Chapter 38
thirty-eight
My assertion was correct that it wouldn’t be difficult to scale the rock wall. But once I reached the bottom, and I stared up, I realized it would be far more difficult to return. This time, if he didn’t give me a dragon, I’d be taking one myself—again.
The path to the river was thick with frozen brambles. They caught my remaining rags and tore into whatever skin they could. My calves wept crimson and soaked through my muddied, stained breeches.
But those were scratches compared to the carving on my back.
Only right as I reached the edge of the riverbed did I realize every part of me ached. From my wounded spine to my bruised, bleeding knees, all the way to my blistered and torn palms. As I adjusted myself at the river’s edge, my legs felt like they might give out beneath me.
Yet I pushed on.
A familiar form was across the wide frozen waterway, crouching on the snowbank. I thought he might wave, but he slowly rose and avoided meeting my gaze.
I bit my lip when I realized I had been staring for too long.
Bastard.
He gracefully moved onto the ice. His hand darted to the crescent blade sheathed at his side, which he raised and thrusted deep into the river.
A thunderous cracking ran up my feet and into my legs, surrounding me like a wall of sound and terror.
I feared the ice would split beneath him and the freezing water would swallow him.
But the hilt beneath his hands radiated frost.
Quicker than I could follow, it crawled down the blade and into the splitting ice. The surface frosted over, rapidly spreading until icicles sprang up in the wake of his lumen. It seethed, breathing a frozen breath into the river.
Within a few moments, it froze solid.
He didn’t say a word, but beckoned me across with two fingers, still kneeling at the sword’s side. I waited a moment longer than necessary, so he didn’t think I was answering his call. I didn’t want him getting any ideas that I’d listen to him.
I had to be careful not to fall on the slick ice as I moved across. The journey across the frozen patch was far more difficult than climbing down the rock.
Yet every step toward him, the rage increased. It seethed like the ice, spreading across me until my fingers vibrated. Once I crossed the invisible dividing line, the temperature dropped, and flurries swirled up. The flakes weren’t soft; instead, razor-sharp. Enough to nick any exposed skin.
It stung at my cheeks as I passed him and climbed atop the solid bank. He didn’t waste time, and once I was across, he ripped the blade clean from the ice. It came free with a snap, and he bolted to meet me.
When he raised his face to meet mine, I gasped. He was—faceless. Where his chiseled features would be was a shifting, pale mass blurred from view.
With trembling hands but dry palms, I ripped the sword from his hands and kicked him back in one smooth motion.
He didn’t make a sound as he slammed into the bank behind him.
The surrounding flurries thickened, pelting my face as I loomed before him and thrust the sword through his abdomen.
It delved deep into the clay beneath him until it hit solid rock.
It felt good, but not great. He didn’t fight—why couldn’t he fight? He merely slumped against the hill quietly.
“Where are you?” I asked between clenched teeth. “The real you.”
“Eltidian. The palace.”
My heart thundered, knocking against my sternum until it ached as much as the rest of me.
I clambered up the hills and found my way to the paths, their maze now branded into my memory. All the while, I could feel Aelen’s ghost shadowing every footfall.
As I reached the depths of the Eltide forest, the branches grew close enough to claw at my skin and the cold began to eat away at me. The flurries were no more.
A bitter and freezing wall of ice replaced my ache with the burn of frostbite. Even blinking became painful as my frozen eyelashes gashed my cheeks.
Though it was full daylight, the forest began to call. Whispers beckoned me from deep in the tree line, with adjoining howls at my refusal to enter.
Eltide was slipping away to the clutches of Ovatar, and soon it would be no more. Every foot seemed a mile. I fought against the cold bitterly, forcing myself until there came a tittering sound to my rear.
I was too frozen to spin and too rigid to dart forward. I tried to move in the blinding blizzard, only to be met with the same tinkling, annoying sound. When the sound reached out and touched me, I screamed. But the wind stole my voice.
The only thing that remained was an urging. The urging pressed into me, forcing me to the side. When I glanced at the oppressive source, he kicked the door open beside me.
When did a building appear here? I tried to spot my tracks, but they’d already been lost as the snow beat against itself.
I couldn’t fight when Aelen shoved me into the doorway. Yet the warmth sank into me and I drank it in. He ripped away the rags from my stiff limbs, and I couldn’t move enough to stop him.
So I didn’t. I merely seethed as he tore a blanket from the chaise and smothered me in it.
I allowed him as much. Once he had completely covered me with cloaks and cloth, he flicked a finger at the hearth to stoke the flames.
They roared with a crackle until they licked the surrounding brickwork.
I thought he might burn the shack to the ground.
“You’ll set it ablaze,” I stuttered with a frozen tongue. “I need to leave.”
He clucked and ignored me. But when he urged me toward the fire, I’d had enough. I shoved him with every ounce of force I could muster.
“You’re going to die,” he screamed.
“Not if I kill you first,” I yelled back. I pushed past him and almost made it to the door before he slid before me. “I’m going to Eltidian. Get out of my way.”
His face remained a mess of changing, a blur that my mind couldn’t quite focus on, and somehow it still wouldn’t look at me. He still wouldn’t find my gaze. He didn’t dare.
“Why?” It wasn’t so much a question as a roar that tore from his chest.
Because I wanted to cry—and fall to my knees, but I didn’t trust he’d catch me. But I didn’t say that. Instead, I swallowed the truth and presented him with the most adjacent feeling. “I need to go there and kill you.”
“I’m right here!” His roar clung to the air as it echoed across the wooden walls. It shattered the quiet and ebbed it again.
“No, you’re not.” I shoved him back with urgency, and he fell against the doorframe. “You’re a lie, and you refuse to show yourself. You’re still hiding, even now. After everything.”
I swallowed down the thorns in my throat, willing myself to not break.
“I have been carved, nearly killed, and pushed to the very brink of insanity. And I haven’t broken, not yet.
I will walk through that blizzard, and if I must, I will die.
But I will see you face to face, and you will look me in the eye and give me answers, goddamnit! ”
He mumbled something unintelligible as I shoved again, enough that the door exploded open behind him and he tumbled into the cold. I tore out, pushing forward through the onslaught of ice.
The blanket provided a brief respite from the chill. But it didn’t take long for the frost to penetrate my bones. I knew he pursued, but I couldn’t hear him over the blast of wind. It consumed me, but eventually the trees parted and spat me onto the well-known path to Eltidian.
Every step was painful. I felt death creep across me with its ice-cold tendrils. Its breath blew me in the face, and life began to slip, along with my vision.
I wouldn’t let death take me, not now. Not when I was so close. I wouldn’t relent, not until I faced him.
Finally, the trees thinned until the barren landscape gave way to frost-coated towers, adorned with enough icicles to slaughter an army. The spires rose, but the silver now missed its gleam.
The streets lay deserted. I didn’t know where the I’phri had gone, but they weren’t here. When the city center came into view, the frost burn overtook me.
In the center of snow, ice coated everything, stealing the elegant garden and leaving death. The mounds of were innumerable, weeping and overfilling every crevice that could hold it.
A gale swept through the square, but only stirred it.
Somewhere in the wind, Aelen was speaking, but I ignored it. I was close enough, but didn’t dare touch the frozen fountains.
“You’re shaking,” he screamed from behind me. Only then did I realize I trembled. The mist of my exhale grew lighter and more translucent with every breath. “You’re dying!”
But my sights were on the monolithic building before me. Its spires cut into the sky, blotting out the molten gray. My world was painted in shades of despair.
It didn’t matter that I had climbed from the riverside to here. It didn’t matter if it was one mile or ten, because before me was an invisible abyss. A wall of oppression I could not, would not pass. No, he must come to me.
“Come.” Now my breath was translucent. I drifted away. Nothing remained of me but spite. The yelling behind me ceased, disappearing into the wailing gale as his avatar fell to ash. The wind carried his remains elsewhere. I didn’t care where.
The oppressive doors flew open. They buckled from the violence and rocked in the wind. And in the distant doorway, he stood. Pride radiated from him, and yet he started toward me anyway. The wind grabbed at his dark cloak, tugging it, and a great gale blew down his hood.
But he didn’t stop. Not until his great form loomed over me.
The wind caught his dark hair and waved it like a midnight flag, until it framed his pallid skin. It held a sickly shade, the gray of decay. Not quite the color I’d seen on the bodies of Ilyatria, but close.
But it was those eyes that pinned me as he stared down. The same ones I’d seen in the cell, the ones who branded me and ordered me to cull my father. The one who offered a brief lifeline, or the promise of death. An abyssal void, with a perfect sapphire ring that glowed unnaturally.
I wondered if he might be filled with magic. If lumen swirled there—but only for a second. For I knew the answer was yes.
When he stood over me like this, his height was oppressive. Yet a softness in his expression dulled any fear I might have. His swirling horns didn’t terrify me, and I wasn’t afraid.
As if he could hear my very thoughts, he kneeled before me. His gaze never broke from mine. Without a word, he unsheathed a blade from beneath his robes and pressed it into my open palm. A single, thin, exquisite dagger.
“Hurry, so you might flee before you freeze.” He closed my fingers over the blade. “Kill me.”