Chapter Thirty-Nine Reyanwyn of the Mountain #3
She scanned the riverbanks for any stretch of passable land. But she knew the currents of this river, had played in its eddies as a child. The Sirene was too deep and too wide to wade through. They’d all be swept away and separated. Many would be pulled under or crushed against the rocks.
“I’ve never frozen something this big before,” Citrio said, sounding unsure for the first time since they’d met.
“You’re the only one here who can,” she pressed.
After one last desperate look behind them, Citrio dipped his hands into the rushing water.
“Line the strongest up at the back and bring the youngest toward the shore!” Caelan commanded. Thance and Omira were sprinting alongside the stragglers, ushering them to hurry. Omira picked up a child and ran the rest of the distance.
The water on the banks of the river slowly began to crystalize. A thin layer of ice formed across the surface. But the Sirene, warm from the balmy summer, fought Citrio with every inch.
Orange light streamed over the mountains in what was sure to be a stunning sunrise. Reya would never understand how the world could be so beautiful and so ugly in a single moment.
“Get in line now!” Caelan shouted, pulling males and females into formation. Twin flames appeared in his hands.
Citrio grunted, and Reya watched as he switched tactics, trying to freeze the river from the bottom instead. Thance appeared at Caelan’s side, a second-in-command ready to follow his general into death.
“Faster,” she urged.
The ice webbed out. Melted. Webbed. Cracked. Spread. Melted.
Not enough.
Reya’s heart sank.
Even if they managed to freeze the water, the legion was too close. They couldn’t get that many people safely across the river in time to melt it behind them. They couldn’t outrun mounted sentinels.
Reya planted herself beside Caelan, light already sparking at her fingertips. Omira took up a place beside her, looking out at the approaching army and absorbing the truth that was becoming clear.
“We will fight until the end,” Omira said to her, an Alethian warrior through and through.
Reya looked down the line Caelan had formed. Males and females stood with weapons raised, among them Drelids, Sages, Cogors, and creatures large and small. People she had led here to die. She thought of Fionán, a child who wanted to play pirates and deserved the chance to see the world.
Reya’s resolve glowed iron hot before it hardened to steel. She met Omira’s knowing gaze. They were already of one mind. “Your call, thief.”
“He’ll stop me.”
Omira angled herself to fix that problem. “No, he won’t.”
So Reya took a deep breath, stepped carefully out of Caelan’s reach, and said to all three of them, “Get them across the river.”
Then she ran.
Caelan roared her name, but it was cut off as Omira tackled him to the ground. Omira wouldn’t be able to keep him there, but it was enough. Thance would have done the same to Reya, but she was already beyond his reach, streaming into the valley like a ray of sun.
White light sparked the grasses at her heels as she sprinted back over the foothills. Glittered in her palms. Shone in the flame of her hair.
When the fear threatened to take her, she pictured her father’s face.
As the earth shook with the weight of a hundred charging horses, Reya stepped up to the threshold of her magic. It crashed against the shimmering floodgate that protected her very sense of self.
She felt more than saw her Ire change, slowly bleeding from violet to iridescent. Whirls of red and green and gold and violet shimmered within the veins of white.
A barrage of arrows flew for her. Reya felt Thance and Omira’s power spread through the air, sending the volley in new directions. Then a wall of fire surged across the sky. The Alethians built an impenetrable barricade above her, clearing the way.
One by one, the arrows soared away or burned to ash.
Her breath was a sharp rasp in her throat, and her legs threatened to give out after hours of navigating the mountains. She gritted her teeth against the nausea that rose.
There is no part of you that is not worthy of the rest.
That is why you are strong.
Never run. Never bow. Never die.
Reya pounded her fist into the floodgate. Once. Twice. Again. Again. The crystal pulsed, as if in warning. Then she was screaming—aloud or in her head, she didn’t know. A crack shot up the center, then another, and she kept pounding, the fissures spider-webbing across the wall.
She could see the faces of the soldiers now. As one, they turned their arrows on her.
Reya slid, skidding across the field wet with morning dew, her shift pushing up to her hips, and threw up her palms toward the oncoming legion.
Who are you? whispered her father’s ghost.
The crystal wall shattered completely.
I am Reyanwyn of the Mountain.
White light encircled her irises as she free-fell into the Rage.
The power ripped out of her so hard and fast that it wrenched a sob from her throat.
Light burst from her palms like a shooting star.
Except instead of shooting toward the legion, she sent it wide, spreading out before her like a shield—a wall of light between the soldiers and the magic-born.
Blackness spotted her vision, and she shuddered with the force of the flood that crashed out of her. Then she was no longer in her body. No longer in this plane. Whole worlds unfurled before her in the cosmos, each of them connected by a current that touched all things.
She had been made by the maker of worlds. Hers was magic in its rawest form—terrible and untethered and breathtaking. The might of Una herself in the palm of her hand.
Light cascaded across the Run, blending with the dawn, towering above even the peaks that were her namesake.
Reyanwyn of the Mountain watched behind sightless eyes as a hundred Rhiterran soldiers drove into the full might of the God Power—and turned to stardust.