“Wait,” Brokk called, chasing after him. “Think this through. You can’t go up there alone, without supplies. I’ll come with you, just give me an hour—”
“I’ve already lost too many gods-damned hours!” His foot was in the stirrup, reins threaded through his fingers. Ignoring Brokk’s protests, he was about to tell Vengeance to go.
“Lagorsson!” Solvei came up behind them. “Someone has been hanging about since yesterday, asking after anyone who knows you. He told the innkeeper it’s about a woman.”
The fight went out of Reyker all at once.
A boy he’d never seen was waiting beside Andrithur, bouncing on his heels. “You are the Sword of the Dragon?” the boy whispered as Reyker took him aside.
“I am.”
“Then you must go quickly to the Temple of the Mountain. She doesn’t have much time.”
The boy would say no more. He ran off, and Reyker agonized over his options, but he’d already left Lira twice—on Glasnith and at the glacier—out of ignorance. He would not risk doing it again, even if it cost him time. Reyker bid Brokk and the others to wait, and rode to the temple.
Another hour, gone.
The Temple of the Mountain was the largest of many sanctuaries dotting the foothills of the Fjordlands. Light leaked out between the slits in its wooden walls, and he knocked on the door, not knowing what to expect.
An aged priestess answered, wrinkled and hunched, scowling at him. “Took you long enough. She has held on longer than she should.” The priestess waved him into the candlelit room. There was a bed inside, and several priestesses hovered around the prone figure in it.
Not Lira.
Disappointment was a thundercloud roiling under his ribs, but once he got past the hair that was blond instead of violet, the eyes that were blue instead of green, he registered who he was looking at. “Hilde?”
The other priestesses moved aside, and Reyker went to her, kneeling beside the bed, folding her damaged hands inside his own. Hilde smiled at him, tears spilling into the scars cutting down her cheeks. “You are alive,” she said.
She was too pale, her skin too hot against his. Feverish. There was a pile of bloody bandages by the bed. “What happened, Hilde?” The fresh bandage wrapped around her middle was seeping red.
“A Dragonman’s arrow.”
“You need help. Healers.” He looked to the other priestesses. “Why have you not sent for one?”
“I am a healer, boy,” the old woman who’d let him in said. “The infection has spread. There is nothing more to be done. The veil-dwellers await her.”
“No—”
“All I needed was to see you one last time,” Hilde said, “to know the man who will save Iseneld still lives. When I told you what I read in the runes, you did not believe. But you do now. Your faith glows beneath your skin where darkness used to dwell. Your magiska’s doing, is it not?”
Reyker shook his head, thinking he’d misheard her.
Hilde glanced at the old priestess and the woman took a slip of parchment from beneath her robes, pressing it into Reyker’s palm. When he looked back at Hilde, her eyes had closed. “I will be watching from the afterworlds with your family,” she murmured. “Make us proud, Reyker Lagorsson.”
“Hilde.” He touched her scarred cheek. The heat was already leaving it. “Hilde?”
“Let her go,” the old priestess said, pushing Reyker from the bedside.
He watched helplessly as the priestesses held hands and sang hymns to send Hilde on her way, and to welcome the veil-dwellers who would lead her to Skjorlog Felth. All the people he had lost over the years, and it never got easier.
Reyker clenched his fists. The parchment crinkled in his hand.
He unfolded it. Read it. Stared.
It was Hilde’s handwriting, but it was written in code, and there was only one person it could have come from.
A brave deer is trapped, dreaming of thorntrees. When the midnight moon is full, she will spring from her cage, hoping a kind-hearted wolf awaits her on the other side.
CHAPTER 37
LIRA
The garden must have been lovely once, a private world where a woman dug her hands into the soil to be one with the earth, but the flowers and herbs had withered long ago, and weeds grew with reckless abandon, held at bay only by the stone walls encompassing them.
No one had tended it since Reyker’s mother died.
This was where Draki brought me after the execution. In front of the fortress, with everyone in Dragon’s Lair bearing witness, he had taken the heads of the two guards I’d fought my way past to slip into the tunnels. The Dragonmen had not begged for their lives, they had simply kneeled and accepted their fate, and the Dragon’s sword had been swift, almost merciful.
Because their deaths were not truly about punishing their mistakes, but mine.
“Katrin came here often for solace,” Draki said now. He stood behind me, looking over the tangles of vines and moss. “It is yours, if you want it. Jardun’s gifts will serve you well here. Perhaps it will bring you solace too.”
Since Hilde’s escape, Draki had not trusted me to be alone with his guards. The door to my room was kept locked, and the only time I could leave was if the warlord escorted me. He told me Hilde was dead, felled by an arrow, but I knew better. If the priestess had been caught, Draki would have brought her body here and dropped it in front of me. He might have made me watch as he took her bones and fixed them to the fortress walls.
“You’re giving me a garden.” A laugh bubbled in my chest. “The same garden you gave your mother before you killed her.”
“She was not my mother.”
“She was, once.” I turned to face him. “She loved you like a son. And you loved her, as much as your tainted heart could. As you loved your father. And your brother.”
Draki’s jaw twitched, the only sign of his annoyance.
“That’s what I found in your soul. Or what’s left of it, since you threw it away for power, to win the favor of a goddess who abandoned you at birth.”
Before I could move, Draki had pressed me to the stone wall with his body, his mouth too close to mine. “Hate me if you must, Lira. Curse my name. But do not speak ill of my mother.” His thumb trailed up my neck, and I shivered. “I did not kill Katrin. Reyker killed her.”
“You’re lying.”
He pressed the scar behind my ear. “Reyker cut my mark from her skin. But such a mark is forever. It was part of her. Without it, she withered like one of her flowers. So will you, if you try to leave me.”