45. Advanced Entropic Reactions
Chaos erupted. The ice shook and cracked beneath me. Iseult barked orders to protect the Rift. Mom screamed my name from where she bent over Gams’s too-still body.
And what remained of Ciarán stood at the center of it all. Shadow stretched over a swollen skull, and orange Skal-light glowed from the recesses of deepset eyes. He reared on monstrous hind legs and shrieked. The piercing wail reverberated across the ice.
It was the same sound that had struck me numb with fear so many times, that made every nerve stand on high alert, but now, it didn’t sound real.
There could not be a rotsbane twitching in front of me, because that was where Ciarán had been standing.
The shredded remnants of his clothes lay at the rotsbane’s clawed feet.
The metal scythe he’d made during our travels and then had kept on his belt glinted in the moonlight from within the folds of his discarded cloak.
But Ciarán could not be a rotsbane.
Brave, gentle Ciarán who was going to spend the rest of his life in Keldori, studying architecture and annoying me in all the best ways, was not a rotsbane.
I refused to believe it.
However, my breaths were too shallow and my heart too quick, as if my body had accepted reality more easily than my mind.
But my mind could not, would not accept that Ciarán was gone because he was still there, screaming in my head in time with the rotsbane’s awful cry.
Ciarán was screaming.
The horror of it all finally clicked, and I screamed too.
Ciarán charged, and I had no energy, no mettle left to move. My grandma had been shot. Ciarán was a rotsbane. Ferrin was about to go through the Rift.
We’d lost, and as Ciarán’s four claws reached for me, I thought how at least I would get to feel his embrace one last time.
“Get up, dammit!” Purple fire danced to my left, and Ciarán changed trajectory to chase after it. Orla’s arms hooked under mine and hoisted me to my feet. “You did not bring us all this way just to give up, Wren! You are better than that!”
Ice shuddered and rose from the frozen sea to create a craggy barrier between Ciarán and the Rift. Orla and I staggered out of the way of rising shards. The bay groaned, Ciarán’s rotsbane shrieked, and ice crashed, but louder than anything was Ciarán screaming in my head.
Not only was he still conscious inside the monster, but he was in pain.
Ahead Iseult helped Fana climb up the icy cliffs that had risen to protect the Rift. Mom was already at the top, her hands glowing blue as she conducted the ice to form the bluffs. Gams lay at her feet, but I couldn’t tell at this distance or from this angle if she was okay.
“Ciarán—” I gasped against Orla.
“We don’t stop fighting, Wren. We keep going.” She knelt at the base of the first icy wall to give me a step up. There wasn’t time to argue over who should help whom, so I accepted the boost, found my footing, and then reached down to help her after me.
Ice cut into my hands and chilled me through my cloak and Keel Watch Harbor crewneck, but Orla was right. We keep going, even with Ciarán’s unrelenting cries filling my head.
Dull blue light filtered through the ice, emanating from the frozen mouth of the Rift where it was encased below us. It wouldn’t keep Ferrin out for long, but it at least would stop Ciarán from crossing into Keldori and ripping it apart as he gorged on Skal.
“Wren!” Mom’s hands helped me up the last ledge of ice. Her arms wrapped around me, and finally, after months, I felt the warmth of my mother’s real self, even as it seemed the world was collapsing around us. “Oh, Wren. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“Is Gams—” I cut off, afraid of the answer.
“Alive.” Mom let go of me to twist around to check on Gams. She might’ve been sleeping if not for the broken glasses, pale cheeks, and bloodstained dress. “I did some rudimentary healing, but she’d already lost a lot of blood.”
I could heal her, but then we’d all die in a volcanic blast. I looked back at the mountains where they continued to spit ash into the sky. The rising sun beyond their peaks outlined their silhouettes in a foreboding red.
Meanwhile, much closer, figures stirred on the shore of the frozen bay.
The armies gathered there had noticed the storm had stopped, and now they lined up to watch the Rift.
The shrieking of Ciarán’s rotsbane and the groaning of shifting ice must’ve been enough to deter them, because while they lined up, none were brave enough to venture forward.
“What if we reseal Gams?” I asked. “Will she survive?”
“I’m not sure,” Mom admitted, “but it might be our only chance. We’ve got three Sovereigns. Four, if you count me and you separately. We can seal her here. We’ll be trapped in Skalterra, but—”
“Absolutely not!” Maxwell shivered in his cargo shorts, and his cheeks flushed with cold and panic. I hadn’t noticed my father cowering among the icy crags. “You send me home right now!”
“You’re lucky I don’t throw you off this iceberg for shooting my mother!” Mom snarled, and her arms tightened around my shoulders.
“Give the man a break, Eliza,” a cool voice laced with the strain of physical exertion cut over our refuge.
Mom pushed me behind her, and blue light flared in her fists, but Ferrin had climbed up when none of us had been watching. Fana, eyes wide with fear, stood at his side, her thin wrist wrapped in his grip and open air beyond the cliff nipping at her t-shirt.
“Let the girl go,” Mom demanded.
“Or what?” Ferrin sneered. “You can’t hurt me without hurting her.”
It was Stanley and his gun all over again.
“You can’t fight us. You’re all out of Skal,” I said.
“That I am.” Ferrin beamed over his shoulder at Ciarán where he thrashed on the ice, searching for more magick to devour. “Well spent, I’d say. And I don’t need Skal to get what I want.”
His grip on Fana’s wrist tightened as he stepped back towards the lip of the cliff.
“You hurt her, and we’ll kill you,” Iseult growled.
“So violent, just like your grandfather.” Ferrin sighed. “I don’t see why anyone should have to die. It’s all such a waste. There is room within the two realms for all of us, I should hope. So, Eliza, is it? Pleasure to meet you. Unblock the Rift. Let me through. No one gets hurt.”
Orla stepped forward. Iseult tried to pull her back but she shook her off.
“Leave Fana out of it. Please,” Orla breathed. “Let her go, and I’ll go with you.”
“My prodigal niece,” Ferrin drawled. “You’d really come back to your dear old uncle after everything?”
“Orla,” I hissed, but she held a hand out to me without looking away from Ferrin.
“You’re right. No one else should die,” Orla said, and I remembered our conversation on Davyn’s boat. “I’m tired of death. If you can promise that there’s no more, then I’m on your side. I have Oren’s magick. I can get you through the ice to the Rift.”
“Orla!” I said it louder this time.
She turned to look at me. Her eyes were tired and her lips quivered. “I’m sorry, Wren.”
“What happened to ‘we don’t stop fighting’ from two minutes ago?”
“I know, I just—” She cut off, her mouth drawing into a helpless frown, and she turned back to Ferrin. “Tell me no one else dies, and I’ll help you.”
“That’s up to Wren and her friends,” Ferrin crooned. “If they stand in my way—”
“They won’t.”
“Like hell!” Iseult snarled.
“We can still be a family,” Orla said. “Nothing can change the circumstances that brought us here, but I can’t let all that death—Galahad, Tiernan, Caitria, Ciarán, my parents—I can’t let it all be for nothing.
Just let Fana go, and I’ll get through to the Rift.
The others won’t hurt you if I’m with you. ”
Ferrin looked at us all one by one, smirking when his eyes passed over my fallen grandmother to land on me. He let go of Fana’s wrist, and she scurried across the cliff to slam into the safety of Iseult’s arms.
I held my breath as Orla stepped forward.
“I’m sorry,” she said to no one in particular, and then embraced her uncle.
Ferrin grinned at me over her shoulder, triumphant for but a second. His eyes widened as her arms tightened.
“Orla, no!” I screamed, but the sound was lost to another one of Ciarán’s ghastly cries.
Orla closed her eyes and, with her arms still wrapped around Ferrin, pitched herself forward off the lip of the cliff.
A purple trail of skal-fire streaked the air behind them as they fell, and Ciarán cried out at the smell of magick.
Neither Ciarán’s rotsbane wail nor Iseult’s scream was enough to cover the sound of Orla and Ferrin hitting the ice with a horrible crunch.
“Wren, stop!” Mom yelled behind me, but I was already sliding down the side of the cliff, ignoring the burning in my hands as they grated against ice.
“Dammit, Orla!” I screamed.
She and Ferrin both stirred feebly, and hope fluttered in my stomach, but Orla’s fire continued to burn, drawing Ciarán towards them.
Iseult slid beside me, half-glissading, half-falling. She beat me to Orla and extricated her from Ferrin’s mangled grip. Orla cried out in pain, her limbs hanging at impossible, gut-churning angles.
I rushed to help Iseult drag her farther from her uncle. Orla lifted her head towards Ciarán’s rotsbane, and the purple flame flared, dancing on Ferrin’s chest armor as we pulled her back.
Ciarán raged towards him, gauging chunks of ice from the ground with every leap off his claws, and I realized what Orla was doing.
Ferrin realized it too, because he pushed up onto his hands and looked at the fire burning on his leathers and then up at the charging rotsbane.
Ciarán wanted Skal. Orla had left him some.
Iseult and I cowered with the ice wall at our backs, cradling Orla’s broken body between us.
“You should’ve… left... me…” Orla wheezed between breaths, and Iseult bent low over her face.
White hair fell forward over Iseult’s shoulders, hiding them both from view.
The purple flame that remained on Ferrin’s chest, the flame wrought from the magick of Orla’s father, disappeared, sucked into Ciarán’s jaws.
Ferrin, as horrible as he was, did not back down even in the face of a rotsbane of his own creation.
“You cannot kill me!” Ferrin, bleeding down his face, roared up at Ciarán. “I killed your family. I took your humanity. I made you! You cannot—”
Ferrin cut off in a guttural scream as Ciarán dug into his chest.
I knew not to let a rotsbane catch me in its claws, but nothing could have prepared me for the brutality of its attack.
Ferrin’s screams were a mercy, as they helped drown out the sound of tearing flesh and breaking bones.
Blood sprayed as vessels burst, and Orla turned her head away to hide against Iseult’s cloak.
The rotsbane shrieked and Ciarán roared as well in my mind, full of rage and pain and hunger.
All the while, Ferrin remained alive.
“How’s he not dead yet?” I asked through a quaking whisper.
“Rotsbane don’t kill quickly.” Iseult grimaced as Ciarán flung Ferrin like a rag doll across the ice, and then chased after him like a cat playing with a mouse before the kill. “They’ll suck Nightmares down fast enough, but real bodies they break apart piece by piece to not miss any Skal.”
“Orla, please…” Ferrin’s whimper echoed across the ice. “Please just kill me—”
He cut off in a scream of agony as Ciarán’s claws punched through his abdomen.
I looked away, blinking at the ice, trying to remove the image from my mind, but it was impossible with Ciarán still crying in my head.
The tether belonged to his horror and his hunger, and so did I. The connection pulled at me, trying to draw me into Ciarán’s head, but I refused.
I did not want to see what the world looked like to Ciarán as he ripped Ferrin apart.
“‘When I kill your uncle, it will not be quick’,” Orla rasped, quoting something Ciarán had once told her. “‘It will not be painless. I will draw it out as long as I can, and I will make him beg for death.’”
If it was justice, it was cruel, and it was cold, and Ciarán continued to scream in my head, even after Ferrin Quillguard moved no more.