26. The Third Game #2
“You must decide the order in which cadets cross between yourselves,” Silver adds, and whispers break out immediately.
“The weakest should go first,” Lilliana suggests.
“Yeah,” one of her followers, Brandor, agrees. “Let them test it.”
“Good idea,” Garrick says, but his voice is filled with sarcasm on top of the usual lisp. “Except you went and killed Diana.” My stomach twists at the cold reminder.
“Then we send the other Halo-rat,” Lilliana argues.
“Yeah. Better them than us,” Brandor agrees again.
“There is no them and us,” Khali snaps. “If you haven’t worked that out yet, you deserve to die.”
“No.” The word leaves my mouth before I can stop it. “It’s fine. I’ll go first,” I insist, knowing it’s only so long until they make the decision for me anyway.
“You don’t need to do this, Angel girl,” Az says. “You got us through the first game. You’ve proved yourself enough.”
But several others have already muttered their agreement that I should go, and I’m already shuffling around them, moving into position until I’m facing the path dead on.
Aes and Stannum have already started to send cadets across. Aes sending the tallest first, likely to see how hard the jump is now they are missing a chunk of path.
He makes it. And before I can think too much about it or lose my nerve, I’m bending my knees and pushing up and out.
My boots land on not-so-solid stone, but whatever adrenaline made me jump dies as soon as I’m face to face with a pack of hellhounds.
Do I know myself?
No. I don’t know myself at all.
I haven’t been in charge of the person I am or want to be, since I was thirteen years old and living in Tidecrest.
Even then, my life and every decision I made was based on finding our next meal or a roof and a bed for the night.
My heart hammers as panic locks my muscles, and the hellhound’s leader steps forward.
I’m frozen on the ribbon of a path, praying to the angels that it doesn’t crumble under me from the quake of my knees.
The beast's golden eyes glint with hunger as they meet mine. I know those eyes. Only, they are usually much warmer when they look at me.
Ravi.
Your Ravi.
No, Yuvi’s Ravi.
She’s different. I don’t know what changed, how or why, but she isn’t herself here.
My chest tightens as I focus on her so the six at her flank blur in my peripheral. Then I lift my hands, palms out in front of me, and force my lips to move. “Ravi… it’s me… remember… it’s me.”
Her growl rumbles through the stone and my words die in my throat. The other hounds shift, tails lashing, muscles coiled and ready to pounce as soon as Ravi gives them whatever permission hellhounds seek from their leader to attack.
They move forward as one, a single step. The path trembles under their weight but somehow holds.
On the upstairs balcony of the castle ahead, Silver stands, arms crossed.
He looks calm, but his eyes glint with that magic I’ve learned to recognize by scent as easily as sight.
But this is different too. Not like on the ship and certainly not like last night in his quarters.
Like Ravi, I can recognize it, but it’s not the same. He’s channeling something different.
The Tamer of Beasts.
I glance between the Overlord and the hellhounds several times, and then again to be certain.
Though their movements are their own, each breath is in perfect sync with one another, Silver and the beasts I’m sure he’s controlling.
He winks at me, and I freeze, my stomach bursting with butterflies.
I’ve been staring for too long, again, and he’s trying to throw me off.
He wants me to panic. To fail. To fall.
He wants Ferrum’s final nephilim dead.
Then why is he helping you?
I don’t know.
Suddenly all I can think about is the feel of his hands last night, and how I don’t want that to be the last time.
I swallow, my heartbeat hammering out of my chest.
Focus.
I need to get the hellhounds on my side. But I have a feeling that means having more certainty about myself and who I am than Silver does.
He’s so confident, one of the surest men I’ve ever met.
I’m done for.
No, you’re not. You have too much to stay alive for.
I wink back at him. And hold my breath.
I don’t know what I expect to happen, but it seems to catch him off guard at least.
Is it enough to fracture his control of the hounds?
Perhaps not all, but my favorite one.
My Ravi.
The volcano’s belly is silent aside from the bubbling and popping of the lava. But then Ravi whines. It’s not a normal whine, but to the faintest hum of a tune.
After the first game, Silver had quoted the lyrics back to me from a song that has that tune.
The familiar tune of the lullaby my mother used to sing to me. The one I still have no idea how Silver knows, or Ravi too, apparently.
Back in control of himself and most of the beasts beneath him, Silver gives me a smile and the subtlest of nods.
Is he helping me again?
The question crosses my mind. Had he really lost control of Ravi, or had he somehow made her whine in that exact tune? Taken control of her vocal cords the way he takes control of the rest of her whenever he chooses too.
Did I wink at him for nothing?
My cheeks warm.
Then I remember Diana and the guilt and grief has me pulling my gaze away from Silver and back to the task at hand.
I have to survive. For her, for Jack and Gabe and Micah.
The song would have helped in the first game, had I remembered it sooner. Perhaps the nephilim boys would still be here.
The hounds grow impatient, and prowl forward another few steps.
I take a step back on instinct, but there’s not enough path behind me, and I almost lose my footing and fall.
Balance, Seraphina.
Balance!
It’s all about balance.
The first two games… this one… by the angels, even the artwork around the castle.
It’s all about balance. Finding the perfect amount of sin and virtue.
Like any amount of sin is good.
Except, isn’t that the true meaning of the song my mother sang?
I mull over the words. I’d thought it was teaching me to be virtuous, but now I think of it, perhaps the song had taught me something else.
Sure, it made me feel like I’m not alone or broken, but now it seems so obvious that it’s about balance.
Being fully good can be as disastrous as being fully evil.
Is that why the song made me feel less of an outsider? Is that what the woman in the hostel had taught her daughter and my mother had taught me? That we weren’t broken, we just had a different way of understanding Trutina’s precarious scales?
Is that what Silver and these games are really teaching us now?
That balance is not about having a population of good and a population of evil to balance the scales and keep them steady.
But we can be both.
Is that who I am?
The gray area Silver tried to explain to me but I didn't want to listen.
At that thought, Ravi’s big head nudges me and I crouch in front of her, touching her forehead with mine. She growls, the sound low in her chest, and with my voice soft, I start to sing.
“Some will burn what lies in sight,
Others wait, too slow to fight.”
A lesson in wrath and patience, I guess, and how they both have the potential to be deadly. How had I missed it before when my mother had sung it so beautifully?
“Too quick, too slow, the world will fall,
The middle path survives it all.”
Ravi’s growl becomes a purr, and I know I’m onto something.
Once I finish the first verse, I straighten and pat the top of my thigh.
Ravi circles me, her thick tail whipping around my legs, but she stops at my side once she’s facing the grate from where she and the others had been released.
I move onto the verse which heeds the same warning as this game. About finding the balance between pride and humility. I start to sing, and though once it had seemed so subtle that I’d completely missed it, now the warning of not just being too prideful, but being too humble, is so obvious.
“Some will rise and crush the small,
Others bend and risk it all.
The crown or the curve can crush the hand,
Only the line between will stand.”
The hellhounds walk with me, and when I reach the last line, I glance up at Silver.
I expect to see fury in his gaze, wrath that I’ve taken control of his beasts and tamed them in my own way.
Instead, I see a smile on his face that makes my heart skip the last few feet over the bridge.
“I did it,” I sigh to myself when the hellhounds don’t cross the bridge to the castle with me. Instead they turn back, ready for their next cadet. Will they copy me? Will they sing to them? I don’t know why, but I don’t think it will work again. That song has helped me learn who I am.
The other cadets would all need to find their own way.
Ravi yips, as though to say, ‘Yes you did.’ I release the breath I’ve been holding since the game began, actually looking forward to joining Silver on the balcony to watch the rest of Ferrum cross.