Chapter 42 #2
Kilraith stared at her as if she’d struck him. My breath hitched when I saw his face.
“You can’t imagine,” he said hoarsely. “I thought I would die. I wish I had.”
She drew him to her, shifting them both so that his back faced the spot where I hovered, uncertain and overwhelmed. I began to think that maybe I understood why she had called for me.
“You could have come to me.” She touched her forehead to his. “Why didn’t you come to me?”
“You were with them. The humans.” His voice twisted on the word. “They’d gotten their claws into you. You loved them so much you’d forgotten who you really were. I had to destroy them.”
“Destroying people I loved? This was how you hoped to awaken me?”
“And it worked. You became yourself again. And now look at you.” He stepped back to regard her, their hands joined. “As you were born. As you were meant to be.”
Ankaret was quiet for a moment. The firebird at her back dimmed slightly, bowing its bright head.
“So much anger in you,” she said sadly. “Tormenting the gods who made you. Tormenting the creatures they made. Our kindred. And yet you would see them slaughtered. You would destroy everything that keeps them safe and watch two worlds obliterate each other.”
“No, Ankaret,” he rasped, his eyes glinting. “The Olden world will triumph, and the human world will fall. Don’t you see? It is the greatest final punishment we can deal the gods who made us and then abandoned us. The humans are not worthy of your love.”
“And you are? You, who have battled me as if I am just as much your enemy as they are?”
“I never intended to kill you. I only wanted you to understand what must be done. And you keep fighting me, Ankaret. These humans have poisoned you against me. Would you truly choose them over me?”
Ankaret’s sadness hit me as surely as if she’d struck me. She stepped back from Kilraith and said, “Choose them over the man I loved? Never. But you are not the man I loved. You’re right. The man I loved is dead.”
Then, so quickly it took me a moment to understand what I was seeing, the firebird surged forward, engulfing Ankaret’s body, and plunged her fiery wings into Kilraith’s chest.
I cannot do this alone.
Her voice resounded through my head, and the despair in it left me reeling.
But at any moment Kilraith could recover from his shock and fight back, and his fury would overpower her sadness, and this time his sword would not miss.
I saw it all unfolding in my mind like a bad dream, and I could not allow it to happen.
So I flew at them, right at Kilraith’s back, which Ankaret had presented to me so helpfully. I’d done this before, I told myself, or at least something similar—with my sisters, I’d torn apart the host body housing Jaetris and revealed the gilded egg of Mhorghast.
But this was different. This was not a feeble human body barely held together by an exhausted and tortured god.
This was Kilraith at his full strength, and I didn’t have my sisters at my side.
I had only the Mist at my back, and Ankaret’s licking fire, and the power that lived inside me, which I drew upon with every scrap of will I possessed.
In the instant before my talons hit Kilraith’s body, a single thought occurred to me: This will hurt.
Then I slammed into him, my talons sinking into his flesh like knives into hot butter.
The dark bird of shadows overhead thrashed in anger, lightning shooting out from his wings to coil like whips around my forearms, and Kilraith’s scream was so loud that it nearly made me lose my grip.
But somehow I kept going, pressing my talons deeper and deeper into his body, until I felt the burn of Ankaret’s fire against my skin.
The pain was searing, unthinkable. My vision went white. And in my desperation, the only thing I could think of—the only thing left to me—were the four precious syllables of my sisters’ names.
Gemma.
Farrin.
I called out to them with everything I was—every muscle, every breath, every memory.
I imagined us as the women of mere moments ago, tearing apart a crown in an empty attic as everyone we loved fought nearby.
I imagined us as the children we had once been.
Three little girls, hand-in-hand-in-hand, running through the gardens of Ivyhill and shrieking with joy, because we were playing hide-and-seek with our parents, and they were so clever with their hiding spots, but we would find them all the same.
When we were together, we could do anything. We were unstoppable.
And then, as I clung to these images in my mind, my sisters, remarkably, answered me.
I felt them hear my call, and I heard them respond with their every muscle, every breath, every memory. Something had happened in that attic, something new and wonderful. Destroying the anchors together had formed new cords of power between us, connecting us in ways I didn’t understand.
Images unfurled before me, beside me, within me.
I saw Gemma on the great house’s steps, helping Caiathos stand as Talan held them both, lending them his strength.
I saw Farrin, singing tirelessly on the ruined lawn as Ryder shielded her with his body and his sword.
And though they were fighting their own battles, they were also there beside me, helping me fight mine.
I’m here, came Gemma’s voice.
You aren’t alone, came Farrin’s.
I sensed their bewilderment as keenly as I felt my own. How this was happening, and if it would last, none of us knew. Maybe this vivid connection would fade; maybe it was only the union of Ankaret and Kilraith, the violence of their power, that gave it life.
But for now it was real, and it was ours.
My mind touched my sisters’ minds, and their memories opened to me in a cascade of colors and sounds.
I was Gemma, wrenching the Three-Eyed Crown from Talan’s head, my heart breaking to hear his anguished cries.
I was Farrin, navigating Kilraith’s version of Ivyhill, desperate to find Ryder somewhere in the flames.
The echoes of their pain, their anger, their helplessness, turned my bones to steel.
I understood now what had to be done. I couldn’t let go of Kilraith—not for a second, not for a breath—even though his anger, and Ankaret’s fire, was searing my skin. I had to hold open his ruined body and keep him from thrashing away. I had to give Ankaret time to destroy him from the inside out.
We’re right here, said Farrin, her voice as clear as a bell in my mind.
We won’t let you go, said Gemma, fierce and close, as if she were right beside me.
When I forced my eyes open against the scorching air, I no longer saw Ankaret’s familiar pale form. I could see only the firebird pouring itself into the bloody maw of Kilraith’s mutilated chest. His arms lit up, his legs, the shreds of his torso. Every vein turned a scorching bright gold.
“Kill me,” he said faintly, the sound nearly lost beneath the firebird’s roaring flames. “Yes, my Ankaret. Kill me. Let’s make her rage. Let’s ruin her.”
Her. The word slipped into my pain-fogged mind and right out again.
Listen to me, Ankaret said. All three of you, listen.
Her voice was suddenly right beside me. No apology there, no regret.
Only a command, and I felt my sisters listening too.
I will not leave any of you. Not yet. Not until everything is finished, and there is so much left to do.
Do not fear, no matter what you see. I am stronger than him.
I am everything he should have been and more.
Thank you for helping me. I could not have done this alone. I could not have borne it.
Just do it, I wanted to scream at her, and hurry. But I couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even be sure that I was still alive.
You are alive. Gemma.
And then Farrin: You’re so strong, Mara.
As I watched, tears streaming down my face, Ankaret’s fire filled Kilraith completely, consuming everything he was and everything he had once been.
I watched him light up from the inside—every bone, every vein, every hair incandescent with flame—until I could see nothing of the body I’d helped rend apart.
The bird of shadows and storms was gone.
The images of their memories disappeared. All that was left was fire.
Suddenly everything grew quiet. I could hear nothing—not the battle, not my sisters, not even the sound of my own screams.
Then an explosion at my fingertips threw me across the canyon. I rolled to a stop on a flat stretch of pebbled earth, pushed myself up with shaking arms, and looked behind me in a frantic daze.
Ankaret and Kilraith were gone. In their place was a huge black gash in the earth, up from which drifted a single column of smoke.
Numbly I inspected my body, but I was unhurt—no burns, no blisters. Only a bright pink tinge to my skin, a faint sizzling sound in my ears, and a few scratches from where I’d hit the ground.
Gemma? I thought, shaking my head a little. Farrin?
But they didn’t answer; whatever power had joined us was gone, or at least exhausted.
For a moment I could only sit there in astonishment. Then my panicked mind came screaming back to me.
Gareth. Get Gareth.
Gareth’s mother, standing near the cliff, fighting with mud and stone.
Gareth, running right toward her.
I staggered to my feet and launched myself into the air through a wave of dizziness.
I had no sense of how much time had passed since I’d left him on those cliffs.
It couldn’t have been long, I told myself, rounding a bend in the canyon.
The Mist was still thick, shrouding the cliffs in silver.
Maybe Gareth was right where I’d left him.
Comets and gods and a purple-skied otherworld—nothing was impossible anymore.
Maybe days had passed for me and only seconds for him.
Then the house finally came into view, and everything inside me went quiet and still.
An entire section of the cliffs near the river was gone. A landslide of rocks and mud had cascaded down the ruined cliff face from Big Deep’s lawn to the river below.
And lying on the riverbank, a bright red gash on his forehead and his lower half buried in rubble, was Gareth.