Chapter Thirty-Seven
Ronan and I dangle from the ledge of the ravine by our shadows, the vine around our waists flailing limply beneath us.
“Hold on!” yells Quinn, rushing to cut another length of vine to throw as a rope. Seth leans over the side, reaching down for my hand, but it’s still a long way up.
The strain on my magic is incredible. It’s draining as quickly as when I concealed the torch back in the Alchemists’ Guild, and we’re barely inching upwards.
Just a little further and we’ll be able to cling to the walls for leverage—
“Pull, Sylvie. You can do this.”
Ronan is straining as hard as he can, the veins in his forehead and arms popping from the effort. The torch, which I had extinguished for the flight, flares back to life.
And rather than clearing our shadows, it strengthens them.
“Almost there,” says Ronan, reaching over his head for the ledge.
I reach deep within me, ignoring the lies and secrets and going straight for the other source of my power: my love for Ronan.
I kiss his neck, and he groans. The sound sends my already elevated pulse racing even harder, and the echo of love that passes between us gives me what I need to make the final pull.
“Yes!” Ronan shouts as his hands grab onto rock. The relief of the reduced weight from his grip is immense, the shadow tendrils relaxing as Ronan braces against the rock wall, gripping into grooves with his fingers, pulling us up by his forearms alone.
If I weren’t about to die, I might notice how extremely fucking hot it is watching this incredible feat of athleticism.
I might see his forearms bulging from his rolled-up sleeves, the sweat dripping down the taut line of muscle in his neck and shoulders.
I might feel those magnificent abs and that phenomenal back as he contracts and pulls both of our body weights up almost singlehandedly.
But with things the way they are, I have to make do with capturing the image and feeling in my mind in a split second before turning my focus to grabbing the rope Quinn lowers.
I reach out and catch it in my left hand, bringing it over to Ronan so he can pull us up. Only once he has it and we’re clambering over the top, pulled up by Seth and Quinn, do I release my shadows.
“Wow, that was…wow,” says Quinn, looking at the muscles of Ronan’s hard body bulging from his ripped white tunic.
It’s positively obscene, and it’s absolutely mine.
He’s lying on his back on the ground, panting, pulse racing, dripping in sweat, and if the others weren’t here, I would have him right now.
Instead, I settle for climbing on top of him and giving him a passionate kiss, ignoring Quinn’s laughter and the vomiting noise Seth makes.
“Did you know…” Ronan says through huffing breaths, his exhausted arms reaching for my back. “Did you know that my wife is incredible?”
I kiss him again, and then I press kisses to his neck and chest where his shirt has torn. “I married you for these,” I say, kissing down his forearms, tasting the salt of his sweat. “I need some alone time with them later.”
“That can be arranged.”
“Can you not?” says Seth.
“I had to witness your multi-hour panic attack over Taran yesterday. You can give me two minutes with my husband after we nearly died,” I snap.
“Say ‘my husband’ one more time.”
There’s a splashing sound that makes us look up. Quinn has broken the surface of the water at the bottom of the middle doorway with her cane. “I wish we had Taran right about now. I can’t feel the bottom.”
I help Ronan to his feet, and we head over to take a look.
The doors, from what we can tell, are identical. There are passages of standard hallway height beyond them, but water has flooded them almost to the floor level of the cavern we’re in. The waters are murky, flowing in from somewhere beyond sight and stirring up sediment from the bottom.
“This one looks cleaner,” says Seth, poking his head in the door on the right.
“They’re the same,” I say before even really looking. He’s getting on my nerves.
“Let’s just pick one and go for it. Maybe they all lead to the same place,” says Quinn, reaching down to remove her boots.
“Wait.” Ronan reaches out with his shadow tendril, dunking it beneath the surface. “We can find a path.”
Ronan and I follow the walls and navigate the passages with our shadows. “We have to hurry,” I say. “I’m almost out of magic.”
The right passage—the one Seth wanted—leads to a dead end fairly quickly. But the other two go for much longer, so far that we reach the end of the range of our magic with no definitive answer.
“Flip a coin?” suggests Quinn.
“The middle one,” I say. “It has fewer completely submerged sections.”
I’ve chosen right. We swim through the passages without incident, our only concern being the torch, which goes out when under water, but we’re able to use the shadow tendrils to navigate through the most difficult sections, and the torch reignites once we reach the next chamber.
Well, mostly without incident. We’re soaked to the bone. Quinn and Seth use their flames to dry at least our socks and shoes, not wanting to use up more magic than necessary, but all of us agreeing that we’d just about rather die than have wet feet.
“More than halfway there, if we’re following the schools of magic from the Codex,” says Ronan.
And it seems that we are. The chamber at the end of the flooded section slopes upward, narrowing as we climb closer to the surface.
“This isn’t so bad,” says Quinn. “Maybe the trap broke.”
Unfortunately, she spoke too soon. We pass through an archway marked with the triangle with a line through it, the wind magic symbol, and it becomes immediately apparent what the challenge is when we’re thrown back through the threshold by an enormous gust.
“Fuck, I should have brought along some of that vine,” says Quinn. “My cane will help, but we’re going to have to use your shadows again. Do you have any magic left?”
“Not much,” I say.
“I’m out,” says Ronan. “I’ve been pulling on the torch since halfway through the water room, and I don’t know how long that will keep working.”
“That’s probably by design,” says Seth. “Leave you weakened and out of magic so you can’t face whatever is waiting at the end.”
“Thank you once again for making me glad we brought you along,” I say, gesturing rudely at him.
He sighs. “I’m saying that you should reserve your magic if you can. One of us should stay behind here.”
“No one stays behind,” says Ronan. “Not if there’s another choice. We’ll just have to dig deep and get through this.”
“Very inspiring. You’re about to inspire us all the way to an early grave,” says Seth.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” I throw my shadows up the ramp in the next chamber, straining against the wind. Ronan follows suit. “Quinn, grab onto me. We’ll go together.”
Quinn uses the leverage from her cane to help pull us forward into the narrow passage as I pull us up with my shadows. We make it to the top in about half the time it takes the boys, but that’s mostly because Seth fights against Ronan’s help.
“Stop being an idiot and let him carry you!” I shout down at him, a part of me enjoying Seth’s humiliation at being carried along by my husband.
I almost yell something about how strong and wonderful my husband is just to piss Seth off when a strong burst of wind blows out the torch.
“Ronan!” I throw my shadows out to catch him, but my magic is dangerously low. Exhaustion starts to set in before I can get them close enough to the top for us to reach them.
In the satchel, the sickle stirs.
It’s quieter than the torch, far less needy and demanding much less attention, but it’s there too, something sentient lurking inside of it with power of its own.
“Help me,” I whisper to it. “I need him.” And then, rolling my eyes a little at having to say it because Seth’s really pissing me off right now, I say, “I need them both.”
A shadow extends from the sickle, reaching down the ramp and grabbing hold of Ronan. I’m controlling it, but yet I’m not. The sickle has a will of its own, but it adapts to me, allowing me to work with it to do what I need.
I pull Ronan and Seth along with him up with the shadow, extending an arm out to pull them stumbling into the room beyond.
“Well, at least we’re dry now,” says Seth as he scrambles away from us.
I sit up, preparing to pull my aching body from the ground when a flame passes within an inch of my head.
“Fire! Get down!” yells Quinn.
“Run!” yells Ronan.
Oh, fuck. Fire flashes across the room, coming from the walls at all angles, exploding completely at random on the floor, the walls, the ceiling. The room is long but relatively short and narrow, giving us little room to dodge the flames.
Quinn and Seth, both fire-born, can’t be burned on their hands, but the rest of their bodies are nearly as vulnerable as the rest of us. They’re able to stop some of the flames, but they move so quickly it’s difficult to see them coming.
The sickle’s shadow is no more effective than their control. Everything is simply moving too fast. We all take hits, keeping close to pat each other out when our clothes ignite.
“I’ll heal us with the torch when we’re through it. Just keep going,” says Ronan.
At the end of the hallway, we turn a corner.
Quinn stops immediately, and I panic as I nearly crash into her.
“Fuck!” yells Seth, stopping just short of what Quinn saw.
From the floor, a wall of flames appears. It burns for a few moments, and then it goes out.
Beyond it are several more traps just like it, coming from the walls or the floor.
At least the area we’re standing in now doesn’t seem to be reached by any of the flames.
“This is going to be tough for me,” says Quinn. “I’m not the fastest anymore.”
“I should have stayed back at the wind tunnel,” says Seth, leaning against the wall. “If I had known the culmination of a lifelong obsession would be this fucking death trap, I would have taken up knitting instead.”
There’s a soft clicking sound. A button being pressed.
The flames cease in both rooms.
“Oh my gods, Seth. You’ve done it. You’ve actually done something useful.”
“Hey, I also found the lever in the sand room.”
Also by accident, and Ronan had to pull it to get us out, but I let him have this one.
“Let’s go,” I say, and I’m halfway over the grate where the flame wall was before when Seth lets go of the button, and the traps turn back on.
Flame engulfs me, my entire world going bright and unbelievably hot.
“Sylvie!”
Ronan pulls me out of the flame and drops me to the floor, rolling me to extinguish the fire consuming my hair, my tunic, and the satchel.
Holy fuck, it hurts. It’s the worst pain I’ve ever felt. Everywhere the flames touched aches and stings immediately, my flesh screaming. I shriek in agony, my mind narrowing to nothing but the pain.
“Oh gods, Sylvie,” says Seth from a thousand miles away.
“Get back on that switch!” bellows Ronan, as furious and deranged as I’ve ever seen him. “Quinn, the water.”
I hear the satchel scrape on the ground as Quinn fishes for my waterskin, but my mind can’t focus on anything but the pain.
“Fuck!” yells Ronan, trying to summon his light but failing. “Sylvie, sweetheart, hold on. It’s going to hurt, but I have no choice.”
“Do you want the water still?” says Quinn.
“Yes. Pour it on her. Start with her face. It might help for the next part.”
Quinn pours the cool water on my face and upper body, and the relief is immediate. There’s still pain and a lot of it, but it’s no longer the only thing I can think about.
It leaves my mind open to realize what Ronan is going to do.
“No, no, no,” I whimper. “Ronan, please.”
“I’m so sorry, my love. It’s the only way. The pain is temporary, I promise you.”
He reaches for the torch. He’s going to do to me what I had to do to him.
I sense, with the tiny sliver of magic I have left, his horror as he presses the burning flame of the torch to my charred skin.
I scream so loud and so long, I can’t tell when it stops.
The pain is blinding, searing, pure white-hot agony on a scale I couldn’t have imagined before this moment.
I’m certain I’m going to pass out from it, but I’m not granted that mercy.
I remain awake as Ronan passes the torch over all of my burnt flesh, his hands shaking and tears running down his face.
“Oh gods, I’m so sorry. Sylvie, I’m so sorry.” He rocks me as he finishes, his fear and anguish palpable.
But it’s working. The pain goes from the worst I’ve ever felt to nothing in seconds. It flees so quickly I could almost believe I died, and this is the afterlife.
Almost, but not quite. Not with Ronan holding me like this, cradling me and brushing the charred section of hair away from my face.
“But you love my hair,” I say, letting out a sob.
“I would love you bald. As long as you’re still here with me.”
He kisses me, and this time, Seth doesn’t have anything to say about it.
Ronan helps me up, and Seth’s eyes can’t meet mine. He’s staring at the ground, lost in his shame.
“Aren’t you going to apologize?” asks Quinn. She moves to shove Seth but stops herself just in time, remembering the button. “She could have died.”
“He couldn’t have known.” None of the other buttons or switches we used needed to be held. As annoyed as Seth has made me today, I don’t blame him for this.
“Could you hold the button for a minute, please?” asks Seth, his voice quiet and low.
Quinn presses the button before Seth releases it, flexing a fist at him in warning.
Seth approaches me. I shift up the ruins of my tunic for modesty as Ronan wraps his arms around me protectively.
There’s a tense moment while we stare at each other. He doesn’t look like Father or Mother right now in this moment of true humility.
He looks like me.
He takes the shirt off his own back and holds it out to me. I step forward out of Ronan’s grasp, and Seth drapes the tunic over my head. It swallows me, but at least I’m covered.
“Thanks,” I mumble. This gesture alone is an extraordinary apology coming from him.
But then he pulls me to him, hugging me tight. “I’m sorry,” he whispers.
“I know,” I say.
Dammit, he’s the worst, but I do love him.
“You all need to go,” says Quinn, unsurprisingly unmoved by Seth’s gesture of kindness. “I’ll stay here with the button.”
“No, I’ll stay,” says Seth.
“You’ll both stay,” says Ronan, surprising even me. “That’s the last room up ahead. Whatever answers it holds, they’re for Sylvie and me alone.”
The torch flares its agreement.
“And I won’t risk you any further. You’ve gotten us this far, and I’m grateful. But we’ll go the rest of the way alone.”
“Like hell you will—” Quinn starts, but Ronan holds his hand up to stop her.
“That’s an order.”
Quinn is furious, but despite Ronan’s current lack of title, we all know she’ll defer to him in the end. He’s her king, crown or no crown.
“Come on, Sylvie,” Ronan says. I pick up the sickle, and he carries the torch as we walk over the inactivated traps.
“Our destiny awaits.”