Chapter 33
THIRTY-THREE
As soon as Aeduan came out of his roll inside the mountain, he caught flickers of a blood that his witchery instantly snarled at: Clear lake waters. Frozen winters. But he was too late to turn around—to leap out of this bear trap before iron fangs closed.
He dove for the magicked door, but already the light was shrinking, fading, vanishing. His hands hit stone, and although static charged through him, he did not topple back out the other side.
He was stuck here.
“No,” he growled at the granite, pounding it.
Then louder, “No.” He grabbed at triangular carvings around the door.
He pressed them, he scratched them, he shouldered into them until it left bruises that his magic had to tend to.
But nothing happened; the stone remained stone. Aeduan could not get back through.
If Aeduan had been angry with himself on the plains and irate with himself in the forest, it was nothing compared to what plunged through him now. He had danced like the broken bear; he had fallen, yet again, for Leopold’s games.
Aeduan spun away from the door. His Bloodwitchery surged, bolstered by fury, and he flung it outward in a wide, vicious net.
Leopold was here, and Aeduan would find him.
Ahead, his magic told him, so ahead Aeduan went.
He wasn’t surprised to find no floating remnants of the silver taler now.
No mountain ranges or dandelions, either.
Iseult wasn’t here. Safi wasn’t here. They never had been.
And now Aeduan finally did what he should have done earlier: he pulled the Truth-lens from his pocket and slung it over his neck.
Like the first time Safi had placed it upon him, power roiled through him. It plucked down his vertebrae, it swelled inside his lungs. This is truth, this is rightness, this is all that is pure and good.
Then the intensity of it shrank, like a settling tide after an unexpected wave.
And for several dragging minutes, Aeduan waited—and took full note of his surroundings.
It was indeed the mountain where, supposedly, the sleeping goddess Sirmaya made Her home.
True, true, true. Yet it looked nothing like Iseult had described to Aeduan.
She’d spoken of storm and stone, lightning and earthquakes.
Of a cataclysm filling a colossal cavern that wanted to kill all in its path.
Nadje’s memories, meanwhile, suggested silence and stillness and peace. When that Aether Paladin had gone into the mountain a thousand years ago, the mountain had welcomed her children home. War had raged, yes, but it had not been the mountain’s doing.
What Aeduan found before him was neither peaceful nor apocalyptic, nor even a cavern. He was in a tunnel made from the same uncanny granite as the spiraling ramp in the woods. Lanterns flickered, not with flame, but with foxfire casting the stone in green.
But that was all Aeduan saw—and all Aeduan felt. A single confirmation from the lens that yes, this was the goddess’s mountain …
And now silence. Now nothing. Every few seconds, the tunnel shivered around him. A vibration that rattled through his feet and up into his eyes. Not a quake so much as a distant heartbeat. This too elicited no response from the lens.
“Useless,” he said to no one as he tore it off again to return it to his pocket. Then he started, walking, aiming steadily through the tunnel while time bleared past. His Bloodwitchery latched on to Leopold.
Dance, little Bloodwitch, dance.
Slowly, the tunnel did change. Its corridors widened, the ceiling lifted, and the throbbing beat in the stone fell away. Gradually, a new light claimed the foxfire shadows: a bluish glow that leaked out of veins in the stone.
Aeduan’s fingers flexed at the sight of it. At the cold, and his heart pumped out a melody he didn’t recognize. Part lingering bewilderment from the weight and strangeness of the mountain. Part booming hunger because Leopold was here and pulling strings …
But most of all, Aeduan’s heart beat with an atavistic terror that said: You should not be here.
The veins that thrummed in the stone were ice, and inexplicably, his old wounds were responding to them.
As if they’d heard their master calling and they’d waited so long for this moment to come.
Finally, you understand what we have wanted from you.
Aeduan didn’t understand at all.
The ice in the rock crackled and groaned, sounding almost like speech as Aeduan walked by. And with each forward step, the more thickly ice coated at walls. Climbed the ceiling. Frayed onto the floor.
Not your mind. Not your body.
Aeduan focused on his breaths, even as pain sharpened in his chest. Even as the six wounds began their oozing again, soaking him in blood. Aeduan breathed in through his nose. Out through his mouth. He could not let the wounds or the ice distract him.
Except there was one small problem: the farther he strode, the more blood scents began to waver against him. Five. Ten. Hundreds. Then thousands, as if somehow there were people all around him. Living and waiting in the stone.
He stumbled forward. The pain was stealing his grace, the cold was numbing his extremities.
If Leopold had hoped to lose him with more trickery, then he would be disappointed.
Aeduan could discard all scents he did not need.
Lilacs and apple trees. No. Rainstorms and salted fish.
No. Gnawing hunger and empty eyes. No, no, no. New leather and smoky hearths.
Yes.
Aeduan locked on to Leopold’s blood and moved faster. His wounds barked; warmth streamed down the front of his body. But he wouldn’t let Leopold distract or evade him. He was tired of this game. He wanted to stop dancing and to simply face the prince once and for all.
But soon, the entirety of the tunnel became ice, and soon, human-sized shadows appeared within the bright blue glow. Each possessed a blood scent. Each was a person that was still alive.
That was when the pain hit its peak. A brutal ambush from all six wounds at once. It stole all breath from Aeduan’s lungs and replaced it with fire. Literally. He felt the flames overtake his lungs. He felt magma carve out from his chest.
His footing failed him. He slid on a patch of unseen ice and pitched toward the nearest wall, the nearest person, the nearest tomb. His hands lifted on instinct, but where he should have hit tunnel wall, he didn’t. He kept falling. Mere fractions of a heartbeat that felt endless.
Then his fingers made contact. He finally collided with something. It wasn’t ice, though. It was warm, pliable, alive. And it was speaking. Shouting: “Blood on the snow! Blood on the snow!”
As quickly as he’d lost it, Aeduan’s footing returned.
And the pain—it snapped off like a spigot had been turned.
Suddenly he could feel himself fully, feel his magic too, and see what was right before him: a woman’s robed body was exposed.
Her face, wrinkled and brown, had wide, panicked eyes of burnished silver.
She shouted again at Aeduan: “Blood on the snow! Blood on the snow!”
He retreated, clawing away from her. Except the ice gave him no purchase. Each time he tried to grab hold and pull, tried to dig in heels and flee, it sprinted from him like metal shavings from a magnet.
More bodies erupted from the ice. Limbs. Feet. Faces. Mouths all screaming at him with different decrees.
“That which is closest!”
“Winds of flame!”
“Knife with two sides!”
“Blood on the snow! Blood on the snow!”
Aeduan finally found a stride. He ran down the tunnel.
Desperate, ungainly, with the unthinking terror of an animal facing its death.
His muscles were not his own. His magic was silent.
He was simply a child trapped in a nightmare that he couldn’t escape.
There were hands climbing out of the ice.
That snatched at him. Ripped at his cloak and clawed at his skin.
“Fissures in the ice!”
“New ways to travel!”
“Knife with two sides!”
“No coincidences except when there are!”
Aeduan couldn’t get out. The tunnel had no end. The ice kept thawing wherever he turned. The bodies kept tumbling out—always women. Always old. And always with eyes of moonlight that saw too much.
Run, my child, run.
He wanted to. Desperately, Aeduan wanted to wake up and find this was all a dream.
Boots would be beside him, and his mother too.
She would stroke his hair while his father crooned a lullaby or told him the story of the monster and the honey again.
But it wasn’t a dream, and Aeduan didn’t wake up.
Instead, when the tunnel finally ended, he found himself in an even worse place than before.
He was finally inside the mountain’s cavern.
Finally inside the storm and stone, the lightning and earthquakes.
Worse though, was the ice. It zigged, it zagged, shrinking away as Aeduan ran toward it.
Which was why he didn’t realize until too late that he’d raced onto a stretch of ice no longer reinforced by stone.
He stepped off a cliff’s edge.
He fell.
Heat roars. Wood cracks and embers fly.
“Run.” Blood drips from his mother’s mouth as she speaks.
It splatters his face.
With arms stained to red, she pushes herself up. She wants him to crawl out from beneath her. She wants him to escape. “Run, my child, run.”
He does not run. He does not move. He waits, as he always does, for the flames to overtake him and the world to burn alive.
The six wounds on his chest scream.