Chapter 80
LUTHER
We flew beneath the clouds, hair whipping at my cheeks. I cradled one arm at my side, grimacing as each breath sent fire through my ribs. The side of my leg was burned so badly, every touch made my vision spot.
Sorae’s triumph over Xipherus had not come easy for either of us.
One of her talons hung limp, missing two of its toes.
Large chunks of her hide had been ripped away, while claw marks dragged across her throat and belly.
The edge of one wing was shredded, forcing her to fight twice as hard to keep us in the air.
Her body seemed ready to give out at any moment and send us hurtling into the Sacred Sea.
She let out a whimper, and I used my legs to give a reassuring squeeze. I knew her wounds weren’t her real concern. Battered and bleeding as we were, our agony was for the woman clutched to my chest.
“Still there?” Diem whispered.
I glanced over Sorae’s side to her uninjured talon, where Ophiucae’s body dangled, unconscious, with Teller’s sleeping-draught-soaked shirt knotted over his nose and mouth. At the sight of it, Auralie’s heartbroken wail replayed in my ears, as loud and as haunting as the moment I’d first heard it.
“He’s still there,” I murmured.
Diem’s hand slipped out from the ball she’d curled herself into and stretched toward her sword, which I’d tucked into my belt.
Her fingers brushed along its golden markings, then turned upright, stained with red.
I shifted the sword out of her reach, mentally throttling myself for not cleaning her brother’s blood from its blade.
There’d been little time to mourn. The sleeping draught had left Ophiucae unconscious, but it had not stopped his army’s attacks. With his soldiers closing in, we’d been forced to hurriedly whisk him away. Even Auralie had to be abandoned, left alone to weep over her son’s corpse.
Diem hadn’t wept. She’d stared at her slain brother, ghost-pale and swaying, until I gently led her away.
Other than her repeated requests to confirm that Ophiucae was still beneath us, she hadn’t spoken a word.
Her quiet demeanor might have been mistaken for denial, were it not for the overwhelming emotion engulfing our bond.
But it wasn’t grief. It wasn’t sadness, or guilt, or even despair—it was anger. Blistering, molten rage. She trembled with it in my arms, and I held her closer.
It felt like cradling a bomb.
I took her palm and swiped the blood away with my thumb, hoping my touch would calm her spirit, but she quickly pulled her hand back. She didn’t want calm, and I didn’t blame her.
“How much longer?” she asked.
“A few more minutes,” I guessed, hoping I was right. A forebodingly black cluster of clouds had formed over the island. The setting sun was a quickly thinning sliver. If we didn’t make it to Coeur?le soon, the most critical part of this war would be fought in the dark.
A fitting end, perhaps.
For most of my life, my world had been ruled by control. My uncle’s dominion over the realm as King. My father’s manipulation of my family, and especially of me. My self-control over emotions I couldn’t risk revealing. The will of Blessed Mother Lumnos, around which I’d centered every choice.
Control made life predictable. Reliable. Understandable. Safe. It made my choices, and their consequences, easy to see. Even when I hated it, at least it gave me a path that wouldn’t bring my world to ruin—a trail of solid, well-lit stepping stones over the open mouth of a beast.
When Diem came into my life, control became a luxury we could rarely afford. Still, I’d clung to it in every way I could. I set myself aflame to light her darkness, lay my body on the coals so that she might have a safe place to step. Anything to keep her on the path she’d been born to walk.
Now we’d reached the final step. I’d promised Diem that we would have a future beyond this war, but the road ahead had disappeared into the shadows, and I had nothing left of me to burn to light the way.
I held out a palm and called on my godhood. Drained from the battle with Xipherus, it scraped in search of a glimmer of magic to offer to the Blessed Mother—one final, desperate prayer for my mate.
My hand lay empty, and my stomach sank.
Diem shifted in my arms. “What’s that?”
She pointed to Coeur?le. At the height of summer, one would expect its grassy hills to be a lush, vibrant green. Instead, the island was covered in a mottled beige-brown. The nearer we flew, the more it seemed to move.
My stomach dropped lower. “Diem, you broke the spell the Crowns cast on Coeur?le, didn’t you? The one that trapped you on the island and kept everyone else away?”
“I did. Why do you . . .” Her face went slack. “Oh, gods . . . those are—”
“People,” I confirmed grimly.
A lot of them—enough to blanket the island from shore to shore.
“Sorae, circle overhead,” Diem ordered. Sorae gave a trill that sounded closer to a cough, her body shuddering. Diem ran a hand down her neck. “This will be over soon.”
Sorae’s head turned, and her gaze cut back to mine. The slits of her pupils swelled, transforming her golden eyes into ominous obsidian discs. There was a message in their darkness, and though I had neither magic nor bond to read it, I knew exactly what it said.
My grip tightened on Diem.
Sorae turned her focus to the island, shifting her wings to drop us lower in the sky.
I felt Diem tense as we approached the shore, and over the bond, cold tendrils slithered through her anger’s flames.
Perhaps she was worried the former Crowns’ spell might still have some lingering power to hurt me or Sorae.
But after we safely flew over the island’s borders, her terror began to burn as hotly as her wrath. She shifted her weight, sliding down Sorae’s back until she was pressed hard against me. Her face turned away from the island, wearing a haunted stare.
“You don’t have to go down there,” I said softly. “I’ll lock Ophiucae in his cell. We’ll come back to deal with him another day—when you’re ready.”
Her eyes closed, then reopened. Muscles worked along her throat. Across the link that bound us, fear and fury warred in cataclysmic waves.
She pulled her sword from my belt, then slammed it into its scabbard on her hip. “I’m ready.”
Sorae swooped over the island’s hills, and my apprehension grew as I studied the swarming people.
Though we were too far to see their eyes, they moved with the same awkward, aimless lumber of the others whose minds Ophiucae had erased.
I feared what it might do to Diem, and to me, if we spotted Eleanor or the others we’d left behind in Lumnos among them.
My focus shifted to the island’s shores, where large wooden ships were tied up at each of its docks, a wind-and-wave sigil painted on the sails. “They’re Merosian,” I said.
“Why did he send them here?” Diem asked. “Why not send them to Fortos with the others?”
I sat quietly, waiting for her to work through what I’d already figured out. Knowing it would crush her when she did.
Ophiucae had been one step ahead of us all day.
He’d known exactly where we’d be and when, how we planned to attack, how to lull us into thinking we’d won before showing his hand.
Even our plan to bring him here had been prepared for and countered—a plan that Diem had only shared the details of this morning with me and Alixe.
Our thoughts had been shielded by godstone against his intrusion . . . but Diem’s had not.
He’d used her own mind against her. Against her people. Against her brother.
When the realization hit her, her wrath blazed hotter than the sun.
It seared past the edges of our bond and grew into something bigger, something else.
Something that bled into the world, pulsing with a thunderous heartbeat like a living, breathing thing—a vengeful, ancient thing.
It whispered and it hummed, and when it did, I heard the faintest notes of an old, beloved song.
Beneath the blood and grime of war, her skin began to glow.
“My Queen,” I breathed.
The sound of distant wingbeats thumped behind us. I twisted around, fearful that Xipherus had healed and tracked us to Coeur?le, but the clouds were too low and thick to see much—just a scrap of bloody fabric twirling in the wind and falling toward the sea.
Not just fabric.
A shirt.
“Sorae, get us to land,” I shouted.
Diem shook her head. “The first time we came here, you said gryverns would die if they touched the island’s soil. That was before the Crowns cast their spell. What if it’s still true?” She pointed to the Lumnos dock. “She’ll have to land there.”
Sorae ignored my protests. Even freed of her compelled obedience, her loyalty was to Diem. She tilted, circling over the Temple. As we turned, Ophiucae’s body swung into view.
And his open, lucid eyes locked on mine.
“Sorae, drop Ophiucae n—”
A column of ice shot from Ophiucae’s hand and cut me short.
The jagged crystal drove through Sorae’s chest and sliced into my shoulder.
Sorae let out an ear-splitting wail. Her talon went limp, and Ophiucae slipped through her claws.
As he plummeted toward the island, he stretched his palm and unleashed a wave of fire.
Sorae spun to spare Diem from the flames.
The heat of the fire bloomed around us, melting the icy skewer until the pressure of my weight snapped it in half.
The sky became a spinning blur. Diem screamed my name, her voice growing distant. I tumbled through the air, and I thought of Perthe, who had fallen to his doom in my stead, and Teller, who’d made that wretched choice.
And my mother, who had died so I could live.