Chapter 30
I’d run long distances before. I’d run so fast that to anyone I passed, I appeared as little more than a blur. And I’d done both at the same time on countless occasions while on missions for the Order.
But until the night I fled Briarcourt with a half-dead god in my arms, I’d never had to run so hard and so fast for so long.
It was a good two hundred miles from the Knotwood’s mouth to Rithia, a port city on Vauzanne’s southeastern shore.
I had Order contacts there; I would secure passage on the fastest ship I could find and hopefully make it across the Gloaming Sea to Fairhaven before anyone could catch up to me.
Kilraith, my mind whispered in Talan’s voice, then in my sisters’. Before Kilraith catches up to you.
He knows.
He’s coming.
No one tried to stop me as I raced out of Briarcourt.
They were too busy flooding outside themselves, evading Ryder’s mad wilded beasts.
Just as I ducked under a flowered arbor and into the Briarcourt gardens, an arrow whizzed past me and pierced the flank of a bounding stag.
I dodged the poor bleating creature, leapt over a hedge, and tore through the rest of the gardens—a sea of guests and guards, wolves and bears and hawks, sweaty finery and polished armor bearing the crest of the House of Lemaire.
The cry of a falcon pierced the chaos and made my heart seize.
I wished desperately that I hadn’t ordered Freyda to stay at Rosewarren.
The long road ahead would have felt much shorter if I’d had her with me.
And with her tireless amber eyes overhead, scanning the horizon for Kilraith, I wouldn’t have had to worry quite so much about being ambushed.
“You run so fast,” murmured Neave, dreamy and half-awake in my arms. The sound of her voice startled me.
“Just stay put and relax,” I told her. “I’ve got you.”
Suddenly a deep groan rumbled behind me, followed by a fresh wave of screams. I looked back just in time to see darkness spilling from one of the gigantic trees nearest the house.
Roots sprang free from the earth, spitting mud and stone, and as I watched in horror, long black tendrils latched onto the corner of Briarcourt and began climbing up its walls.
Whatever had held back the Knotwood was gone, and now this wild, gods-crafted forest was waking up.
I turned away and bolted down the road. My stomach turned at the sounds I heard. Each one painted a vivid picture of crumbling stone, collapsing towers, shrieking people, and a hungry forest knitting itself closed around the Briarcourt grounds.
I knew what happened when the Middlemist broke past its boundaries, as it had done a little more every day over the past few months.
The land it consumed became Mistland—gray and sunless, unpredictable, and vulnerable to Olden invasion.
Those who didn’t make it out of Briarcourt in time could end up facing unimaginable horrors in the depths of those woods.
Neave peered past my arm. “They’re helping,” she murmured. Her eyes were cloudy, her lips white. “Your friends are helping. How do I know that?”
“You’re dreaming,” I told her. “Go back to sleep.”
But her words made my throat tighten. They’re helping. My sisters, my friends.
My Gareth.
Neave could have been delirious, but I knew in my heart that she was right.
Of course they were trying to help as many people escape as they could.
I might have done the same if I were them.
The Warden would have scolded me for it.
Unnecessary heroics was what she called that sort of thing.
Our lives, she always told us, were too precious for us to take needless risks.
Keep to the mission. You cannot save everyone.
And she was right. Nevertheless, it was torment to run away from the others.
Part of me wanted to toss this girl I neither knew nor loved into the bracken and tear back up the road to make sure all five of them survived.
I would carry them on my back if I had to.
I would blaze a new fiery road through the trees and stun the Knotwood in its tracks.
But instead I gritted my teeth and kept running.
The trees on either side of me shrank from monstrous to simply tall.
Soon they were gone, and it was just Neave and me alone on the road, with Briarcourt behind us and open country ahead.
The horizon was white, the sky thick and gray. It had begun to snow.
***
Neave was light, but she didn’t weigh nothing, and as far as I could tell, no one was following us.
So, forty miles into my run, I stopped beside a small creek to stretch my legs and dunk my head into the icy water. Even though the air was cold and the snow came thickly, my muscles were warm, limber, and happy, and the exercise had cleared my mind.
I considered Neave while I wrung out my hair and twisted it into a tight knot.
She was a pitiful sight, hardly more than a bundle of knobby elbows and scarred legs.
I wished I’d thought to snatch someone’s coat before fleeing Briarcourt.
My body was hot enough to warm her as we ran, but she deserved to wear something more dignified than the nightgown of her imprisonment.
I squatted beside her and brushed the dark hair off her face.
It was chin length and jaggedly cut, most likely hacked to pieces by Eldric Lemaire’s knife.
She reminded me of Alastrina Bask. After her time in Mhorghast, Alastrina had looked like this—as if all the good, strong pieces of who she’d been had been cut away.
According to Ryder, her time recuperating at the estate of Gemma’s friend Illaria Farrow was the only thing that had brought some life back into her eyes.
“Lily?” I said. “I need you to listen to me.” When she didn’t respond, I lightly pushed her. “Wake up, Lily. This is important.”
Her eyelids fluttered open. “That’s not my name.”
“What is your name, then?”
I waited, but all she could do was frown at me.
“I don’t know,” she mumbled. “It’s far away.”
“Excellent. I’m Mara. Nice to meet you, Faraway.”
A flutter of irritation crossed her face. “That’s not my name.”
“It will have to do. Listen carefully. We’re going to start running again, and we won’t stop for a long time. Do you remember when you told me that my friends were helping?”
She stared at me, but it was obvious she wasn’t really seeing me. Her pale hazel eyes swam with specks of bright gold.
“I do,” she replied, her voice quiet but steady. “Your sisters and their lovers. Your lover.” She touched my cheek. Realization dawned in her eyes. “Kerezen.”
I grabbed on to her wrist, as if that would somehow keep her with me. “Neave? Can you hear me?”
The shadow of another face flickered across her features. “You are my sister’s daughter.”
Her solemn proclamation chilled me. “I am, and I need you to stay with me, all right? I need you to keep watch as I run. I’m going to run faster now, and I’ll need to put all my energy into that.
It’s possible someone might come after us on the road.
If you sense anyone coming toward us with ill intent, tell me at once. Do you understand?”
“Ill intent?”
She was fading. Neave was fading. The gold in her eyes dimmed; her voice wavered.
“Ill intent means that someone wants to hurt us,” I said.
She nodded, her gaze distant. “And he does. He wants to very much.”
My blood turned to ice, then fire. “Who does?”
“Him.”
I was loath to say his name. “I need more than that.”
“He Who Is All,” she replied. Her unseeing gaze lifted to mine. “Kilraith. He seeks with many arms, and many eyes, and all of them are cruel.”
“What do you see? Is he coming after us?”
“He comes,” she said, her voice lowering, “with ill intent.”
“How far away is he?”
“Faraway. That is my name, not his.”
I nearly slapped her. The clouded look in her eyes was terrible. “How close is he?”
But as soon as I asked the question, I felt the answer myself.
The ground began to shake, a faint tremor that neither of my sisters would have noticed.
A sour charge filled the air, like the scent of lightning.
And then, from perhaps a few miles behind us, came sounds I knew well: a glottal roar, an avian shriek, and the hard, swift gallop of paws and hooves.
Chimaera. Ten of them. I cocked my head, listening. Three avian, two ursine, four lupine, one feline. And they weren’t alone. From somewhere behind them came a deep, slow rumble like a rolling wave, and suddenly Kilraith’s voice slithered out of my memories.
You are certainly interesting, he’d told me.
On that night in Mhorghast, when my sisters and I had retrieved the egg anchor, when Ankaret had come at Farrin’s call and destroyed it—and herself—we’d first had to play Kilraith’s cruel games of illusion.
Farrin had navigated a replica of Ivyhill; Gemma and Talan had once again fought through the dark hallways of Talan’s childhood home, Brimgard.
And I, with Nesset at my side, had faced the trials of my childhood.
On the shores of a false Lake Voroth, I’d endured dozens of trials, stabbed Kilraith’s illusion of Petra dozens of times.
Everything I’d done to try and change her fate had failed.
And when I’d stood over her dead body for the final time, stone paving my insides cold, Petra’s eyes had opened, and a smile that was not the one I remembered had spread across her face.
“You are certainly interesting,” she’d said in Kilraith’s smooth voice. “I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered a creature who despises herself so completely.”
Then her smile had widened. “Except perhaps myself. Kindred spirits, you and I.”