Chapter 71
Enough
We continue into the pass without speaking.
The line holds tighter than before, every movement more watchful, as though something might still be waiting just out of sight.
The path narrows as we move deeper into the mountains, the land rising on either side until the sky appears only in fragments above us.
Snow gathers thicker here, caught between the slopes, the wind changing direction without warning.
The change comes before anything reveals itself.
A pressure at the edges of my awareness, subtle enough that I almost dismiss it as the cold or the altitude or the particular weight of two days in the mountains.
But it does not move the way those things move.
It sits. It waits. It has the quality of something that has already decided what it is going to do.
I lift my head and look ahead.
They stand in the path. At this distance they look like people.
That is the first thing wrong with them, because people this deep into the mountains, this far from anything, do not simply stand in paths.
They are dressed ordinarily, their clothes worn and travel-stained, their postures carrying the particular heaviness of exhaustion.
One stumbles. Another catches them just late enough to feel real.
But their faces are too smooth. And beneath the surface of them, beneath everything that reads as human, something else sits very quietly and waits.
Colsar has already seen them. He does not look back at me but I feel the shift in him immediately, the way his attention narrows, his horse adjusting as he moves slightly forward without needing instruction. The Avanki line responds with him, the formation tightening with quiet precision.
I let my awareness reach outward. Just enough to touch.
What answers is wrong. There is no fear in them, no panic, no relief at the sight of soldiers. They hold themselves in a way that feels controlled, contained, patient in a way that does not belong to anything living.
My grip tightens on the reins. "They should not be here," I say quietly.
Trophi guides his horse closer, his attention moving over the figures ahead. "This far into the mountains," he murmurs. "No."
One of them lifts their head. Their face does not change when they do it, which is the thing that makes my skin pull tight.
"We were attacked," they call, the words breaking against the wind with careful strain. "Please—"
The sound carries and dies without answer. Colsar does not slow.
"We were attacked by the dead," another says, louder. "And by Thren rebels. We have nothing left—"
The hollow feeling presses again, unmistakable.
"They said the outer border was hit," I say, still watching them. "Not this deep into Gyarin."
Enovar's head turns once toward the ridgeline and then he shifts his horse without a word, breaking from the line at an angle that carries him ahead and outward. Smooth enough that it disrupts nothing.
The figures draw closer, their movements dragging through the snow, hands lifting as though to show they carry nothing. "We need shelter," one says. "We need—"
Saurin moves before the words finish.
She steps forward with a fluid certainty, her hand lifting as she murmurs something low and old, the language pressing into the air as though the world itself recognizes it. At first, nothing changes.
Then it does.
The surface of them gives. It peels, the way something carefully constructed comes apart when the thing holding it together is removed.
Their skin remains but the quality of it shifts, deepening to something too pale, too preserved, the texture of something that has not been warm in a very long time.
The light behind their eyes drains away until what looks back is aware and patient and entirely empty of anything that was ever human.
Their mouths stay closed but their faces lengthen just slightly, just enough that the proportions no longer sit right, and their bodies, which had been performing exhaustion so convincingly a moment ago, are now perfectly, terribly still.
They are deathmages. And they are being controlled. And they have been standing ten feet away from us looking exactly like people. The smell reaches me then. Beneath the cold. Something chemical and wrong.
One of them moves. It closes the distance before the Avanki can intercept, its hand catching my wrist, fingers tightening with a force that bruises instantly.
"They are looking for you," it says, the voice perfectly even, which is somehow worse than anything ragged or bestial. "You will die, Princess of Veynar.”
The hand closes around my wrist and for a fraction of a second my body does exactly what it did then. Locks.
Watch the hands. When they reach you. That is when they tell the truth.
The pressure comes with it, heavy and suffocating, trying to root me where I stand.
That is the mindset of the weak.
I force a breath out. One exhale.
A queen knows it is not the case.
I step into it.
Light answers before I can stop it, rising through me fast and clean, pushing outward without being called. They recoil, not from the strike but from the sound that tears out of me, something deeper than fear, forcing its way into them until they break, their hands lifting to their heads.
Colsar reaches us in the same instant, tearing the first one away before it can tighten its grip, his body already shifting as he drives through them.
Power surges beneath my ribs, racing up through my arms in threads that burn at the edges, and I shove it outward hard enough that both of them reel back. The Avanki push forward into the gap. Steel and light moving together.
More come. From the trees. From the shadows between the rocks where something standing very still could look like nothing at all for a very long time. They move with a coordination that has no desperation in it, only instruction, and that is the most frightening thing about them.
A grey mist spills from one of them, spreading too fast, catching one of the firebirds mid-flight. The bird drops hard. The sound of it carries.
Colsar sees it. I see it. Our eyes meet for a single second.
The children.
A roar tears through the air behind me. The transport door bursts open and Cambra comes through it in a shape I have never seen her wear, massive and low and already moving before she lands, slamming into the nearest cluster with a force that scatters them.
I had not known she was kyvarin. There is no time to hold that thought.
More deathmages press in. Too many. The Avanki cut through the first ranks but the things are stubborn in the way that only constructed things can be, built to absorb and continue.
I pull the staff free. The glamour falls away as its full weight comes into my hand and the feel of it changes everything, the way it always does, the power in it resonating against the power in me, old Alarnan magic against old Alarnan blood.
I think of Petunis with her staff and the lesson beneath every cruel word she ever said to me.
I think of what I was in my father's house, small and veiled and waiting to be used.
I am done with that. I am done hiding. I am done being a victim. I will not be chained and I will not let my children be touched and I have had enough, I have had enough, I have had enough of things coming for what is mine.
"Enough."
The word tears out of me and the lightcraft follows it.
It gathers under my ribs first, hot and fast, driving up through my arms and into the staff and then outward through every deathmage in range at once.
Force and frequency together, old royal Alarnan power finding the wielder's binding that holds these things upright and shaking it apart from the inside.
They cover their ears, all of them, their carefully constructed composure fracturing for the first time, their bodies jerking as it cuts deeper than any blade can reach.
Syle's voice breaks through in my head, distant and straining. Forty paces ahead there is a cluster of deathmages coming your way, Enovar tried to hold them but they keep—
His voice cuts out.
My eyes find Colsar's across the chaos. "Now," I say.
He lifts his head and the sky answers. The firebirds come down in a single coordinated strike, fire sweeping low across the outer edge of them as they surge forward in a mass of gray.
The Avanki follow. Steel and light and fire hit at once, and for a moment the mountain is louder than anything I have ever heard.
Then silence.
The deathmages dissolve where they stand, leaving torn ground and broken snow and a quiet that arrives too fast and presses in too completely.
It takes me a moment to understand why the silence feels wrong.
The transport door hangs open.
I am off my horse before I have decided to move.
"Saurin."
Nothing answers.
I reach the transport and look inside and what moves through me has no clean name. The furs are there. The blankets are there. The small hollows where they had been lying are still pressed into the fabric.
They are gone.
"Saurin." Too loud. I do not care. "Cambra."
Silence.
I push my intunar outward as hard and as wide as I can, reaching through the snow and the cold and the fading chaos, reaching for the particular warmth I have been able to feel since the moment they were placed in my arms, that small bright presence I would know anywhere.
Nothing.
Colsar is beside me before I finish turning, his hand finding my arm, and I pull away because I cannot be held right now, I cannot be managed or reassured when they are not here.
"Where are they?” My voice has gone somewhere I do not recognize. "Colsar. Where are they?”
He does not know. That is the most terrifying thing that has happened today.
"Fan out." His voice carries across the entire line without breaking. "Every soldier. Now."
The Avanki spread across the terrain in every direction, their lightcraft rising as they go.