Chapter 4
Four
Khayrivven
One more day had passed, and he was still alive.
General Vesren Ycken hadn’t made good on his promise to slit Khayrivven’s throat after the encounter with the rebels.
Guardians, these mountains were swarming with rebels.
Too many Criu who believed they stood a chance out there, fighting Ulder’s troops—Ulder’s magic-wielding troops.
No wonder they’d recently taken to despising all things magic.
When Khayrivven had first been sent into the mountains to kill the people of his homeland, they had offered him refuge.
They’d recognized his origin by the olive tint of his skin and the gray of his eyes—not an uncommon combination in Criulias.
But most of all, they had recognized the accent in his voice when he’d cursed in the common tongue—a lilt that was barely noticeable to the people of Sen Dunai or Naolapia, but the Criu had instantly understood Criu blood ran in his veins, and his heart beat the rhythm of the lush and wild forests south of the Amrin Mountains.
Ycken got up from the fallen tree trunk where he had rested, draining the canteen of water he’d refilled at the stream where they’d washed the blood off their hands and the sweat off their faces after slaughtering five rebels total.
“Move your ass, Falcrest,” the general barked when Khayrivven paused, glancing out over the steep incline of the mountainside spreading ahead of them.
Vastly familiar rocks lined a path upward until it ended in a short cliff.
He followed Ycken without complaint, even knowing that at the end of the path, they’d need to climb a vertical wall of smooth rock and hope they wouldn’t plunge to their deaths.
“We’re getting closer to the first mountain top,” he narrated, carefully flexing his left arm.
The bruise blooming on his shoulder throbbed, but he hadn’t lost any range of motion—yet.
If he was lucky, he’d be able to hide the injury from Ycken completely.
No matter that the Master of Whispers had sent them on a mission together, he didn’t trust the Master of Steel enough to admit any weakness.
“Maybe we should take a less exposed route to prevent more run-ins with the rebels.” He spat the last word the way all soldiers in Ulder’s armies did.
Ycken was smart enough to take the advice, even when, as Master of Steel, he was inclined to prefer confronting opponents to sneaking around them.
As Veiled Hand, Khayrivven Falcrest was used to avoiding being seen at all—not that he couldn’t fight his battles.
He’d fought about as many of them as the general himself and killed more men than he could count.
“Back there.” Ycken pointed at the tree line a few hundred feet east. “We can use those to get closer.” A glance at the cliff confirmed Ycken had recognized the spot as the last one Lenya’s astral projection had picked up and delivered to them, and he didn’t need to close his eyes and confirm by pointless attempts at reaching Lory in a heartbeat-length trance yet again into a solid wall. It was the place they were looking for.
If the rebel attack hadn’t interrupted them in the night, they would have long arrived, and he’d have turned the cave atop the cliff upside down until he found the Flame-born woman.
Together, the two men strode toward the forest, hands on their weapons and a tense silence blanketing their movements the way they’d perfected during their training at Ashthorn.
Khayrivven had to hand it to Ycken; the man was as stealthy as the soldiers in the Ebon Division, his movements lithe, melting into the sway of the branches, and his eye vigilant on the shadows between the rocks and trees.
Less than fifteen minutes, and they’d made it to the base of the cliff without encountering another rebel or even a deer. Something was different here. A hint of danger and magic lingered there, announcing that he couldn’t trust his senses.
Whether Ycken felt it, too, Khayrivven couldn’t tell.
With a glance into the morning sky, Ycken sheathed his weapon and placed a hand on the slate rock in front of him.
“Eyes and ears open, Falcrest,” he warned.
“There might not be any rebels around here, but with both Lenya’s and your powers blocked from that cave, we need to be infinitely more careful. ”
“As if I didn’t know,” Khayrivven muttered under his breath, joining the general by the wall.
He started climbing without another thought, ready to find out what had happened to Lory because, deep down, his insides were knotting and squirming with every moment he couldn’t reach her.
Since the moment Lenya’s projection had faltered and vanished, Khayrivven had been virtually holding his breath, listening to the shadows and watching—always watching his surroundings for any sign of her.
They didn’t need to communicate a plan; the common army and Ashthorn had protocols for going into unknown territory, and the Master of Steel himself had instructed Khayrivven in his early days at the Ward.
The stone was almost too smooth to find a good handhold, but Lory had made it up there in her panic, surrounded by her fire and exhausted from fighting, so he wouldn’t balk at such a ridiculous obstacle as this.
Within a minute, they were up, staring into the gaping mouth of an obsidian cave, and had Khayrivven not already known something dangerous was lurking here, he would have felt it now.
This place was rife with magic, with a power infinitely stronger than anything he’d felt before.
But it was also familiar. It had called to him during his missions in the mountains—and he’d ignored it.
He’d turned his back on the shadows that had haunted him, whispering to him, and he had fought and killed instead, ever the good soldier.
Everything for Elina.
“What is this place?” he whispered, locking down the embers crackling in his veins in response to the dense power weaving through the air.
Ycken shook his head. “Whatever it is can’t be good.” Jerking his chin at the stains of ash and soot on the ground, he padded forward, the blade he’d drawn the moment he’d crossed the top of the cliff firmly in his hand, and Khayrivven followed.
His own saber sang with the vibrations of the magic Khayrivven kept on a tight leash, and a part of him believed it would have been smart to use the flames he could summon from thin air to light up the space and examine it closer.
“Don’t even think about it,” Ycken hissed like he’d read Khayrivven’s mind. You’ll only announce our presence to whatever lives in the bowels of the mountains.”
Enough of the morning light slithered into the cave to expose three dark holes at the other end—tunnels that would lead toward the weapon Lenya suspected the rebels were hiding here, or to something entirely other that Khayrivven didn’t dare think about.
A weapon that blocked his dreamweaving and severed the bond connecting him to the tapestry of Lory’s dreams.
Whatever vicious thing it was, he’d make quick work of it and—
“We take the middle tunnel,” Ycken decided without taking a second to consider the other two.
For Khayrivven, the middle was as good as any. The cave was pressing in on him from all directions, but he wouldn’t leave here before he’d figured out what happened to Lory.
As they filed into the tunnel, the scent of fried meat and fresh bread hit his sensitive nose, and he wondered if Ycken had followed that scent on instinct after not having eaten a proper meal in almost three days, but the general’s purely human senses weren’t as refined as his own.
The cold, black stone seemed to morph in their presence, growing and vanishing in places as if to make their path through the narrow opening easier.
Again, these were details that Ycken’s eyes couldn’t pick up, but Khayrivven’s eyes did.
If this cave was sentient, and if it decided they were its enemy, they’d be in deep trouble.
By the bend in front of them, a shadow moved, tall and fragmented in the minuscule light now left to brighten their path. Well, brighten was an overstatement.
On soundless boots, they were moving for a minute, two, before they hit what seemed to be a dead end.
“Damn it,” Ycken cursed, the general less composed than Khayrivven was used to. “I was certain I’d seen a light flicker somewhere ahead.”
Cocking his eyebrow, Khayrivven squeezed past the general, sliding his fingertips over the rock: smoother than the roughly hewn walls of the entrance area, almost …
velvet to the touch. Whatever this was, it wasn’t stone.
Holding his breath, he pushed—gently—and with a scraping sound, the wall shifted.
“How did you do that?” Ycken was beside him, blinking into the bright morning light greeting them on the other side.
Khayrivven shook his head. “Someone must have built in a mechanism. Almost like the moving walls in the training chambers in Ashthorn’s dungeons.
” Khayrivven couldn’t shuck the image of Lory burning in her own fire when her powers had reared their head after his bold use of Almelyte powder.
Aiden had been with her, ready to put out the fire, the ice wielder of perfect use for the cause he’d picked him for.
And now, he was dead—or he’d succeeded. Before he could drift into the details of Aiden Bellmont’s death, human silhouettes appeared in the stripe of sunlight, and they weren’t amused by the two men stepping over their hidden threshold.
“Shit,” Ycken grumbled, readying his sword, and Khayrivven had his saber and the dagger sheathed at his hip in his hands, ready to slit throats if need be.
“Intruders!” perhaps ten men and women in rags shouted, charging at them with simple weapons.
He would have lifted his blades to kill had he not spotted a glimmer of fire at the fingertips of the woman to the very right.
Flames. These were Flames. At least one of them.
He barely managed to pull the first blow he’d have delivered to the man at the front, dancing out of his path instead, and swinging his saber above his head in a blur, forcing it out of the man’s way.
The Flame-born ran right through the spot Khayrivven had been standing in a heartbeat ago, blinking as he turned around, taking Khayrivven in while behind them, Ycken had already started cutting down Flames.
Fuck—
He couldn’t abandon this battle and leave the general to himself, not because he was worried the man would be killed by the five Flame-born in this room, but because he was worried he wouldn’t, and then Khayrivven would pay for his disloyalty—and his sister would pay, too, the moment Ulder got word of what happened.
As the man in rags faced Khayrivven once more, he felt it, the fire running through his body, a force ready to spring free if he lifted his control the slightest bit.
He’d never been around this many Flame-born or the sum of magic sizzling in the air at their presence.
Ycken might not have felt it, but for Khayrivven—he couldn’t feel anything else as he stared into the Flame-born man’s black eyes.
“Two down,” Ycken announced, the sounds of clashing steel deafening in the background, and when Khayrivven nodded at the Flame-born he’d spared, hatred shone on that face, and from the man’s free hand, a pillar of flames erupted, tilting toward Khayrivven, until it was a hair’s breadth from engulfing him.
“Traitor,” the man shouted. “TRAITOR!”
With a roar, he lunged for Khayrivven, triggering those instincts honed since childhood. Khayrivven’s sword arm moved of its own volition, ripping through the rope of fire trying to wind around his neck, a shockwave of his own magic breaking free, harnessing the flames the other man had set loose.
Guardians, he didn’t want to kill him, but there was truly not much choice here.
With a flick of his fingers, the fire changed course, folding in on itself and collapsing into a single flame, which Khayrivven summoned into his palm, a comfortable heat burning at his fingertips, while cold blood ran through the rest of his body as he spilled the Flame-born’s.
One precise stab in the neck, just above the collarbone, and the artery was gushing rivers of crimson.
The light left the man’s eyes the same moment the guilt settled deep in Khayrivven’s stomach. Slowly, he lowered his saber, snuffing out the flame in his palm in a wisp of smoke, readying himself to join what was left of the attackers.
Ycken had already taken down four, leaving five more lining up to die.
“Are you just going to stand there?” the general barked between spearing a woman in the chest with his sword and hitting another attacker in the face with his elbow.
So far, none of the others had used their fire magic, but Khayrivven could still sense it in their veins: strong and crisp, the crackling flames almost audible in the sounds of battle.
“Of course not.” He uttered the words to himself, darkness dripping heavily from each syllable as he lifted his saber once more and cut the legs out from under one of the attackers.
It was easier when he didn’t look them in the eye because, if he did, he needed to acknowledge the lives he was taking. Not just any lives, but those of his kin. And too much was the fear of finding a familiar face among the many.
Strike, strike, strike. There was no time to think. Within a minute, the rest of them were down, none of them moving, and Ycken pulled his sword out of the man he’d brought down last, a grim expression on his face. “Lenya was right. They are hiding a weapon up here.”
Busying himself with wiping his sword on the thigh of his uniform, Khayrivven gave Ycken an inquisitive glance.
“They are building an army of Flame-born.”