Chapter 29
At first I was afraid she wouldn’t come. In a single instant of icy fear, I thought a hundred things: the feather was a lie, Ankaret’s strange friendship was a lie, I was foolish to have trusted her. I was wrong about what I’d seen at the capital. She hadn’t beaten Kilraith; he had beaten her, and now she was dead.
But then there was a distant boom like a far-off explosion, and the ground began to shake. Kilraith—all four of him—shifted forms. He was a great bird of storms and shadows with eyes like lightning; he was a roaring column of darkness; he was a whirling fist of night sky; he was a bear chimaera with a crescent-moon smile. And then he was a man—tall and bare-armed, as Talan had described his appearance on the night they’d first met. He wore a fine vest and trousers, gloves and gauntlets, and an onyx diadem in his long white hair.
I froze. This was the form he came back to most often amid all the flickering others, this tall, finely built man with skin as white as his hair, angry eyes of violet and gold, and, on his forehead, a bright starburst scar.
I didn’t have time to work through my shock, for suddenly she was there, streaking down out of the sky in a cascade of fire. Ankaret.
Kilraith roared with fury and rose to meet her, his voice warping as he shifted between his many shuddering forms. The elegant body of the white-haired man stretched and darkened, becoming the massive winged creature I’d seen at the capital. He shot up into the air and crashed into Ankaret. Their eyes flickered—eyes of lightning, eyes of blue fire. The tremendous impact knocked us all off our feet.
A distant wave of terrified cries rose up underneath the cacophony of their fight—all Mhorghast’s spectators, still distant, now screaming. The shapes of their assembled crowds flickered in and out of sight at the corners of my eyes. The illusion that hid them was buckling.
“Gemma!” I cried. “Mara!”
I ran for Jaetris and heard my sisters, Talan, and Nesset close behind me. I sang as I ran, still the cheerful rondo, my steps as light as each twirling note. Distract him , I thought, charging my song with the command. Hide us. A song of deception, a plea for protection. Ankaret. I laced her name into the notes of an upward bend in the melody, as light and brilliant as her fiery feet upon the ground.
Ryder, Gareth, and Father still lay bound, their bodies frozen in agony. It killed me to run past them, to leave them to whatever torment Kilraith had devised for them, but our time was short. I didn’t know how long Ankaret would be able to hold off Kilraith; every second seemed to race faster than the one before it.
We reached Jaetris on his throne. When his tired gold eyes slid over to look at me, I felt the instinctual urge to kneel before him in reverence. But instead I steeled myself against the might of him and stood fast. Even bound and at Kilraith’s mercy as he was, his presence made my skin buzz.
“Talan, Nesset, keep watch,” Gemma said sharply. “Anyone or anything who comes near—”
“I’ll make them think they’re skipping through a meadow without a care in the world,” Talan replied pleasantly. “Nudge them right past us.”
“And I’ll tear out their throats with my teeth,” Nesset spat. She crouched, lithe and battle-ready, and then a wave of warmth rippled through the air as Talan called upon his demonic power. Right before my eyes, he shifted into a horned chimaera, scaly, cat-faced, prowling. I thought of what he’d told us about the many forms Kilraith had forced him to take while he was bound to him, how his cruel parents had transformed into the shapes of whatever had most terrified their victims. The greater demons were beings of deception and illusion, descendants of Jaetris and Zelphenia—god of the mind, goddess of the unknowable.
I turned back to Jaetris, who watched Talan with bland interest. Beyond and above him, the sky rippled. I tried not to think about how many Olden beings were lurking just past the range of our vision, ready to strike.
“Jaetris, god of the mind,” I said, “where is the egg that binds you to the creature Kilraith?”
He didn’t answer. He stared with bleary eyes at the warring shapes of Kilraith and Ankaret in the sky.
I shot Mara a silent plea. She was the one used to prying information out of people.
Grim-faced, she approached him. “Jaetris, tell us where it is,” she commanded. “We can destroy it. We can free you.”
That got his attention. Slowly he looked up at her and let out a thin, wheezing laugh.
“You?” He took in all three of us—our shining skin, our lustrous hair, the gold flecks in our eyes. Unimpressed, he chewed on his cracked lip and let his eyes drift closed. “Leave me,” he moaned.
Gemma tried next. She knelt before him and placed a hand on each of his. “Uncle,” she said softly. “Hear me. Hear us. Come out of the place where he’s put you.” Her fingers glowed a faint blue white as she gently probed him with her power, just as she’d done to pull the Three-Eyed Crown out of Talan. The scars on her hand lit up like stars.
Shadows shifted across Jaetris’s gnarled face. Tiny green vines sprouted at his heels and climbed up curiously to show him their budding faces.
He sneered down at Gemma. “How dare you,” he gasped. “Uncle?” Then, trembling violently with the effort, he knocked her back with a sharp jut of his chin. She flew several feet before slamming into the ground. Talan slunk over to her at once and nudged her upright with his massive horned head.
That display of power had taxed Jaetris. He slumped back against his throne, even thinner and grayer, as if entire layers of his being had been scraped away by that single swipe. I looked back over my shoulder and saw the brilliant twist of Ankaret spiraling up into the air, Kilraith racing after her in a torrent of black clouds.
An impatient burst of inspiration exploded through me, as quick and hot as Ankaret’s own fire. I grabbed the obsidian-handled dagger from my boot and sliced open my arm. The pain was instant, searing, and for a moment I crouched over the wound, gasping first in shock, then in relieved wonder. My wild guess had been correct.
The blood dripping down my arm was bright red swirled with gold—a human’s blood and the blood of a god, awakened by Mhorghast’s Olden air.
Mara cursed and grabbed for me, but then she saw the sheen of my blood and stopped, staring. I pushed past her, blinking back tears, and slashed open Jaetris’s own arm. His wrinkled skin opened like paper, and out of the thin wound trickled blood so brilliantly gold that it hurt my eyes.
He stared stupidly down at the gash, then blew out a short angry breath. I thrust my own arm at him, showing him the red-gold blood staining my skin.
“You see?” I said angrily. “Uncle indeed. I’m no mere scrabbling human deluding herself with heroic ideas. Your sister’s blood runs in our veins.”
The words were like an incantation. Above, the sky cracked open like thunder. The air shifted violently, cold and angry, and without even turning around I knew that Kilraith was flying toward us. I heard Ankaret’s distant scream. A shock wave of heat rushed past us, nearly knocking me off my feet.
Jaetris was staring at me. Awareness flashed in his gold eyes.
Behind me, Talan growled a warning.
“Whatever you’re doing to do, Ashbourne, do it fast,” Nesset barked.
“We can help you,” I insisted desperately, fighting not to look back over my shoulder. “If you only tell us where it is, we can destroy it.” I bit back my many teeming doubts. Maybe we could destroy it. But it would do no good to admit to him, or to myself, how desperate a hope that was.
A shell of air pulled tight around Jaetris and me. He closed his eyes, his mouth twisting, and then there was a popping snap, deep in my ears. I tottered as if punched, dizzy, but his wizened old hands held me firm. There was a new steadiness in his golden eyes.
“You will have to kill me to get it, child,” he said, his voice thin but firm. “This body must be destroyed. Do not fear. I am more than this form and will come back, though I cannot say when or how. Do you understand?”
No , I wanted to tell him. No, I understand none of this. I was operating on instinct alone, and I felt lightheaded from the loss of blood, but I lied and gasped out, “Yes. I understand.”
“Good. Now, this will hurt. You will live, but you will need much rest afterward. With this body gone, someone needs to know what I know, or else the knowledge will be lost, and I may not remember it all when I return.” He pulled me close. “You must live, daughter of Kerezen. Live, and leave this place. Destroy the anchor. Take my knowledge and run.”
Then he pressed his bleeding arm to mine and grabbed the back of my head, holding me steady. A searing pain rushed into me where our wounds met, and his fingers were like scorching needles piercing my skull. But as soon as I opened my mouth to scream, the pain was gone, and when I opened my eyes, I found myself standing on a vast northern plain.
Images rushed at me too quickly to decipher. I saw five great stars joining together as one over the snowy landscape. A white explosion, too loud and impossible to be heard by anyone but the gods. It bloomed in silence and tore across the world, and when it cleared, the stars were gone, and the snowy plain was a charred ruin of ice and ash.
My heart thundered wildly. I knew in my bones what I had just seen—the Unmaking, the day on which the gods had died and separated the world of Edyn from the Old Country. The destroyed landscape stretching to the horizon in front of me was part of the brutal Unmade Lands in the farthest north, an unpredictable glacial country where no one dared live.
More images came, flying at me like arrows. Each one stole my breath. From the ruin of the unmade gods careened two gleaming silver comets. They arced over the Unmade Lands in opposite directions and disappeared over the horizon. Somehow I was able to follow them with my mind, both at once. One crashed into the sea south of Aidurra, carving a great canyon into the ocean floor before coming to rest far inside the earth. The crash extinguished its light; it was now a mere shadow, indistinguishable from the cold darkness, seething miserably inside the deepest rock the god Caiathos had ever created. It would take some time for the creature to claw its way back to the living world. For now, it raged unheard in the frigid depths of the ocean, where there was no other life. And there it stayed for an age, buried and alone.
The other comet had a softer time of things. It tumbled into the Bay of the Gods on the southwestern coast of Gallinor, and when it hit the water, it didn’t sink or float. It skimmed across the surface like a skipped stone, like glimmering sunlight, and when it came to rest on the shore, it was a twisting, pale thing, a mere wisp of cloud. It pulled itself weakly into a seaside cave, where it became a white flame, shivering in the dark. As it rested in the cavern, the bruised power of all five gods churning in its deepest heart, it discovered it could grow wings, that it could shift and snap like fire, that it could grow monstrously huge if it wanted. It crawled deeper into the cave and discovered a vast network of caverns. Alone, content, it soared over underground lakes, dropping cinders into the black water.
Ankaret.
Her name burned in my mouth, an ember I couldn’t swallow.
And I watched her, Ankaret, as she discovered how to take other forms too—a sleek speckled seal, a cool breeze with no body that whistled through the caves. Her favorite form was that of a young woman, for in the reflection of a dark underground lake, illuminated by her inner light, she could admire the woman’s long hair of sea foam, her delicate bones, the pink starburst scar on her forehead.
And then, on a summer morning bright as diamonds, Ankaret awoke as the woman she had come to adore, remembering nothing else. She was alone in a cave; she was frightened, desperate for sunlight. She walked on shaky legs into the city of Fairhaven. The people who lived there knew at once who she was, what she was. Before she even opened her mouth, they fell prostrate at her feet, weeping with thanks and praise, for the gods were dead and they were afraid.
She knelt before them and gently raised each of their anguished faces to the sky.
“You need be afraid no longer,” she told them, her voice spilling across the land like the dawn. And they named her high queen, and when they asked for her name, she told them what it was, though she couldn’t remember who had named her or what her life had been before she crawled out of the seaside caverns. She had forgotten the name Ankaret, had forgotten falling to the ground as a comet, a remnant of the gods’ Unmaking. And she had no memory of the other comet—the other god relic, her other half—who stewed in deep darkness on the other side of the world.
“I am Yvaine Ballantere,” she told them simply, a name she pulled from her newborn heart and knew to be true. “And the gods have chosen me to protect you.”
I would have crashed to my knees then if Jaetris had let me, but he didn’t. He stood beside me, bearded and old but hale, his eyes glinting.
“We’re running out of time,” he said. The burning pressure on my head and arm heightened.
The images that came at me were like illustrations on the pages of a book being flipped too fast for any human mind to absorb. Shadows and storms, lightning and fire. The Crescent of Storms in Vauzanne. The Knotwood in Aidurra.
The Middlemist, and the glittering streets of Mhorghast.
“You understand now, I trust,” said Jaetris tightly. His face was calm but his eyes were desperate.
Impossibly, I did. The information now crammed into my mind was a mess of colors and feelings, but somewhere in that jumble gleamed a polished stone of truth.
“Hide it,” Jaetris breathed, a note of pity in his voice. “Protect it.”
His body was fading, flickering. I grabbed for his arm. “Wait, please! How do I do that?”
But before he could answer, he was gone, sunken back into the depths of the ytheliad curse that bound him to Kilraith’s will. That he’d been able to fight the curse for long enough to share with me what he had… I shuddered, imagining the agony of it. I held his face in my hands and searched for any lingering glimmer of godly gold, but staring back at me were two ordinary eyes, blank and understanding nothing—the gaze of the horribly unlucky human who’d been born with a god inside him. Imagining my mother in his place—all of Kerezen’s godly power bound to Kilraith while trapped inside the body of the innocent human Philippa Wren—I felt choked with sadness; all of this was so horribly unfair. What was this man’s name? What had his life been before the god in him awakened?
Then a great force threw me back from the throne, and I landed flat on my back. I gasped, seeing stars, and Ryder came into view. His skin was ashen, and his shoulder was bleeding, but his eyes were clear and strong.
“Is it really you?” I said hoarsely. I realized that I was crying. My head hurt so terribly I was convinced it would split open. A shimmering white aura suffused my vision, turning everything dreamy and glittering.
Ryder helped me rise. “Yes, love,” he told me. “It’s me, and I’ve got you.” His hands were warm and familiar. I clung to them, gasping, and leaned hard into the warm mountain of his body.
“We have to kill Jaetris,” I said.
He stared at me. “What?”
“Not him . Just this body.” With Ryder’s help, I staggered toward Gemma and Mara. “The egg… He said we had to kill this body he’s in to get at it. It must be destroyed.” I couldn’t stop crying, everything I’d seen beating on the inside of my skull with iron fists. “He’ll come back, he said, and I believe him.”
Grim and pale, my sisters joined me at the throne. Dimly, as if from a great distance, I realized what was happening all around us. Kilraith’s illusion had crumbled, and now all of Mhorghast was emptying out of the giant arena above us. Father was free and on his feet, a blur of speed. He was fighting a clutch of gray stone-nymphs with white eyes and boulder fists, and past him raced Nesset. With a fierce cry, she jumped onto the back of a fae with skin that gleamed like green jewels. She plucked a long red thorn from the knot of flowers sewing up her cheek and stabbed the fae in the throat. Talan, still in his beastly disguise, tackled a chimaera with plates of bone jutting out of its back. He swiped black claws across its face and sent it tumbling.
“Gareth,” I croaked. “Where’s Gareth?”
“He’s unconscious but alive,” Ryder replied shortly. “I won’t let anyone touch him.”
I had no idea how he could promise me such a thing, but I chose to believe him and turned to my sisters, heart in my throat, pain smashing my temples like battering rams. Two words darted like panicked birds through my mind: Ankaret. Yvaine. Ankaret. Yvaine.
They were the same. They were the same, and she hadn’t told me. Why hadn’t she told me?
“Do we have to kill him in a particular way?” Mara was asking.
I could only stand there, trying desperately to think and blinking back hot, overwhelmed tears. I didn’t how to answer her. From behind us came a scream I thought might belong to Father.
Suddenly Jaetris lurched forward on his throne chest-first, as if someone had thrust a spear into his ribs and yanked him toward them. He let out an agonized scream, horrible, like metal scraping against metal. A cold force pulled at my back as if trying to drag me away along with him. Mara grabbed on to him, her arms glinting like swords. Caught between her sentinel strength and Kilraith’s furious, ravenous will, the gilded throne twisted wildly in place, its back legs tearing divots into the ground. Gemma let out a triumphant cry, and suddenly black roots limned with silver burst out of the ground where the throne’s legs had cracked it open. I felt a burst of hope. She had found, in all of this illusory chaos, a piece of nature. A fierce, proud love blazed up inside me as I thought yet again of young Philippa Wren, born with simple botanical magic that she would someday pass on to her youngest daughter, not knowing that her body housed a sleeping god.
Gemma flung the roots around Jaetris and his throne, helping Mara hold him in place, and I started singing an aria from the final act of one of my favorite operas—the heroine, triumphant, feels the sunlight on her skin for the first time after years of unjust imprisonment. Strong , I thought, staring at Jaetris, at the throne, at my brave, bright-eyed sisters. Hold.
Once my grip on the song was sure, I looked back over my shoulder and saw Kilraith coming at us. His grasping shadowed hands were huge as trees. His mouth yawned wide. He was storm and lightning, he was shadow, he was a monster. He was a vestige of the gods—lonely, vengeful, burning with hate. His wings blacked out the world. Through the dark haze of his attack, I saw Ryder kneeling over Gareth’s body, shouting desperately at a swarm of birds swirling in the air near him—hawks, starlings, Olden birds with silver eyes and brilliant plumage. He’d wilded them from somewhere, I supposed from the chaotic streets of Mhorghast. They gathered into a mass like a fist and flew at Kilraith—huge, fearless—but as soon as they hit the crackling mass of his fury, they disappeared, burned to ash in an instant.
I closed my eyes, a sick peace falling over me. I didn’t know what had happened to Ankaret—to Yvaine —but I knew I was going to die. We were all going to die.
Then a roar of heat shot down from the sky, and when I opened my eyes, tears streaming down my face from the sudden blaze, I saw Ankaret standing before us—a solid tower of fire with one snapping wing outstretched, holding back the tide of Kilraith’s wrath. The relief of seeing her gave me new strength, and yet the despair of knowing what she really was— who she was—nearly felled me. I thought her name desperately, the most earnest prayer I’d uttered in years. Yvaine, Yvaine. Why didn’t you tell me?
“Gemma!” I spoke quickly, afraid what would happen if I stopped singing for too long. “Like before, with the crown!”
Gemma’s face was hard, her eyes glittering. She had torn the crown from Talan’s body; she could tear the egg from Jaetris’s. I hoped, I had to hope.
She placed her hands flat on Jaetris’s chest, seeking, and when her fingers began to glow, she choked a little, her stony expression faltering with horror.
“It’s inside his heart,” she cried. “It’s hidden deep, underneath a whole lattice of glamours, but I can see it. I feel it!”
“Get it out!” I cried. “Now, hurry!”
Gemma set her jaw. She pulled a knife from her boot, hesitated only a moment, then drew it fast across Jaetris’s throat. Within moments he was dead, and my baby sister was soaked with his golden blood, and shaking horribly, but at least now Jaetris—and the body he’d lived in—would feel no pain.
“Hold him, Mara!” Gemma cried, tossing away the knife.
Mara obeyed, her whole body beginning to coruscate as if she were a river shimmering beneath the sun. With a great cry, she tore one of her arms from around Jaetris and flung it out like a whip, knocking away with a boom of power a whole swarm of attackers that, in my panic, I hadn’t noticed were almost upon us.
Gemma screamed, and I looked back in terror to see her glowing hands pinned to Jaetris’s chest. His flesh and bone were opening at her touch, peeling outward like bloody petals. The protections Kilraith had glamoured into Jaetris’s body were fiercer than those with which he’d bound Talan to his crown. Sweat poured down Gemma’s body, her slim frame straining with the effort. New roots sprang up out of the earth at her command and dove into the bloody cavity of Jaetris’s chest to help her. Her power crackled furiously; brilliant bolts of light burst from her fingers and shot into Kilraith’s seething darkness. I was reminded of the two comets I’d seen in Jaetris’s vision. So much new knowledge bubbled inside me, and if I looked too hard at it, I’d lose my nerve, my song, my self.
Instead I closed my eyes and kept singing that same soaring aria. Hold strong. But my mind careened between so many fears and feelings, so many worries for all my loved ones around me, that I could feel the song’s focus start to split in different directions. At first, I choked on the feeling. It was as if all the power inside me was at war with itself, each branch of my music fighting for supremacy. I felt stretched thin, pounded flat. My whole body ached from the strain of forcing out my confused song.
But out of this chaos rose a memory, like a single blossom that had been plucked from a meadow bright with color. A humble gift for me alone. It was Philippa’s voice from her quiet kitchen at Wardwell. You are the daughters of Kerezen and therefore demigods of the body, of the senses. Fighting and creating glamours and making music—these things you can already do. But there is more buried in your power, and I can help you find it.
It was like receiving permission I didn’t know I was asking for. My eyes snapped open, a strange calm flooding through me. The last time we were in Mhorghast, I’d tried this very thing—holding multiple songs in my heart and mind and voice all at once. It hadn’t worked; I’d been overcome, my body unable to withstand the disarray of confused magic. But now, a certainty rose in me like the sun. What I had tried before was possible. It was necessary. Maybe it was desperation that urged me to try, or perhaps it was simply the presence of Gemma and Mara fighting so close to me. My precious, brave sisters. I watched them and drew a fresh breath, no longer afraid to attempt this mad thing. Five songs at once was what I needed. And I could do it. I could sing them all and hold them fast. I could trust my power; I could trust myself.
Hold strong , to give Gemma and Mara endurance. Protection , to keep the others safe: Ryder, Gareth, Father, Talan, Nesset, all fighting bravely, lost somewhere in the flame and shadows. Release , to coax Jaetris’s battered body to release the treasure it held. Confusion , to divert and deflect the swarming Olden attackers. Love , for Ankaret, for Yvaine.
My voice split open into five parts, as if my single song were the work of an entire chorus. Each shining branch of it connected me to my purpose, my dearest ones. Gemma and Mara— hold strong . Ryder, Gareth, Father, Talan, Nesset— protection .
Tears streamed down my face. Slowly I stood, allowing my column of breath a clearer passage. I watched Jaetris’s body unfold. Release , I sang to it, to the memory of the man it had been. Be at peace. Give us the egg, and all your suffering will not be in vain.
Past the body roiled a dark sea of enemies. The citizens of Mhorghast—some Olden, some human—fought for Kilraith, fought each other. Confusion. I glared at them with unfocused eyes, directing my song to wash over them like a tidal wave. Brutal. Relentless. Driving. Unfeeling. An arm of nature sweeping coldly over them, leaving ruin in its wake.
I didn’t dare turn to look at Ankaret, but I could feel the heat of her—a bloom of warmth that should have burned me, should have flayed me to my bones, but didn’t. I heard Kilraith’s distant roars and imagined what she looked like just behind me. An impossible creature, all fire and feathers and light, holding back the tide of death for us. Shielding us.
Love. This branch of my song called out to her, tender, seeking. I felt the moment when the soaring notes reached her; I felt her take them into herself and receive them as an audience might, with wonderment, with delight.
A horrible cracking sound met my ears; Jaetris’s body was a mess of shattered bones and ruined flesh. The roots that held him to his throne dripped gold with his blood. Mara released the throne and sped off into the shadows with a fierce warrior cry. Now she could properly fight, as she was no doubt desperate to.
Gemma, shaking, turned to me. She held in her bloody hands a large gleaming egg—a cousin of the Three-Eyed Crown, with the same metal body and elaborate carvings, rimmed with round-cut topaz jewels.
“Farrin?” Her voice was in shreds, her face gray. “Can you?”
I ended the part of my song that had been for Jaetris and began a new one to replace it: destroy . It was like holding in my mind a jewel with five facets, constantly aware of every sharp turn, every gleaming surface, the size and weight of the jewel, how to direct and refract its light. And all the while, I stood on a stone in the middle of a rushing river, struggling to keep my balance.
The egg began to glow in Gemma’s hands. She cried out in pain and set it quickly on the ground at her feet, then cradled her hands against her stomach. One of my feet lost its purchase on the slick rock of my mind. The jewel of my song flew out of my hands and into the roaring water.
I fell to my knees beside the egg and reached desperately for it, choking on the dregs of the song I’d lost. My throat was raw, my lungs burning. I dragged the egg toward me and curled my body around it.
And then, suddenly, there was a snap of roaring fire behind me, a fresh rush of heat, and a single steady flame came into view. My vision was blurry. At first she was only a column of white fire stepping out of Ankaret’s larger inferno. Then she knelt before me, and I saw her clearly—Yvaine, her hair glinting with feathers and fire, her eyes bright as gold and violet stars.
“I know how to destroy it,” she told me. She held out one small white hand covered in a thousand glinting sparks. White and gold feathers encased her slender arm.
Despite her remarkable appearance and sheer spectacular impossibility of everything that was happening, her voice was so familiar, so her own, that I started to cry. “Yvaine, I saw… Jaetris showed me…” I couldn’t finish, overwhelmed by the pounding pain in my head. I didn’t yet know how to explain what I’d seen—the comet plunging into the dark sea, the other coming to Gallinor and becoming a human. A queen.
Yvaine’s face flickered with brilliant light. Diamond tears gathered at her lashes. “I know,” she said softly. She touched my throat, and the pain there eased. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. For a long time, I hardly knew myself. I’ve been awakening slowly, you see, for a very long time. Ankaret has, I mean. My first true heart. I didn’t understand what was happening until after he attacked Fairhaven. Farrin, I’m so sorry.”
Then she leaned close to me, touched my cheek, kissed my forehead. She held me to her for a moment, her eyes closed, and then said, “We’re running out of time. Can I have it, Farrin?” She drew in a shaky breath. “I can’t hold him off for much longer. I know how to destroy it. I promise you.”
I shook my head, sobbing, understanding that something terrible was about to happen. “No. Please. ”
But I held out the egg to her nonetheless, hating the rough carved feel of it in my palms. It was heavy, slick with Jaetris’s blood. Yvaine took it from me, and it immediately lit up in her hands, too bright to look at. My arm flew up instinctively to shield my eyes, and by the time I managed to look up again, she was gone, stepping back into the enormous wave of Ankaret’s fire.
Beyond that shield of light, Kilraith raged. His anger was like mountains crashing down. “Ankaret, look at me!” he howled. “Don’t you understand me? I know you do! It’s what they deserve! Don’t do this! Look at me! ”
In the visions Jaetris had gifted me—an entire history of an entire world—one particular story flickered brightly, one among millions. I held my breath and let the current of memory sweep over me. Two beings—confused and chaotic and bright as comets, created by irresponsible gods in a thoughtless dying instant—had fallen to the earth from their birthplace in the ravaged skies. In the few blazing seconds it had taken to fall, they had known each other, and loved each other, as fiercely as anyone ever had. And then they had crashed to the ground—the unfeeling ground of a nascent human world—and been separated.
I was in love once , Yvaine had told me in the Green House, her gaze distant and sad. It was a very long time ago, I think, years and years before any of you were born.
I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t want to. Kilraith and Ankaret. Kilraith and Yvaine . And yet I could not shake myself free of that truth; it was too real, too huge. It clung to me like a bramble and always would.
Kilraith’s furious roars pulled me back to the warring waves of flame and shadow crashing into each other above my head. Despite all his raging thunder, Ankaret’s fire was unwavering, unfading. The tiny white form inside that blistering inferno—the form that wore Yvaine’s dear face, the face of my impossible friend—turned back once and found me shivering on the ground, miserable in my shock and fear. Somewhere in the brilliant glare, I thought I saw her smile.
“Come and find me,” she said gently. The world was crashing apart around us, and yet her words were clear as rain.
Then she turned away from me and disappeared completely into Ankaret’s flames. The wave of her fire surged hard against Kilraith. Light and darkness crashed together like stars colliding—blinding, booming—and then, all at once, Ankaret disappeared. Her blazing light shrank and coalesced into a single glowing shape: Yvaine, alone, unprotected, her shield of fire gone. Serene in a cloak of white-gold feathers, the egg a glowing star in her hands. Kilraith was already diving for her, raising one huge shadowed wing to swipe. He was expecting Ankaret, a firebird as monstrous as his own storming self. And he couldn’t stop in time; he was too large, too fast. I heard his cry of horror the instant before he crashed into her, but it was too late. Yvaine was ashes, and so was the egg. White as snow, they were a flurry in the air, and then they were gone.
Kilraith fell from the sky, the vast might of his shadow self collapsing. When the darkness cleared, his human form knelt at its epicenter—pale as Yvaine had been, tall and beautiful, shadows clinging to him like shredded skin. He clutched ashes in his hands and howled out his grief. The sound was like a roaring wind ready to carve the world to pieces.
I watched him in disbelief, and through my tears, I choked out a small song of hope. Are you there? But nothing answered. The notes skipped weakly across the ashen ruin before me and quickly sputtered out. I tried again, and again, vaguely noticing the world shifting and turning all around me. A distant part of my mind understood that Mhorghast was collapsing, folding in on itself. Erratic, short-lived moonlight roads shot out in all directions. The city was shrinking, brought to ruin by the grief of its creator, and soon it would crush me.
I closed my eyes, too tired to move, too heartbroken to run. Let it crush me , I thought. Let me die as she did.
But Ryder wouldn’t allow death to claim me. He came out of the shadows and helped me to my feet, everyone else just behind him— Gemma and Talan, Mara and Nesset. Father had Gareth slung over his shoulder. Ryder lifted me into his arms, shouted something to the others, but my shock was too complete to understand him. I pressed my face against his chest and hummed my song into the folds of his coat. Are you there? It was the most desperate prayer I’d ever known. Yvaine. Are you there?
No answer came to me. I knew it wouldn’t. Past my closed lids shone the glow of fractured moonlight. I clung to Ryder and let him carry me home.