The air had grown stifling and sweat trickled along my spine. Dear gods, what have I done to you, my wolf? What have I done to us?
“Rest, little warrior. You will need it.”
My head fell against his shoulder, suddenly too heavy to lift. “Are you going to kill me?”
“Do you want me to?”
“No.” Unlike before, the answer came instantly. Maybe I deserved to die, in payment for all those who’d lost their lives because of me, but it would not bring them back. The only honorable choice was to keep fighting, foiling Draki at every turn, giving my life only if it served to stop him.
In the dark, I couldn’t tell the difference between when my eyes were open and when they were closed. I wasn’t aware I had slept until I realized I had woken.
There was light here, torches flickering in sconces. The bed beneath me was piled with furs, the ceiling and walls around me carved of ice. This was where I’d first discovered Draki’s invincibility. He’d brought me back to the glacier.
There was nowhere to run, no way to escape, so I rose and walked across the frosted floor, through halls of ice, to where I knew Draki waited. In the Mountain of Fire, the scalding, pulsing heart of the Frozen Sun.
Heat poured from the crater, and the hollow space was bathed in red light. Draki turned when I entered, his expression grim. A woman stood beside him on the rocky ledge. She was unlike anyone I’d ever seen, her beauty unsettling. Her very presence shook me to my core. There was a living ice serpent wrapped around her throat like a torque, one decorating each of her wrists, all of them the same silvery-white hue as Eyvor. Her eyes were burning embers of black and gold. Her hair was a lava flow, the liquid fire dripping from her scalp, over her shoulders and down her back.
A goddess.
“Ildja,” I whispered.
Draki’s mother, the serpent-goddess, the eater of souls. The one who started the Gods’ War by convincing her brother, the god of death, to seduce Aillira and destroy Veronis.
Ildja didn’t seem to move, yet she was abruptly in front of me, circling, assessing. “You chose well, my son.” Her voice was the music of crackling flames and boiling magma. “The Fallen Ones’ vessel will prove quite useful in the war to come.”
Something gleamed in her fist. A dagger made of ice.
It hadn’t fallen into her fire.
Veronis’s warning from when he first told me to go to Iseneld came back to me: do not let her take the key from you, or all will be lost.
My journey here. The trek across the wilderness. Quinlan’s death. It hadn’t been for nothing—it was much worse than that. Every struggle, every sacrifice, had resulted in my delivering this weapon of destruction right into Ildja’s hands. The Fallen Ones had gambled on me, and I had failed.
“That’s mine,” I said, pointing at the dagger. The war gift swelled beneath my rib cage until my heart was a drum.
The goddess’s gaze seared me. My eyes burned and watered, and I had to look away. “The key to the Fallen Ones’ prison has always belonged to me,” Ildja said. “It was misplaced after I gifted it to my son’s father, a boon that bestowed him with immortality. The fool betrayed me, trading it for a healing potion.”
“For his wife, who you poisoned.” I’d overheard this in my vision from Aillira’s Temple—Reyker’s mother had been stricken, and his father had given the ice dagger to the Daughters of Aillira, in exchange for an elixir to save her.
“I offered him the world,” Ildja said, “and he chose to remain a mortal and share his life with a mortal woman. I offered him a god to be his heir, and he chose his mortal son instead. You have done the same, choosing your mortal lover over the god who could give you everything.”
“I chose the man I love.”
“Love is fleeting. Mortals die. The strength of a god is forever.”
“Forever is meaningless if you must spend it without the one you love.” Which was exactly what I had done to Reyker—stolen his love to keep him safe and alive. My love for him had made me as selfish as the soul-eater.
“Meaningless?” Ildja cocked her head. “You sound like Veronis.”
Draki observed us, crouched at the edge of the crater. Waiting for something. “They’re here,” he said.
A cloud of skeletal shadows with black-veined wings emerged from the crater and swarmed around us. Hundreds of creatures with emptiness where their faces should have been, with multiple heads and tails, and too many twitching limbs to count. The swish of their wings sounded like the rasp of parchment being rent in half, the rattle of bones in a jar.
Ildja smiled at them. “Your mortal Dragonmen failed you, Draki, but my soldiers will build you a new kingdom, even greater than your last one. An unstoppable army of Destroyers to dispatch your remaining enemies, secure your holdings, and conquer the countries beyond.”
Destroyers. Demons of the nether-realms that dragged the souls of the damned into the Mist and tortured them. Ildja was releasing these monsters into the world. My world.
“You will not send those demons to Glasnith.” The wind gusting over the glacier was strong, and I drew it to me, unleashing it on the goddess.
She caught it and slammed it back into me, hurtling me through the air. I collided with a wall of ice and slid down it. The impact jolted things inside me, but I made myself stand. I could feel the moisture running through the glacier, the vein-like rivers and streams. I tugged, and the whole glacier shuddered.
I could bring it down on our heads. If I could get the dagger away from Ildja, I could stab myself and tear the floor from beneath us, sending us all into the fire. Freeing Veronis. This was something worth dying for.
Ildja waved a dismissive hand at me. “Do not be ridiculous, Daughter of Aillira. I cannot be harmed within my own home, not even by your war gift.” The goddess addressed her son. “As you warned, she is strong but far too spirited. I shall have to make some adjustments.”
Draki’s eyes grazed me with more sentiment than I thought him capable of. Reluctance. Resignation. He nodded, and Ildja’s hand wrapped around my wrist, tight as a vise. Ildja’s skin shifted from pale cream to the burnt-orange of a fire iron.
A scream burst from my lungs as my flesh burned, as the acrid scent of seared meat filled my nose and I realized what she was doing—burning away my skoldar, the mark of protection Reyker had given me to keep Draki from ensnaring my mind. Beneath the pain in my wrist was something deeper, a ripping that traveled through my chest. Threads tearing loose in my soul. Ildja was sundering the connection the skoldar had forged between myself and Reyker, and it felt like every inch of my body was filled with thorns, shredding me from the inside out.
This was how Reyker’s mother had died.