“No, no.” My mind was racing. Everything was happening so fast, yet somehow it felt as if we’d been hanging here forever. It was only hours ago we’d been looking at each other, speaking in code about a possible future, a fragile hope. “We leave together, or we don’t leave at all, remember?”
“This was always your journey.” The fibers of rope frayed, coming apart. I was coming apart, too, each slice of the knife undoing something inside me.
I’d lost the only man I’d ever loved. How could I lose the only man who might be worthy of taking his place? How could I bear it if both of them were stolen from me?
The knife. Oh gods, the knife was still sawing. This couldn’t be happening. “Quinlan! Please, no. Not you. I can’t . . .” My fingers were cramped. Slipping.
“You can, Lira. You will.” He smiled at me. Not a boy’s smile full of mischief, but a man’s smile full of promise. All the love he’d kept hidden, not wanting to guilt or pressure me—he let me see it, and it burned like a sun, setting him aglow. Turning me to ash.
The rope snapped.
His smile grew smaller as the distance between us widened. The light couldn’t penetrate the shadows of the crevasse. The glacier swallowed him in its dark depths and he was gone.
That burning sun, that boy I’d loved, that man I’d taken for granted. Gone.
I screamed his name into the void that took him, telling him I was sorry, telling him I loved him. Begging him to come back, even though it was pointless—he’d gone to a place I couldn’t reach. Not unless I let go too.
It would have been easy to do nothing, to wait until my arms gave out. Join Quinlan. And Rhys, Mother, Father. Reyker. But Quinlan gave his life for me, so I could finish this journey. Everyone I’d lost, in ways small and large, had died to get me here, to this place. This moment. I couldn’t waste it.
Better to die fighting a goddess and take her to the otherworlds with me.
I kicked and clawed, hauling myself onto the ice, lying beside the axe and staring at the unfeeling sky above. “I’m going to end this,” I told it, because there was no one else left to hear.
I made myself stand and take the axe. Made my arms wield it, my legs bracing as I pulled my way onto the foot of the mountain. The slope was steep, barely climbable, and I kept scrambling up only to slide back down again, displacing ice and snow.
“I’m going to end this!” I said again, slamming my fist against a bare spot of rock. The crystal bracelet circling my wrist brushed the slope. Pebbles tumbled and rolled, and a thin ray of light appeared, spilling from an odd-shaped hole in the rock. The hole had perfectly cut lines and curves, and it was the size of my thumb.
The size of a key.
The bracelet was so tight my whole arm throbbed. I ran my hand over it and the bracelet released its grip, liquefying in my hands, molding into a large crystal key. It slid into the hole in the rock, an exact fit. I turned the key, and a gap opened in front of me. A tunnel.
With tears frozen on my cheeks and the weight of so many deaths pressing me forward, I entered the Mountain of Fire.
CHAPTER 25
REYKER
He knew something was wrong as soon as the tracks he was following left the green canyons and headed into the desolate dunes. No one trying to survive would abandon fertile land for stark wilderness.
“They’re going somewhere.” His gaze raked the black sand that stretched as far as he could see. There was nothing that way except . . . “The Mountain of Fire.”
Brokk gripped his knees. “Why would they go there?”
“Some Glasnithians know our legends. Maybe they think the goddess in the mountain can help them.”
“Then they’re as good as dead,” Brokk said. “Ildja will bite off their heads and feast on their souls.”
“Not if we find them first.”
Reyker pushed on.
Ildja had taken his brother from him. Aldrik was flawed, but there had been goodness in him—he could have been saved, had he not gone to his mother and let her poison his mind. For years, Reyker had revisited that moment when Aldrik left, wondering what would have happened if he’d shrugged off the hateful words Aldrik said to keep him away and ridden after his brother. Could he have prevented it all—his parents’ deaths, the battles and bloodshed, the conquering of Iseneld and Glasnith?
Ildja had taken enough. He would not let her have these Glasnithians.
They had made good time. Unlike the quarry they stalked, the two warriors were at home here, accustomed to trekking through harsh terrain in volatile weather. He knew the cold that nipped at him, no worse than a gnat, would slow the blood in a foreigner’s veins. He could see it in the tracks the Glasnithians left—their strides had begun to flag, the traces of their camps growing closer together.
Reyker set a brutal pace, pausing only for short rests, until he was certain they were less than a half day behind.
“Sjaf’s balls,” Brokk wheezed as they knelt at a stream in the middle of the black sand desert. “How are you not tired, Lagorsson?”
“I am.” The lure to lie down in the sand and sleep under the open sky was strong, though it was nothing compared to the exhaustion he’d felt in Glasnith. Being in his homeland, close to his gods, was already healing the damage that had been done to him while he’d been away, fading scars, soothing aches. Even the weight of his grief had lightened, something that both relieved and shamed him. “But we have to hurry if we want to find them alive.”
And he did, desperately, for reasons he couldn’t quite understand, reasons that went beyond nobility or need. Something deep in his gut pulled him along, urging him to go faster.
The skrikflak was beside Brokk, slurping from the stream. Its head jerked up suddenly, swiveling toward the distant dunes. Its nostrils flared, and then it trotted off, surprisingly swift on its mismatched legs—paws in front, hooves in back.
“Skrim! Get back here, you rotten furball!” Brokk shouted, but the beast ignored him.
“Solvei said the girl can control animals.” Reyker noted how the ducks struggled to swim upstream briefly, in the direction the skrikflak had run. Overhead, a pair of gyrfalcons dropped out of the air as if stunned, catching themselves before hitting the ground. “She spoke to them, just now. If she can turn that monster pet of Solvei’s against us—”
“She can’t. If she could, she’d have done it during the battle for Dragon Bay or on the sea crossing here. And stop calling the skrikflak a monster. If I have to refer to that phantom-eyed horse of yours as Vengeance, you can call him Skrim.”
Reyker was already on his feet, pulling on one of the packs he’d taken off Skrim while they rested, and then he was running, keeping pace with the skrikflak.