41 A Blow to the Chest
They arrived at a snow-coated clearing. It was dark, only light from the aurora and dagger-crisp stars. Cold, as a breeze sighed through the shiverpines.
Pointless, to bother coming here. Antal knew in the deepest fibers of his ether, they’d find nothing. Even if Avroz had accidentally led an aedari to the Season-Locked Planes, he’d never leave evidence.
Fionamara had donned a black coat. Antal weighed her frown, the tension between them. He wanted to assure her they’d expose Avroz. He couldn’t see any way that futile endeavor wouldn’t end horribly. What a wretched tangle.
She touched the base of a lantern. The energy bulb lit with a cool glow, ghostly across the snow. Fionamara set off across the clearing.
Antal followed the crunch of her boots, his bare feet quiet against the drifts.
Not family. Using you.
He didn’t need her to tell him all these things.
He’d seen the evidence play out over a dozen decades, a hundred arguments fought against Avroz’s disapproving glower.
Yet when Antal contemplated letting go, his stomach knotted fierce enough to bend him over.
There had to be some compromise. Some level ground to find with his father.
Avroz had let him keep Fionamara—and dug his claws into her cheeks that very night.
He’d proudly presented his son to the Daey Celva—then steered Antal like a wayward lamb through the afterparty.
Not family. Using you.
Antal clenched his teeth until they ached.
In the clearing sat a lumber mill. The closest city, Runeyska, was a major trading hub, its transit terminal housing Curtain connections across the Winter Plane and beyond.
But that was some distance away. Here, the settlements were sparse, no nearby neighbors.
A rumble sounded from a river, a water wheel alongside. The mill itself remained intact.
Only the home had burned. The earliest record they’d found on the Winter Plane, so old that Antal barely smelled ash beneath ice and pine. Snow covered charred stone, blistered beams. Not much left. Aedari fire was destructive.
As Fionamara lifted her lantern over the ruins, Antal’s tail lashed. He’d accepted this territory. It was his duty to protect its people from immortals. If Avroz had done this…
“What are we looking for?” Antal asked.
“Anything.”
“This trail is long cold.” In their search for the aedari, they’d not bothered visiting these older sites, focused on fresher tracks.
“Try anyway. Maybe we could narrow down when, exactly, the aedari arrived? Or what Curtain they used to get here? Track them backwards, see if that links to Avroz at all.”
Even on good days, Antal knew better than to argue with her. He stepped into the tangle of snow and timber, sniffing what remained.
The scent of scorching sand on stone sent him rigid.
“Antal?” Fionamara called, concerned.
“It’s…” He rounded a beam, smelling alongside it. Sunlight stung his nose, sharp and hot and unmistakable. “An aedari. Recent.”
“How recent?”
“Not within the last few days, but fresher than two months.”
Metal clicked as Fionamara drew her sword hilt, eyes wary on the dark tree line. They’d lost the magician less than two days ago. Had slain its partner. Had the aedari visited before that?
Why return to grounds it had already hunted?
Antal dove deeper into the rubble. He searched under beams, through frozen ash. As he worked, Fionamara kept watch. Her silence could be interpreted as focus.
He knew better.
“I’m sorry,” Antal said, pausing alongside what had once been a stone hearth. “I shouldn’t have made you speak of your father.”
“Except you did,” she returned, curt.
She’d survived so much loss. Not just her father, but her brother, her childhood friend, all ripped from her hands. Yet when she’d spoken of his family, she’d named Syvr and Ixli, Yme.
She’d said nothing of herself, despite doing more for him than all the rest combined.
“You’re my family, too, Fionamara.”
She rounded on him with a scowl, as if Antal’s low words were weapons to be parried. It never lasted. Not anymore. She softened, breath fogging around a sigh.
“I know, Antlers.”
Last night, he’d asked her to marry him. She’d not given an answer, had told him to ask again once his head was clearer. Then the world had come crumbling down. It seemed an age ago, that soft morning, waking with her in his arms.
Antal begged the Void for one more soft morning, this sordid business with aedari and his father behind them.
“Keep looking,” she said. Her gaze returned to the trees. “I don’t like this.”
Neither did Antal. If the aedari had been here recently, they’d stumbled into a larger peril. Antal circled the hearth, just so Fionamara couldn’t accuse him of not being thorough.
A new scent hit his nose.
He frowned. This smell was cool, rather than hot. Antal breathed deeper, testing the notes of ozone. Hoarfrost. The sweet of midnight dahlias.
“What is it?” Fionamara asked.
Antal couldn’t breathe. He was vaguely aware of Fionamara shouting at him, the mumble of her curses as she waded through rubble to get closer, but Antal was too busy huffing a lungful of snow. The scent was so faint, he could have missed it. So familiar, he’d know it anywhere.
It smelled like Avroz.
But it was wrong. Not a trail, like someone passing through. The scent was localized. Antal brushed away a drift of snow near the hearth. Nothing. He hefted one of the stones. There was a gap underneath, a hollow amidst the crumbled masonry. And hidden inside…
The whole Plane fell still around Antal. Frozen, the beat of his phantom heart. Motionless, his tail drooped against the snow. He’d told himself this was a futile errand. They’d never find anything.
Nothing in the farthest reaches of the Void could have prepared him for that piece of daeyari antler, smooth and lacquer black.
Aedari glyphs glowed gold along its length.
Antal stared at it.
He was still staring when Fionamara reached him. She stared, too. In the cold, both their breaths billowed steam.
“Fuck me in the Void,” she said. “Is that—”
“It’s his,” Antal returned in a hush. It smelled like Avroz. The length fit the tip he’d lost.
“Holy fuck. I thought…” Fionamara’s lantern swayed, her cheeks pale as snow. “I thought we might find a trail or something. Not an antler. How in the endless Void did that get here?… Antal? Are you ok?”
He wasn’t.
Antal’s world fell apart in pieces.
“He should have thrown this into the Void,” Antal said in a hush.
All the cold that had ravaged his insides, the numb creeping up his fingers, thawed beneath a burst of heat. It galvanized his teeth, sparked like embers down his claw tips.
“Avroz went to the Contested Planes,” Antal said. “He fought an aedari.”
Fionamara hovered at his side, concern in her dark eyes.
“He lost,” Antal said, “he fled back home, not realizing the glyphs on his antler. A marker the aedari could track. He cut off the antler tip, then left.”
“That was as much as Yme knew.”
“Avroz didn’t want the aedari tracking him to the Twilit Plane,” Antal said, lower still. “But he didn’t destroy the antler. How could it have gotten here… unless he brought it?”
Fionamara fell quiet. She was a strategist. Of course she’d come to the same conclusion.
Because Avroz was a Void-damned opportunist.
“He came here.” Antal’s voice rose, a building rage aching his fangs. “He left the antler here, on the Winter Plane?”
“Antal…”
“He led the aedari to my territory on purpose?”
Antal burned inside, restless energy scorching beneath his skin. For two centuries, he’d watched Avroz manipulate. Lie. Kill, if it would get him what he wanted.
“And for what?” Antal spat. “To make sure I’d be involved, when my territory was threatened?
To make me distinguish myself for the Daey Celva?
Does he think that fucking little of me?
” Antal’s tail lashed the snow. “Just for that, he led the aedari here, and told no one. Pretended he was surprised when they were discovered. Let them feast on my people.”
Antal’s vision blurred. He was so hot, so fractured down every curve of his ribs. He sank his claws into the nearest beam, just to tear something apart. All the time they’d spent hunting the aedari, trying to prevent further calamity.
While Avroz had known all along how the beasts had gotten here.
Fionamara’s hand on his arm snapped the world back to focus.
“We can make him pay the consequences,” she said, hard through her teeth.
“How?” Antal struck a hand to his chest. “I’ve never been able to stop him doing whatever the fuck he wants!”
“We have this!” She pointed to the severed antler.
Antal scoffed. “How much good will that do? When it’s his word against ours? Avroz will deny everything, even if we have—” Antal snatched the antler out of its resting place.
The moment he touched it, golden light erupted.
Antal recoiled, dropping the antler to the snow. A flare of light shot upward, arcing high above the shiverpines, then vanishing with a zap. He and Fionamara froze like hares in a spotlight. Once darkness returned, he blinked, light spotting his vision, a scent of sunlight flooding his nose.
Dread came fast on its heels. He scanned the clearing. The trees. Empty, but that light would have been visible for miles, its magic hot on his tongue.
“We need to leave.” He reached for Fionamara.
Too slow.
Before he touched her, a sharp pressure struck his back.
Antal watched, as the tip of an arrow erupted from his chest.
Heat split through him, a flare of pain that flooded white across his vision. Antal felt his knees hit frozen ground. He felt the cold of ice. He gasped, and the ache through his sternum left him doubled over.
Distantly, he heard Fionamara shouting.
He dug his claws into the snow, grasping at consciousness. Not a lethal wound. He knew that, yet some instinct rioted against reason, his body remembering it wasn’t meant to function with an arrow through its chest.
It had missed his heart. Only just.
Fionamara was still shouting—in his ear, actually.
Antal blinked her into focus, crouched beside him, wide-eyed.
She looked down. He followed. The arrow had cracked through his sternum, oozing black blood.
Coated in golden aedari glyphs. His own energy fought against the wound, trying to knit, to heal, but heat seeped off the metal.
By Veshri’s sharpened antlers, it burned.
Fionamara reached for it.
“No,” he rasped. “Wait—”
She screamed, flinching backward as the arrow’s magic seared her palms.
Brighter gold flashed through the trees.
“Run!” Antal pushed her away.
The aedari landed beside him with the force of dawn. Its golden wings spread overhead, lighting the clearing like day. Glyphs coated the magician’s arms. Rage burned in its eyes.
Antal grabbed the arrow. The heat was unbearable, a scent of flesh melting off his palms. He yanked, dragging the projectile an agonizing inch out of his chest.
Above him, the aedari clenched its fist. The arrow halted, fixed in place, a fresh wave of scorching pain hunching him.
When it grabbed his wrist, he lashed with claws. Snapped teeth like a cornered beast. He tried to snarl, but his lungs had temporarily forgotten how to function. A softer heat bloomed beneath the aedari’s touch. It released him, leaving glyphs seared upon his skin.
When it spoke, he understood.
“On your knees, dusk beast.”