I filed that information away, unsure how to digest it. It was possible the small council thought that I was somehow willingly aligned to the five masters and were trying to manipulate me into an alliance with them, instead. If they believed in the myth, then they believed that I might defeat the king of the afterworld. Did that threaten their power?
“What are you saying exactly?” I asked Laerke. “I’d rather not make assumptions.”
“We’re saying that we think they’ve known all this time,” she answered, emphasising the we so I’d know she wasn’t alone in the assumption. “We think that they’ve been travelling the world for a long time, looking for you.”
“And you’re upset they didn’t trust any of you enough to let you in on the secret,” I surmised.
“We are the small council,” Olav answered dryly. “It’s our job to make decisions for the people of Fyrio.”
I nodded, casting my eyes over them. “It didn’t even occur to me that I should tell any of you. I was condemned before your eyes, though those same eyes had seen what truly happened the day my mother died. I didn’t mean to kill anyone, and you all sat there silently while the King marked me with the mor-svjake, damning me as a killer of the weak. I left the Citadel that day assuming that you had no power or conscience whatsoever. Perhaps the great masters thought the same.”
They stared at me, and I felt something click into place as I read their expressions. They didn’t trust me. That’s what this meeting was about. They thought they could summon me, question me, and decide whether to take over my fight against the Darkness, using me as a tool the same way the great masters were.
“Let’s make a deal,” I said, a spark of satisfaction flaring to life at the uncomfortable looks on their faces. I greatly preferred the small council robbed of words. “If you want to be kept informed—and that’s as much as I’m offering—then you must dedicate help to our fight.”
The spark of satisfaction turned to a spark of pain, and I hid a wince, pushing it away to focus.
“What is it you want, Tempest?” Magne asked.
I hadn’t thought that far ahead, and the pain pushed back against my dismissal, twice as strong as before.
I’ve held it back for as long as I can.
The whisper came to me in a rush of heat, like an explosion at my back, knocking me forward.
The worlds are colliding. The Darkness is rising.
“Ein,” I muttered, answering the familiar voice.
It was the voice of the first Fjorn, straining toward me, barely audible. It was like she screamed to me through the roar of a waterfall.
“We will tell you our terms in the morning,” Calder’s voice projected through me, riding a wave of power. It was enough to distract everyone from the sudden paling of my face and the name I had uttered. “But until then, you will send us one person from each of your sectors. Five of your most gifted. Summon whoever has travelled here tonight and have them sent to the end of the road up the mountain. The first set of gates.”
Calder’s hands were no longer resting on my shoulders. They were holding me up.
Ein, I called inwardly, my hand twitching as if I might reach out to her, but she didn’t exist in this world.
She had called to me across the reach of the three worlds, and I knew, on some level, that she wouldn’t be able to do it again.
“What’s happening?” I heard one of the small council members asking, as the pain inside me spread out like a clawed beast, ripping through my core to be free of the vessel of my body. “She’s bleeding.”
I brought a shaking hand up to my face, touching the wetness beneath my nose.
“We’re out of time,” I rasped.
The door to the room suddenly opened, Fjor striding in, the velvet black of his gaze swallowing me.
“Everyone out,” he ordered, not even bothering to look at them.
Predictably, none of them put up a fight, quickly filtering from the room—hurrying even faster when Vidrol strode in, ignoring them. I stumbled over to one of the vacated chairs, slumping into it, my mind spinning, an idea occurring. I grabbed Calder, pulling his face down to mine.
“Don’t … let go,” I whispered as Andel followed Vidrol into the room.
I had no idea what they were doing there—presumably Fjor had felt the change in the air, the Darkness cracking through whatever protection Ein had afforded me.
Were they coming to watch me die?
Calder scooped me up from the chair, holding me tightly against his chest, taking a step back from Fjor, who had drawn closer, his eyes still stuck on my face.
“That’s far enough,” Calder growled.
I swallowed back a scream as the ache in my soul turned to something infinitely worse. It was a cold so freezing it burned me, a feeling of despair clawing out from wherever the cold originated, dragging me beneath its weight, claws of fire puncturing my lungs.
Before I lost the ability to speak, I grabbed hold of Calder’s jacket, turning my face into the material and whispering a word as I focussed all my remaining energy on tearing apart the fabric of the world around me.
“Lotte.”
The pain didn’t fall away, but it became muted, dulled by a blanket of grey. I had pulled us into the midworld. A place of ghosts and echoes, suspended between the light of the foreworld and the dark of the afterworld.
“What in Ledenaether…” Calder’s voice was stilted with shock.
I cracked my eyes open, tapping his chest to let him know he could let me down. We stood on the mountaintop, the moon and the sun both hovering on opposite ends of the horizon—the wrong ends of the horizon. The Sky Keep had disappeared, the cobblestones making way for grass. It rose almost to my knees, swaying in the wind, each strand bending toward the sea as though beckoning me to the tip of the mountain.
“Not Ledenaether,” I murmured, finding my feet with a wince. “Forsjaether. The midworld.”
“Are you okay?” He spun me around gently. If he was feeling any shock at where he was, he didn’t voice it.
Whatever I might have replied died on my tongue as I glanced behind him and caught sight of the five great masters. They stood patiently, only a few feet away.
“W-What…” I stumbled back, a muted thrill of pain shuddering through me. “How?” I asked.
Calder turned and I quickly stepped up beside him before he could shove me behind his back.
“Your surprise is insulting,” Fjor answered. “We know everything before you do, but you somehow thought you were the only person to step into this world?”
He shook his head, advancing closer. “We’ve come to witness which thread of fate you choose, Tempest.”
I turned away from him, feeling the truth of his words. They were there to watch, to witness. They had no interest in helping or hindering me. I walked in the direction the grass swayed, Calder close behind me.
“Ein?” I glanced to the sun and then to the moon.
I didn’t know where to look. I didn’t know where Ledenaether was, where Foraether—our world—was. I knew only that they touched, in a way. Close enough for me to walk between them. Close enough that when I was in Forsjaether, Ein could speak to me.
Come to me, she summoned, but I could barely hear her.