Chapter 39
The attic was empty except for the three anchors, my sisters, and me. Talan and Ryder stood guard outside the door, and a small detachment of Lower Army soldiers patrolled the floor below.
We arranged the anchors into a triangle, then sat around them in one of our own.
“Shapes are very helpful to me,” Ankaret had said before the transference began.
We’d spoken with her for well over an hour about how she had destroyed the egg anchor in Mhorghast. “Think of shapes, and make them, both in your minds and with your bodies, as often as you can. Magic becomes more pliable when it’s tidy. It enjoys being organized.”
I thought of her voice now, how pleasant and confident it had sounded—a welcome alternative to the thunder outside. The onslaught of chimaera hadn’t paused for a second. Constant vibrations shook the house, thrumming like discordant music in my bones. But there was still no sign of Kilraith.
I couldn’t decide if that was comforting or terrifying.
“Remember what Ankaret said,” Farrin murmured, a lilt to her words. “She is a child of the gods, and so are we. If she can destroy these anchors, we can too.”
I caught Gemma’s eye, saw the same doubt I felt flicker over her face. I didn’t much like that reasoning now, and I hadn’t when Ankaret had said it either. We were merely demigods; Ankaret was a creature that defied classification.
But neither of us voiced our fears, instead waiting for Farrin to begin.
Her song started slowly, softly, a mere hum in the back of her throat. She sounded content, even a bit distracted, like she was absently singing to herself while lounging in bed and we weren’t being attacked from all sides by an angry Olden army.
Then a melody began to take shape. At first it sounded like the kind of rudimentary tune a child might practice when learning to play an instrument.
But then the simple song started growing, just as Farrin had said it would during our practice sessions.
She sang a little louder with each passing note, her voice clear and sweet.
The straightforward progression of melody remained essentially the same, but each repetition was a more complex variation of the previous one.
A little predictable, but with slight embellishments here and there—a trill, a modulation. Tidy shapes.
I held my breath until Farrin gave a single serene nod. Our cue.
As one, we reached for the key. The scarred skin of my taloned left hand shivered a little.
I would never forget the shape of this thing, the weight of it in my fingers as I’d ripped it out of that poisonous yellow moss.
We’d decided unanimously to begin with this anchor.
Gareth’s theory was that I’d already weakened it when I’d extracted it from the fae tree; his team had found it much easier to examine than both the crown and goblet.
They could manipulate its elaborate engravings, which all the ytheliad anchors had in common, as easily as sifting through a pile of stones.
The second our fingers touched the dull metal, the key flared to life.
Brilliant blue light outlined every shape carved into its surface, and it grew hot to the touch.
The cords of my sisters’ powers twined with my own, each of us tugging the key in a different direction.
I tempered my strength to match theirs, and soon we reached a perfect equilibrium, held immobile by the opposing forces of each other’s power.
As Farrin’s cheerful song continued, filling the room and my body with a balmy feeling that was almost peaceful, I focused on the image I wished to make real: the key coming apart neatly in our hands. Three sisters, three clean pieces.
I couldn’t measure the time, too absorbed by my task.
Perhaps five minutes passed, maybe ten. I imagined my power as a roaring fire within me, one that would never burn out, and then I imagined drawing upon that fire, channeling its heat and light through my fingers and into the key.
I thought of little Farrin building a tower of blocks on a blanket, how easily and softly they would clatter to the floor.
I thought of little Gemma carefully lifting a wedge of pie from its dish, determined not to dislodge a single crumb.
My body felt warm and supple, perfectly aligned with my sisters.
And then, without warning, the key softly came apart in our hands. Three sisters, three tidy pieces. We froze, hardly daring to breathe, as they dissolved, coating our palms with cold glittering ash.
“We did it,” Gemma whispered. Her eyes shone as she looked between Farrin and me. “We did it, my darlings. And I feel fine, don’t you?”
“I do, though I’m also a bit baffled,” Farrin replied. She examined her hands, the ash glinting softly on her palms. “That was too easy. It shouldn’t have been that easy.”
“And why not? We’re stronger than we’ve ever been, and we knew this one would be easy after what Mara did to it.”
“We hoped it would,” I said. I glanced at the goblet, which still stood innocuously where we’d placed it.
One of Gareth’s tracking teams had found it in the woods just outside the northern Mistlands, which had struck me as oddly convenient.
But when nothing terrible had happened and no hostiles had tracked the goblet to Fairhaven and invaded, I’d eventually moved past my suspicions.
But now there was the matter of this unexpected ease.
It all made me think that someone had wanted us to find the goblet, and that maybe whoever it was wanted us to do exactly what we were doing now.
I shook myself a little. Such thoughts were of no help to anyone.
“Maybe Ankaret’s presence has weakened their structural integrity,” I mused.
“And the excess of magic bleeding out from the transference,” Gemma added, “and all the work the librarians have already done. Gareth said this might happen.”
He had, and all of this did make logical sense. Still, I felt uneasy.
“Yes,” Farrin said, “that must be it.” Her worried gaze flicked up to mine.
I took a moment to stretch my senses past the attic—to Talan and Ryder standing guard, to the soldiers patrolling beneath us, to the lawn and our soldiers and the chimaera still throwing themselves tirelessly against the wards.
The portals still hovered in the air, casting an orange glow over the canyon, but nothing more emerged from them.
Another lucky thing that made my feathers bristle with warning.
“We should keep going,” I decided. Maybe the answer really was as simple as Ankaret’s nearness enfeebling the anchors’ metal. Maybe she was even consciously helping us somehow.
My sisters agreed, and Farrin began her song.
It was identical to the first one in both melody and rhythm—pleasantly predictable, pleasantly ordered.
As it moved over us and through us, the air thrumming with our joined power, I thought of the same images of tumbling blocks, a tidy wedge of pie, and my sisters, small and careful, content.
Simplicity, urged the sweet timbre of Farrin’s song. Softness. Unlatch. Unmake.
Gemma gasped softly, and a second later, the goblet cracked in three. The light outlining its carvings disappeared, the hot metal went cold, and soon another layer of ashes coated our hands.
We stared at each other in bewildered silence. Even Gemma, with all her cheerful optimism, looked surprised.
“All right, then,” she said, a little uncertainly.
She glanced at the crown, which now sat alone in the center of our triangle.
It had always been the most fearsome-looking anchor, with those sharp spikes and the three jewels like eyes.
The Man with the Three-Eyed Crown. It seemed like ages since we’d been to Brimgard, where Gemma had torn the crown from Talan’s head and broken his bondage to Kilraith.
I took a deep breath. There was no sense in delaying this, no logic in fearing this dead metal thing. “Farrin—”
Her name disappeared in an explosion of sound and a burst of brilliant light. The house jolted around us; the light outside was suddenly a sinister flood of orange.
I hurried toward the windows, dread high in my throat, already knowing what I would see.
What met my eyes was even worse than I expected: the shell of ward magic still stood in place around Big Deep, but the surface of it had shattered like thin ice.
And the chimaera were no longer alone. Titans, fae, furiants with their flashing fists, nymphs wielding spirals of fire and water, griffins with wingspans twice as large as mine—Kilraith’s army had in its ranks every kind of Olden being I’d ever faced.
I watched them pour out of the portals hovering in the sky only long enough to see a wind titan dive straight for the wards.
Tall, thin, and pale, with eyes like lightning and fists swirling with cyclones, it rammed into the wall of magic so hard that a dozen fresh cracks appeared in its surface.
I watched our armies hurry into formation with a pit in my stomach. We’d prepared for this. We’d known it would happen. And yet our soldiers seemed suddenly pitiful in the face of all this Olden glory. We needed Caiathos. We needed Neave.
We needed Mother.
And we needed my sisters.
And me.
I hurried back to them, my blood roaring with the desire to leap out the window and tear across the lawn into battle.
I said nothing; they could see everything they needed to know on my face and hear it in the din from outside.
Either Kilraith remained strong enough to control that army even with only two anchors left to him, or all those Oldens were just as determined to crush us even with Kilraith’s will weakened.
Or Kilraiths’ will hadn’t been weakened at all.
Our plan was in shambles. Every decision that had led us here seemed suddenly, fatally foolish.
I looked fiercely at Farrin. Begin.