Chapter 54
KORYN
My thighs burned as we trudged up the last stretch of the sloped mountain.
I’d thought the never-ending spiral in Balar Shan had kept me in shape, but it took only two days of trekking through the mountains to relieve me of that delusion.
It was a damn good thing my control of my power had grown, because I was still not going to outrun anyone.
Who knew what the Unknown Gate would ask of us. We did not even get a hint. Mercy, Justice, Sacrifice, Devotion, Memory, and Peace. They had all taken a different form than I’d expected. But the darkness took many shapes.
Knowing Syleris as we did should have made predicting the trial awaiting us easier… except I did not know him. Not after what had happened with Alize. He’d let Maura resurrect her, even when I begged him.
The light I thought I’d seen in him? A dream. Just because I was coming to terms with the duality within myself did not mean that it even existed within him.
Hungry, Isanara invaded my mind with a high-pitched whine.
Too hungry to use full sentences?
Yes, that hungry, she sassed back.
A low humming sound started in the back of my head. The first sign of a headache, maybe. Despite Garrick’s arguments, we had not stopped to eat today. A hot meal in the temple around the blood fountain sounded inordinately appealing.
You can gnaw on the Dark God’s altar when we get to the temple, I said.
The humming got louder. My hand dropped away from my temple. It wasn’t inside my head, but around us. Over the rise where the temple waited.
Garrick had already stopped walking. I’d assumed it was to let me catch up. But he frowned up the incline.
“What is that sound?” I asked.
Garrick’s silvery brows notched together.
“Stay here,” Garrick said. Was he talking to Isanara or to me? “I will shift and scout from above.”
I reached for his arm before it could transform into a mass of blue-black feathers.
“Tomin?”
The familiar emerald-clad acolyte sheltered beneath a tree a few yards short of the ridgeline. Soft snow began to fall a few hours ago, but none of it had accumulated on his emerald robes. He’d been standing beneath that tree for a while.
He stamped his feet to fend off the cold, but his normally warm brown skin was ashen and mottled with purple across his cheeks. When he spotted us, he waved and hurried through the snow in our direction.
“Varian sent me up here to wait for you,” he said.
I could kill her. “How long—”
Tomin waved his hand dismissively. “Just a few hours.”
At least he had on leather gloves, though I doubted they still did much after a few hours in Velora’s cold.
Garrick was more concerned with the practicalities, as usual.
“How did she know we were coming?” he asked, frowning down at the acolyte.
I nudged him in the side. Varian might be stubborn about neutrality, but Tomin was a friend. Garrick relaxed his face, but not his guard. I rolled my eyes.
Tomin observed the exchange but did not comment. He was the one who’d taught me to control my emotions and calm the panic when my senses overwhelmed me. Whatever he thought of me and Garrick’s interaction, he kept it to himself.
“The blood fountain only flows when supplicants are near,” he explained. “Don’t tell Varian that I told you.”
“I don’t plan on telling her anything,” I said. But on second thought, “Does she know about Alize?”
Tomin did not hide his surprise. Several tight, dark curls fell over his forehead as he leaned forward, brows raised.
“We have received no news since you left the Peace Gate. The blood fountain began to flow this morning. We prepared three rooms, just in case,” he said.
I suddenly felt very, very cold. “You’ll only need one,” I said. “We will share. And Alize…”
“She is dead,” Garrick said. His voice was rough. He’d packaged up his grief and put it away when we escaped Balar Shan, but I knew he would not be able to hold it back forever. After the Unknown Gate, we would be free. We would have time to process our grief together.
“She is a witch,” I said, because Garrick had not. I hated to remind either of us of that gruesome scene, but it already haunted us. And I needed to know if what I suspected was true.
Tomin thoughtfully kept his reactions to himself. “I am sorry for your loss,” he said to us both. “With the end of her mortal life, her Oath of Atonement to the Seven Gates is fulfilled.”
Garrick looked away. Tomin lifted a brow in question. I shook my head slightly.
Tomin nodded, wiser than his meager years on this cursed continent.
Beside me, Garrick exhaled and turned back to the conversation, his neutral mask back in place. “We should not linger here.”
Tomin frowned. “Why?”
This time, I was the one who sighed. “Our exit from Balar Shan was more of an escape.”
Tomin blinked, but took that new information in stride as well. “I see. Once we are within the temple, no one can touch you.”
“Then let’s go.” Garrick turned back and started up the ridge.
But Tomin took another direction entirely, parallel to the ridge instead of up to intersect it. I watched them both.
Which one do we follow? Isanara snarked.
You are not helping, I countered.
Garrick realized first. “Where are you going, acolyte?”
Tomin turned around, his face full of genuine surprise that Garrick was halfway up the ridge, and I had not moved a foot. “We will pass undisturbed if we go… you do not know?”
Not know… what?
Our expressions must have been enough of an answer. Tomin changed course, angling up toward the top of the ridge. He trudged past Garrick, whose eyes shot me a question. I shook my head again. I was going to be dizzy if I did not eat soon.
The buzzing sound got louder as we climbed. One yard, two, a few more, and then…
Garrick grabbed my waist and hauled me against him with one hand. His sword was already drawn and ready in the other. At my side, Isanara flared her wings wide and then snapped them in tight.
“What is this?” he demanded, glaring down at Tomin.
The acolyte was not cowed. “They began arriving a week ago from all over Velora,” he said. “Word has spread that the curse may finally be lifted.”
The ridge curved around in the shape of a crescent moon.
We stood at one end. Perhaps a mile away, at the other end and seated down in the valley, was the temple.
And below the ridge, in the valley between this mountain and the next, there were dozens of fires.
I could make out the shape of hobbled-together tents.
The humming sound we heard was actually hundreds of sounds, maybe as many as a thousand. Voices.
At my side, Isanara dipped her head and chewed on her claws. The grinding sound of her fangs against her claws disappeared into the hum from below.
A sharp pain twisted my stomach. “I did not know there were this many people left in Velora.”
The talismans weighed heavily in my pocket. No matter what Maura and the king’s intention for them was, they had not been made to protect the humans.
“Have there been fights?” Garrick asked sagely.
Tomin nodded. “A few. A lot of people and not enough food. It is unavoidable. But if we go along the ridge, we can mostly avoid them. The temple guards have maintained a perimeter around the temple. Only a few people are allowed through at a time to make offerings at the external altars.”
Isanara’s tail whipped around so fast it hit the back of my calf.
What is it? I snapped.
She whacked me with her tail again. You do not have to take that tone with me.
You are going to gnaw off your own talon. What is wrong?
Isanara swiveled her head in the serpentine motion that usually meant irritation. Do you feel comfortable around this many people?
No.
My familiar was bigger than a horse, now. She’d grown rapidly in the last month. If this continued, she’d be full-grown, at least by the standard of legends, within the year. But even so, I did not want her anywhere near that mass of people.
“Thank you for coming to get us,” I said to Tomin. “Lead on, please.”
We’d played out the scene six times before. Tomin woke us at dawn. We paraded around the altars while Varian and Tomin offered prayers. Then we marched out the rear door of the temple. There was a familiarity to it, but it was not a comforting one.
This was the Unknown Gate. Syleris’ domain.
The rear of the temple was private, lined with guards on each side of the walled rear garden to keep it so. Varian must have summoned them from other temples. I’d never seen more than half a dozen at a time. Now there were at least four times that many.
They held back the crowd that had gathered in the valley, but they were an audience in their own right.
“You may proceed together,” Varian said.
My hand was already in Garrick’s. I cast a skeptical glance over our surroundings.
The rear garden was bare and untended. Tomin had told me at one of the previous gates that the later ones were not kept ready for supplicants, since they so rarely made it far enough to merit the effort.
Garrick and I were the first supplicants to reach the Unknown Gate.
There was no gate or exit from the garden. Just a low wall about the height of my waist, lined with guards, and the sloping hills of snow on the other side that eventually gave way to the mountains.
“What now?” Garrick asked.
With one hand in his, the other on Isanara’s back, I took a deep breath. “I expect we are about to find out.”
Together, we took a step. Our forward feet never touched the ground.
It was just like before, when Syleris had transported us from the presence chamber to our bedroom. Or the times that he’d pulled me from my reality to his, first when I’d bargained for Kyrelle and then in the Memory Gate.
I was not used to the sickening feeling, but at least I knew it would end.
However, I expected to find myself in Syleris’ dark realm. Instead, the world that materialized around me was familiar. Snow-covered trees arched overhead. A thick blanket of snow covered the ground. Ahead of me was a long, curving path.
Not just me. Us.
Garrick and Isanara were still at my sides.
We exchanged looks, but there was not much question in them. “Now we walk.”
I’d learned not to trust time within the Gates. We might have walked for an hour or only a few minutes, and it might feel like either.
A tree appeared in the middle of our path. The trunk was massive, too big around for me and Garrick to encircle it with both our arms outstretched. Carved into it was the triquetra.
Garrick paced around the perimeter of the tree and then returned. Nothing else of note, then.
“It is a witch symbol,” he said.
I nodded. “The Dark God is the creator of the witches. All of our symbols were his first.”
“What does it mean?”
I traced my finger along the curves. The intersecting lines were similar to the pentagram. But this sister symbol was gentler, less severe. It was a trick, though. It could do as much damage as the pentagram. “It symbolizes the past, present, and future.”
“Indeed,” a dark voice said.
Syleris stood between two trees at the edge of the path.
He no longer wore his Winter Tithe finery. He looked just as handsome in the severe black leathers and vest beneath his knee-length coat. But despite the night we’d spent together, the three of us, it was not my needy core that ached for him.
It was my heart.
It had not beat in nearly four centuries. But despite my lying to myself and trying to encase it in ice, it could still feel. Witches’ hearts might die, but our ability to love did not. The proof stood on either side of me. And before me.
Syleris walked to join us, his leather boots making no sound on the snow.
“In the previous gates, you faced your past. You live in the present. Now it is time to see your futures.”
“That does not sound so bad,” I fronted. But we all knew I was lying.
It could be very, very bad.
If we did not make it through the Unknown Gate. If only one of us did. If Maura and the fae king found us. We had not discussed what came after the curse was broken. It seemed foolhardy. Now, it felt like a dangerous oversight.
Garrick did not avoid Syleris’ gaze, but I did. So it was only when Isanara hissed that I realized he was looking down at my dragon.
“You will be separated from your familiar.”
I stepped in front of her. “No.”
Let him try, Isanara hissed between her fangs.
The corner of Syleris’ mouth twitched, but he managed not to show any emotion. “The terms of the Unknown Gate were set centuries ago.”
“If I could allow her to remain, I would,” he said to me alone.
I had nothing to say in return. He was not going to break any rules for me. He’d already proven that.
I turned to Garrick—
He was gone. I reached for one of Isanara’s curved horns, but I already knew. My hand grasped at nothing.
I was alone.