Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
Iran all day and into the evening, hopping on a freight train when I could, and taking the rest on foot.
By the time the sun was setting, I was close.
The trees closed around me as I ran in my wolf form, and the air took on the smell of coal.
I peered up and saw the base of the mountain.
I was on the backside of it, away from the arena where I’d fought for my life with Kaelric at my side.
That felt like a lifetime ago. I didn’t even recognize that person anymore. That Brynn was gone.
I shifted into my human form and unstrapped Valkaryn long enough to move the leather sheath so she would ride higher across my shoulders without knocking my ribs each time I ran. I tightened the buckle and stood.
‘Are we close?’ I asked her. It was getting dark.
A potent sadness hit my chest hard. I wasn’t ready for it.
‘Yes. Once you get to the ridge, go left at the fallen cedar,’ Val said. ‘Then the ground dips, and there is a path to a cave. It is there.’
‘You remember the way?’ I said.
‘I do,’ she said, again with sadness in her voice.
‘Why are you sad?’ I asked. This was something she’d been waiting to complete for over a decade. Something she believed in. A promise she too had made to the Creator.
‘I wish I could have a body to see you and Kaelric grow in your marriage, to hold my grandchildren, to watch you become the great queen I know you will be. I could not have hand-picked a better wife for my son. I just wish I could hug you, Brynn. My daughter.’
Her praise knocked the breath from my lungs. Tears burned the edges of my eyes. Why was she saying this now?
‘You’re saying goodbye,’ I breathed, as my legs strained with the incline of the mountainside.
‘Who knows how long any of us have?’ she told me, and dropped the subject, but I wasn’t buying it. She knew something.
When the trees thinned, I stripped out of my coat and tied it tight across my waist. I loosened the strap that held Valkaryn. The air bit the bare parts of me, but it felt good.
Valkaryn rested between my shoulder blades, cradled by the leather.
I ran.
I slipped through willow thickets where the branches tapped my flanks and the land lifted. The trees grew thinner and knotted. The air changed. The higher I ran up Steel Mountain, the more I thought of Kaelric sleeping in bed alone.
As if that very thought roused him, the mate bond tugged at my chest. Was he waking? Looking for me? I ran before I could change my mind and turn back to beg him for mercy.
When the first shoulder of the mountain rose in front of me, I slowed. The cold bit harder at human skin. The mountain was steel both in name and in fact. Veins of iron flashed where the rock had cracked, and winter had polished it clean.
The fallen tree was right where she said it would be. I climbed a low slope of broken stone. It traced along the side of the ridge like a scar. Ice had worn it smooth in places.
The hidden path narrowed and then dissolved into a cave. Right as I paused at the threshold, that was when the bond tugged sharp, like a thread catching on a nail.
‘Brynn?’
Kaelric’s voice was filled with alarm. I braced against the stone and let my breath settle enough to answer.
‘I’m sorry.’
There was a pause before he spoke again. ‘What? You’re too far. I can’t… where are you?’
‘I’m at Steel Mountain.’
‘Steel Mountain? Why?’ There was disbelief in his voice.
‘When the Creator let me come back to you, he did so with a request.’
‘What request?’ he growled.
I placed a hand on Val’s hilt. ‘That I help your mother end magic, no matter the cost.’
‘End magic? No.’ The word wasn’t said with anger. It was a realization breaking open. ‘Brynn, wait. I’m coming to you. Just tell me where—’
‘You won’t reach me in time.’
The bond went as tight as a pulled bowstring. His next breath shuddered through both our chests. A heartbeat of silence passed while wind scraped along the stones around me, rushing into the cave.
‘I forbid you, Brynn, and this time I am your alpha, and I can control you if I wish.’ His voice was low, roughened from sleep and fear for my safety. ‘I just got you. I’m not letting you go.’
Shock ripped through me at that. He wouldn’t dare.
‘He would if he thought it would keep you safe,’ Val told me. ‘But I can shield you from his power.’
I could never ask a mother to go against her son like that.
‘Kaelric, the Elites have taken magic too far. They got drunk on the power. We have to end it. I promised.’ You didn’t break a promise to the Creator of all that was.
‘I don’t care!’ He was frantic, breathless. ‘It sounds dangerous. I won’t allow it. Just wait for me. I’m coming.’
My grip tightened. ‘You can’t stop me.’
That stopped him. I felt it, the hit, the truth of it, the way our bond shook. I felt his power slide over me, but it didn’t stick. Valkaryn was stronger.
‘Brynn.’ He said my name like he was in agony. ‘Come back down. We’ll find another way.’
‘There isn’t one.’
Another long breath, slow and broken at the edges. ‘At least wait for me. Don’t go into that mountain alone.’
Something in me lurched hard at that, but I forced it still. ‘I have your mother. I’ve never been alone.’
The bond strained again, harder this time, like he was trying to push through it with his whole body.
‘I can’t lose you to this.’
‘You won’t.’ That was a lie. I had no idea the cost of what I was about to do. To rip magic from the entire world? I might explode this entire mountain for all I knew. But I trusted the Creator, and I would not go back on my word.
He hadn’t commanded me to do it. He’d asked. Like a father would ask a child for a favor. I didn’t want to let him down.
‘Brynn.’ His plea was wordless this time. Our bond filled with so much love and adoration that I was overflowing.
‘Tell him I love him,’ Valkaryn said. ‘And that I won’t let you die. That he will see you go gray in your older years.’
She couldn’t possibly know that, but I relayed the message anyway.
Kaelric fell silent for a beat, resigned to the fact that I was going to do this.
‘Tell her I love her, too, and thanks for avenging our family. And damn you, Brynn, for being so headstrong and independent,’ he added.
I grinned. ‘Sorry, submissive is not in my nature,’ I tossed back, glancing into the cave to see only darkness.
I felt a tug at our bond, as if he was trying to pull me back to him by force, and then it went slack. Val was blocking him, and I think he knew it.
‘Okay,’ he said finally.
‘Okay,’ I agreed.
I wasn’t saying goodbye. I wasn’t saying what he meant to me, because there were no words.
Before he could throw anything else across the thread between us, an order, a plea, I let the bond go slack.
Not severed. Not gone. Just quiet. Muted enough that he couldn’t pull my attention or distract me.
Without hesitation, I stepped into the cave that opened wide like a mouth, and instantly the sound changed.
My footsteps echoed off the stone walls as Valkaryn burned yellow in my hands, lighting the way. A chill hung in the air.
I reached the back of the cave, where a large set of stairs was carved from what looked like pure iron ore.
Valkaryn’s glow hit the shiny black stone and caused it to look wet and menacing.
I swallowed hard, taking the steps one at a time as my stomach twisted into knots.
When I reached the top, there was nothing, no floating crystal or fancy inlaid stone at the back wall.
I was about to turn back when I felt a pull to look at my feet.
There, a flat stone lay on the ground about four feet in diameter.
It was greenish, with a vein of white running through the center of it, and so much power radiating off of it that the ends of my hair stood up.
‘Here,’ Val said, as plain as bread.
I had expected something more… pretty or magical, maybe. This stone was very unassuming. I gripped Valkaryn and peered down at the large stone. My breath smoked and drifted away as Val’s steel was warm against my palms.
‘You sure?’ I said, although asking was foolish. I felt the power from here. This was something ancient, holy even.
‘I am,’ she said.
The words did not make anything softer. They made things clear.
‘What do I do?’ I asked her. She seemed to know more about this than I did.
‘Drive my blade right into the white line of the Creation Stone.’
I swallowed. My throat hurt the way it did when a person tries not to cry and wins. “Will you be gone?” I got the courage to ask, and hated the way I already knew the answer.
‘Yes. I will return to the Creator.’
My heart fissured at her words. Grief tore it right open.
‘Then we shouldn’t do it. The world can live with magic. The Elites aren’t that bad. It will be okay for some while longer,’ I pleaded with her like Kaelric pleaded with me, and staggered away from the stone.
‘Are the Elites really not that bad? Did you know that the Creator intended for all to have magic? That the masses could come to the mountain and take his offering every five years freely? The Elites are the ones who have the Arcane Trials and restrict it to just one winner. The Elites are the reason you and so many in the Dregs were poor and magicless for so long.’
Anger rolled through so hot that my chest burned. Was that true? Of course it was, she would never lie to me.
‘We have to end it,’ she told me. ‘I’ve waited so long to find someone worthy of wielding me so that I could do this. I want to set the world right before I go.’
Tears were streaming down my face.
‘What happens to the Wolfkin?’ I asked. ‘To Kaelric? To all of us who are changed?’
‘Wolves will still be wolves. Those who shift will keep what is already in their bones. But the Elite, the magic wielders, will lose their ability. Healers will use herbs and time instead of spellcraft. The world will find a new way to be. The Wolfkin will protect the humans.’
That felt right. Just Wolfkin and human. Wolfkin protecting, cherishing. Something that Kaelric had proved was already possible by taking my people into Hildreth.
‘I love you,’ I whimpered, and then turned the blade so the light highlighted the engraving along the spine. I had traced those lines with my finger a hundred times. I pressed my lips to the wolf engraving on the hilt. ‘Thank you for getting me this far.’
‘I love you, too. Thank you for taking care of my son,’ she said. ‘And my people. Now put me where I belong, Brynn. I’m ready to meet my fate.’
I stepped forward. My legs felt strange, hollow, as if the muscles had disappeared. I closed my hand around her hilt, set my feet the way Godric had taught me, and faced the seam in the rock.
“Creator, see me,” I said, because saying nothing felt wrong. “Receive her and keep her always,” I begged him.
‘Bless you, daughter,’ she said, her voice a whisper, but her energy engulfed me, cocooning me in a mother’s love.
I lifted Valkaryn over my head, and a sob burst from my throat. I put every ounce of strength I had into the downstroke. Valkaryn’s steel bit the stone, and the white seam accepted her. A low sound like a lion roaring went through the mountain.
Pressure built up in my arms, and my vision went white at the edges. I kept my hands on the hilt. The blade slid another inch into the seam and stuck.
‘More,’ Val said, the word bright with pride.
I pushed, heaving all of my weight onto her hilt, tucking it under my ribcage and grunting, driving the blade deeper.
The seam widened around the metal as if it had been waiting for this shape.
Light rose from the cleft, then the rock swallowed her whole, and I pitched forward, falling onto my hands and knees.
She was gone.
The mountain rumbled, shaking violently, and I screamed because my hands were now on the green stone and shocks ran up my arms and settled in my teeth.
‘Brynn…’ Valkaryn’s voice found me somehow. ‘Tell Kaelric I saw him become the man I prayed he’d live long enough to be.’
“I will,” I sobbed, as the stone beneath my hands heated up.
‘And you,’ she said; the light rose again, and she was everywhere. ‘You were the best choice I ever made.’
I let go. I couldn’t touch the stone any longer. My palms were scorched. Valkaryn’s bright purple light shot out from the stone, and everything went black.