Chapter 24
Wroth
In the flickering darkness, all I could hear was the primal roar echoing inside me.
Not again. I could not lose her in this place again, not after I had promised to see her out.
The brightness of her flame on the other side of the door flickered out, and Jesamin’s shadow faded away.
I shut my eyes, forcing away the rage that boiled in my bones, my blood threatening to erupt through my skin, twisting me into a creature of horns and flaming eyes—
No. I had control of myself. She was moving, and we would meet again.
I turned my back on the door, every fiber of my being screaming that I was leaving her behind, failing her.
Marrion’s eyes were shadowed, but she straightened imperceptibly and nodded. Líadan wrapped her arms tightly around herself, still staring at the door that cut her off from Jesamin.
“All right.” I growled the words, my chest aching. “We take the long way to find her again. Marrion…for the love of the gods, stay close.”
I could keep myself together long enough to find Jesamin, but if I lost my niece too…I would never be able to face myself or my family again.
“She’ll be fine, Uncle,” Marrion said reassuringly, but she couldn’t hide the doubt in her eyes. I tried to take comfort regardless, touching the glass charm around my neck.
Jesamin had fallen into an abyssal river and survived. She had faced relics without batting an eye.
We would find each other.
We moved out, my anger driving me forward. We cut through labs and workshops and unnameable rooms with no purpose I could sense. I had the sensation we were moving in a wide circle, looping back around to where we’d started, yet rising slightly with each room we passed.
Hopelessness surged through me after an hour of useless hunting, until one of the crystalline doors slid upwards, the fulmen flickering as though in warning, and we found ourselves looking at a landing on a stairway.
A massive stairway, rising to the right and descending to the left, wide enough for four oxcarts to pass abreast. The stairs themselves were designed for inhuman legs: each step was wide, and yet rose too high for the comfort of human legs.
I peered down into the flickering shadows, then turned and looked up at a sliver of light as the women crept out onto the landing. A dark figure descended towards us, and I herded the women behind me, praying it was Jesamin, ready to rip into whoever it was if it was not.
The figure stepped into the light as the fulmen brightened.
But it wasn’t Jesamin, and to my shame, the first thing I felt was disappointment.
“Nikos,” Marrion breathed, clinging to my shoulder.
The vampire looked up, and the sight of my last remaining knight wrenched something deep inside.
He took a deep breath and exhaled, his shoulders slumping with the relief that came only when one was no longer alone.
He was followed by Rasmus, deep in shock, his face deathly white and arms red to the elbows.
Talos was at his side, and though his iron face was immobile, the golem seemed to glower at me, red-hot embers gleaming deep in his empty, dark sockets.
“I lost her,” I said honestly, my throat clamping tight around the words. “But she’s alive. Alive and fighting.”
Talos never looked away from my face. I wondered if the golem felt, as Cirri’s golems seemed to feel for her, and if he truly blamed me for Jesamin’s loss.
Or if he was thinking of retribution, and how many of us would make it out alive if I fought this Artifice that Jesamin had designed to kill.
A long moment passed, my heart racing in anticipation, when the golem finally shook his head, and the minute signs of violence in his posture dissipated.
“Are you sure?” Rasmus asked, his voice a hoarse rasp. “Ever since the fulmen started flickering, things have been waking up. We nearly got locked in a room when the door came down halfway and froze.”
“That’s precisely how I lost her,” I said grimly, guilt a boulder in my chest. We had set this off. “A crystcore surge at the wrong time. But if we keep going, we’ll come across her.”
I refused to believe anything other than that she was alive and well. If I allowed myself to consider any other outcome, all would be lost.
Nikos looked over his shoulder at the stairs. “We’re not the first ones here,” he said, pointing down at his feet.
I studied the stairs, covered in a fine film of dust. If Nikos, Talos, and Rasmus had emerged on this landing, then those footsteps belonged to Alvar and his crew. Hundreds of footsteps, marring the dust, a path clearly trampled straight down the middle.
“Then we follow,” I said, building my mental map around this wide, endless stairwell.
To the human mind, Liuridar was a twisting, nonsensical labyrinth…
but only because we had entered from the wrong direction.
Every floor of the laboratories linked to this stair, and I could see the image in my mind of each level looping about to meet here. “It’s almost over.”
Nikos smiled crookedly, utterly humorless. “If you say so, my lord.”
I looked at my ragtag group; Talos’s fury, Nikos’s exhaustion, Marrion’s fear, Rasmus’s hopelessness, and Líadan, an unknown quantity, more a hindrance than anything else.
We were on our last legs, and we all knew it.
My fists clenched at my sides, the rip within me growing wider.
Was it worth sacrificing all these lives for one?
Would I not move faster and easier on my own, if I didn’t need to fear for them?
I would never leave Jesamin here alone, but to ask any of them to stay…
I imagined telling Bane that I had sacrificed his daughter for my woman, and that determined me.
“I should go on alone.”
“No, you damn well shouldn’t,” a familiar voice snapped, and a shiver ran through my pelt at the sound of her voice. For the first time in my life, I understood what people meant when they said their heart lightened; I would have sworn then that I physically felt a weight fall off my chest.
Jesamin emerged from the darkness below, panting as she climbed the stairs, her hand on her pistol. And beside her...sucking in breath like a dying man, climbing the stairs on all fours, was Alvar.
Jesamin dropped her pack as I raced down the stairs, gathering her in my arms.
She wrapped her hands around my neck and buried her face against my chest, the scent of her sweat a greater comfort than I could’ve imagined. Alive and with me, where she belonged.
“Gods, I thought…”
She laughed into my mane, exhausted but elated. There was a delirious tinge to the sound. “That I would bring precisely what you came for? Do have faith in me, Wroth. I saw what they’ve dug up.”
Alvar collapsed, panting weakly. Rasmus rushed to his side, muttering over his older brother’s skeletal limbs and the reddened scar around his throat until Alvar shoved him off with a hissed curse.
“He wore a chthonium slave collar, but my packrat tendencies came in handy.” Jesamin drew back, a tight smile on her lips.
She pulled half of one of the collars from her waistcoat, holding it up to show me where she had roughly sliced it.
“See? Picking up random things is a great idea. And now he’s all yours.
Do we risk using one of the labs for a rest?
You’ll want to hear what he has to say.”
Alvar grimaced at her, nearly a sneer, and I thought about simply breaking his neck now and ending the entire matter.
“We stay on the stairs,” I said. “If the crystcore surges and closes the door, we’ll have to traverse another gauntlet of gods know what, and…”
I almost said ‘we’re no longer capable of that’, but if my crew, worn to the bone as they were, heard such words of doubt, their morale would die, never to recover.
“We are done with their damn laboratories,” I ended crisply.
“Praise be to the Light,” Jesamin muttered, plopping right down on the stair next to Alvar to pull a waterskin from her pack and take a long gulp. She fumbled a piece of jerky from its wrapping, took a bite, and tossed another strip to Líadan. “Well, go on, Alvar. Tell them.”
Far from sneering at her again, Alvar looked at us, and it finally seemed to hit him that he was surrounded by enemies, all of us people with very good cause to want him dead—with the exception of Líadan, who was sniffing the jerky suspiciously.
He said nothing, showing white all the way around his eyes. Alvar wore the strain of his last months like ill-fitting clothes, no longer the handsome young man I remembered, but one aged into the sort of man who had looked nightmares in the face with no hope of escape.
No pity moved me.
“You came to Liuridar for weapons, did you not?” I asked, a hair shy of pleasantness. “You truly became your mother’s son, boy.”
Alvar took a shuddering breath. “Someone had to be the one to free the Rivers from you,” he said, low and vicious. “I stood up. I put myself on the line.”
Jesamin and Marrion exchanged an incredulous glance, brows raised, not bothering to hide their disdain from Alvar. He flushed an ugly dark red.
“So did you find one?” I spread my hands, inviting him to share his victory. “Where is this weapon that can kill me?”
Alvar took a breath, closed his eyes, and muttered something under his breath.
“A bit louder, if you don’t mind.”
His second answer was no more audible. Jesamin leaned back on the step, pausing mid-chew to kick him in the kidney. Hard.
The air woofed from his lungs, and after several writhing moments of pain, Alvar nearly screamed his next answer. “I found a fucking Fae!”
Everyone immediately focused on him. Even Líadan, who was eyeing the red ring around his neck with deeper suspicion than which she regarded the jerky with.
Marrion made a noise of question. “How is that possible?”