54. Lucy
Lucy
Overturn your garden on Tuesdays and plant at seven bells. The plants prefer the structure, and the mugworts prefer the moisture.
“Do you think one night you’ll go through and never come back?”
I didn’t answer Emrys right away. The fog wall rose in front of us as I turned the question over, looking for the honest answer underneath the comfortable one.
“Yes,” I said simply.
Emrys threw a pebble at the wall. It bounced back and hit his knee. He picked it up and threw it again. “If you had to choose right now, which side?”
I could feel the world on the other side pulling me even now, even sitting still. Riot in our makeshift home. The ocean. The city I’d grown up in. The people I’d left behind.
“Out there,” I said. “If I had to choose.”
He nodded slowly. Turned another pebble over in his fingers before sending it at the wall.
“Emrys—”
“No, I know.” There was no bitterness in it, which was somehow worse. “I knew that already.”
“I’m not going to stop trying to bring the wards down,” I said. “If one day I stop coming back, just know I’m fighting for your freedom from the other side.”
He threw another stone. It bounced back harder than the first. He looked at it on the ground between his feet and said nothing for a moment.
“Tell me again about that Silverbolts game,” he said. “The one where the striker read the veil’s movement too late.”
I smiled. “You said it was lame.”
“It is lame.” He threw the third pebble. “Tell me anyway.”
So I told him.
Emrys listened with his elbows on his knees and his eyes on the fog wall and I watched him picture it, watched him build it from nothing the way he always did when I described the world outside. The way he thought of the ocean.
“Sounds loud,” he said.
“Unbearably.”
He nudged me with a shoulder. “I’d probably hate it.”
“We both know that’s a lie.”
The corner of his mouth lifted. He picked up another pebble from somewhere and turned it over in his fingers without throwing it.
The light was going fast now. I could feel the Ossira warming against my throat, orienting itself, getting ready.
My body already knew what was coming even when my mind was still here on this cold stone with this ridiculous dragon and his damn pebbles.
“You have to go,” he said.
“I have to go.”
He nodded, turning the pebble over once more. “Tell him I said to take care of you properly or I’ll really be motivated to break down this fucking wall.”
I laughed. “I’ll tell him.”
“I mean it.”
“I know you do.” I stood, brushing the cold from my coat.
He looked up at me from the ground and something in his expression was so open it caught me off guard. He wasn’t hiding it the way he hid most things. He just let me see it.
“Come back,” he said. “Just this one last time. Come back.”
I opened my mouth.
They dropped from above.
No warning. No sound before the impact, just wings and weight and the ground gone from under me as something enormous drove me down. A dragon. I heard Emrys shout, heard him scramble up, heard the crack of a collision that said he’d shifted mid-lunge trying to reach me.
Terror hit before the pain did. Pure and cold and total. “Emrys!”
I heard Emrys make a sound I never wanted to hear again. Then a wing connected with the side of my head and the world went white, and then it became nothing at all.
I came back to myself all at once, in a collision of pain and fear and confusion. I lay on cold stone staring at the carvings embedded into the mountain as I willed my vision to clear.
I gasped, sitting up too quickly as my head spun and my stomach turned. The warded cave. The one Emrys had shown me weeks ago. But no. I scrambled to my feet, stumbled and caught myself on a wall, righted myself and did every single thing to push down the rising panic.
I was on the wrong side. Trapped with the weird glowing altar in the belly of a runic mountain.
And now that I was all the way in the room, I could see what the doorway had hidden.
Behind the altar, a waterfall of power climbed the rock in reverse, pouring upward, feeding every rune in the stone.
I knew it to be dangerous immediately and didn’t go near it.
The second my fist collided with the invisible barrier over the door, locking me in, the wards threw me backward hard enough that I hit the opposite wall and slid down it.
The Ossira was actively burning me. I could smell it as much as I could feel it.
I tried to shift.
Nothing.
I tried again.
Nothing.
I hit the ward with both fists. It threw me back. I got up and hit it again. It threw me back harder, and I hit the floor on my hands and knees and stayed there for a second that lasted forever.
Get up.
The Ossira cinched and I made a sound I didn’t recognize as mine, something between a gasp and a cry.
I clawed at my throat with both hands. It wouldn’t help but I couldn’t stop myself.
With great effort, I forced myself to find stone instead of skin, dragging them down the wall.
Down and down, because I needed to do something with my hands or I was going to lose my mind entirely.
I’m going to die in here.
The thought arrived so certain that I shoved it away, but it came back.
I’m going to die in here, and no one knows where I am, and Emrys might already be dead outside that damn wall, and I will never see Riot again, and the collar is going to choke the life out of me one degree at a time and it’s going to hurt and I can’t get out. I can’t get out. I cannot get out.
The Ossira tightened.
I dropped to my knees. Breathe. Just breathe.
I couldn’t.
I pressed my forehead to the cold stone and concentrated on the cold. Just the cold. Just that one thing. The stone against my skin.
In.
Out.
In.
The edges of my vision went dark. I was going to die.
A roar split the world open.
Not from outside the cave. Not from close by.
From everywhere, from the mountain itself, a sound so vast and so furious it moved through the stone beneath me and up through my spine.
The warded walls of the city hadn’t stopped it.
Whatever those wards were built to contain, they had not been built to contain that. Him.
Riot.
The Ossira screamed against my throat. I pressed my hand flat to the cave floor and reached for him through whatever connection existed between us, thin as thread through all the suppression and stone and distance.
I’m here, I pushed toward him. I’m inside the warded cave… Riot, I’m here.
The roar cut off.
Silence.
Then his voice, ragged at the edges in a way I’d never heard from him. I can hear you. Don’t stop talking, my Tilouri. Don’t stop.
A sob broke free as I tried to breathe. I can’t shift. The Ossira. I swallowed against the tightening of it. I’m going to die.