Chapter 45
forty-five
Icouldn’t fail. If I failed, Aelen would bait Ovatar and let him consume the I’phri.
So I screamed as the headwinds beat against us. Progress was painstaking, as if Ovatar used the ice storm to drive us away. The thought that he knew we were coming turned my guts.
Every few seconds, the gale would blow us back, and Mourn had to work twice as hard to make headway. A rough wind blew into us and just about sent us spiraling backward, but he corrected at the last moment, keeping us from plummeting into the ravine below.
Don’t look down.
I found it impossible to keep my eyes parallel to the horizon. The height didn’t send my heart spiraling, but crossing the threshold of the river did.
Though it only took a passing second, it felt like an eternity. I wrapped my fingers around Mourn’s neck, letting the magic trickle into his shoulder. A second wind took him, and we darted through the headwind.
The city came into view like a bone-colored smear.
I pressed Mourn to cross the city’s wall.
He spiraled like a dying moth, folding his wings inward until we reached terrifying speed.
I brushed the face of death, but only momentarily before he shot them out, and we parachuted.
My fingers were too icy to grip him, and the momentum threw me to the square’s unforgiving stone.
The pain bit into me, but I shambled to a stand.
The guards would appear once they heard the thunder of Mourn’s landing, and I needed to be standing. I had to face them with my head held high, or they’d rip me to shreds.
The gilt-armored guards didn’t disappoint, coming from all sides. Frost climbed their cuirasses and settled on their halberds. They called for him—I knew they would, but I still trembled while their shouts for Ovatar cascaded into the crowd.
The guards inched closer, but a well-placed fiery rune sent them back. Mourn dissipated it before it blew up in their faces, and I ran a thankful hand across his scales. A knowing pat he leaned into.
“I have no business with you,” I yelled above the metallic chatter. “Leave and let me speak to Ovatar.”
“He’ll come to claim your soul,” one of his knights shouted.
“Let him!” I screamed, my volume silencing the closest guards.
Half a song.
I allowed my mind to linger on those pikes, the death, the destruction, and what would occur if I climbed up Mourn’s back and departed.
I couldn’t run. Not now.
A shudder rippled across the horde as it parted before me. Peasants and guards alike took to their knees, leaving a perfect row for his eminence.
It took all of my strength to not sneer.
There he walked, until he was a few strides away, with the appearance of my father but the presence of something more. With that awful sapphire that ate his eyes and left blinding orbs.
I’d rehearsed this a thousand times. Yet when he stood before me, my mouth dried and I grappled for the receding words. I wanted to shrink away, but I would not.
I raised my chin. “Ovatar, the fallen star.”
He jerked, a slight cringe of discomfort. I bit the inside of my cheek to hide my smile. I’d unnerved him, and I reveled in that.
“Bold of you to enter back into my realm.” His voice was unnatural, every word spoken as if he’d never held a conversation. But the tone reminded me of Aelen—high, but not haughty. “You escaped. I thought you’d never return.”
Now was the time to put on my gambling face, the one the crown had taught me so well.
To pretend.
To lie.
To play his game better than he ever could, and stab Aelen straight through the heart.
“Isn’t all of this your realm?” I asked, motioning to the distant Eltide. He cocked his head, knowing exactly where I waved.
My hand flashed with pain. A sudden, terrible stabbing. Aelen was listening.
My thin threads of a plan snapped.
If he knew what I intended, he wouldn’t come.
He’d bait Ovatar, and they’d all die. I ran my tongue across my teeth but found nothing but dryness as I broke into a sudden sweat that chilled me to the bone.
My teeth chattered, but I wasn’t sure if it was from the blistering cold or the rolling tension.
I searched for any way to stop his spying, but only found one—the thrum of magic across my chest. If I could get Mourn to cross the border against his will, then surely I could sever this connection.
I focused on the back of my hand and the invisible ties that led to him. When I searched, the threads were palpable, like the sapphire cords woven into the city’s walls—before they’d disintegrated.
I took the twisted lumen and formed them into razors.
Then I snapped them in two. Blinding pain shot up my forearm. I had to strain to avoid crashing to my knees. The threads seethed, trying to reform, and I had to focus on holding them at bay. Sweat beaded across me from the effort, gathering at my brow and dripping into my wincing eyes.
“Well? Why have you come here?” he asked before I could muster a single word.
“What do you want more than the world’s souls?” I asked, straining to speak. “More than anything?”
He scanned me, searching for any sign of weakness. I pressed against the bond as it constricted my neck like a noose. They wanted to choke me into breaking, but I wouldn’t.
“You prattle as if you already know the answer. Speak it then!” His tone was like the crack of thunder, and I fought jumping.
I had to lick my lips before I spoke the final nail in my coffin of betrayal. “You desire Maelindiir’s soul. He has your godly power.”
“Yet I sense some of it within you.”
My head spun, and my grip on the frayed threads slipped momentarily, enough for Aelen’s words to hit me loud and clear. Do not push me out. I can sense your fear. I need to protect you from him.
He inhaled like a ravenous wolf. “So much lumen. Did my spawn give you some of his? The same way he gifted your father?”
Without the threads of the pact, he can see you, and I have done much to shield your power from him—
I gathered my strength and severed that thread. It hurt terribly, but this time wounded my soul directly. I was maiming the person I loved.
“Not as much as what remains inside him. If you allow him to cross the river, I could bring him to you and shred his defenses.”
“With what, pray tell?” he hissed.
“With love. He loves me. He’ll come if I ask,” I said before pressing my nails into my palm. “He won’t fight. I’ll make sure of it, and you can claim his soul.” I bit my tongue until I could betray no more.
In that moment, something inside me tore. A deep, visceral knowing that I could never go back. That I’d never be the same person as before. A threshold I’d stepped through where the door slammed, locked, and thrown into flames.
He’d never forgive me.
Ovatar threw his head back and laughed a horrible sound. It wounded me without a single word. With my loose, fretful fingers, I tore at the leather of my cloak.
It might have been parchment for how easily it split.
“You entertain me, mortal. But how am I to believe that without your life on the line?” Blue seethed from him like Aelen’s tendrils of shadow, blooming across the snow and snaking toward me.
They wrapped around my legs like vines, and as much as I tried to fight, they wound up my sides and pinned me.
Ice. Burning ice.
They bit into my flesh like frigid thorns.
I screamed as they pressed against my chest, forcing air from my lungs. I couldn’t take a full breath. With what little I could muster, I shrieked a tired, fruitless noise that made him howl louder.
My hold on the pact expired. It came rushing back with a fiery explosion.
Aelen, please help me.
But he didn’t answer. He only responded with a wall of rage. The pact seared like a red-hot poker pressed into it.
Had he seen what I’d done?
The fear wrenched through me as the vines choked me further.
Air. I need air.
The surrounding air rippled and shimmered. The spread of something I couldn’t place my finger on. If I didn’t have the pact, I don’t think I could have sensed it at all. But I could feel it—the very fabric of the world altering.
“Bring him, then. I caved my hold on Eltide and loosed the bars of his cage, moving them instead to you.” A sick grin spread across his face.
I pleaded for his answer, focusing on words like help and the terror I drowned in. But there was nothing.
Ovatar continued to laugh and cackle.
Why won’t he come?
But his last words came flooding back. ‘If you die, this will all be for naught.’
Like the horrible barrier surrounding Ilyatria, my walls crumbled. Aelen wasn’t coming. Not because I betrayed him, and not because he was afraid. How could I not see, when I protested on Mourn’s back that he wasn’t fearful for himself—but for me?
He wouldn’t come because he thought Ovatar would kill me during the binding. That we’d fail. And then he’d lose me eternally. He was so willing to face his monster of a father that he’d draw him to Eltide—to be consumed by him—so I wouldn’t.
Aelen wouldn’t come unless I was on the very precipice of death.
I didn’t beg again or plead with the threads that bound us.
I grappled my lumen and drummed my fingertips as the blue slid from me, seething.
It darted for Ovatar’s magic like a striking viper, sinking in its smoldering teeth.
They entangled as the blue threads struggled, but released me—just enough.
In that brief reprieve, I grabbed the blade from my side.
I didn’t think.
I plunged it into my abdomen. I emptied my mind as it slid through my guts. The fire of anguish ripped through me.
Ovatar’s threads didn’t return when I lost my grip on them. They didn’t need to. I fell to my knees as crimson wept through my clothes. I collapsed to my palms and watched as the pool grew and grew. Quick. Too quick.
I’m dying.
“What are you doing?” Ovatar screamed.
But the air changed again. This time it heated, pulsated.
Lorelana.
That wasn’t a whisper. It was a chorus of a thousand screams. It throbbed in my ears while my pact turned molten.
A minute of silence passed. Ovatar continued his tirade.
I felt every second. I could count them in my agony. But just as my vision began to blur, an armada of silver formed across the horizon. The pool widened, and breathing became harder, more staggered as my extremities grew cold. I drowned. Like the day of my execution, but with many more dragons.
Aelen was coming, but too late.
My grip on the world faded.