I looked between them, a little shocked, but too tired to respond properly. “Thank you,” I finally said. “I need to keep going.”
“We’ll walk with you.”
I thought about refusing them, but I realised they weren’t offering to escort me. They were asking to follow me. They had stood at their fence all night waiting for me—they didn’t know what else to do. Their family was gone, their home collapsed, their farm burned. With a tightness in my throat, I nodded at them, and we began to walk.
At the next settlement, there were another four people waiting. They greeted the two brothers by name—Njal and Sune. I didn’t even glance at the food they offered me before pleading with them to keep it for themselves. They joined Njal and Sune behind me as I walked on, and I repeated the same process with the next five settlements. Not everyone joined us—some stayed behind to look after injured members of their family, but they all came out to greet me.
They had all waited for me.
By the time I reached the low stone wall crumbling around the perimeter of Edelsten town, there was a large group of stewards behind me. We passed into the unguarded town, where huge stone homes leaned up against each other. The whole town was like a vast, sprawling castle, each home a three-or-four-storey turret. There was significant damage to the homes, some of them had crumbled completely, others had burned down. Despite the damage, I could see the bones of beauty making up Edelsten town. Somewhere nearby, an unfamiliar bird cawed, and I stared down the ruined street running between buildings, watching the dawn light illuminate the harbour at the end in a hazy glow. I walked towards the water, picking my way over rubble. I had no ring, no power. My only option was to wait. To sleep. To find a way to get to Calder.
I seemed to always be drawn to the water—my eyes always drifted that way while I was awake, my mind while I was asleep, and my entire body when I was in the midworld. It seemed natural for me to go there now. It was my only remaining anchor without Calder. The stewards followed, our progress slow. We walked as a body of wounded soldiers, our eyes peering backwards, to what we had spent and sacrificed to keep ourselves alive. Sectorians began to emerge from their houses—wary, at first. Whispers spread, drawing more of them from the wreckage all around me.
The Fjorn is here.
When I reached the harbour, I stood on the wooden docks for a few minutes, watching the light creep slowly, hesitantly back into the sky. An injured animal crawling out from a dark log. There were blackened ships bobbing along the piers, some of them half-sunken in the water. We stood there, as far as we could go, and watched the sun rise in silence.
Eleven
Death
I felt the change before I saw it. Goosebumps spread over my skin, the air dropping to a frigid temperature. My breath misted before my face. I stumbled a step back, a few of the sectorians lining the dock looking around in alarm. They could feel the strange energy but didn’t know where it was coming from.
The air in front of my face rippled, a dark coil of smoke escaping from some invisible pocket in the atmosphere. It took form slowly, growing in size until it was the shape of a mammoth person, only a foot away from me. I watched in growing horror as the person took form, the black smoke sinking inwards to escape beneath his scarred skin. It caressed his face, settling into one of his eyes.
An eye that had once been golden.
Calder’s magic mutation now dripped with black, the colour overtaking his iris, dripping down over his lower lid, tracing his neck and chest and disappearing into the hard black armour wrapping his lower torso. All around him, dark shadows danced and twitched, a halo of charged energy and power.
“No,” I choked, stumbling back another step.
The stewards began to scatter, somehow sensing that this man was no longer their Legionnaire, no longer their hero. His black eye radiated poisonous, malevolent energy, his unsmiling lips now twisted in pain.
“It’s evil,” one of the sectorians announced, his voice panicked.
I could hear them fleeing in earnest now, their footsteps pounding against the dock. Voices were yelling for messengers to be sent to the Keep, for the king’s guard to be summoned.
“It’s impossible.” I didn’t know what else to say as Calder stopped before me, those curling shadows around him trying to wrap around my arms.
“You rid this world of Darkness,” Calder replied. A whisper. His blue eye was sick with sorrow. “But not the other world.”
I shook my head, but his hands were there, anchoring my cheeks, preventing the movement. He closed the distance between us, his boots inches from my bare feet.
I had to tip my head right back to see him. He seemed to have grown a few inches—or maybe it was just the shadows that added height, swelling in a dark halo around him. I should have been terrified, but there was an impossible, intrinsic part of me that still trusted Calder. No matter what.
“Who got there first?” he asked.
He was tipping my face up, his eyes categorising each of my features. Committing me to memory.
It was a look that sparked a memory deep in the recesses of my mind. He had looked at Alina the same way. The day she died.
I opened my mouth to answer, but no sound was summoned.
“You’re alive, which means one of them saved you.” He sounded like Calder. “Who got there first, Ven?”
“Vidrol,” I replied robotically.
“How did you leave that mountain alive?” he asked, his finger stroking back and forth across my cheek. The shadows stroked with it. “They wouldn’t fight like this over you only to give up when you finally choose one of them.”
“I said I would marry all of them.”
He stopped analysing my face and his eyes slammed into mine, his hand freezing against my cheek. He barked out a surprised laugh, though his blue eye narrowed. His black eye flickered, oily and vibrating with rage.
“And they still let you walk away?” His voice sounded off. It was sharper. Less like him.
“They admitted they were after the throne of Ledenaether—the eternal throne, they called it. I think I’m starting to look like a viable option to overthrow the king of the afterworld. Their problem is no longer figuring out whether I’m better off dead or alive—it’s the fact that there are only two seats on the eternal throne.”
“And they think the second seat is for your husband?”
“They must.”
His attention flicked down, to my mouth. “You shouldn’t have a husband yet.”
I laughed, though I wasn’t sure why. There was nothing to laugh about in this situation. Calder was trying to engage me in normal conversation, trying to pretend, for just a moment, that he wasn’t standing before me utterly changed.
“Yet?” I stared up at him, tears slipping from my eyes. “I should have died today. I’m no longer sentimental about these things. I’ll marry one of them, all of them, or none of them. What does it matter? Who am I waiting for?”
“Stop.” His hands fell to my shoulders, shaking me. My head rattled with the force of it. The shadows around him grew and crackled angrily. “The Darkness in this world is gone, Lavenia.”
In this world.
“You have your entire life ahead of you.” He shook me again. “You could walk away from them. Disappear. Go to Reken, or run into the Vilwood. Go somewhere these people won’t follow you, somewhere they haven’t heard of you. You don’t need to play their game anymore.”