Chapter 31
Ithought I knew what dead land looked like. I thought the bare trees, scarce food supply, and dull skies of the six Territories embodied what it meant to be drained of life.
Only now did I realize how na?ve I was.
And the realization only worsened the more we walked and the more we saw.
We’d emerged in what might have been some kind of field. I said might, because there was no yellowed grass wisping across the landscape, only tree stumps in the distance, suggesting the edge of some kind of forest.
Or what used to be a forest.
The ground beneath us was so dry, it cracked in places like shattered glass. Beyond it, many of the tree trunks were without their arms, broken off at the top like the one we entered back in First Territory. Even the air was stiff and stale, no breeze whispering through to animate it.
It was an alternate reality, another world that belonged to monsters or spirits, because this could not have ever been a place people lived. And it was most certainly not what it should have been.
A sense of numbness enveloped me, one I felt seeping into the others with every kick of dust beneath our feet. This was our hope. This was our savior. This was the only thing that could end our suffering.
And it was none of those things.
When I glanced at Harthon’s face, that numbness receded only so heartbreak could snake in.
He was devastated.
He didn’t fall to his knees or curse the skies. But the roll of his throat, the speechless part of his lips, the pain in his eyes told me everything.
I couldn’t bear it, which is why I rasped, “Maybe it’s just because we’re so close to the walls. If we keep going, it could change.”
No one nodded, but we continued toward the tree line.
Every step unveiled a new hopeless discovery—the crumbled skeleton of a small animal lying on the ground, a wilted brown seedling that had tried to find its life.
Far in the distance, hidden by low-lying clouds, rose the shrouded outline of city walls. Sections had crumbled.
We’d almost reached the petrified tree trunks when a rhythmic shuffle washed through the still air. We halted. A heartbeat later, the figure appeared from within the trees.
Merelda had always told me stories of spirits. I never believed them, though I questioned that now, because the thing rushing toward us couldn’t be human. It was made of skin and bones, face sunken, skin nearly translucent. Rags hung from its waist, swishing as it lurched in a lopsided run.
“Go back,” Harthon demanded, pulling a weapon free. The figure was nearly at the edge of the field.
“No,” Aric objected fiercely, blade in his hand. “We take it down and keep going.”
“If there’s one, there’s more.”
Aric held his ground with a stern shake of his head. “We need to see if anything is alive here. We need to head into the ci—”
A garbled choke cut him off.
I stared in shock at the bloodied arrow tip protruding from the center of his chest.
I blinked to clear the image, because it couldn’t be real.
Aric couldn’t have an arrow cutting through his leather armor.
This…this…no. This isn’t happening.
In horrified disbelief, his chin tilted down as blood began spurting from the wound. “Fuck.”
That was the last time the air stood still.
He tipped as Harthon threw a dagger, taking down the figure—the man—that had distracted us. I watched him hit the ground, and then Stefano launched himself at me, knocking me down. An arrow whistled where my head just was.
“Run!” Harthon roared.
Stefano dragged me up as Harthon shoved Aric over his shoulder, and then we were in a wild sprint, running for our lives from the group of wraith-looking humans that emerged from the tree trunks with bows in their hands.
There weren’t many of them, but we had no shields against their arrows. There was nothing to hide behind. We were completely exposed.
Stefano jerked me in a zig-zag pattern, Harthon tracking just behind us as Aric’s weight slowed him down. Joris stumbled beside us as an arrow grazed his leg. Our attackers weren’t good marksmen on moving targets, but if they flung enough arrows, aim didn’t matter.
Ahead, the brambles taunted us, mocking us for ever leaving their circle of protection. These people had been waiting. They couldn’t uncover the path’s entrance themselves, so they’d been waiting for something to come out of it.
Just make it. You can make it.
The whistle of an arrow came with a thud. When I realized it wasn’t from me, I swung to the side and saw the sharp tip jutting out from Harthon’s side. His steps hitched, but he kept barreling on. I told myself it was okay.
It had to be okay. He had to be okay.
I was the first to crash into the brambles, Stefano following me through the narrow path we’d cut. Harthon careened through and deposited Aric on his back.
We were temporarily shielded from their arrows, but we weren’t safe. We had thirty seconds, at most, before they were here.
“Light it up,” Harthon demanded, nodding to the two torches hanging on to dying flames. Stefano and Joris quickly took them to the brambles. By some blessing, they caught instantly, the scent of burning wood filling the air.
I kneeled beside Harthon, who was preparing to snap away the tip of the arrow in Aric’s chest.
“Don’t bother,” Aric gasped, blood dribbling from the corner of his mouth. “We both…know…I’m dead.”
He was.
He’d been shot directly in the middle of his chest. Even if a healer was right here, there’d be nothing anyone could do. It was a perfect kill shot.
Harthon’s hands squeezed the wood in frustrated denial before breaking away with a curse.
“Torr…is going to…think it was…you,” Aric rasped, every word weaker than the last.
Harthon put a hand on his shoulder. “I’m going to return your body. You’ll be buried like you should. With honor.”
Aric shook his head, or tried to. His head lolled to one side, and I gently righted it. His next breath sounded wet. “No. He’ll…kill you. Leave…me…survive.”
The smoke wafting above us only made the grim reality bleaker. The flames would only hold our attackers off for so long. Harthon had an arrow in his side. He couldn’t carry Aric through the tunnel and still manage to outrun them. And even if he did, Aric was right.
Sixth would blame this on us.
The punishment would be death.
Aric’s gold eyes slid to me, mouth cracking open to gasp out a few more words. But then it stayed like that, open and silent, and his eyes stopped seeing.
“We have to go,” Joris said above the crackling of burning brush.
The entire circle was engulfed in flames, oppressive heat licking my exposed skin. Already, the perimeter was crumbling.
Harthon clenched his jaw, fighting some internal battle as he stared at Aric’s expressionless face. That battle erupted when he slammed his fist into the ground. “I’m sorry, brother,” he hissed, gently closing Aric’s eyes.
Then the moment was over. “Stefano first, then you,” he demanded, standing. He palmed the arrow still buried in his side. With a brutal jerk and an animalistic grunt, he snapped the arrow tip off and yanked it out from the back.
“Go,” he urged, nudging me toward the hole Stefano had already disappeared down.
I coughed on smoke and dropped to my knees, crawling to the edge. I grabbed the thickest-looking roots and swung my legs into the void.
A section of the brambles collapsed, black soot billowing up and glowing embers scattering. They rushed toward me in a violent swell, urging me to go back to where I belonged, and I dropped.
* * *
The opening in the ground didn’t seal back up behind us.
And so our escape turned into a massacre. One by one, our attackers dropped in, and one by one, Stefano and Harthon took them out with quick, close-range strikes.
Eventually, they learned and stopped coming, so we started running before they returned with backup and resumed their efforts.
And they did. We knew this because as we ran through the tunnel’s pitch-black depths, we were chased by the echoes of our attackers—the whiz of an arrow that couldn’t quite reach us, muffled footsteps, garbled words and low grunts.
Our safety was entirely dependent on the gap we maintained with them, so we didn’t slow for hours, pushing a pace that was dangerous, running blind. Several times, I caught on someone’s feet and sprawled to the ground, only to be hauled up and sent into a sprint again.
The darkness was consuming, threatening to suffocate my lungs, already wheezing for air. But the chase was a blessing.
Because we couldn’t think about our failure, our disappointment. How Aric was dead and Sixth would now come for our heads. How there were no resources to save our world. How things had veered from hopeful to so damningly bad, it was laughable.
Everything we’d worked toward, everything we’d hoped for, had just come crashing down, and the burn in our legs was all that kept us from crumbling with it.
That was probably why I didn’t feel relief when we finally reached the exit into First Territory, or as we emerged with no new arrows in our bodies.
The Horrads greeted us, a group of ten or so with pitchers of water and platters of food.
They must have been awaiting our return from the moment we left, and they didn’t take kindly to the skeletal, vulture-eyed pursuers who climbed out of the path only minutes after we’d surfaced.
They swarmed and attacked every single body who followed us. Only one was still breathing by the time they were done, and that was only because of our interference.
We shouldered the Horrads aside to surround the man as his breath rattled his emaciated, exposed chest. His skin was covered in blotches, grime, and bruises spattered over protruding bones.
Blood poured from a head wound and dribbled from his mouth.
This was a man who’d just managed to stave away death, but couldn’t for much longer.
“What happened in Centralis?” Harthon demanded, crouching before him.
Bloodshot eyes regarded him, but he didn’t speak. That changed when Harthon pressed a fist against a wound in the man’s side.
Face contorting in pain, he scraped out, “The fucking walls.”
Harthon shook his head in denial. “The Domus was supposed to preserve your land while it took from ours.”
The man’s mouth contorted into a macabre grin. He wheezed out a weak laugh, and his eyes pulled up to the gray sky. Harthon jabbed the injury again, drawing a gargled choke from his throat.
“Started that way,” he rasped, dropping his gaze. “That witch…fucked up. Or—” another wet laugh— “fucked us.” A cough sent a spray of blood from his mouth.
My brows clashed together. If the magvis’ oath of loyalty to the king was as strong as everyone said, she couldn’t have gone against his wishes and killed the land—intentionally or unintentionally.
“Where is King Donon?”
“I’m…about to…see ‘im.” His hoarse voice became weaker with every word.
Harthon shook him roughly, trying to keep some life in him. “When did he die?”
We leaned in as his mouth parted, the syllables hardly audible. “I…forget.”
His mouth didn’t close after his final word, and it never would. My gaze collided with Harthon’s, the implication of the man’s words sinking in.
Raking a hand over his jaw, he said, “So Donon died long ago.”
I bit my lip as the pieces came together. “There must have been a lapse in the crown—some moment of time where there was no king for the magvis to obey. Either the Domus turned on her, or she made things that way.”
His mouth compressed as the situation we’d never anticipated, the possibility we’d never once considered, settled on us with the weight of boulders.
Hope—that terrible, unreliable thing—had blinded us.
We didn’t speak again as we followed the Horrads to their camp, nor as I helped Harthon bandage his wound. The arrow’s track had been the most fortunate part of the entire journey into the Domus, lodging in the outer muscle of his side. So long as it didn’t get infected, he would be fine.
No, that was a lie.
Harthon wouldn’t be fine. No one would be fine. Sixth Territory was going to declare war on us. And even if we won, the Domus was going to kill us all eventually. What we saw in Centralis was our future.
None of us voiced this redundant truth as we gathered to decide on our next steps.
We couldn’t return to Sixth without Aric, which meant we needed to sneak through to Ellan’s Territory and continue home from there.
It wasn’t wildly different from the original plan—which was to travel home via land rather than ship, as the strong one-directional winds made return voyages lengthy—but the sneaking was new.
Eventually, Torr would hear that we had returned to home and piece together Aric’s death, but at least we would have time to prepare for retaliation.
With that settled, we stayed the night with the Horrads, allowing some time for recovery before what would be a grueling trek across land.
Before we turned in for the night, Harthon and I located our horses, which were being prepared for slaughter.
It was easier than I thought to convince the Horrad leader to return the animals to us.
At least here, the violet and gold hues of my eyes still meant something.
Here, I wasn’t the inconsequential village girl parading as something more than she could ever hope to be.
It was that train of thought that drowned out all the rest as Harthon cradled my body on the thin mattress.
Instead of giving me strength and comfort, his embrace caused my skin to itch with the need to crawl away.
I didn’t, but only because I didn’t want to disturb his rest. So I laid there silently, soaking in the bone-deep guilt that this was my fault.
I was supposed to help Harthon save this world. People had died because of me—for me—in the pursuit of this mighty goal that, for some reason, had felt possible. Yet in the end, I’d been entirely useless.
Actually, the reality was worse.
In the end, my role had caused Aric’s death and whatever war would inevitably come.
If I said this to Harthon, he’d tell me I wasn’t being fair, and remind me that no one could have known how wrong we were. But the thing is, he would be wrong.
Josenne had warned me of this situation weeks ago, telling me in that cryptic way of hers that we shouldn’t make assumptions.
Do not pretend to know things you have no knowledge of, she’d hissed.
But I’d ignored her, instead finding reassurance in the favorable seas and skies, the birds, the wolf, the heat in my chest and my glowing eyes.
Shame followed me into the dark caverns of sleep, no doubt to plague me with nightmares.
I was on the edge of unconsciousness when something waved through the remorse. It was brief, barely-there. A flash.
But I felt the orb in my chest flare with a burst of heat, like a body sputtering out a grand, final breath before it passed on.