Chapter 41
Ryder looked down at his sister in astonishment.
“Trina,” he whispered. “The transference worked?”
“Beautifully,” she replied. “Though Neave and I have a lot to work on together once this is all over. She’s very respectful but is also rather, ah, emphatic about her opinions.”
“Sounds like someone else I know,” Ryder said, his eyes bright.
Alastrina looked at him keenly for a moment before pulling him into a fierce embrace.
“I’m all right, little brother,” she said, an incredible tenderness in her rich new voice.
“Everything’s going to be just fine, I promise you.
And don’t worry about Lily,” she added. “She will heal, and she will live. And once all of this is over?” A cold smile curled her lips.
“Neave and I will make sure to visit the people who hurt her.”
I could no longer contain myself. I felt wild, like I might soon combust. “And Gareth, is he all right?”
“He’s gone to look for his mother, who has disappeared, apparently, the troublesome old bat.” Alastrina took a second look at me, then touched my arm and offered me a little smile. “He’s perfectly fine, Mara. And he was brilliant in there. I’ve never seen a mind quite like his.”
I let out a shaky breath, blinking back tears and unable to speak. He was alive, he was alive. My brilliant, brave Gareth.
Suddenly the air shifted around us, blooming with heat. Farrin had her arms around a small, pale figure wreathed in fire.
Ankaret.
Her bright blue gaze was fixed on the horizon, where the Mist-cloaked figure of Kilraith was growing larger by the second.
I couldn’t read the guarded expression on her face.
The transference had aged her; lines around her mouth and eyes made her look tired, but her fire still snapped as brightly as it ever had.
“The rest of you stay here,” she murmured. “I’ll keep him away from the battle.”
Alastrina frowned. “After what you’ve just been through, you can’t possibly face him alone.”
Ankaret kissed Farrin’s forehead, released her, and turned to look at Alastrina with fire snapping in her eyes.
“Come after me, and I’ll knock you back here without a second thought.
I have surpassed you, and I have surpassed him.
I am the last of your age and the first of the new one.
” She took a breath, a wave of exhaustion passing over her face, and then said quietly, “Help these people fighting for the world you created, Neave. I’ll do the rest.”
Then she left us, tearing down the lawn even faster than I could’ve managed.
Each light, leaping stride was at least fifty feet long.
Sparks flew in her wake, her path blasting a wave of hot air across the battlefield, and by the time she reached the edge of the canyon, her human form was gone.
The firebird of Mhorghast burned in its place, wings bright as the sun.
She dove off the cliff’s edge and streaked toward Kilraith at breakneck speed.
For a moment none of us could move, frozen in awe. Ankaret’s fiery form grew as she flew, the beat of her wings stoking her own flames.
Kilraith picked up speed, his own wings seething with storms and spreading out wide, throwing the canyon into darkness. He let out a deafening howl of despair, of fury. And then, far out over the canyon, perhaps two miles away, they crashed into each other—light and dark, fire and shadow.
In the story Farrin had told us after Mhorghast, the Unmaking—the death of the gods—had created Ankaret and Kilraith and sent them plummeting to Edyn like comets through the stars.
Now, centuries upon centuries later, they battled above the canyon like two monsters out of a nightmare.
Ankaret hurled a wave of fire at Kilraith.
He raced toward her with his huge beaked mouth gaping open and engulfed her in darkness.
She punched her way out of the shadows, scooped sunlight out of the morning sky, and flung it at him like a harpoon.
He dove into the canyon’s red earth and emerged with a huge slab of stone in each shadowy hand.
He launched them at her; she dodged them and flew back toward him, a streak of fire in the sky.
I tore my gaze away from them, my heart racing and my stomach sick with a primal, childlike fear. It wasn’t possible to understand what I was seeing, to truly grasp the enormity of it. They were too alien, too mighty. Even the gods felt more familiar.
Ryder spat out a curse. “The Mist.”
It roiled toward us like a surging ocean, flooding the canyon with that swirling silver-gray I knew so well.
Out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed Brigid, Cira, and the other Roses in formation as they battled a group of fire nymphs.
Above them, a shrieking Freyda battled a small avian chimaera with two sets of naked wings.
I flew over to my fellow Roses, ducking the nymphs’ arcing fireballs, and grabbed Brigid’s arm.
“Split up as soon as you can!” I shouted. “One Rose for each army division. Don’t let them face this alone!”
I jerked my head at the Mist, which would be on us in seconds. Brigid, sweaty and blood-splattered and fierce-eyed, nodded grimly.
“Understood!” she shouted back, before spinning around to swipe her talons across the chest of a snarling fire nymph.
I took off through the resulting shower of blood and embers, darting back up the lawn with the Mist at my heels.
It overtook me in seconds, and as soon as it engulfed me, all the sounds of battle warped into strangeness—muffled one moment, blaring loud the next.
The Mist whispered and hissed, choking the air like smoke.
It brought storms along with it. Cold rain spat hard as nails, thunder boomed overhead, lightning crackled through the battlefield like snakes of white fire.
A bolt zipped right in front of me and slammed into a nearby soldier.
An instant later the scent of burned flesh stung my nose.
I raced blindly toward the house, helping no one. I should have followed my own orders and fought alongside a Lower Army battalion. Among our troops, they were the most vulnerable to the Mist, the most fragile.
But I ignored every single one of my training instincts, defied all those years of duty and responsibility and sacrifice the Warden had drilled into me.
I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t. I had to find Gareth.
I’d waited long enough, and if I could simply hold him for a moment, even just set eyes on him and reassure myself that he was in one piece—then I’d return to battle, and I wouldn’t stop fighting until the end.
By the time I reached the house, the battlefield was in ruins, turned into a giant mud flat by the relentless rain.
A chimaera sprang out of the Mist, heading right toward me.
I ducked its huge arcing body and then whirled about in the air and knocked it to the ground with a swipe of one feathered arm.
A new enemy came at me every few seconds. A furiant used its brilliant fists to tear away a whole section of the house’s roof and fling it at me like a discus.
A fae with golden skin and silver eyes ran at me with a spear in hand and whacked me across the shoulders with it.
My knees buckled, and I fell hard into the mud.
I rolled out of the way right before the spear plunged into the ground, then spun around to kick the fae’s legs out from under him and wrestled him in the mud.
His punches jabbed me in the chest and stomach, leaving me gasping.
I managed to slice one of my talons across his midsection, and when he reeled back, clutching the wound, I got my hands around his gleaming silver head and snapped his neck.
I pushed myself up, panting and covered in mud, and looked around wildly. How in the name of the fucking gods was I supposed to find Gareth in this chaos?
There was Alastrina, charging into a line of armored fae with an entire stampede of birds and wolves behind her. Mother and Father fought together back-to-back, surrounded by a circle of snarling, muscular lycans that were proving no match for them.
I looked away quickly, a boiling black anger suddenly tightening my throat.
Every feeling I had for them was in conflict.
I was glad they were alive, but I hated how happy they looked, how they fought together so seamlessly after all these years apart.
I longed to go fight them, show off all I’d learned.
I hoped they would disappear after this battle was over, go spend years gazing adoringly at each other somewhere even more hidden than Wardwell so I’d never have to see them again.
Focus, Mara.
Gemma and Talan flanked Caiathos, guarding him as he wrangled the Mist’s storms. He looked much calmer now, more settled in his host’s skin, dignified even in the tattered rags of his captivity.
He raised his muscular brown arms to the skies and parted the rain as if it were curtains.
When a lightning bolt shot down toward him, he grabbed it in one hand and wrestled it into the shape of a sword.
A slithering reptilian chimaera leapt for Gemma, but she tore a root from the wet earth and lashed the chimaera with it like a whip, cutting the creature in half.
Another one bounded up after it, but Talan intercepted it before it even got close to my sister and beheaded it with one savage swing of his sword.
Farrin’s singing underscored everything.
I couldn’t see her in the gloom, but her voice was strong and shrill, reminding me of a Rose’s battle cry.
Ryder would be with her; Ryder would let nothing touch her.
As I raced around the house, searching for Gareth, my sister’s music poured strength into my limbs, soothing my panic.
Courage, it told me, told us all. No storm, no hissing Mist, no shrieking chimaera could dim the glory of her voice.
Then, at last—
I found him.
He was running down the back lawn toward the river.
My breath caught when he slipped in the mud and fell face first into the slop.
But he wasn’t alone; his friends from the university were with him, helping him back to his feet.
I started flying after them, heedless of anything but him.
What was he running toward? He should have been in the house, or at least with some Upper Army soldiers or beguilers from the transference—some kind of defense, any kind.
Squinting through the storm, I found my answer.
Lady Fontaine stood near the edge of a cliff, ankle-deep in mud.
Not far from her, the roaring river poured over the cliff into the canyon.
She was fighting a trio of stone nymphs, returning the rocks they hurled with some of her own.
My mother is a stone elemental, Gareth had told me as we’d sparred at Rosewarren.
A stone elemental and a captain in the Upper Army—but now, years later, she was a sloppy, unfocused mess.
Her aim consistently went wide; a nymph’s hurtling stone caught her on the shoulder and sent her tumbling into the mud.
The fool. If she wasn’t careful, what with all this rain and mud, and the river roaring so close by—if she didn’t stop scooping up boulders so near the cliff’s edge—she’d cause a landslide and bury herself in sludge.
I didn’t like the woman, but I certainly didn’t want Gareth’s only remaining family member to die.
I’d almost caught up with him when a voice rang out.
Mara.
The sound was so loud it felt like it was coming from inside me. I stopped, hovering above the ruins of a shattered pine. No one around me seemed to have heard the voice. The battle raged on undisturbed.
Mara, I need you.
My heart sank. I knew that voice. It belonged to Ankaret.
I looked back toward the river. Upper Army soldiers had engaged the nymphs, drawing them away from Lady Fontaine.
Gareth and his friends were still running toward her through the storm.
Stupid, brave, dear Gareth, with his shirt plastered to his skin and his trousers coated with mud.
The back of his neck was bare and unprotected; the sight of that little patch of skin tugged at my heart. He didn’t even have a sword.
Mara, hurry.
Ankaret’s voice was more urgent now, a note of panic inside it. I couldn’t ignore her. Gareth would never want me to abandon the larger fight. He would never even think me capable of it.
You’re so full of goodness that you lift up everyone around you simply by existing.
My brave Mara.
I’d seen him, just as I’d wanted to. That would have to be enough.
I turned away from him, hardly able to swallow around the tight lump in my throat, and flew through the Mist toward the sound of Ankaret’s voice.