“All of you will pay. Everyone who stepped foot in her village. Anyone responsible for its destruction.”
He’d killed every other warrior Draki had sent after him over the past days, leaving a trail of bodies like bread crumbs to follow through the trees. He would add these men to his count. It wasn’t enough to sate him, not even close, but it would ease the ache in his chest for a short while.
Again, the black river hissed. Let me out again.
So he did.
He felt her here still, in these lands. Not as she was before, not a bright spark in a sea of darkness. Now she was part of the darkness. Tainted. Angry. As if her spirit clung to all the wrongs done to her and to Glasnith, demanding vengeance.
I will grant it, he told her. To my last breath.
Lira’s horse was waiting for him, its dewy-eyed gaze eerily observant. The mare bowed her head and Reyker pulled himself onto her back. He nudged the horse and it galloped deeper into the forest, just as it did yesterday, and the day before that. Reyker had searched, over and over, for the Grove of the Fallen Ones. He’d scoured every inch of this forest and found nothing, as if it were hiding from him.
The same way he’d searched for her body at the foot of the bluffs, waiting until the tide was low and the sea was calm, diving from the boat he’d stolen. Swimming so deep his lungs burned and the dark water threatened to crush him. Yet there had been no trace of her.
“You will show yourself, Veronis.” He pressed his hand to Lira’s medallion, resting against his chest. “I will not stop until you answer me.”
This time, someone—the island, the grove, the gods—finally responded. The sounds of life in the forest tapered off into an unsettling hush. Green trees were replaced by ones ripe with decay. A land of death rose around him.
“Gods aflame,” he said. Beneath him, his horse’s mane fell out in clumps. The flesh on the mare’s bones began to rot.
“Sword of the Ice Gods.” The voice was brittle, like a branch snapping in half. “I know what you seek, but you are too late.”
The girl was balding, only a few brown curls hanging from her scalp. Her creamy skin was pocked with black, molding spots. She stared up at him with burned-out holes where her eyes should have been, but there was an eye watching him from the wrist she held up, another in the center of her throat. A lump grew atop her bare foot, the skin splitting open, and a third eye sprouted. It winked at Reyker.
The rotting horse stopped in front of the rotting girl, and she placed her hands on its muzzle. “You were touched by this place as well, noble mare,” she murmured. “You sense what others cannot. You will serve your new master well, if he bothers to listen.”
There was something impossibly familiar about this girl.
“Ishleen?” Reyker said.
The girl cocked her head. “Oh. That was my name once, I suppose. Now I am only the mystic. The last one died, and there must always be a keeper of the portal. The loch called to me after I fled into the forest. It offered me shelter and a purpose. I could not refuse.”
The filthy loch burbled. It reeked of old blood and decaying meat, sacrifices left to the gods in exchange for favors. This was where Lira had brought him when he was dying, where she’d bled into the loch as an offering, to save him. Where he planned to do the same. “I wish to speak with the Fallen Ones.”
“There is nothing left for you here. The Fallen Ones have gone silent. When I arrived, they showed themselves to me, revealing all I needed to know.” She tapped her empty eye sockets. “They speak only to their vessel now.”
“No.” This was his last hope—that he might bargain with the gods to bring Lira back, or at least to see her one last time outside of his dreams, to tell her he would come for her after Draki was dead and their countries were safe. “Please. I came to give an offering. Can I find this vessel? Will the gods answer me through it?”
Three eyes blinked at him in tandem. “The vessel has a destiny. So do you. Your path leads you to the Dragon. To make up for what you could not save by saving what you can.”
Reyker shook his head, puzzling over the words. “You mean the ones who didn’t escape Stony Harbor. And the other magiskas, the Daughters of Aillira Draki captured.”
He glanced down at himself, at the blood of Dragonmen staining his clothes, dead because they’d tried to drag him back to the warlord. How was he supposed to go willingly? How could he stand to be in the Dragon’s presence? Every time he looked at Draki, he saw his mother bleeding out on a stone floor. Now he would also see Lira leaping to her death.
“It’s what she would want you to do, is it not?” Ishleen smiled, revealing a glimpse of the girl she’d been before the grove’s plague fell upon her.
The horse craned its neck to peer at Reyker, vertebrae peeking beneath the mare’s mouldering coat. Agreement clear in her keen gaze.
“Yes.” Reyker sighed. “It is.”
CHAPTER 5
LIRA
Quinlan slept through most of the next day. Sitting across from where he lay, I watched the healers change his bandage, the wound already healing nicely. When he woke that evening, I leaped to his side, and he gave me a tired grin. “Fancy meeting you here.”
“How are you feeling?”
Quinlan touched his side and winced. “Like you beat me with a practice sword after I passed out. You didn’t, did you?”
“Tempting, but no.” I moved to pour him some of the special herb tea the healers had brewed. “Here. This will help with the pain.”
He drank, his lips puckering. “Uck. That is vile.”
“How were you injured, Quinlan? Why did you come to the desert?”
He stared into the greenish liquid in the mug. “Houndsford was sacked. We saw the smoke coming from Stony Harbor, and we were strapping on our armor, ready to ride to your clan’s aid, when they slipped into the village. Mercenaries. Dragonmen. They were cutting men down before we realized they were among us.”
I saw my own pain reflected in Quinlan’s face.
“Some of us managed to escape. We got separated when a group of Dragonmen attacked us near the Silverspires. I took a sword to the ribs. There was nothing I could do but run for the Green Desert and hope . . .” His eyes met mine. “I can’t believe you’re here. Thank the gods you got away.”
Yes. Thank them for infecting me, for keeping me alive and away from Draki so they could use me for their own ends.
Quinlan set his hand on top of mine. “You were all I could think of when I was running for my life. That I had to get to Garreth and tell him what happened, so we could save you.”