hand over the face of it. “But the stones are older than that.”
He kept his eyes on the massive rock, not sparing a glance for the path behind them. Dawn scoffed out loud as she pulled up beside them.
“Can we get the fuck off the road before we start telling faerie stories?” She did look back, with a frown that pulled her eyebrows together. If Talia didn’t know her better, she’d say Dawn was worried.
Dawn clucked, urging her horse forward. A narrow stream crossed the path ahead, black water sliding over darker rock. The horses splashed through, exhausted from the flight.
On the far bank, Talia turned to face the way they’d come. It felt wrong here, too slow and quiet after the violence they’d just escaped. Gateway’s lights weren’t directly visible, just a glow in the sky behind the hills. Riven was somewhere in that darkness. Or his body was.
They made a haphazard camp in a clearing between the strange, twisted trees.
Talia sat on a fallen log. Around her, the others moved through their tasks in silence, watering horses, checking weapons.
They didn’t risk a fire. At one point Lore pulled Dawn aside, and based on Dawn’s gestures, they seemed to be arguing.
Talia couldn’t make out any of the words.
She found herself sitting with her elbows on her knees, staring down at her shredded hands.
Slowly, she pulled back a piece of loose skin and picked a bit of gravel out of her flesh.
Then another. She focused on the sting and took stock.
No grief. No rage. She should feel something, but her chest felt empty instead. Scraped bare.
She smelled Holloway approach before he even sat down, clean, like vanilla soap and linen.
He took one of her hands and started washing out the wounds with a wet cloth.
Each dab of the cloth shot jolts of pain up her arm, but she didn’t complain—it would be over soon.
When he was done, he took her left hand, turned it over, and brushed his thumb twice across her knuckles. Their signal.
“I was angry,” she whispered. “I was acting like a child, and now I’ll never be able to tell him I’m sorry.” She knew how much an unspoken apology could hurt, how it burrowed in and bit you at the strangest times. An old memory of her sister kept trying to intrude, and Talia pushed it down.
Holloway tensed at her side. “I’m sure he understood,” he said finally.
Guilt colored his emotions. There was something he wasn’t saying, but she didn’t have the energy to probe it. Maybe he was jealous? He’d never had nice things to say about Riven. She let her head fall against his shoulder and closed her eyes.
“You can rest now, Tally. You’re safe.”
Safe. The word rang empty. This was going to be a long journey, and a dangerous one. Riven had promised to keep her safe, and he was already gone. Safe was an illusion, she decided. She couldn’t afford to pretend.