Page 227 of Keldori By Daybreak

“They won’t.”

“Like hell!” Iseult snarled.

“We can still be a family,” Orla said. “Nothing can change the circumstances that brought us here, but I can’t let all that death—Galahad, Tiernan, Caitria, Ciarán, my parents—I can’t let it all be for nothing. Just let Fana go, and I’ll get through to the Rift. The others won’t hurt you if I’m with you.”

Ferrin looked at us all one by one, smirking when his eyes passed over my fallen grandmother to land on me. He let go of Fana’s wrist, and she scurried across the cliff to slam into the safety of Iseult’s arms.

I held my breath as Orla stepped forward.

“I’m sorry,” she said to no one in particular, and then embraced her uncle.

Ferrin grinned at me over her shoulder, triumphant for but a second. His eyes widened as her arms tightened.

“Orla, no!” I screamed, but the sound was lost to another one of Ciarán’s ghastly cries.

Orla closed her eyes and, with her arms still wrapped around Ferrin, pitched herself forward off the lip of the cliff.

A purple trail of skal-fire streaked the air behind them as they fell, and Ciarán cried out at the smell of magick.

Neither Ciarán’s rotsbane wail nor Iseult’s scream was enough to cover the sound of Orla and Ferrin hitting the ice with a horrible crunch.

“Wren, stop!” Mom yelled behind me, but I was already sliding down the side of the cliff, ignoring the burning in my hands as they grated against ice.

“Dammit, Orla!” I screamed.

She and Ferrin both stirred feebly, and hope fluttered in my stomach, but Orla’s fire continued to burn, drawing Ciarán towards them.

Iseult slid beside me, half-glissading, half-falling. She beat me to Orla and extricated her from Ferrin’s mangled grip. Orla cried out in pain, her limbs hanging at impossible, gut-churning angles.

I rushed to help Iseult drag her farther from her uncle. Orla lifted her head towards Ciarán’s rotsbane, and the purple flame flared, dancing on Ferrin’s chest armor as we pulled her back.

Ciarán raged towards him, gauging chunks of ice from the ground with every leap off his claws, and I realized what Orla was doing.

Ferrin realized it too, because he pushed up onto his hands and looked at the fire burning on his leathers and then up at the charging rotsbane.

Ciarán wanted Skal. Orla had left him some.

Iseult and I cowered with the ice wall at our backs, cradling Orla’s broken body between us.

“You should’ve… left... me…” Orla wheezed between breaths, and Iseult bent low over her face.

White hair fell forward over Iseult’s shoulders, hiding them both from view.

The purple flame that remained on Ferrin’s chest, the flame wrought from the magick of Orla’s father, disappeared, sucked into Ciarán’s jaws.

Ferrin, as horrible as he was, did not back down even in the face of a rotsbane of his own creation.

“You cannot kill me!” Ferrin, bleeding down his face, roared up at Ciarán. “I killed your family. I took your humanity. I made you! You cannot—”

Ferrin cut off in a guttural scream as Ciarán dug into his chest.

I knew not to let a rotsbane catch me in its claws, but nothing could have prepared me for the brutality of its attack. Ferrin’s screams were a mercy, as they helped drown out the sound of tearing flesh and breaking bones. Blood sprayed as vessels burst, and Orla turned her head away to hide against Iseult’s cloak.

The rotsbane shrieked and Ciarán roared as well in my mind, full of rage and pain and hunger.

All the while, Ferrin remained alive.

“How’s he not dead yet?” I asked through a quaking whisper.