Chapter 44 #2
The process is slower the second time. There are more men and more Greys, but the Riders are also depleting their magic, relying more on what they can pull in real time through the Veilstones rather than the reserves inside them.
I study the way Chyr crafts the rope, and I start to narrow and twist the air for him as I feed it to him.
But this isn’t the way my magic wants to be used.
My Cailleach magic is a living power. It knows the things I can find in nature, and twisting the air like this, forcing it into such a narrow constraint in the way of Siorai magic rakes through me in needles of pain the same way it used to. That part of me hasn’t changed.
Instead of constraining air and trying to shape it, I think of how a vine grows, the way it lengthens and snakes forward.
I grow a vine of air and feed that to Chyr instead.
His hands tighten at my waist as he senses what I’m doing, and he no longer has to twist or shape it either.
We simply grow the air vine longer and longer together and guide it until it has wrapped itself around every one of the soldiers and Greys, and we wrench their lives away.
Chyr kisses the top of my head as the other Riders run forward to kill the Greys. “I didn’t think you could be any more beautiful to me, but I was wrong.”
I turn and reach up to lay a palm across his cheek, and I hold it there a moment, memorising the feel of him, the shape, the likeness of those perfect features, and the eyes with endless layers that I could lose myself in forever.
“I love you,” I say, and I need the words to hold every bit of what I feel for him.
Chyr’s brows snap together. “Why does that sound like regret?”
“No regrets, and no apologies.” I turn away, choking on sorrow. But I’ve made my decision—the only decision I can live with making.
We set to work on the group of soldiers and Greys beside the altar. There are fewer of both, but as we creep closer, I notice amulets of serpentine—brilliant green veined through with glowing yellow—hanging around their necks. Not just the Greys, but every soldier also has them.
The amulets are similar to what the soldier was wearing when he started the signal fire back at the Loch Seil camp. But these amulets hold three runes each, and they are active. They’re purple instead of gold, but their glow is similar to Daire’s power runes when he has them triggered.
I tug at Chyr’s arm. “The amulets—”
“I see them,” he whispers.
Even so, we keep to the plan. We grow the vine of air and nudge it to the nearest soldier’s chest. The vine shreds like storm-torn clouds. Sean tries to force it back together, but it seeps away.
“Damn it,” Daire says. “They’re immune. The runes on the amulets must eat the magic.”
“Then we do it the old-fashioned way,” Chyr orders dryly.
The Riders draw their swords, celestial steel singing in a single voice as it leaves their scabbards. The enemy hasn’t seen us yet, but that changes when the first blood is drawn.
The six Greys all swivel towards us, their motion slow and eerie.
The nearest throws up a palm, pushing out a cone of dark red vapour.
I smell the reek of decay and terror long before it reaches me—sharp enough to make my skin crawl as if it’s overrun with spiders. It sends a sting of bile up my throat.
The mist billows closer. Niall is closest, and it slams into him even as Chyr sends a burst of fire to scorch it. Niall chokes and screams, staggering to a knee while it rolls over him. He screams even after the mist is gone.
A female Grey cocks her head, her milk-pale eyes studying Chyr with interest. She flicks two fingers, and a flame shoots out, the heat snuffing out a few inches from his face.
My heart roars in my ears. Drawing my dagger, I pull magic to shape the sword, and I run forward to help in the only way I can. But the Grey sees me coming.
Shifting her stance, she pushes out another wave of red mist. This time, it’s aimed at me.
I do what Chyr did. I burn the air before it can reach me. Except my magic doesn’t stop.
The crown flares on my brow, and heat rips through my chest. An inferno pours out from my palm—wildfire that races along the slick of red vapour and flashes across every Grey and soldier and Rider in its path.
Flame licks wet steel and blazes through crimson uniforms, burning across Daire’s back and Niall’s right shoulder.
Daire jerks back with a curse. Niall’s hands are quicker, and a pop of air puts the fire out.
I gape uselessly for a moment, too horrified to move.
When I reach for Daire, he flinches away from me.
The smell of singed leather and hair makes my stomach pitch.
But I shake myself and push forward, beyond Niall and Daire and all the Riders still wading through the soldiers to reach the Greys. Niall won’t meet my eyes.
The Greys are damaged, their faces blackened and burned. I push out another wave of fire, pour it out of me. Push it at them until they scream and writhe.
Chyr catches my arm. “Flora, stop. Pull back. We can do the rest.”
In another ten minutes, there is silence. The stench of burned flesh assaults me.
There’s another group down the loch, so we can’t feel relief too soon. But I don’t sense anyone moving. Water laps at the banks, shushing through the reeds, and peat breathes up its sour-sweet rot beneath our feet. Moonlight turns the black water into a mirror.
“We’re running out of time,” Chyr says. “The moon will set soon.”
Striding to a spot at the end of the Altar, Chyr stops near where the river runs out towards the sea. I see nothing that marks the spot, but they say that doorways between worlds are made in the betweens where the Veil is thinnest.
The place where Chyr stands is between loch and river, between blanket bog and valley fen, between flat and brae, between moor and ring dyke rock on the cusp between spring and summer. He thrusts the Sword of the Anvar’thaine into the air.
I hold my breath, expecting something that looks like the veil in Lannraig’s story to appear, for the air to split with threads of magic that dance like the Tirnaeve’s pale gold magic in the Veilstone rings.
Nothing happens.
Chyr tries again, though I can see the defeat in the slump of his shoulders and the tension that runs through the other Riders as they gather around him. My stomach hollows, and my chest aches. I know what it means, even before he fails again.
The gate won’t open. Vheara must have remembered it and sealed it, after all. Which makes sense given the ambush she prepared for us.
We are alone. The nine of us will have to fight Vheara on our own, and there will be no help coming. Not from Tirnaeve, at least.
I am not a general. My power is not Siorai, and it never was. I don’t know how to fight her.
I’ve seen the strength of the runes the Riders wear and the fire rune on the amulet the soldier used to light the signal beacon.
Chyr once said that Vheara was one of the most powerful runesmiths Tirnaeve has ever known.
The magic that fuels her power may have changed, but she will still have all that knowledge.
I don’t know how to counter that, not the way the Riders can.
I’d be pointless on a battlefield. A danger to both sides.
While Chyr and the Riders are all still occupied with the doorway, I step around the Cailleach’s Altar and the Hallow Keepers who stand at the corners, and I remove the scarf that hides my crown.
The flames reflect in the thin puddle of water that coats the stone, and it’s the first time that I have seen the crown.
The first time it’s felt real.
The light stone of the Altar of the Moon stands out against the dark mountains behind it, a long plank with the crescent moon etched along its centre and a bowl ground into the slab near each corner.
The ancient stories tell us that back in the time of the true queens, there would have been four people here to make the sacrifice: the old queen and her consort, and the Maiden and the Rider she had chosen.
The Maiden and the Rider would have vowed to be true to each other, to the Great Mother, and to Alba Scoria, and they would have sworn to sacrifice their lives when the gods and the land chose for their time to end.
There would have been blood spilled four times in that moment: the Maiden and her Rider would have cut their palms and filled their bowls with blood, and the old Cailleach Queen and her Consort would have cut their wrists to make way for the new Queen to reign, their bowls filling while their lives bled away.
Agreeing to give up their lives would have been part of the sacrifice the old queen and her Rider consort had made before she received the Crown of Moonlight.
The Maiden and her Rider had to make the same promise before she was crowned as the new Cailleach Queen.
The Great Mother watches me now—I can feel her attention. The air falls completely still as I draw my dagger and prepare to make the sacrifice in the only way that I can.
“We sealed the doorway as part of the trap, but we weren’t expecting to catch the Maiden. Vheara will be so pleased,” a male voice says somewhere nearby.
I whip around, searching for whoever spoke, but Shade and Shadow growl at the same time from somewhere else. I can’t find any of them.
Pressure slams between my shoulders, snatching my breath. The pain comes later—a sharp pain like the fiery knives that come with emptying my magic. I look down at my chest, and the tip of a sword has pierced it through.
“You know, I’ve grown to enjoy the name they call me,” the same voice says, close to my bad ear yet loud enough that I hear him clearly. “The Butcher has a poetic ring to it, but I think I will enjoy Maiden Slayer even better. It invokes so many delightful possibilities, don’t you think?”
Chyr is shouting. Others, too. Footsteps pound closer.
But I’m not dead yet, and my dagger is in my hand.
I throw my hips back and use the Butcher’s body as leverage to push myself off the sword. The blade tears through more flesh as it dislodges, but I don’t care. I push magic into my dagger to transform it into my hard-won sword as I turn, and I thrust it into the Butcher’s chest.
It’s the first time that I’ve seen him. He’s shorter than I thought he would be, and younger, with a round, almost feminine face set off by a long, powdered wig.
The red coat he wears has rows of braid and silver buttons, and a large amulet hangs from a gold chain around his neck.
His eyes have gone wide in horror. Blood bubbles at the corner of his mouth as he gropes at the wound with hands that are etched in runes that glow a garish purple.
I don’t wait to watch if he’ll fall. Shade and Shadow are already tearing at him with their teeth.
Chyr, Ronan, and the others rush towards me, and though the place where the doorway should have opened isn’t far, it feels like a long time until they reach me.
I lean across the Altar, lining up so the blood that drips from my chest falls into the nearest bowl. The stone cavity is already half-filled with rainwater, but it’s too late to worry about that now.
“Great Mother, Cailleach,” I begin, “I don’t know what words I am meant to speak.
It’s been too long since the true queen died, and the words didn’t pass down in the stories.
All I can offer you are the promises in my heart.
I will be true to this land and the people of Alba Scoria, and I will serve the gods in any way that is just and honourable.
I swear to this on the life I give you freely, now or whenever you ask me to sacrifice myself.
I pray that you’ll find a new Maiden to take my place, one who can defeat the darkness that Vheara brings.
And because defeating Vheara requires all our strength, I beg that you accept my sacrifice without a consort. ”
“No!” Chyr reaches me. He’s beside me. “Pick me, Fierceness. I beg you.”
He pulls the dagger from his belt and slices it across his palm. Blood wells and thins with rain.
“Don’t,” I manage to say. “This isn’t because I don’t love you. I can’t choose you because I do.”
Everything hurts. The ragged pain in Chyr’s eyes, the burn of torn flesh in my chest. The thought of losing him.
He reaches across the Altar of the Moon to let his blood spill into the consort’s cup.
“Stop.” The words are the same words coming from my mouth, but it’s Sean’s voice speaking. Sean grasps Chyr’s wrist and drags him from the altar.
“Let go of me, Sean. I’m warning you. If you keep me from fulfilling the Compact, you’ll be banished.”
“She hasn’t chosen you, idiot,” Sean says. “And I can’t let her. She can’t be queen.”
“Then you are breaking the Compact.”
“Like you, I have other oaths,” Sean snarls. “Ask your uncle the next time you see him.”
Magic flares somewhere. A sword sings, and I smell the ironless sweetness of Siorai blood. Someone is behind me, holding me up. Magic pours into me, and I look back to find Fergal and Ronan there.
“Hold on, wildcat,” Ronan says. “Don’t you dare give up.”
“Never.”
I see Sean fall and Niall standing behind him with his sword bloody. Chyr is reaching for me.
My eyes close, and I pray as I have never prayed before.
Not with words or even thoughts. This prayer comes from my heart, from the hope I cling to with every stubborn fibre of being.
I pray for the people and the place I love, for their future.
For good to win. And I pray for Chyr, because the way he is looking at me is making me feel that I’ve betrayed him.
But he chose me, and now I choose him. Just not in the way he wanted.
Pain flares in my chest, and I cough. Blood spatters across the altar.
More pain bursts across my forehead, but the sensation is cool, not the fire of the Crown of Flame.
It’s the soft glow of the moon, the sweet refuge of night falling after the killing heat of a summer day.
The Crown of Moonlight is rest and reawakening, and it takes the pain from my chest and fills me with a sense of peace.
I pull myself upright and hold out my hand for Chyr. “This was the only way. I don’t know what your oaths to your uncle will mean, but if he wants you to have the throne of Alba Scoria, he’ll need us all to work together. Win the war first, then worry about who wears the crown.”
Chyr is on his knees, his body bowed in pain. He looks up through glazed eyes, and I know he’s fighting with everything he has.
“I will love you until my last breath, my last thought, the last beat of my heart. No matter what I may be forced to do, please always remember that.”
On the hilltop above us, a signal beacon flares. Then another. All around Muilean, the beacons light, and I breathe a sigh.
It used to be that the fires burned when the Cailleach crowned a queen. And now they burn for me.