“Don’t,” a raven-haired magiska said. Several of the other girls whimpered, clinging to one another.
Reyker lifted the sheet covering the table and saw the dead Dragonman’s body. He turned, stepping toward the magiskas, a question on his lips.
“Stop!” The bone-healer lurched forward, palms lifted as if she was blocking a blow.
An invisible force slammed into him. From under layers of skin and muscle came the sick crack of bones, his entire rib cage splintering into kindling, pinching his lungs in a vise. He gasped, and it was like breathing razor blades.
Pain hit him in a red wave, and he sank to his knees, the healer’s screams filling his ears.
CHAPTER 13
LIRA
The cells of Stalwart Bay were nicer than those in Stony Harbor—cleaner, airier, with floors of stone instead of dirt. These were my observations as Madoc dragged me past the guards and threw me into one of the cells, slamming the bars shut in my face.
The crown he’d worn in Taloorah was perched on his head, a gaudy gold circle studded with sparkling gems. I am no chieftain, he’d confessed during Gwylor’s trial. Because he thought he deserved more. A kingdom. All of Glasnith.
“Where are your subjects, Uncle? Where is your throne? You’re squatting in a village conquered and held by a foreign warlord. It seems you’re king of nothing.”
Madoc stared at me, fingers drumming on his sword hilt.
“You can’t touch me,” I said with a smile, “and you know it. I can call Draki with my mind. I can tell him where you are, what you’ve done, what you’re threatening to do. He wants me alive. Kill me, and he’ll hunt you down. But if you take off that crown and run, I won’t tell him anything.”
His eyes narrowed. “And why is that?”
“Because I don’t want him to kill you. Your death belongs to me.”
Someone coughed in the cell next to mine. “Lira?”
My back was a constellation of scars, every one of them twinging at the sound of his voice. The smile fell from my face.
As Madoc observed my reaction, his grin widened into a gulch. “I need to think,” he said. “While I decide your fate, I’ll give you two time to get reacquainted.”
He left me. Left us.
“Lira,” the man said again. He sounded too much like my father. I didn’t trust it.
“I thought you were dead,” I whispered to the man, the thing, in the cell beside mine. “How did you survive?”
“I ran.” There was a shame-filled pause. “I didn’t know I was leading the Sons of Stone into an ambush. When Dragonmen surrounded us, I abandoned my men. Madoc found me the next day and gave me to the warlord, and Draki brought me here for you. He said you would come.”
Had this all been a trap? Were my choices ever my own, or were Draki and the gods manipulating my actions at every turn?
“Is a part of Gwylor still inside you?” I asked.
“Yes.” He sighed. “But he comes out less, now that he doesn’t need me. Just to taunt. To gloat.”
Part of me felt this was what Torin deserved for his foolishness and pride, for inviting the god of death into his soul. Another part—the pieces of me that could never let go of the father I knew had loved me and my brothers more than anything—pitied him and wondered if there was any way to ease his suffering, to release him from that darkness.
“In the desert,” Torin said, “I didn’t run out of cowardice. I ran because Gwylor gave me my mind back for a moment, and all I could think of was you and Garreth. I didn’t know if you were safe. And after what I’d done to you both, the thought of never seeing you again, of never making it right . . .”
I sank down, forehead on my knees, resenting the sadness flowing through me, the little girl inside who wanted to hug her father. The soul-reader who wanted to fix him. “Did you know Mother followed the Forbidden Scriptures? That she worshipped the Fallen Ones?”
A long silence. “I did.”
“You could have exiled her.”
“By the time I discovered it, we’d been married for years. You had just been born, Garreth was only a child. I was so in love with Iona, I couldn’t bear to lose her, so I helped her hide it instead. She said she’d denounced the Fallen Ones, and I believed her.”
But she hadn’t denounced them. She’d named me after Aillira, as if daring the world to discover her secret. “Was she a Daughter of Aillira?”
“If she was, she never told me.”
My fingers went to the hollow between my breasts, seeking a medallion that wasn’t there. My parents had loved each other, the sort of love I’d only just begun to discover before it was torn from me. Mother would want me to save the man she’d loved.
My gift was strong. The discordant forces inside me had made me a weapon when I walked through Andrithur’s soul, but I had a better handle on it after my practice in the temple. Perhaps there was a way to use that weapon for good.
“Torin, if I could free you from Gwylor’s grip, would you want me to?”
“Yes.” The hope in his voice shook me.
“I need to put my palm on your chest. It will hurt. My touch will burn you. If it becomes too much, you must pull away. Do you still want to try?”
I heard him shuffle closer, the rustle of him adjusting his tunic. “I trust you, daughter. I will do whatever it takes to be rid of this curse.”
I angled my arm around the wall of stone between us, my hand just inside the bars of his cell. He moved so my palm settled on his chest. “Ready?” I asked.
“Begin.”
“Show me where Gwylor hides,” I said, blowing out a breath as I opened myself up. I expected to be assaulted by sensations, but Torin didn’t fight me as Andrithur had, and he was weak, so little of him left inside his diseased soul. I pushed through memories and impressions, meeting no resistance as I sought the rot eating him from within. I could feel the splinters there, pieces of the god of death piercing Torin’s essence.
Slowly, carefully, I reached for one of the splinters. At my touch, the splinter warmed, charring along the edges, but it remained intact. I pulled, but the splinter didn’t give, not even a fraction.
It would take every ounce of strength I had to remove the hooks Gwylor put in him. “This man is a prisoner, just as you are,” I whispered to the Fallen Ones. “Help me fight Gwylor’s influence over him. Help me release him as I will release you.”
My power churned and my blood burned hotter. The splinter lodged in Torin’s soul bubbled and blistered, melting enough that my fingers slipped. I tightened my grip and pulled hard, harder, until finally the splinter came free, disintegrating, leaving my hands sticky with oil and ash.