Chapter 30
Somewhere on the moonlight road that brought us back to Ivyhill, I gave in to the pain that had been battering my head since Jaetris had planted his visions in me. I slipped into blackness, and when I next awoke, I was in my bed in my room, my body aching, Osmund curled up in a tight ball against my side.
Immediately the loss of Yvaine rose up inside me, a pain in my throat that made it hard to swallow. Everything made it hard to swallow; my throat was raw, and each breath was fire. Suddenly I wanted to be rid of all the blankets on me. I tried to sit up and free myself. My movement disturbed Osmund; he jumped down onto the carpet with a disgruntled meow. The sound ripped something open inside me, and I let out a choked sob.
All of this brought Ryder in from the bathing room. He was drying his face with a towel, which he dropped to the floor when he saw me. He paused at the foot of the bed, then started to come around and reach for me, then stopped. His expression was grave, his eyes soft. There were fresh cuts on his cheeks and neck and arms, but they were healing nicely. A drop of water clung to his beard, just to the left of his mouth.
“We’ve been watching over you in shifts,” he said at last, his voice rough. “You’ve been falling in and out of consciousness for three days. Madam Moreen didn’t know what to do for you.” He cleared his throat and rested his hands carefully on my polished footboard. He considered me for a moment longer before lowering his gaze to his fingers.
“Shall I get one of your sisters?” he said quietly. “Do you want me to leave?”
His voice was gentle. He looked unbearably dear standing there, big and brawny and quiet, very still, as if he’d entered a temple to pray, and in the lines of his face I could see the echo of the boy he’d once been, the boy who’d run through fire for me. The boy who had saved me. I began to cry then, truly cry. The weight of everything that had happened pressed against my chest.
I held out my arms to him. “Please don’t go,” I whispered. “Please, Ryder, come here.”
He did at once, crawling into the bed beside me. He wrapped me up in his arms and in the blankets, in the cocoon of his fierce love. I touched his face, his beard, and cried against his chest. He held me to him, his hands warm on my back.
“Farrin, love,” he said hoarsely. “I’m so sorry.”
For a moment, I considered trying my song once more. I felt it building inside me, stubbornly hopeful: Are you there? But I decided that if I asked again and still heard that awful silence, the lack of Yvaine in the world, I wouldn’t survive it.
Instead I held on to Ryder and cried until I couldn’t anymore. My exhaustion was mighty, my headache constant. Ryder rubbed slow circles between my shoulder blades. The rhythm of his touch helped me find sleep.
***
Two days later, I sat on a sofa in the morning room, searching for courage.
It helped to have Ryder beside me, and to know that everyone in this room loved me: Gemma and Mara, Father, Talan. I tried not to think about Gareth lying silently upstairs. He ate and drank obediently, but he hadn’t spoken since returning from Mhorghast, not even angry or confused words like Alastrina’s. He’d been utterly silent, his eyes glassy and distant. When he’d first seen me, a look of relief had passed quickly across his face, but still he had said nothing. He just lay on his bed in one of our guest rooms and slept, or else stared at the ceiling.
It was the sight of him more than anything that had gotten me downstairs. I was wobbly on Ryder’s arm, brilliant flares of pain still pulsing in my head, but I’d done it, and Gemma had fed me breakfast tenderly, fussily, as if she were bottle-feeding a kitten—never mind that after the onslaught of magic in Mhorghast, she could barely hold herself upright without Talan’s help. And now, with my belly full and my chest in knots, I would tell them all what I had seen.
“What I saw is difficult to understand,” I said first. “Jaetris didn’t explain any of it for me. I’ve had to interpret it on my own, and I think I’ve done it right, but we will need to study it further. Gareth…” I swallowed. “Gareth, when he’s well, will be useful in that regard.”
They said nothing, waiting patiently for me to find my words. I kept my eyes trained on the designs in the plush carpet under my feet. They were vines, of course, an elaborate swirl of greenery dotted with pale flowers that mirrored my mother’s handiwork on the ceiling. The thought sent a pang of longing through me, which I furiously dismissed. I didn’t miss her or want her, certainly not in any sort of maternal capacity. She hadn’t been there to see what I had seen, to watch Yvaine die right before her eyes. She didn’t deserve my company; she hadn’t for years, and the fact of her godliness changed nothing.
To get her out of my mind, I started to speak.
“On the day of the Unmaking,” I said, “when the gods came together to create Edyn and then died, two pieces of their joined magic flew out from the cataclysm in opposite directions. Each piece contained the remains of the gods, a remnant of each of their five powers. One of these entities crashed into the sea south of Aidurra and was lost to the depths for…” I shook my head. “I don’t know how long he lived there. But that being became Kilraith. And the other…”
I paused, struggling for composure. Ryder put his hand on the cushion beside me, palm up, and I grabbed it and held on until I caught my breath.
“The other fell into the Bay of the Gods and became Ankaret, otherwise known by the name she took in her human form, Yvaine Ballantere. What she truly was and where she came from, she didn’t know. She only knew that she wanted to protect Edyn—I don’t know why, perhaps some lingering instinct of the gods—and so she assumed that the gods had chosen her for that task. She came to Fairhaven, and they saw her power and believed her. Legends grew up around her. She became the high queen of Edyn.”
I drew in a shaky breath. “She didn’t understand what she truly was until very recently. That was the reason for her strange behavior, I think—her lost memories and declining health. Perhaps it began when Philippa started becoming aware of herself, or when Kilraith found Jaetris and bound him. I can’t be certain. But I think she rediscovered Ankaret unintentionally, and that whatever power brought her back to that form—her true, original form—was beyond her control. Until…” I stopped, swallowing hard. “Until I called her to me. Until Mhorghast.”
“Perhaps,” Talan suggested thoughtfully, “an instinct awoke in her that sensed the growing danger of Kilraith, prompting her to take the form of the creature who could most effectively protect us.”
I nodded, grateful to have heard a voice other than my own. “That’s what I suspect as well. And then…” I paused, closing my eyes, thinking back over the images I’d seen in Jaetris’s visions. I’d spent the last few days sorting through them, trying to organize them in a way that made sense, but already they were beginning to fade. A protective measure, I assumed; Jaetris wouldn’t have wanted such a story to live inside me forever. I was only a demigod, after all, and even Jaetris himself had fallen prey to Kilraith.
“Kilraith wants to destroy them,” I whispered. “All the gods. He found a way to wake them—I don’t know how—and now he wants to kill them truly, as they didn’t succeed in doing themselves on the day of the Unmaking. He hates them for his own creation, for the years of agony he endured alone in the ocean, for the conflict of five gods living forever inside him. He has never been able to make peace with this confusion of power, as Yvaine did. Perhaps he carries more of their darker, baser instincts than she does, or maybe everything he suffered is what corrupted him. Whatever the reason for his nature, it’s one of anger, vengeance, and hatred. He wants to tear down all boundaries between Edyn and the Old Country—the Middlemist, the Knotwood, the Crescent of Storms. It wasn’t Yvaine’s declining health sickening the Middlemist; it’s been him all along, though I don’t know how, and neither did Jaetris. What I do know is that Kilraith believes the separation of humans from Oldens to be subjugation. An unfair restriction on those in the Old Country made only for the sake of humans, whom he believes to be inferior and undeserving of the gods’ affection. He believes we are the reason for all the pain he’s endured. And once Edyn is destroyed…”
I opened my eyes. Tears streamed silently down my cheeks. “Then I think he will destroy himself. His life has been a torment, too many clashing powers trapped in one form. He blames the gods for the aberration he is. In his eyes, they are irresponsible, careless, cruel. And he loves only one thing: his equal and his opposite.”
This time, when I tried to say her name, I found that I couldn’t.
Mara, leaning against the far wall, said it for me. “He loved Yvaine. Ankaret.”
“ Loves ,” I corrected her, looking up fiercely. “I don’t believe she’s dead, at least not truly. Maybe she’s dead in the sense that we can’t perceive her, but she’s not dead altogether, not destroyed.” I bit my lip, realizing how desperate I sounded. “‘Come and find me.’ She said that to me, right before the end. ‘Come and find me.’ Jaetris said he would come back in a different body. I believe him. Why would Yvaine have said such a thing unless she intended to return as well?”
This was the thing I’d been telling myself since awakening and realizing she was gone: that she wasn’t truly gone, that this was all part of something grand and godly that we couldn’t yet understand.
Talan leaned forward heavily, elbows on his knees, and considered his hands. Gemma and Mara avoided looking at me altogether. Only Father, frowning thoughtfully, seemed willing to entertain the thought that I wasn’t just mad with grief and grasping for any comfort, no matter how outlandish.
“I suppose it’s possible,” he said. “Many things have happened of late that I would have deemed unthinkable not long ago. Your mother returning and being a god. All of you being…”
He couldn’t bring himself to say the word. He blew out an incredulous laugh and scrubbed a hand over his face. He looked old and tired, and yet somehow more himself than he’d been in years, and when I thought of Kilraith’s arrow trained on him in Mhorghast, how close I’d come to losing him—losing all of them—I almost couldn’t bear to look at him.
“ Mother ,” Gemma said thickly. The disgust in her voice surprised me. “Part of me really believed, right until the end, that she would come to our aid in Mhorghast, that we wouldn’t have to do all of that alone.” She shook her head and looked imploringly at Mara, at me. “Do you think she really is doing the right thing, the wise thing, by continuing to hide at Wardwell? Or is she simply—”
“A coward?” Mara finished. I couldn’t read her expression; I could see only how tired she looked, and heartbreakingly awkward, sitting there among all Ivyhill’s finery in her drab Rose garb. How brave she was. How brave we all were.
“It doesn’t matter if she’s a coward or not,” I said, realizing only as I said it that it was true, and that I could know this harsh truth, say it out loud, and still keep breathing, keep fighting. “We’ll drive ourselves mad trying to determine what’s going on in her head. What matters is that we can’t depend on her to help us reliably. She’ll come when she wants to, maybe.” I shrugged, feeling a little lightheaded with surprise, with relief, at my own matter-of-fact attitude. “We’re on our own, and we have been for a long time. Nothing has changed. Being angry with her is a waste of emotion.”
The room rang with quiet shock. It was as if a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders. Philippa had broken my heart as a child, but when I’d spoken of her just then, it had been with a sort of coldness, a detached clarity. I didn’t know what that meant, couldn’t untangle my motives—and I certainly didn’t dare look at my father to gauge what he thought of my little speech. But I did nudge my foot ever so slightly against Ryder’s, and when I felt him return the gesture, I realized that at least one thing I’d said simply wasn’t true.
I was not on my own, not anymore.
Gemma spoke next, briskly, brightly, as if she could lift the mood in the room simply by willing it. “Well, I suppose what we have to do, then, with or without Mother’s help, is find and destroy the other anchors of the ytheliad , which are presumably giving Kilraith the power to move between realms with ease and gather followers.”
“And we must find the other gods before Kilraith does,” Ryder said darkly. “Or else destroy him before he can find them.”
“But how do you destroy such a creature?” Mara mused. “A being who was created by the gods and contains enough of each of their power that he can control them?” She crossed her arms over her chest, looking grim. “Either he’s truly that powerful on his own, or he’s using something that is. A tool. A weapon. Is it the ytheliad anchors, or something else?”
Silence fell, perhaps the heaviest I’d ever experienced. These questions were impossible to answer.
We tossed ideas between us all through the afternoon until Ryder took my cup from me and told me softly that I was falling asleep sitting up. Gemma sent down to the kitchens for supper, but I was too tired to eat and too heartsick to remain conscious. I touched Ryder’s arm and leaned into him. “Will you come with me upstairs?” I whispered. I looked up at him, fresh tears building behind my eyes. I couldn’t seem to stop crying, and if I was going to cry, I wanted to be with him and him alone.
“Of course,” he said, kissing my hair. Then he helped me rise, and we were slowly crossing the entrance hall when Gilroy stopped us, grave and gray, his voice hushed. The whole house was hushed, despite the number of people in it; we were now sheltering dozens of citizens from nearby towns, and more were coming every day. Word had gotten out that the queen was dead. The air was thick with dread and sadness, and Ivyhill’s rooms were full of new beds. I felt guilty for leaving the care of all those people to the staff, but I didn’t think I was strong enough to shoulder their grief in addition to my own. Not yet.
“Pardon me, my lady,” Gilroy said, “but a messenger from the palace just arrived with this note for you. It seems to be from Lord Thirsk.”
Ah, Thirsk. I had wondered when I would hear from him. I took the letter from Gilroy and thanked him, and only when Ryder and I reached the privacy of my rooms did I dare open it with shaking fingers and read it.
I looked up at Ryder, who waited tensely in the middle of the room. His worried frown was comically at odds with the purring Osmund, who lounged contentedly in his arms.
“What is it?” he asked.
“It seems,” I said quietly, “that the queen has named me in her will.”
***
At sunset the next night, I stood at the windows of my bedroom in the Green House, looking out over the capital city. From there, it looked almost peaceful: a quiet sea of flickering lights, and rooftops gleaming red and orange, pink and violet and gold. Ankaret’s colors. Yvaine’s colors.
But I had just been in the city, and I knew the true state of the people living in those shimmering streets. They were absolutely terrified. Their queen was dead. Something existed in the world that was strong enough to kill a queen chosen by the gods to protect them. A few of those imprisoned in Mhorghast had resurfaced—I didn’t know how; perhaps some last effort of Jaetris before his death—but many others had still not been found, and I feared never would be. And soon enough, the people of Edyn would know the rest of it—that the gods were reawakening, that they were being hunted, that the thing hunting them was also trying to tear down their last protections against the Old Country. The Middlemist, the Crescent of Storms, and the Knotwood were all in danger. Now that I had briefed the Royal Conclave on what had happened, they would brief the Senate, and truth would flood across the world. The armies would train and disperse, and the Senate would issue its draft to bring a slew of new initiates to the Order of the Rose.
Our world would be at war with the gods’ own angry son—our brother, in a way, as Gemma had pointed out with dark humor.
And yet, as I stood at the windows that night, watching the sunset splash its colors across the city’s towers and parks and the placid water in the bay beyond, all I could think of was the simple fact that I missed my friend. I missed Yvaine.
“Farrin?” Ryder came down the stairs, his voice hoarse with sleep. He hadn’t been allowed to accompany me to the reading of the queen’s will, and though I’d planned to give him a full report, that idea suddenly seemed almost too sad to contemplate.
Instead, I said it quietly, as quick as I could. “She gave me all her belongings. Everything, Ryder. The Citadel. The royal archives. Everything, to do with as I will.”
His frown deepened at this extraordinary statement, and he let out a soft, frustrated grunt. “That seems like far too much to place on your shoulders.”
I smiled at him, gently teasing, “Are you calling me weak, Ryder Bask? And if you are, isn’t a student’s skill—or lack thereof—due to the quality of her teacher?”
He came to me and took my hands, his frown softening into a sweet smile I was beginning to realize he showed to no one else.
“My brave Farrin,” he said. “In fact, you’re the strongest person I’ve ever known. But love, the responsibility of that—”
“Is something I don’t want to think about just now,” I said, “though I do have a few ideas.” I rubbed his fingers softly. “I’d like to convert some of the palace into additional hospitals, temporary housing and schools, anything to help people in the coming months.”
He made a low sound of approval. “A fine idea. It will be needed.”
“And I’d like to evacuate as many northerners south as we can. ”
That surprised him, and pleased him. He kissed my hands, his eyes shining. “The Warden won’t like that.”
“No, she won’t,” I said sharply, and left it at that. I stood with him in blessed silence for a moment, then took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Are you frightened? Of what’s to come, I mean?”
“Of course,” he answered at once. “Anyone who isn’t is a fool, and I don’t care to associate with fools.” Gently he turned up my chin so our eyes met. “But I also have hope. And I think you do too. I see you try to hide it, but I know your face. I know you.” He touched my cheek with the backs of his fingers. “Farrin in the sunlight. Star of my life.”
“I’ve been wanting to ask you what that means,” I said softly. “I’ve never heard the phrase before, not until you.”
“It’s a northern term of endearment. Star of my life: a fixed beacon, a guiding light. Beloved, and always there, day or night, but brightest when all around it is dark.” He shrugged, looking a little uncomfortable. “Flowery, I know. But I’ve always liked the sound of it. I always hoped…” His mouth twisted. Now he looked deeply embarrassed. “That is, I always thought it would be rather nice to have someone I loved enough to say that to.”
I was crying again. I gestured helplessly at myself with a rueful smile. “Now you’ve done it. And I’d only just managed to stop.”
He took my face in his hands, his touch as gentle as anything I’d ever felt. “Is it wrong of me,” he said quietly, “to be honored by those tears? That you would show them to me? That you love me that much?”
“Love you? Oh, so you think…you…” I put my hands on his chest, then shook my head in exasperation. “Ryder, I was going to say something clever, but I’ve lost all capacity for cleverness. Please.” I looked up at him. “Take me to bed. I want to see you. I want to be with you, now, right now, on the eve of war. I don’t want to think about anything else but that. Is that selfish?”
“Yes,” he said, “and beautifully so.”
Then he lifted me into his arms, and I wondered if I would ever stop being delighted at how easily he could carry me. I laughed through my tears and wound my arms around his neck. Allowing myself this happiness felt revolutionary. War would come, but tonight, in this house that had seen so much sadness, there would be only this: only the two of us and the silk of my bed. Our hands joined, my legs hooked around his as he moved in me, his voice rough and tender around the shape of my name. The violet gold of sunset paid silent tribute to Yvaine as it danced across our skin. We were alive, and we were together. I buried my face in his neck and held on tight, pressing all of myself against him—my body, my heart, every song my power carried. We were alive, and I would cherish every moment of it.
War would come, but not tonight.