40. Fen
CHAPTER FORTY
FEN
The dead came for her first.
I put Eradin’s body between my own and the nearest of them. Her small frame, her healer’s hands, and a stone blade torn from a dead man’s fist the only weapon I had, because the magic in these borrowed hands mended and would not kill.
Callix swung a stone arm that would’ve taken my head off if I’d still had my height. I ducked under it on legs shorter than I was used to and drove the blade into the seam of his petrified throat. It did nothing, because you can’t stab a thing that’s already dead and turned to rock.
Blue fire lit the dark beside me.
Eradin, in my body and my skin, threw my killing magic in wide, cold arcs.
The drowned nearest her cracked and crumbled from the blast. She’d never held a weapon like that in her life, and she wielded it like she’d been born to it.
Some part of me that should’ve been drowning wanted to watch her do it forever.
A stone hand caught her across the arm and dragged a gash with its nails.
Callix took advantage of my distraction and gouged out with a blade, catching me across the ribs. Pain bloomed hot and blood shot into the water. Hers. Mine. Ours. I’d stopped being able to tell.
The lake tasted of iron now, and it only brought the dead faster.
The pearl had dissolved to almost nothing. A sliver of a moon behind my teeth, one breath left in it. Maybe two.
An impact struck the dome so hard the water shuddered.
Aristus.
He’d found the backward rune, and he hit it, and hit it, the collar at his throat flaring white and stabbing him every single time.
The thing killing him screamed down our thin bond.
He threw himself into it anyway, because I was on the other side of the wall and he’d decided I would not stay there.
Some might suggest he was the weakest dragon in the race. My mother’s records had a word for creatures like Aristus.
Culled.
He hit the rune again, and the dome cracked. Water punched through the fracture in a plume.
The pearl was so small in my mouth, I could barely feel the life-giving air it shared.
Eradin’s gaze found mine. She had my body’s strength. With what was left in the pearl, she could make it to the surface.
We both knew it.
No. She mouthed the word.
I would rather drown in the wrong skin than climb out of this lake over her body.
I had spent thirty years learning to need no one. It turned out I was always waiting for her.
I pulled the pearl from my mouth and held it between us.
Her eyes widened with understanding and something fiercer than fear.
She nodded.
Do it, I could swear I heard her say.
I let the last breath in this trial go. It rose off my fingers in a thin silver thread and floated toward a surface neither of us would ever reach.
Taking her hands, I pulled her in until there was no water left between us.
We’d go together, or not at all.
Our magic surged between us, the two colors finding each other and braiding into one cord of light where there had been two.
It shot away from us and slammed into the fracture Aristus had opened from the outside.
The dome disintegrated around us.
And something vast turned its attention on us. It didn’t strike. It appraised, a slow drag of attention along the braided cord of our magic, the same measuring I’d felt my whole life from across a council table. Whatever it found in us, it chose to keep.
For later.
Then it let us go.
The lake spat us out.
I came back into my own body on my hands and knees on cold sand, retching lake water onto a sandy cavern floor, real air tearing down my own throat and burning like the first breath after a lifetime under.
A rest cavern. Empty. No other riders had reached it yet. Aristus and Selira stood off to the side, dripping and alive.
Eradin knelt beside me, back in her own skin, her reddish-brown hair plastered to her face, her chest heaving. Blood ran down her arm from a wound I’d taken while I wore her body. My own ribs screamed from a slice she’d received while she wore me.
We’d traded those too.
She lifted her head, and we stared at each other.
There wasn’t a single thing left between us that the other hadn’t seen.