Page 35

For one unguarded moment, I see exactly how young the grief underneath all that discipline still is — a boy who read six pages three times over, looking for a fourth that never came.

“Then you understand why I can’t accept your answer either.” My voice softens despite everything. “You lost people to a story told badly. I understand that loss, Chancellor, better than you probably think. But the answer to a bad story was no story at all. It was a better one, told honestly, by someone who cared enough to get it right instead of simply making certain nobody got to try.”

He doesn’t answer that. For the first time since he stepped out of the dark, Rikmal Frythe looks like a man who’s run out of rehearsed lines.

I hear him before I see him.

A scrape of boots against crystal, ragged breathing, the unmistakable sound of a body climbing rather than walking — and I’m on my feet and moving before my mind fully catches up to what my ears already know.

Vorren pulls himself up over the gallery’s broken edge, blood running dark down one arm, a gash along his hairline that’s painted half his face red, and very much, impossibly alive. His chest heaves like the climb cost him everything he had left to spend. His eyes find mine before he’s even fully upright, and whatever he sees in my face makes him move the rest of the way toward me instead of waiting to find out whether his own legs are steady enough to trust. His boots find purchase on solid crystal, and for one moment he simply stands there, swaying slightly, looking at me like I’m the only thing in this entire chamber worth spending his last reserves of strength on.

I don’t remember crossing the distance between us. I only remember my arms around his neck, his good arm crushing me against him hard enough to steal the breath I only just got back, both of us shaking with something that has nothing left in it resembling restraint. My hand finds his chest to feel his heart hammering there, too fast, too real to be anything but exactly what it is, and something in me finally breaks open after holding itself shut through sheer refusal for what feels like an hour.

“You’re alive.” Muffled against his shoulder, not caring how it sounds. “You’re alive, you absolute lunatic, you’re⁠—”

“I’m alive.” His voice is wrecked, rough with exertion and something rawer underneath it, and when he pulls back far enough to find my mouth with his, the kiss isn’t gentle. It’s relief given a shape, desperate and certain, his hand fisting in my hair like he needs the proof of me solid under his palm as much as I need him solid under mine. I taste blood at the corner of his mouth and don’t care, kissing him harder instead of pulling away, because right now the only thing that matters is that he’s warm and breathing and here.

When we finally break apart, nobody moves to put distance between our bodies again.

“The crystal caught me.” His forehead drops against mine, breath still ragged. “Different ledge, lower gallery, the same gentle drop that caught us both the first time. Cracked my head on the landing anyway, which I’ll be feeling for a week, but I’m not currently in any position to complain about the alternative.”

“You could have told me that before I spent the last several minutes convinced I was never going to see you again.”

“I would have, if shouting up through solid rock were a skill I’d had the foresight to learn.” A ghost of his rare humor flickers through despite the blood still drying along his jaw. “I climbed the whole way back the moment I found solid ground, and every single foothold I found myself thinking about exactly one thing.”

“What.”

“That I wasn’t finished. Not with this fight. Not with you.” His hand stays at my jaw, rough and certain. “I’m not finished with either one anytime soon.”

I laugh, wet and unsteady, and kiss him again because I don’t currently have a better answer available. He lets me, arms banded tight around me, holding on with the same total certainty he’s held onto everything worth keeping since the night we met.

Rikmal watches the two of us from a few paces back, and when I finally glance his way, his eyes have gone unsteady in a way they weren’t a moment ago. Not fear exactly. A man watching a certainty he’s carried for thirty years finally crack under weight he never expected it to be asked to hold.

“I’ve spent thirty years believing devotion like that was the exact weakness the First Keeper’s ritual proved civilization couldn’t afford.” His voice has gone quiet, almost to himself. “A single will, unified, immune to the chaos of two people choosing each other over every reasonable argument for caution. Watching the two of you, I find myself considerably less certain than I was an hour ago that unity was ever the thing worth protecting in the first place.”

“It was never unity you were protecting, Chancellor.” Vorren’s arm stays locked around me, steady, unwilling to let go even now that the immediate danger’s passed. “It was control. There’s a difference, and you’ve spent thirty years too frightened to look at it directly.”

Rikmal doesn’t argue. For a man who’s built his entire life on having an answer for everything, the silence that follows tells me more than any speech he might have given instead. He looks, for the first time since I met him, less like a chancellor and more like an old man who’s finally run out of ways to defend a choice he made thirty years too soon.

Before I can answer him, the light changes.

Not the slow, deliberate dimming that’s been working through this cavern since the Keeper first split the Heart. This is faster, wrong, the silver overhead guttering toward red in a way that has nothing patient left in it at all. Cracks race across the crystal floor beneath my knees, spidering out from the Moonkeeper’s final words in every direction at once, and above us the Heart itself flares once, violent and wrong, before its light stutters down toward outright dying instead of merely dimming.

Vorren’s grip closes around mine before I’ve fully processed what’s happening, pulling me back from the widening cracks toward solid ground that’s rapidly becoming harder to find. His grip is bruising and urgent, the same instinct that stepped into a blade’s path for me now redirected to get me clear of whatever’s coming next.

“That’s not the Keeper.” Vorren’s already pulling me toward the gallery’s far edge, Nightfall back in his grip despite the blood still running from his arm. “Lyessa, that’s the chamber itself.”

Rikmal’s face has gone the color of old ash, every trace of his practiced composure finally and completely stripped away.

“The Heart isn’t failing slowly anymore.” His voice carries none of its practiced calm now, nothing left in it but plain, unhidden fear. “Whatever’s happening down there, it’s accelerating. We don’t have hours left to stop this.”

“How long do we have?” I hold the question level through the same discipline that’s carried me through the last hour, refusing to let my hands betray how badly they’re shaking.

He doesn’t answer right away, and the silence tells me everything his careful calm won’t. Around us, the whole cavern has gone as still as it did the moment the Heart first answered our hands — except this stillness tastes like an ending instead of a beginning.

“Minutes.” The word costs him visibly to say out loud. “If we’re fortunate. If we’re not, considerably less than that.”

Above us, the Heart’s light stutters again, and somewhere deep in the water below, something vast and wrong begins, very deliberately, to wake. The lake’s surface, still and black only a moment ago, starts moving in slow, deliberate ripples no wind or current could account for — the same unhurried patience I watched cross an entire bridge toward us not an hour ago, except this time it isn’t wearing armor at all.