CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
C HAPTER T HIRTY- N INE
Annika had prepared her as best she could. With failing delicacy she’d described the tight cramps that would come in her lower stomach and intensify with the passing of time. She’d described the waves of pain, building until she would be blinded by them, until she would become nonsensical, and then she described the blood, the broken bones, the last moments of Farra’s life, spent in agony.
“Will you care for the baby after I’m gone?” Farra whispered to her one evening, back when the swell of her stomach still seemed innocuous. “They will belong here, after all. Among your kind.”
Annika had sighed and patted Farra’s hand. “Of course, Yennes,” she said, but her expression clearly told Farra what she already knew – the female was advanced in years. She would not survive to see this baby grow to maturity. Annika shook herself from her reverie and laid her hand reassuringly along Farra’s cheek. “He will be raised in our village and this village protects its own. If there’s one thing I’m sure of, it is that there will be many a hand to help guide this young one. Just as I was raised. Just as my Ryon was raised.”
“Tell me what he was like,” Farra asked suddenly. Annika gladly told her tale after tale of a boy running through the Colony with his wings following, making mischief from nothing, his heart too free to heed the dangers that surrounded him.
“He was fiercely brave,” she told Farra, a sad smile appearing. “Too brave for one such as us. Too confined for his wild spirit.”
The shelter filled with Annika’s palpable grief. Farra could almost see the boy running through the drapes, launching himself out into the open air. She felt the heaviness of his absence, and clutched Annika’s hands. The female’s tears had begun to slip down her face. How must it feel to have the ghosts of your family living within you? The sounds of their laughter, their chatter. The smell of their skin and the feel of their hands, their expressions and tenor, and the exact sound their footsteps made when they came home. How heavy the weight of their memory must be.
“I pray this child grows to be just as fierce,” Farra told her. “And his spirit as strong.”
Hours later, in the dead of night, Farra awakened to a telling clench at the bottom of her stomach, and she prayed for the same once more.
She waited until dawn broke to wake Annika. By then, the tightening of her stomach had begun to force beads of sweat to coat her forehead and chest. Her back ached terribly, and she found she could not lie down.
“Mercy be with us,” Annika murmured, going still and pale. Then she disappeared out into the morning air.
There was a blizzard coming – of that Farra was sure. She could smell it. The stillness of the wind outside, the biting smell of frost, the charge in the atmosphere. As though the mountain knew something of consequence was imminent, that fate would bring this day a being of great magnitude – an existence immense enough to move it.
Farra curled over her stomach and howled.
Annika stayed with her through each shuddering wave. It was not long before they began to eclipse her – blocking sight and sound and sense so she was nothing but agony. When the iron-like clenching of her belly released and the pain ebbed, she heard the words Annika tried desperately to fill her with. Reassurances, encouragement, prayer. Farra could only nod, her breaths ragged and hitched. The wind outside whistled through the cracks of the shelter, finding the exposed parts of her skin, but she found the cold could not touch her. She was aflame. She was combusting.
“Malishka?”
A face appeared above hers. She blinked away the sting of sweat to bring it into focus. It had been months since she had seen it last. “Thaddius,” she breathed, feeling his fingers wiping the hair from her face. His own crumpled. She saw his eyes well, his lips shudder. He whispered, “This is my doing. My selfishness.”
Farra could not tell if he spoke to her or to himself.
For a moment, while sense was suspended, she could only feel relief that he was there, running his fingers over her cheek, leaning to press his lips to her forehead. She forgot to summon the anger she had carefully harboured these past weeks. Farra clasped his wrist and relished the feel of his forehead pressed to hers.
“You will be well,” he told her, as though it were a command. “I’m going to make sure of it.”
“Fucking hell,” came Phineas’ voice, though Farra could not see him. “Of course it comes the night of a blizzard.”
“Say nothing, brother,” Thaddius rasped. “Or wait outside if you cannot restrain yourself.”
There was a snort of derision. “ Now you speak of restraint?”
“Go!” Thaddius roared, and it aligned with Farra’s own as another wave overcame her, burying her. When she surfaced again, there was only Thaddius, and he looked at her as though the sight of her pain might split him in two.
“Forgive me,” he said brokenly. “Forgive me.” He said it over and over as the day wore on, as her body revolted, threatening to break her apart.
“I should have come,” he said aloud. “I should have come sooner.”
“No,” Annika answered. “You shouldn’t have.”
“I could have been with her. Comforted her–”
“Comforted yourself, you mean,” Annika quipped. “The damage was done, Thaddius. Returning to this shelter only risked exposing her. Exposing yourself.”
“I could have–”
“There is nothing you could have done, Glacian. Stop pitying yourself. There is little time remaining. What exactly do you and the moron have planned for her?”
Farra lifted her eyelids long enough to see Thaddius become taut with worry, with dread. “We will take her to the pool,” he said. “And she will drink from it.”
Farra’s strength was waning, but her repulsion was fierce enough to lift her shoulders from her pallet. “No,” she bit out, and was then seized by the grip of pain. She grit her teeth, her vision blurring until it subsided. He wrapped his arms around her, and she gasped into his chest. “No,” she repeated into the fabric of his tunic. “No. I’d sooner… sooner die.” She crumpled again, the pressure strengthening around her middle. She was sure she would snap soon. Her bones would break and there would be no need to speak of her drinking from the pool in some absurd attempt to keep her alive. She would already be at the Mother’s Gate.
Thaddius begged her, pleaded with her, but she heeded none of it. Eventually Annika pushed his hands aside, and Farra heard no one, nothing. She was being sliced from within. A fire scorched through her, starting from her middle. She tilted her head back and screamed.
Then all became black.
Was this death?
Farra dearly hoped so. Death was quiet. It was sightless. Voiceless. There was no sensation. Just the tender suspension of thought, her mind ambling to make meaning of this oblivion, fighting backward to remember. Remember what? How had she found this place? How to escape from it?
But what could possibly compel her to flee its embrace?
“Yennes!”
How out of place it was, the sound of panic amid the peace.
“YENNES!”
Yennes. It meant survivor. Annika had given her the name.
“Yennes! The baby!”
The baby.
The baby. Her baby. The one made of Glacian and Ledge blood, both.
She found her heavy limbs, her heavy eyelids, and forced them open. It took the strength of a titan. The strength of a mountain, but she opened her eyes. The darkness fled and pain gripped her anew.
A terrible roar left her, but it was cut short when her throat closed, her lungs empty of breath.
“Yennes, you must push. Now!”
And this was all that was left. This last thing she would have to endure. She would accept the pain and gift the world this life that never should have been, and then she could rest forever. She need only suffer a while longer.
She was well-versed in suffering. In surviving. She was Ledge-born.
The squalls outside blew in pursuit of her. The frost crept in and tried to take hold, and she pushed it away. She fought it back. She reared up and bore down, feeling each snap within her, and though the pain was beyond description she pushed still, until there was no feeling at all. Just the absence of pressure, of fear, and the first brays of a baby, freshly born into a world not its choosing.
“Farra,” Thaddius murmured reverently, as though she were the Holy Mother Herself. His lips pressed to hers gently, for a moment. “You did it.”
“Take him, Yennes,” Annika’s voice bid her. But she could not feel her limbs. Could not command their movements.
Farra opened her eyes as Annika placed the form of a baby to her chest, then picked up Farra’s arms and wrapped them over its warm, slippery flesh.
“A boy,” Annika said, her eyes wet. “Your boy.”
Farra blinked slowly at the shape cradled to her chest and for a moment, her vision focussed. She looked long enough to see the warm hue of his skin, perfectly matched to hers, the exquisite dimples of his knuckles, the delicate slope of his small nose. He opened his eyes long enough for her to see that they resembled hers and that of her own Mother’s, and she smiled.
“Ryon,” she said, though she could not be sure her voice would carry. “Call him Ryon.”
She felt his heart, beating resolutely against her weakening one, and sighed contentedly. This child must be a design of fate, for how could something so perfect, so improbable not be?
She looked her last at her son, smiling weakly, and then the darkness reached up. It clawed her back down into its embrace. Farra was too weak. Too tired.
But she did not want to go. She wished suddenly, fiercely, to stay.
Death ambled, slow to collect her.
Life came in flashes of anguish. There was a glimpse of the night sky and the excruciating jostle of movement. She felt a moment of wind, lancing her cheeks, before the dark pulled her back. Over and over reality returned, and she clawed to stay each time. She heard the swoop of wings. Felt the shudder ripple through her as something collided. She heard a voice, his voice, giving desperate commands.
“Phineas, she is fading!”
“Hurry,” came the answer, then more jostling. More pain.
Doors closed, footsteps glanced off stone, and then a glow burned beyond her eyelids.
“Lay her down,” came Phineas’ hushed voice. “God, the blood. Quickly! We only have a moment.”
“Drink, malishka,” Thaddius told her, and she felt the press of metal against her closed lips, felt the strange matter press against her mouth, neither wet nor solid. “Please,” he said again more urgently, and she felt fingers pulling her chin down.
But suddenly, her ears were filled with swoops and clatters, a cacophony of activity. And she heard Thaddius moan in despair as his hands left her.
Her head hit the stone.
“Let go of me!” he shouted, his voice quaking the ground around her.
There were other shouts. Voices that made little sense, curses and braying anger. Only one other voice seemed able to usurp the discord and Farra recognised it.
Mother help them all, she knew that voice.
“Mesrich,” Vasteel said. His voice trembled with something deeper than mere rage. It was betrayal. It was pain. “You fool.”
There was a scrambling from behind, then a shout of pain.
“The time for struggle has passed, deshun,” Vasteel said. “Though I ought to tie you up and let you throw yourself against the chains for an eternity. I might, if I could bear the sight of you. And you, Phineas. What am I to do with you?”
Farra wrenched her eyes open. She found Thaddius, lurching against the Glacians that tried to restrain him. Their thick hands wound around his biceps and wrists, struggling to subdue him. Phineas stood alongside, ceding to his own detainers. “Thaddius,” he said, desperately. “Stop, brother. It’s over.”
“NO!” Thaddius roared, and he slipped the hold of his captors, lunging to Farra, his body caging hers where she lay on the floor. “I’m sorry ,” he gasped to her, his voice breaking, crumbling.
Then he was gone. She heard his screams as he was hauled away.
“Take him to the Chasm,” Vasteel said. “Phineas, too.”
“Not him!” Thaddius shouted. “He played no part!”
“Your loyalty warms me,” Vasteel said, no hint of mirth remaining. The words were festered around their edges. “Ill-placed as it is. Have I not given you everything, Mesrich? Have I not offered you the place at my side and shown you eternity?” The words shook. They rose in volume with each passing second. “Was I not also owed your loyalty?”
“Let them both go,” Thaddius begged, though there was little conviction left in his voice. “Please. Kill me .”
“No pure Glacian muddies their blood and lives, Mesrich. Your death is not for bargaining.”
“My death…” Thaddius grunted, panting heavily. “Will be a welcome reprieve. So long as it departs me from your tyranny. Your greed.” A heavy silence followed. “You speak of eternity, but your fear is plain to me. Soon, your pure-bloods will dwindle, until this world is finally free of us, and the Mother will rejoice.”
A slow laugh began, and it was full of the fear Thaddius spoke of. “My,” Vasteel rumbled. “How far into madness you have fallen. Much further than even I thought. Though you did try to warn me, did you not, Phineas? Was it not you that suggested I send him to the Ledge for Selection? That it would shake him from his reverie? Return his spirit?”
Phineas closed his eyes and lowered his head.
“It returned quite a bit more than we bargained for,” Vasteel said icily. The King’s anger seemed barely contained. “Though fear not, Mesrich. It was not Phineas who revealed your treachery to me. I have my own acquaintances in the Colony who bore witness to a pregnant human, visited by Glacians this night. Though the girl does not seem to be with child any longer,” he remarks, his tone dropping to a deadly timbre. “Where is it, Mesrich?”
“Kill me,” was his only answer, and then the crunch of his knees hitting the floor. “Kill me and let it be over.”
“Very well,” Vasteel said, his heavy footfalls finding Farra’s ears. He passed close by her, his talons glancing off the stone, and came to stand before Thaddius. “It pains me to know this is the last time you will kneel before me, Mesrich,” he muttered coldly, taking a sword from a nearby Glacian’s scabbard. “My only consolation is knowing that your offspring is out there still and that they will continue to pay for your stupidity.”
There was ringing sound as the sword passed through the air and then the hall was torn by the sound of pure anguish. Thaddius’ wings lay broken and bloody.
Farra faded, unable to hold onto her consciousness any longer. Her thighs were slick with blood that continued to flow from her, and it promised a kinder demise. She whispered Thaddius’ name, her heart splintering to pieces, and begged death to come.
“Take him to the Chasm!” Vasteel roared. “And push him in.” A frenzied cheering followed.
“As for you, Phineas, I am loathe to spill more pure blood–”
“Please!” Phineas begged. “Please, Your Grace. I’ll do anything. It was a mistake!”
“You will learn to heed your King again, Phineas. Or find yourself devested of your wings.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“You sink to the bottom of our ranks. Do you understand me?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“Now,” Vasteel said, though his voice had become muted. Farra wasn’t sure she truly heard it at all. Was not sure if she were still there, in that realm of hell with mountain beasts. “Let us see what spark resides in this one.”
Farra was kicked onto her side.
And she fell.
Pain was absent.
But it was not death that relieved her. Of that, she was certain. She had touched death, seen its insides, and they were hollow. Death was dark and voiceless. It did not sing to her as she was serenaded now – lulled to sleep by choirs.
They sung of escaped sorrows.
They sealed her eyes shut.
They coaxed her to follow the current of this river to its end, where death would embrace her.
But this was not death. Death was bloody. Death was a freefalling abyss. Death did not lure its prey into its clutches, it wrenched the living from their perches and shut out the light. One had to fight to reach the surface again.
She felt the pressure against her lips, her eyes, warm tendrils of an indescribable substance holding them shut. But she could not breathe, could not find the will to try.
That matter was inside her now. Warming the inside of her nose and sliding down her throat. Searching… searching.
For what, she could not fathom. All that she had been made of had been left for ruin. Stripped from her.
Her home, her lover, her baby…
Ryon.
She could bring to mind his name but not his face. Not the exact shade of his skin and eyes and hair. Not the feel of his weight on her chest. She had to find it. Had to find that memory.
No, she thought. Wait.
Sleep, the whispers told her gently, hushing her. Her eyelids were shuttered so tightly she could not move them.
But she could find the seam of her lips, could prise them open. She gulped, expecting to choke on whatever substance trapped her, but found it as gentle, as fortifying as air.
She breathed again.
Suddenly, she was pulled, not along the current, but out of it, in the opposite direction.
Her face felt the sting of the cold and she was abruptly hauled onto stone.
She blinked and the Glacian palace took shape once more. She lay on her side, immediately noticing the absence of injury, of pain.
Beside her, the Pool of Iskra swirled, glowing impetuously, as though it had been cheated.
“Your first task in your repentance is upon you, Phineas,” Vasteel’s voice rang out, reverberating in her ears. “Send her into the Chasm. I have a new set of wings to hang on my walls.”
She watched the distant shapes of Vasteel and his nobles depart and a cold hand reached beneath her upper arm.
“Stand,” said a hollow, broken voice.
She turned her head and looked up. Phineas stared back at her, the tresses of his long hair falling into his face, but not concealing the alarm that struck him.
And despite the fresh panic blossoming inside her, she levelled her stare, her bottom lip trembling. “Try to throw me into the Chasm,” she whispered. “And I will drag you in with me.”
Phineas’ breath left him. His eyes widened in awe. “Farra?”
In response, Farra merely glared.
“ Don’t speak! ” Phineas rasped suddenly, eyes darting around the throne room. “Do as I say. And do not try to run.” It was spoken in a rush, his lips barely moving as he uttered the demand.
It was only then that Farra remembered how the pool had made the other humans lame, had sucked the will from their bodies.
“They’re watching, ” Phineas murmured to her, so low she had to focus on his lips to understand him. “Stand.”
There was little choice in the matter. There was only this, the friend of a Glacian who had sired her child, and the hope of his lingering loyalty.
She stood.
“Walk,” he said, a little louder now, as though it were not for her benefit.
She walked, wondering if the tremor she felt was showing on the outside, whether the walls of her chest could withstand the pounding of her heart, whether her throat would collapse amidst the pressure that gripped it. She wanted to cry. Wanted to scream or run.
“Don’t,” Phineas whispered, gripping her arm tighter. “Trust me.”
An impossible ask.
He led her out of the throne room and down a wide hall, down a stairwell, until it opened to a tunnel. A tunnel that led them to the ice plane before the Chasm.
“What will you do with me?” she whispered to Phineas.
He only gave her a look of warning and swallowed hard.
His strange magic opened the portcullis at the end of the tunnel and the force of the blizzard squalls almost sent her tumbling backward. But Phineas took hold and pulled her forward.
The wind sliced at her cheeks, her neck. The sleet forced her eyes closed and she could not see where she was being led, she only knew that somewhere before them was the Chasm and beyond that the Ledge.
Perhaps Phineas would take her back where she belonged. She could return home.
It suddenly did not seem so bleak a place.
Phineas stopped on the ice, stabilizing her when she pitched forward. She could hear his panicked breaths, even over the howl of the wind.
Farra turned her head inside the shelter of her cloak hood to look at him. But his eyes were elsewhere, locked on something before them. Farra followed his gaze.
The Chasm was a mere foot away. They stood before the lip, achingly close to the void. She did not dare move, lest she slip.
“Please,” she rasped, turning her head toward him. Desperation overcame her. It roiled in her core, streaked down her arms and burned her palms with its cold fear. She looked at them and found them coated in frost.
“I owed my life to him,” Phineas said, holding her still as she wrestled with the wind. “Many times over.”
“Please,” she said again. “D-do not throw me to the Chasm. Please !”
“Yennes,” he said, shaking his head in wonder. “It is a fitting name.”
Farra said nothing, shielding her face instead from the onslaught of ice and snow that lanced her skin.
“My last favour to you, my brother,” Farra heard, and then her feet left the ground.
She was plummeting into that dark abyss, identical to the belly of death she had clawed her way out of. Only this time, the fall was accompanied by the swoop of wings, the strong encompassing of pale arms, and the sensation of her spirit leaving her body as she dropped and dropped and dropped.