Page 68 of Turncloak

Two sentinels approached the spot where Lorissa Rezaran was cooling into marble, but Rasso’s howling dropped into a low, feral growl.

“Stop,” the boy commanded, with a surge of desperate emotion.

They all stopped. The mages, the fallowwolf, curtailed with unnatural suddenness.

The boy was holding four mages still at once—while cuffed in deminite, no less—but was too distraught to consider the magnitude of this.

“Live,” he compelled his mother, with every last shred of magic in his still-developing well.

She did not live.

“Please. Live. I command it.”

She did not live.

“Mama. Please, Mama. Live.”

She did not live.

A sob turned into a hiccup, and he shook his head frantically, furiously. “No. No, no, no. No. This isn’t real. No.”

“Fant,” one of the sentinels said, his voice so soft it almost broke the boy. “Fant. Cera briet.”

The boy did not speak Bellandrian, but intuited that the mage was trying to tell him either that it was alright or that it was over. But it wasn’t either of those things. How could it be? The woman who’d saved him was dead at his hand. How could he live alongside this truth?

Unless…

He’d heard some of the adults at the encampment discuss a hallowed scroll of necromancers—their last resort. A list of mages who could bring the dead back from beyond the veil. They hadn’t sought out said necromancers for the fallen recruits two days ago, because there hadn’t been enough left of their bodies to revive. But Lorissa was still whole.

If the boy could just get her back to the Havenwood…

“Help me,” he commanded the remaining wardholders, both with words and with his very soul. “Help me get her body to the portari gate. Unseen. Unheard. Help me.”

So they helped him.

As the unnatural pillar of water crashed to the flagstones, the wardholders propped Lorissa Rezaran up on their shoulders and dragged her all the way to Almere’s central-west portari gate, as though hauling a drunken friend home from the tavern. Rasso continued to growl and whine, but did not attack.

The boy followed them, dragging his scuffed boots along rain-slicked cobbles, the canyon inside him filling with an ache that would never, from this night on, abate.

And in the atrium of the flooded bank, a small gold wand box drifted aimlessly on a shining green stream.

Lyrian was waiting by the Havenwood portari gate—leaning against a narrow wyrmwood and nervously carving a wooden board game piece with a paring knife—when the boy, the fallowwolf, and his dead wife arrived home.

At the sight of his murdered beloved, Lyrian let out a strangled sound.

The board game piece fell to the moonlit ground.

“It was my fault.” The boy fell to his knees, dropped his head into his hands. Warm tears poured through the cracks between his fingers like blood from a mortal wound. “It was all my fault.”

“No,” Lyrian moaned, pleaded. “No, Riss—I told you, I told you. Why didn’t you listen?”

“Dad, listen, it wasn’t her fault. I followed her invisibly, and the tincture wore off, and it distracted her, and—she got hit. Because of me.”

The boy didn’t know why he let the truth gush from him like water from a burst dam. Perhaps because the guilt and shame were pressing on his chest with all the force of a ten-ton rock, and if he didn’t squirm out from under it, he might die himself. Perhaps because he just wanted, needed, for someone who loved him to tell him it was all alright, that it was not his fault, that he didn’t mean for this to happen.

How could he have known? How could he have stopped it?

By thinking faster, the boy realized miserably. If you’d compelled Vielle quickly enough, she never would have…