16. Fencing I
Ciarán had cleaned and removed his parents’ remains from the main chamber by the time we all sat on the flagstone together the next morning. Or maybe it was evening? Time had become amorphous at some point in the last few days.
Whatever the time was, I avoided looking at the floor in the center of the chamber. The thought of Ciarán’s dead parents was all the more haunting after accidentally slipping into his head, and my brief time spent as Liam had left me shaken.
If Ciarán remembered his dreams from the night before and the memory of Liam I’d recovered, he made no indication of it.
Granted, he’d always been hard to read. He stared at Iseult with the rest of us, waiting for her to organize her thoughts and hopefully agree to help us find the secret back way into Keldori.
The slippery sliding of Skal as it cascaded down the walls around us echoed through the room, filling the silence. Iseult stared at the copper gate, and I wished I could hear what she was thinking. Instead, I was left with the continued buzzing Ciarán’s thoughts just out of reach.
We’d laid out everything for her—the truth of how Galahad had died, Ferrin’s secret life as a Lucid Nightmare in Keldori, the true identity of the Saergrim, the real purpose of the Grimguards, and the unwitting role I played in all of it.
“You need me,” Iseult finally said, still looking at the copper with a careful expression. “Because I’m a Lyrian.”
“The Saergrim said any Lyrian would do, but you’re the one we’ve got,” Ciarán explained. “So is it true? Do the Lyrians know how to pass into Keldori without the Rift?”
Iseult’s brow furrowed over her silver eyes, and she exhaled heavily through her nose before straightening up to look around the circle at us. Despite the baths the others had taken and the sleep we’d all gotten, I knew we still looked beleaguered.
“My grandfather died trying to keep Magicians from ever setting foot in Keldori. Why would I tarnish his memory by helping you achieve something that went against his life’s work?” Iseult asked.
“We’re trying to reseal the Rift,” I said. “I think Galahad would understand.”
“I think I would understand my grandfather better than you, Nightmare.”
“Nightmare?” I raised an eyebrow at her.
“Sorry. I meant Wren.” She cleared her throat. “Still, Galahad may have been your nocturmancer, but he was my family.”
“He abandoned you,” Ciarán taunted.
“Excuse you?” Iseult bristled, and Ciarán’s coy grin widened, so different from that scared boy I’d found in his memories.
“I heard Ferrin tell Wren all about it back when I was spying on your city through her eyes. I know how you lost your parents and your leg in a single night, only for the old man, your only family, to leave you the next day.”
“Stop it,” Iseult hissed, and I echoed her command to Ciarán through our bond.
“Why? It’s true, isn’t it? He left you.” Ciarán’s hand played with the jar of ashes on his belt. He sat just ahead of where we’d found his parents’ remains the day before, and the orange of his irises made the copper plate on the wall behind him seem all the brighter.
“He had a duty to uphold.”
“He did. An important one.” Ciarán nodded. “One he was willing to die for. My parents left me, just like Galahad left you, and they died for the same cause he did at the hand of the same man. And now you’re going to let that man win.”
“He won’t win,” Iseult asserted. “If we wait long enough, the volcanoes will seal the Rift. You said it yourself. There’s no need to go to Keldori.”
“Rocks and magma aren’t as permanent as a magick seal,” I said.
“Don’t act like you understand magick just because you found out you’re a Saergrim,” Iseult sniffed.
“It’s actually the rocks and magma she understands more than the magick,” Ciarán chuckled.
“Regardless, she’s right. After the debris from the volcano settles, Ferrin will be able to drill through rock better than anyone.
Look at this keep. His people are better than anyone at carving halls and corridors through stone. ”
“It still takes time,” Iseult argued. “And in that time, we can stop him.”
“A magick seal is still—” I started, but Iseult cut me off.
“A magick seal is better only in that it spares your grandmother. Look around you, Lady Saergrim.” She sneered my title, and I tried to quell the anger rising in my throat.
“Ferrin killed my grandfather. He killed your Grimguard’s parents and cousin.
Orla’s parents. Fana’s entire family. Why should we risk entering Keldori so we can save yours?
Everyone else has sacrificed. Why can’t you? ”
I reeled away, struck and shamed by Iseult’s words.
“Iseult,” Orla said slowly. She’d been quiet the entire morning, letting Ciarán and me do most of the talking, and her voice was hoarse from lack of use.
“No one here has sacrificed anyone. Those people, everyone who has died, they were taken from us, cruelly and violently. We didn’t choose that.
That’s no sacrifice. We are just as cruel as Ferrin if we expect Wren to suffer loss for no reason other than we have all already suffered the same. ”
Iseult narrowed her eyes at Orla, and a deep blush rose in Orla’s cheeks.
“I expect Wren to suffer because the alternative you brought before me is a death mission. One of you is a child, the men are both injured, and you,” Iseult turned her glittering eyes towards me, “may have been a powerful and resourceful Nightmare, but as a Magician, you are woefully untrained and volatile.”
“So you won’t help us?” I blanched. We’d risked so much to get her. We’d wasted so much time already.
“If you don’t, we’ll be forced to go back to Tulyr to find someone who will,” Ciarán threatened.
“Calm down.” Iseult stood and shifted her weight to her Skal leg. She stared down at me with a neat frown. “I’ll help, but only if the Lady Saergrim proves this mission isn’t as hopeless as it looks.”
“Of course.” I scrambled to my feet. “Whatever it takes.”
She smirked and flipped her long silver hair over her shoulder as she spun on her glowing heel and stalked out of the chamber, through the steam-filled antechamber and into the moss-laden canyon.
I chased after her, and the shuffling of feet against stone told me the others were close behind.
Iseult stopped in the mossy courtyard, then spun to face us where we gathered on the stone steps of the keep. She lifted her metal knight’s helmet and pulled it over her head, letting the visor fall into place and obscure her eyes.
A silver longsword that glowed the same color as her leg took shape in her hands, and she brandished it at me.
“Show me you’re worth fighting alongside, Saergrim. Make a weapon. Any weapon.” Her voice echoed from inside her helmet. “Any weapon that isn’t a flail.”
The others were silent behind me, but Ciarán swore softly in my head.
Whatever it takes, I’d told her. I would’ve fought a rotsbane or gone back to the Second Sentinel to prove it to her, had she asked.
No. Instead she had to choose the one thing she knew I couldn’t do.
“I don’t have any Skal.” It was a terrible attempt at delaying the inevitable. Not only could I feel magick buzzing beneath the skin of my palms, the Keep of Realta Fiel was so full of Skal that even the steam hummed with its magick.
Glass clinked behind me, and someone pressed a bottle into my hand. I turned to see it was Ciarán, unreadable in both his stern expression and the way he continued to keep his thoughts locked just out of my reach.
“Drink up.” Iseult gave her sword a flourish.
Skal warmed my throat, electric in taste, as it slid down my esophagus. I grimaced, and the buzzing beneath my skin surged, as if begging to be let out.
“Wren?” Orla handed me her Skal-goggles, and I fixed the cracked glass over my eyes, more out of a means of stalling rather than actual concern for my retinas.
Ciarán prodded my back, and I stumbled down the worn steps to meet Iseult on the moss. The goggles over my eyes muted the bright greens and blues of the canyon, but Iseult’s sword pulsed with silver light. If I could get her to listen, maybe I could still talk my way out of this.
She was obstinate, sure, but it was more likely to work than I was to produce anything that wasn’t a flail.
“It’s not just my grandmother’s life on the line,” I tried to explain. “Everything north of the mountains will be—”
Iseult surged forward with a two-handed grip on her longsword. Blue light flashed, and I batted her attack to the side with a flail. Magick cracked, and the air between us burst with static.
“I said,” Iseult heaved her sword back into the air to swing it again, “no flails!”
I abandoned my flail and took up a dodging-based strategy. The heat of the Iseult’s weapon seared beneath my chin as I backpedaled out of its reach.
“Don’t kill her!” Tiernan sounded more exasperated than worried, but his support was a nice change from the Tiernan I was more used to.
“You have to try again, my Lady,” Ciarán growled in my mind as I dodged another swing of Iseult’s sword.
“I know!” It was hard enough to concentrate on the handful of Skal I was trying to shape without Ciarán giving useless advice in my head.
Blue light burst, and I swung my weapon to meet Iseult’s. The chain of my new flail wrapped around the blade of her sword, hissing and steaming, and I took the moment to get in close and kick Iseult in her armored stomach.
Compared to the kicks and hits I’d dealt while in my Nightmare form, it was weak and sloppy, but it was enough to make Iseult stagger back in shock.
“You don’t need to fight her!” Ciarán’s voice snapped. “You just have to make anything that isn’t a flail!”
But Iseult was more than happy to repay my strike in kind. The metal knuckles of her gauntlets crashed into Orla’s goggles where they sat on my face.
The goggles took the brunt of the force, otherwise I was sure Iseult would’ve broken my nose. The rims pushed back against my cheekbones, the metal biting into my skin, and the glass lenses shattered.