Chapter 19 #2
“One weave.” His finger moved from the first drawing to the last. “As roads were lost, the exchange had fewer paths to travel.”
His finger stopped beside the single remaining road. “We opened one part of something that was built to work together.”
“That’s why the standing stone nearly tore us apart.”
A muscle twitched in his jaw.
I looked back at the five roads in the first drawing.
“But we only know how to open Cedarstone.” My finger moved toward the others. “How are we supposed to open all of those?”
Xandros' attention shifted to the narrow line of Asterran script beneath the drawings.
He read it once, then again more slowly, before returning to the first image.
“There.”
A pair of figures stood beside one of the roads. Curling lines surrounded one. Stars marked the other. The same two figures appeared in the next drawing where three roads shone across the page.
My pulse skipped as I scanned both images. “They didn’t have to stand at every road.”
“No.” His gaze moved over the faded script. “They only needed one road to reach the others.”
A low, steady pulse moved through my hand as Maren’s voice rose through my memory.
When Briar crowns Moon. And root entwines star. The forgotten gates shall open.
My fingers stilled against the parchment.
I had heard those words again and again since the night the thorns crossed our moon, but I had been looking at them wrong.
The prophecy never said Xandros and I would open the gates.
Only that they would open.
I looked down at the faded roads spreading across the page. “The Briar Moon.”
Xandros’ gaze snapped to mine.
“It’s waking them.”
We didn’t need to find every buried road and open it ourselves. They were already stirring. We only needed to learn how to reach the others through the one road that answered us.
He exhaled, some of the tightness in his shoulders easing as his attention returned to the page.
Metal scraped against stone.
I turned as the silver doors opened and Aurelian entered with his new captain at his shoulder. Five more guards filled the corridor behind them.
Crimson and gold filled my vision. A body lifted from the dining-room floor, one hand clawing at his throat. Bone cracked. Blood spread beneath his head while Aurelian reached calmly for his glass.
My fingers curled against the corner of the parchment.
Bramble scrambled to my shoulder and tucked himself behind my hair, his body rigid against my neck.
Aurelian stopped at the edge of the table.
His gaze moved over the open records one by one, lingering on the pages we had pulled loose before finally lifting to Xandros.
“It would seem you have found your answer.”
Beside me, Xandros closed the nearest case. His hand rested there for a moment longer than necessary.
“We found evidence that the roads were never meant to function alone.”
Aurelian’s expression barely shifted. “Then restore them.”
Xandros looked at him. “We can’t.”
The quiet certainty in his voice drew Aurelian’s full attention.
“Why?”
“Because Asterra was only ever half of the connection.” Xandros glanced toward the records spread between us. “The roads were built to draw from both realms. Without the Deepwood’s Wild, there is nothing here to meet the Everlight.”
Aurelian’s eyes slid to me and the back of my neck prickled.
“So you require a Druid.”
Xandros moved before I could answer, stepping just far enough in front of me that his shoulder broke the king’s line of sight.
“No. We require the Deepwood.”
Silence stretched between the brothers.
“You have brought me a Druid who carries the mark of a Veil Weaver–”
“She is not a resource for you to use.”
Something flashed in the king’s eyes, and the corner of Aurelian’s mouth twitched ever so slightly as if he enjoyed seeing his brother react. For one heart-stopping moment, I imagined just how far he would go to pull those reactions from Xandros.
I swallowed the lump in my throat as Aurelian’s attention moved past his brother and found me again.
“Bring her to me.”
Bramble’s claws caught in my hair as his body stiffened, and a low growl vibrated through him.
Steel slid free around us. The guards stepped forward.
My fingers twitched toward the sword that should have been at my hip and found nothing.
Twisted Hells. I had left it in Xandros' rooms.
For half a heartbeat, Xandros went completely still.
I blinked and the guard suspended over the dining-room floor flashed through my mind once again. Golden light burning through his armor. The crack that followed.
No one standing in that corridor could have forgotten it.
“Stand aside.” Xandros' constellations flared in warning.
But they kept moving.
Aurelian’s stare remained fixed on his brother as his soldiers closed in. “I believe we have already settled whose orders they follow.”
The king studied him with the same detached attention he might have given a
Xandros bristled and his constellations flared in response, starlight pulsing from his skin in time with the beating of his pulse.
Something sharpened in Aurelian’s gaze as he watched his brother. He had already seen the decision forming.
His fingers curled before Xandros could move.
Light flooded the floor beneath my feet, golden streaks racing through narrow veins in the stone and snapping around my ankles before climbing toward my knees.
I stumbled as the bands cinched tighter, locking my legs together.
Xandros lunged.
Everlight blazed through his constellations and raced toward his open hand. It stretched from his palm in a brilliant line, hardening into a long celestial blade bright enough to throw his shadow across the archive walls.
He swung it toward me.
My body jerked back on instinct, but the blade dropped past my thigh and struck the bands wrapped around my legs.
The impact cracked through the archive.
Light burst across the floor as every channel beneath us flared at once. The stone split beneath my feet, fractures racing outward from where his blade had struck.
The restraint around my legs buckled.
Before it could break apart completely, indigo streaked through one of the fractures.
It shot toward Xandros.
“Look out!”
Indigo caught along the edge of Xandros’s blade and twisted around the Everlight, climbing toward his hand.
I seized his wrist.
The instant my skin touched his, everything slowed.
Bramble’s growl dragged low beside me. Somewhere behind Xandros, a guard’s blade scraped across fractured stone as he moved closer, but my attention narrowed to the press of my palm against Xandros’s skin.
The star throbbed once beneath my palm.
Indigo wound higher around Xandros’s blade, smothering the Everlight as it climbed toward his fingers.
A sharp sting pricked the center of my hand. Numbness followed, spreading through my palm until my fingertips trembled against his wrist. The vines along my arm stirred in answer, a faint glimmer moving through their leaves.
Xandros’s fingers clenched around the hilt of his sword just as the indigo reached his knuckles.
I reached for the Wild but nothing answered.
I pushed deeper, searching through the hollow place Asterra had left inside me while boots struck fractured stone somewhere beyond Xandros’s shoulder.
Something stirred beneath my vines.
So faint I almost lost it.
I caught hold of that fragile trace before it could disappear and pulled.
The vines shifted against my skin, their leaves trembling as a thin line of living light crept along my forearm. I strained for more, but it barely brightened.
Indigo spread over Xandros’s knuckles.
“No.” The word tore out of me.
I pulled harder.
My arm shook with the effort. The Wild flickered weakly beneath my skin and threatened to vanish again.
It wasn’t enough.
The darkness crawled over his knuckles.
And the star in my palm blazed.
A violent pulse ran through my hand and up my arm, and the fragile thread of Wild inside me snapped taut.
Light erupted between us, brilliant shades of emerald and gold.
Xandros’s starlight flooded the blade while the Wild surged through my vines, bright enough to wash the archive walls in shifting light. Beneath my palm, the indigo gave a violent jerk. Then it changed direction.
My breath stopped.
I held onto the Wild and drove it down toward the blade, forcing the indigo away from Xandros’s skin. It retreated over his knuckles, past the hilt, and along the length of the blade.
Wherever it passed, something impossible happened.
The indigo didn’t just disappear. It was clearing.
Darkness peeled away from the current beneath it, and the same living light that filled Xandros’s constellations emerged in its place.
I pushed harder.
The corrupted current raced down the blade and spilled into the fractured channel beneath our feet. One streak after another lost its indigo cast as it moved, until clean Everlight streamed through the stones closest to us again.
I stared at the channels beneath us, then up at the beautiful and pure golden light of his constellations.
The indigo hadn’t been consuming his power.
It was his power.
Everlight, twisted into something cold and corrupted.
Beside me, Xandros went still. His gaze followed the clean light through his hand and down the blade toward the fractured channels beneath us.
“All this time…” His gaze stayed on the blade. “It was Everlight.”
“Again.”
My attention snapped up to the king who was staring at his brother’s hand almost greedily.
Every muscle in Xandros’ body went taut. “No.”
Aurelian narrowed his eyes and slowly met his brothers. “No? She restored corrupted Everlight, and you expect me to ignore that?”
“We don’t know why it worked?—”
“Then we find out!” Aurelian’s roar ripped through the room.
I recoiled before I could stop myself. His voice crashed off the stone walls while every light around us flickered, throwing his face in and out of shadow.
It was the first time I had heard him raise his voice. I hoped I never would again.
My fingers tightened around Xandros’s as Aurelian turned on me.