Chapter 59
I wake up the morning after my birthday to find the roses are already beginning to spoil. I was shocked by my father’s toast last night, but I need to stay calm. He won’t marry me to the first lord who asks. I have time to figure this out.
The week after Noctus, at Seran’s insistence, I accept an invitation to a lunch with a lord from Mordun.
I’m returning to the Sunrise Palace when a bird screeches.
It’s one hawk, then it’s ten, then it’s too many to count, black wings filling the sky.
Men shout and guards race past me. Arrows zip overhead.
Metal clangs against metal at the courtyard entrance.
I freeze, not fully believing what I’m seeing.
Warriors in dark clothes are clashing with the guards, driving them aside, as a huge force marches through the gates with weapons drawn.
At their front is a man like I’ve never seen before, his skin glowing, eyes blazing silver, long dark hair whipping behind him.
Wings arch up from each shoulder, made of misting black feathers that twist and reform like living shadow.
He looks like a god.
“Princess!” a voice shouts to me. “Get inside!”
I take a step to obey, then something punches the middle of my chest, knocking the air out of me.
I look down and see a golden arrow between my breasts, the same kind the guards are firing at the birds.
I glance up in shock and lock eyes with the winged man.
His piercing silver gaze bores into mine, then drops to the arrow in my chest.
My mouth fills with blood and the world slants sideways.
I’m bobbing. Arms are holding me, one beneath my knees, one across my back. I crack my eyes to wide-open sky. I turn my head and the ground is rushing by far below. Alaris has me, and we are flying.
He lands hard near a copse of maranth trees, and I rock against his chest as he stumbles to his knees. He stands and staggers, walking us under the cover of their long branches and dark green leaves. He settles me against a trunk, kneeling beside me.
“Ly. Ly, are you alright?”
I force my eyes open. He is injured and dirty, covered in soot and blood, with half his shirt burned away. His chest is heaving.
But he’s alive.
“Hit my head,” I mumble. I reach to touch the tender spot under my hair where my skull met marble. “’tsalright now.”
His hands are gentle as they feel my skull and neck, then check my ribs.
“Let me know if anything else hurts,” he says.
He keeps prodding me as my sluggish mind clears. I only hiss when his fingers skate over fresh burns, the skin red and raw along one side of my torso. My robe is gone, reduced to charred scraps.
I pull myself to sit up farther, lifting a hand to my temple. I can only put together pieces of what I saw in the chamber. Bloodshed and fire and magic blur together with my memories. “What happened?”
“I extinguished the Flame.” One of his hands is completely black, and it shakes as he curves it into a fist. “But the emperor…the emperor is alive. When the Flame went, he was still on his feet.”
“So…we failed? The wither won’t stop?”
“It will be slowed.” He shakes his head, mouth grim. “The Flame was always the bigger problem, but it will be harder to kill your father now that he knows I’m coming. There will be war.”
I swallow. “What about everyone else? Dashol?”
“I don’t know. I pushed as many as I could behind columns before it exploded, but I had to get you out of there.”
I think of my siblings, and the waiting company in the throne room. I hope everyone made it out. I hope no one was hurt.
“I’m sorry I fainted. I tried to stay present, but I couldn’t…”
“Don’t apologize.” One corner of his lip lifts slightly. “You provided something of a distraction, even if you nearly gave me a heart attack. More memories?”
“Another life.” The first one. Without even questioning it, I know it to be true.
I went to bed on my birthday and woke up the next morning, with nothing at all disturbing me at midnight.
And I died just as Alaris led a massive army through the gates, a golden arrow from the Citadel’s own guard pierced through my heart.
An accident, from the archers taking aim at the hawks overhead.
I stare at his silver eyes. So ethereal and beautiful, so dangerous and powerful.
“I saw my first life.” I raise a shaking hand to his face. “You were there.”
Even though he was a stranger in that moment, an enemy, when I locked onto those silver eyes, I couldn’t look away.
I’m too tired for words, but I use the strength I have left to sit up and kiss him. I want to drink him in, even though he tastes like ashes. I kiss him with all the desperation I’ve felt these last few days, terrified of losing him.
He holds me carefully, but his lips devour mine back. I want to crawl into his lap right here, but he might be bleeding, and I’m burned. Though the longer we kiss, the more I think we should just work around that…
I flinch, as a phantom arrow punches through my chest.
“Ly?”
“Just…the memories…”
Gates appear before me.
Despite the chaos in the courtyard, I gaze in awe at the winged man. Then pain, and I look down to find a gold-fletched arrow lodged between my breasts. The Citadel’s arrow. I glance up at the winged man. Our eyes meet. Blood fills my mouth as I fall.
I swim back to the present moment, orienting myself here. The smell of maranth surrounds me. But something in the image tugs at my awareness. Someone to Alaris’s right…
A shape. One of many soldiers, but familiar. Dressed in black.
Hooded. And masked.
I’ve never been more certain of anything. The man next to Alaris in my memory is the masked man.
I fold over, struggling to gasp in my next breath.
“What is it?” he asks.
I scrape my sandals against the roots, pressing back against the tree as far as I can. “Nothing. I don’t know. Just, just give me a second.”
He nods and sits back on his haunches, wings flaring once.
I use the tree to help me stand, and stagger around Alaris to get some space to breathe.
It’s as if I was just there. I can clearly picture the courtyard, the guards, the hawks.
The army marching in. I was so focused on the man with wings, I didn’t examine the soldiers around him.
They wore all kinds of armor and leathers, and some had their faces covered, with helmets, and hoods, and scarves.
But I’m not confused by just any hood and mask. I know his silhouette. Even at the edge of my vision in a memory, I’m sure it’s him.
I turn slowly to face Alaris. “Do you know him?”
“What?”
“Do you know…” I can’t even bring myself to fully say it. “Do you know him?”
He stares at me, eyes still full of starlight. “Ly, I’m not sure what—”
“I saw you with him. He was right next to you. He was…” I’m not making sense. I have to slow down. “In my first life, you stormed the Citadel with an army. The masked man was next to you.”
I wait for the tiny pinch of his brows that shows me he’s confused. I wait for him to tell me he didn’t know or offer the answer that explains this.
I wait. And I wait.
I take a slow step back. I must have something wrong. Alaris protected me from the masked man in the field. Alaris knocked us apart, then blasted the man again with that starlit power when he flipped his knife to throw it.
But did he flip his knife in order to throw it? He flipped his dagger and lifted it by the blade. His arm was straight…
Like he was offering the hilt.
My eyes go wide. “Stay back.”
“Ly.” Alaris stands. “Please talk to me—”
“Just stay right there, Alaris!” I snap. “Don’t come any closer, just answer me. Do you know the masked man?”
His ancient eyes blaze. He’s silent for another breath. “Yes.”
“How?”
He stares, without saying a word.
I snatch the moonstone dagger from the binding at my hip, slicing some of the gauzy layers in the process. Alaris’s lips part as I hold the blade between us.
“Answer me!” I keep it pointed at him, even though I’m no match for him, and I don’t want to use it. “Tell me the truth.”
All I want is for him to tell me I’m wrong and my memory is a lie. That my head and my heart haven’t misled me all these months. That the only person who ever made me feel safe, who ever really made me feel seen and cared for, didn’t have anything to do with my deaths.
But he doesn’t.
“He’s one of my soldiers,” he says. “My most trusted.”
The blade wavers as my heart cracks, sorrow washing over me and taking my strength. “Your most trusted…”
“I’ve tried my hardest not to lie to you, Lysandra.” His stillness is total.
I take a few steps back as he continues to stare silently. This is the cold Alaris, who soared above the world for centuries. No, no, no.
Terror clenches around my heart. I whirl and run. He shouts after me, but I can’t hear a word.
Why would Alaris want me dead?
He’s the one who guessed I was cyralian, but why would he care about my bloodline?
Did he guess I was cyralian…or did he already know?
Adrenaline bursts through me. I run as fast as my legs will carry me, my flimsy sandals flapping over thorns and rocks. I stumble when a sandal snaps but keep going.
Run, run, run.
It feels just like when I ran from the masked man, but even worse, because my head is screaming while my heart is cracking in two.
I feel a gust of air behind me just before I’m tackled, slamming onto him instead of the thorn-covered ground.
“Ly, stop,” he demands, holding my arms in a vise. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”
His words of concern make something explode in my chest, rage and fear filling me and chasing out all other thoughts. I punch and scratch and kick, thrashing in his arms. “Let me go!” I shriek. “Let me go!”
“Ly, stop. I’m not trying to hurt you…”
I kick and buck and fight him, but he’s too strong. Panic rises in me like a wave and I scream. I swing the knife to stab him, but with my arm locked in place, I slice the side of my thigh instead.
He grunts and his arms loosen. I scramble off him and back up, holding the shaking knife between us. I watch my blood drip off the beautiful blade. The blade Alaris gave me to protect myself and soothe my fears.
Tears stream down my face. “You sent him, didn’t you? Why?”
“I had to, Ly. I saw you die that first time, with the arrow. When I figured out what your power was doing…”
I freeze. I didn’t tell him about my first life yet. I didn’t tell him there was an arrow.
“You remember? You remember…seeing me across the courtyard?”
“Your powers don’t affect me like everyone else,” he says in that reverberating voice. “Our patrons were lovers. What even time forgets, the night remembers.”
I try to process what he’s saying. When I woke at midnight after my birthday, with no memory of my previous lives, he returned to wherever he was months before, remembering everything?
That means he already knew how every coup went. There was no new information I could give him with the oraculi. While I’ve been spiraling in these dreams and visions seeking answers, he already lived all of it.
I never saw the same attack twice.
I almost always died in winter.
After Alaris failed.
“You’ve been using me to restart time?” My voice shakes. “You sent him to kill me for another chance at your stupid plan?”
His silver eyes and wings don’t look beautiful to me anymore. They look like the marks of a monster.
“You don’t understand. I had to stop this.
” He takes a step toward me. “You don’t have any void in you, Lysandra.
Do you know what that means? It means you aren’t even partly mortal.
Cyralia placed you directly in your mother’s womb, outside of time, long after she faded.
You are Cyralia’s incarnial. You are immortal. ”
His words don’t make any sense. Incarnials weren’t born, they were made, and they all died. The entire province of Cyralon and all its divinials stand against his word.
But right now, it doesn’t matter.
“Is that your excuse for all this pain?” I snarl. “That I’m not still dead?”
I had no feelings about things like birth and death. If I have to look at his blank face another second, I’ll scream until my voice breaks.
“You’re not listening, Lysandra. If the wither kills everything, you won’t die. You’ll live forever, suffering, in a dead world.”
“I don’t care!” I screech. I laugh then, hysteria overtaking me and wracking my body with something between a laugh and a sob. “You failed this time too. My father is still alive. Are you going to kill me again? Are you going to murder me yourself?”
“Never.” He scowls. “I won’t let you die anymore.”
As if it matters that he’s not the one who held the knife. I’m alone with him. My true killer. I need to get away from here. I can’t outrun him. I only know one way out.
I want him to suffer.
“If I’m her incarnial, then I can come back again.” I lift the moonstone dagger to my throat. “And when I do, I’ll make sure you never get what you want.”
I start to slash, but he’s too fast. In an instant, he’s on me, his fingers clenched around the blade. I try to pull it free, but he grips hard, his blood mixing with mine and running down my chest.
“No,” he growls, eyes blazing silver. “I told you, I won’t let you die anymore.”
I shriek then, trying to saw the knife free, but his hold doesn’t give.
The glint in his eyes is dangerous. Wild. “It doesn’t matter if you hate me. I’ll still save you, Lysandra. Now sleep.”
A pulse of power washes over me and forces my mind into darkness.