Chapter 55
Audra gazed down upon six hollow things scattered across the earth like fallen leaves; nothing but dried husks stretched across a latticework of bones—all that remained of the Chorus of Echoes.
Audra could feel their bones. Hear them.
They didn’t speak, but sang—a dry, rattling song that vibrated in her marrow.
That dark power within her, not yet satiated, followed the call.
It curled around their ribs, latched onto their joints, whispered to the connective tissue, fortifying any weak areas.
Her eyes fluttered for a moment as her power settled in, a cat who’d found an arc of sun to rest awhile.
Her fingers itched to make the bones shift and move.
But then, her eyes flew open with a gasp, as the spirits rose.
They were smoke and spite, gray things reaching out for the only living thing.
Help me, they rasped, their voices rang in her mind like stone grating against stone. Their hands were cold, clutching at her sleeves, her skirt, the heavy weight of her blood-soaked braids.
These were the ghosts of selfish, hateful beings. Audra stumbled back, her skin crawling.
“You torment me in life and even now, in death,” Audra said, planting her legs in the frozen earth. “Enough, you will torment none ever again.”
With a sweeping gesture, she lashed her power out at them, so their coalescing, translucent forms were thrown back.
She followed, driving her power into them.
It ripped through their ghostly forms, fraying them to ribbons until there was no remnant left of their spirits, no residual stain of their corrupted souls.
Only when there was nothing left of them—no echo of the Echoes—did she pull her power back into herself.
It coiled behind her ribs now, nuzzled against her heart, and waited.
She would need to learn to control it easily every time. Though she knew that it only returned to her this effortlessly because it had just tasted life, shredded souls. It was satiated, to a point, though it still pulsed with hunger.
She must learn to control it every time, always.
And there was one who could teach her. But she could not reach him here beneath the Veridian gods’ malevolent altar. Their presence was too strong in their hallowed place.
She ran. Her boots thumped on the hard, frozen ground, away, away, away from that hungry tree.
She ran until the sapling spawn of the Perennial Tree were far behind her, and then she ran some more.
A new, untainted forest closed behind her as her heart hammered a frantic, stolen rhythm against her ribs.
The life force of the Echoes thrummed through her—a hot, electric current that strengthened her muscles, quickened her stride.
She twisted around branches, leapt over trees long ago cracked from the cold, fallen to their deaths.
The forest shifted. The hills grew steep. The air turned brittle with frost that burned her lungs.
Finally, she slowed, stopped.
When she called for him, she didn’t whisper his name; she roared it into the silence of the woods before sinking to her knees, threading her fingers into ice-encrusted moss.
A seam split the air, a tear in the fabric of the world. She felt the rush of his power before she saw him.
He stepped through the Veilway, wearing black armor like a second skin, a shimmering ebony blade clenched in his hand. When he saw her, he froze, his breath hitching, his gaze roaming over her, drinking her in with a desperate, starving intensity.
“Audra.” Her name a prayer upon his lips.
He circled her, his eyes searching desperately for signs of wounds, signs that the blood covering her hair, her face, the Holyvere Academy uniform might be her own.
But she displayed no wounds, not even the scratch from the knife’s edge, nor the wounds on her wrists from Khari’s timepiece cuff, which the ropes tied on her wrists that morning had reopened. “I feared the worst.”
When he halted, satisfied that she wasn’t harmed, Audra took a moment to drink him in.
Dark circles ringed his eyes, stubble she’d never seen on him before kissed the strong curve of his jaw.
She noted his armor, the shimmering blade clenched in his hand.
He’d arrived dressed for battle, ready to fight for her.
Tears stung behind her eyelids, but she didn’t want to cry, so she chose humor instead. “You’ve been hiding the good swords from me.” Her voice trembled despite the joke. “I could’ve used a sword like that.”
“I …” He blinked. Then, the corner of his mouth tilted up in a ghost of a smirk. “I would have gladly given my sword to you,” he murmured, “if I thought you could swing it without taking off a limb.”
Somehow, she laughed.
The silence that followed was a thick, heavy thing, pressing in from the hoarfrosted trees, the limning fog that threaded around their ankles.
What did he see when he looked at her? She was no longer the naive initiate. The surprised girl in the tavern. Or the woman on the altar.
She was something new, something forged from blood and bone and death.
“I was worried,” Zhaire said, his voice dropping an octave. “I felt your call. And then you were gone. We tried to break into Holyvere Academy, we would’ve burned the place down to get to you, but something changed—the wards, the incras themselves, they—”
“I felt it too. I think … I think their gods might be real.”
Zhaire grimaced. “Of course, those bastards are real; they have been the cause of both our people’s problems for thousands of years.”
“I wanted them to be a story,” she whispered. “I wanted you all to be liars.”
A sad smile as he sheathed his sword. “I can’t fault you for that. How could you not have hoped that we’d fabricated this entire conundrum?”
She stared at the blood crusted on her hands, beneath her fingernails, staining the white sleeve of her academy uniform a deep burgundy. She thought of the tree. She thought of its ravenous hunger. Audra shuttered. “If only this had all been an elaborate lark.”
She pushed up from the ground, released a deep sigh, a cloudburst of breath fluttered in the air between them. “Zhaire, I—I want to apologize. I was an asshole. An ignorant, stubborn asshole.”
Zhaire whistled, the sound low and lilting as he stepped toward her.
“Sure, it would have saved us both time and effort if you had listened to me sooner.” He stepped closer, his fingers reaching out to touch one of her braids.
He pinched the hair between his thumb and forefinger, staring at the bloodstains.
“But you can’t be blamed for not trusting me.
And anyway … how would you have gotten your braids such a vivid shade of red? ”
The same red that had gushed from the Perennial Tree, spurted from the mouths of the dying priestesses.
Was she like that Perennial Tree now? She was covered in blood …
had consumed the life force of the Echoes just like the tree had wanted to consume hers.
She shoved the thought away. She could follow that disturbing thread another time, another place—a future Audra who was safe and warm and had time for reflective philosophical contemplation.
He noted the anguish in her expression, dropped the braid, his expression fracturing. “Sorry, Heiress. I shouldn’t make light of … whatever happened.”
He stroked an eyebrow. “Will you share with me what it was that happened? How it is that you were discovered, and yet you wonderfully stand, living …” A step closer.
“… Breathing, before me?” He leaned toward her.
“How has spring not sprung?” Her hair was back in his grip, as though he’d had her in his grasp and wasn’t going to let her go just yet, even if that meant holding on to a bloodied braid.
Audra studied his face. The marvel shining in his eyes.
Could almost feel his hope glowing bright and warm around him.
To him, she was a miracle. Here she stood.
Alive somehow, though all others, when taken to be sacrificed, had fallen to the Zenaidan fae’s knife before her.
She was living, breathing proof that his prophecy might come true. Might be realized at long last.
Expectation.
It weighed on her, heavier than her parents’ expectations, a constant presence that had shaped her entire life.
Theirs was a blanket laden with sand; his was lead heaved upon her shoulders, her chest, pressing heavy, heavy, heavy until she couldn’t breathe, pressing her down, down, down, painful as it buried her.
She dropped her gaze. “It’s a long story. A dark one. Not to be told here.”
“I see.” His voice had changed, a grave tone, lacking the earlier luster, hope.
She glanced back at him, and had to crane her neck to see him.
That shrewd gaze of his missed nothing, did it?
He nodded slightly, as though confirming something to himself. She noted that the light in his eyes, though not entirely gone, was now diminished.
She looked at the Veilway, the shimmering door to another world. They can discuss this more later. When she wasn’t covered in blood and freezing. “Does the offer still stand?”
“Which offer?”
“The one where you take me home with you.”
“Yes,” he said, his hand reaching for her and then dropping, as though he changed his mind. He fisted it at his side instead, the arc of his shoulders settled into a hard, rigid line.