Chapter Thirty-Four
Kai
The tunnel was broad and smooth to begin with, a neat construction of ice pillars and flat pathways.
It was not difficult to see where the Wielder’s energy had begun to wane.
The passage narrowed, the walls growing more jagged, and where their long tunnel splintered into forked pathways, Lady Imogen caught his lingering gaze and said, “Those ones aren’t ours. There’s a few bisecting this passage.”
The Sealgair’s tunnels.
He peered hopefully into them whenever they passed, but it was difficult enough to see the path ahead, let alone spy anyone hidden in the ancient, unlit passages.
The winter sunlight, filtered through centuries of muggy ice, did little to light their way.
Lanterns had been set into the walls, but the farther they walked, the sparser the light became, as though the Wielders had underestimated just how deep they would need to tunnel.
But Kai was unfortunately familiar with these depths.
He had expected dread to fall upon him as they entered the tunnels, but it did not come.
After all, while the dark could not be called a comfort, it was familiar.
For better or worse, this ice, these shadows, had been his cradle for longer than he could truly fathom.
He didn’t fear them anymore; his fears had taken a very different shape in these last few months.
And so, it was with an unexpected ease that Kai followed Lady Imogen into the frozen heart of his lost home, knowing that what he truly feared was a threat hanging far above the solid surface.
They walked in silence broken only by Lady Imogen’s occasional offerings; that they were not far now; that the other wielders and gards would be waiting for them; that he need only clear their way as they broke through the ice to the running waters of the cavern.
At this last assertion, Kai could not help himself.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked tersely. Ahead of him, Imogen did not turn, but he enjoyed a savage satisfaction in the tightening of her shoulders. “How can you help her?”
“How can you?” she shot back.
Kai gritted his chattering teeth.
“She has Adeline.”
“And Mareda, too,” Imogen said simply. Her gaze remained on the dim path ahead, one hand flat to the rough-hewn ice wall, following the tunnels she’d carved at Avette’s command.
“Do you have any idea, Your Majesty, just how many times I’ve had this conversation?
I’m tired of it. You cannot know, any of you, what I have done to survive these past few months. To ensure we all survived.”
“And you think we’ll survive if you give her the Pearl?”
Imogen drew abruptly short, gaze flicking halfway over her shoulder.
“I think if I give her the next pretty trinket she has her eye on, it’ll hold her attention long enough to keep us all safe a moment longer.
I think if she didn’t send me, she would send someone whose motives I can’t guarantee.
I think I am buying us time.” She turned fully to him, and even in the dwindling light of the depths, he caught the fire behind her eyes.
“And frankly, I think that’s more than anyone else has done to stop her. ”
Kai’s tense jaw loosened, thawed by the hot sweep of shame in his chest, all that self-righteousness crumbling to ash.
Thoroughly cowed, he flinched from the sear of her gaze and caught only the sparkling whisk of her skirts as she turned and continued on, her steps decidedly more clipped.
He followed at a distance, reminded irresistibly of the last time a slight and elegant woman had cut him down to size.
Lady Snow, Avette had called her, and he doubted whether she knew just how apt that was; Imogen was every bit as formidable as the Queen of Snow and Silver herself.
He hurried on as Imogen rounded a bend in the tunnels, nearly slipping in his haste and sending his heart lurching.
“I should not have presumed to understand your motivations,” he said. “I am sorry, Lady Imogen.”
Her shoulders pulled back straighter.
“I am aware of how it must look,” she sniffed—then softened. “And I’m sorry for snapping. It’s just been—”
She sighed, the gust of her breath going beyond words.
“A tense time,” Kai finished for her.
“A tense time,” she agreed. “The wrong time to be branded a traitor. I’ve had to be smart. Careful. And despite how uncomfortable it might make you, or Adeline, or anyone else—I will continue to move with caution, for as long as I need to. There’s too much at stake.”
Kai bowed his head.
“Understood.”
But something in her phrasing tickled at the edges of his mind, featherlight.
Branded a traitor. He could not think why those words bounced around his skull the way they did, rebounding back and forth as they descended into colder, darker tunnels.
Their footsteps rang off the ice walls, keeping rhythm with the echo of that one word in his head.
Traitor. Traitor. Traitor. The phrase unsettled him for reasons he could not begin to articulate, and as the descent grew steeper and more slippery, the whir of his mind slowed to a muggy swirl until his thoughts were stagnant.
Until there was only sensation.
The walls were throbbing.
The air sang.
And Kai’s palm stung. That lick of heat tore along his scar, calling to him in harmony with the dry throb in his veins. Warning and want, warring within his blood, hot despite the numbing ice that enveloped them.
“You can feel it too,” said Imogen, more statement than question.
Her breath was tight, and by the way her fingers curled and unfurled at her side, he could only assume that her veins, like his, were contracting painfully around the crashing tide of her blood.
“We’re getting close,” was all Kai said.
All he could say—for all his calm as they’d entered the tunnels, the air down here was thicker, the muscles around his gills spasming around his every inhale.
The sound of their laboured breath had slowly bled into the silence between himself and Imogen, and as they struggled down a final steep slope to where the tunnel evened out, their wheezing was met with an invisible chorus.
There was but one solitary lamp carved into the ice wall, midway down the long, narrow corridor of ice—and where the light dissolved, the darkness shifted and writhed.
Kai’s head swam. He wasn’t sure if it was his vision that wavered, or if reality itself was bent and warped by their proximity to the cavern.
“Commander,” called those living shadows.
Edward, said the foggy tendrils of Kai’s thoughts.
But the shadows peeled apart, and it was Lady Imogen that they reached for, that they looked to.
Wielders, but not Edward’s Wielders. Not anymore.
The Wielders formed a crescent around her, and she settled herself in the centre of it, doling out low reassurances that Kai could not hear above the floundering gusts, their shared struggle with their breath.
Their eyes flicked as one toward him, Imogen peering over her shoulder to where he stood frozen several feet back. She stared at him, her blink slowed by the distortion of time. Blearily, his gaze dragged to a glint of green in his periphery; Daithí’s seaglass pendant pulsed in her extended hand.
“Come, Your Majesty,” said Lady Imogen.
Time moved in fragments, and Kai’s awareness leaked between their cracks.
He was almost certain he had been stepping toward Imogen, but the seconds smeared together, and in the next blink, he found himself standing in the dark bottleneck of the tunnel, shadows swimming around him.
He glanced around—and reality lurched again, his hand now pressed to the thin ice wall that separated the tunnel and what he knew to be the cavern.
“Here,” said Imogen’s voice, vibrating through his skull as though her words were his own thoughts. “Take it. It will help.”
Take it.
Kai did reach out, though the Mother only knew how long it took his hand to cross the space between himself and Imogen.
Shadows and dim green light flickered over his hand in staccato flashes as his awareness wove in and out.
And then, like the snap of a rubber band, his mind jolted back to him with stinging clarity.
Daithí’s pendant glowed in his scarred palm, the only light in the narrow alcove Imogen’s Wielders had carved out.
The space was so tight that only the two of them could fit this close to the ice wall, the others crowding the mouth of the tunnel, waiting.
“Are you ready?” said Imogen.
Her words were slurred, lids heavy, but she had a hand on the wall and a determined look on her face.
Fighting the might of Mother Adhlas herself to cling to consciousness and see this through.
It was rather impressive to watch, but then, as he was quickly learning, Lady Imogen was rather impressive.
Kai pulled the pendant over his head and felt his mind sharpen with dizzying clarity. He extended his own hand before him, the cool kiss of the ice barely whispering over his fingertips.
“I’m ready,” he told her.
And at his word, the centre of the ice wall splintered like glass and began to crumble, jets of frigid water spitting at them between the cracks.
Behind them, the other Wielders hissed and skittered back, but Kai drew on the glow on the pendant, spooling in magic from the chill in his chest and the thrumming air around him.
The call in his blood did not feel like a call; it was a song, magic weaving seamlessly beneath his pulse as though his body was one with the Laune itself, as though the Mother’s rivers ran within his own veins.
The forceful flow of the water slowed, and as Imogen peeled back the membrane separating them from the cavern, Kai parted the waters beyond it easily.
Very easily indeed.