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“Malefica.” He spat out the name. He was so close, I could see the serpentine red vessels in his glassy eyes.
I said, “May you find joy in your reunion.” And I threw the vial down. It fell with a clink, trailing an arc of blood behind it, rolling to a stop at the statue Aren’s feet.
Cael let out an animal snarl and leaped after it, scraping his fingers across the splattered blood as if trying to gather it back into the vial. I flew past him and scrabbled to Zan, who was still lying on his side. As I worked my knife through the ropes binding him, the wind rose from a whistle to a scream and the tower swayed as a dozen funnel clouds spooled down from the sky to the ground. The air was hot and electric as the earth gave a deep, primal groan, and the three marble men at King’s Gate splintered into pieces that tumbled into the roiling ruby water of the fjord.
It seemed that my gamble had paid off. Victor de Achlev’s last remaining blood had worked in place of Zan’s for the sacrifice. King’s Gate was falling, and it was the last anchor; its loss catalyzed the wall’s final decimation. All around the city the ancient, indestructible stones of Achlev’s Wall began to shake and crumble. Below us the blue-white lines of magic seared across the black expanse, snapping back to their original course, one after another after another. I clutched Zan close as they intersected in the earth deep below us, a throbbing tangle of energy and light.
“I’ve got you,” I murmured into Zan’s shoulder. “We’re going to make it out of this. We’re . . .”
But Zan was slumping against me. When my hands came away from his back, they were red with his blood.
I let out a wrenched cry.
I was wrong. It was not Victor’s blood that had broken King’s Gate but Zan’s. Cael had delivered his death strike before I ever arrived at the tower. Aren’s final foretelling was coming true right in front of my eyes, and I was helpless to stop it.
“No,” I begged, lowering him onto the bed of bloodleaf and tearing his gag away with my bloody fingers. “No.” My voice was breaking. “Please, Zan. Don’t go.” I took out my knife and held it to my palm. “I can fix this,” I said. “Like I did before. I can—?”
“Nihil nunc salvet te,” Cael rasped from behind me.
A spidery blue light burst from Zan’s body and spiraled into the clouds. Beneath him the bloodleaf vine was coiling, stretching, straining toward his trickling lifeblood while his spirit materialized above. I lifted my head from his prostrate body just in time to see his ghost glimmer and fade, as if swept away into the swirling storm.
I let out an angry sob, pressing my forehead to his chest and twisting his shirt in my fists. His hand fell limp to his side, and from his cold fingers tumbled his mother’s ring. It fell onto the blanket of bloodleaf just as the first tiny, white petals began to unfurl.
Blood on the snow.
I reached for the ring and stood up to slip it onto my finger, now filled with a terrible calm.
Cael was amused. “Well played,” he said. “Using someone else’s blood. But I got you one better, didn’t I?”
The last king of Achleva had fallen, and with his death the final seal holding the wall’s magic into place gave way, and the plane of the spell cracked into tiny, jagged shards. Above us the black moon oversaw it all, a portal into darkness itself.
I turned to Cael, knife in hand.
He tilted his head. “Your weapon is useless against me, girl.”
“It’s not for you,” I said.
Sorrow and rage burgeoned inside my body, corrosive and catastrophic. I wrapped my fingers around the glass blade and gave a quick, searing yank. Then I fell to my knees and pressed my hands against the stone, feeding the energy of my loss into the tower and deep into the power below, letting it expand and grow until I was not simply me; I was the tower. I was the storm. The magic. The bloodleaf.
Then I lunged and closed my bloody fingers around Cael’s neck. The force of my grip sent him reeling, slipping in Victor de Achlev’s blood and falling backwards against the bloodleaf-ridden battlement. He was stunned for a moment, before throwing his head back to laugh.
When the first vine of bloodleaf wrapped around his throat, the laughing came to an abrupt stop. “You can’t hurt me,” he said as more vines encircled his arms, his legs. “I cannot die.”
“I don’t want you to die,” I said. “I want you to suffer.”
I clenched my fists, and the bloodleaf tightened in response. Lines of red were spreading from the veins of the leaves across his skin, leaving black trails behind them, like the spirits of Achlev’s gates.
“My mistress will destroy you,” he said, choking. “She is angry, she is wrathful, she does not forgive—?”
“Nor do I,” I said as I unleashed the last of my magic into the vines holding him.
The bloodleaf absorbed him, consumed him, became him. It ate away his body, separating cell from cell, until he was nothing but a pile of blackened leaves and thorns that fell into dust, whipped away on the wind.
“Nihil nunc salvet te,” I said, and sank to my knees.
37
When I gathered enough strength to reopen my eyes, it was to a world of white.
