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While you live, you fight.
I had barely enough time to register the meaning of those words before I found myself in the middle of a bustling midnight dock that smelled of fish and sweat and sulfur. A man in a dark jacket, hood pulled over his head, was leaning against the side of a squalid tavern. Splashed onto the wall next to him was a two-foot depiction of a horse and rider, painted in those bold black strokes I knew so well.
Underneath the painting, Zan had scrawled,
SI vivis, tu pugnas
The words blurred momentarily, and I could feel the tug of my material body calling me back into it. But I wasn’t ready yet. A horseman had pulled Zan from the bay and told him to fight, but who was he? I remembered Rosetta’s description of Argentus, Mathuin Greythorne’s silver Empyrean horse. Was Mathuin still alive, a century after he left his family home and never returned? If so, why would he choose to show himself now?
Mathuin Greythorne. I hefted his name into the formless void like an anchor, and the smoke parted for it. I was back in Greythorne now, but not the one I knew. In this version, the house was a smoldering ruin, gray-white flames scavenging the skeletal timber remains. The balconies were caved in, the balustrades scorched black. I turned on my heel, slowly taking in the apocalyptic panorama as hot ash blew in my face.
Sputtering and coughing, I tried to wade through the smoke. The caustic air scoured my lungs, but I pressed forward, fixing my gaze on the Stella Regina as the clock in the bell tower struck midnight.
The sound crashed into me like a wave, and I fell back into a stone parapet draped in curling red-shot vines. From beneath the beatific statue of an ancient queen, I saw myself stretched out onto a spiderweb of silver threads across the bloodleaf.
No, not bloodleaf—sombersweet. I was not at Aren’s tower but at Nola’s Cradle.
I surged up from the liquid silver plane, and it instantly contracted into thread, taking the mirror portal with it. I tried to stand, but my legs buckled beneath the weight; my body felt like it was made of solid stone and not flesh and bone.
“I saw it,” I panted, trying to catch my breath. “I saw the bell. It was around the neck of the horseman. If I’d just had a few more minutes. You woke me up so soon . . .” I felt exhausted. I looked around, surprised to find myself sitting beneath a dusky sky. During my sojourn into the Gray, it appeared that night had become day and was marching toward evening time once again.
And I was being watched. By not one face but three. Kellan and Onal had joined Rosetta in the Cradle, and they were wearing the exact expressions that had kept me from telling them of my plans in the first place.
Rosetta stood. “How long do you think you were in there, Aurelia?”
I scrunched my eyes shut, trying to reorganize my encounters into a sensible timeline. Sheepishly, I said, “I don’t know. It felt like twenty minutes, maybe thirty. Bu
t judging from the sky, perhaps it was longer?”
Kellan, Onal, and Rosetta exchanged glances.
I asked, “How long was it, then?”
Kellan helped me to my feet. My knees were wobbly, my stomach empty and aching. “Aurelia,” he said quietly, “you were out almost a full day.”
16
“I have to go into the Gray again.”
We were back at the homestead, where I was drinking warm tea by the fire as feeling crept back into my extremities in hot prickles, like a swarm of biting fire ants.
“Out of the question,” Kellan said. He hadn’t left my side since I’d reawakened. “Would you look at yourself??” To Rosetta, he said, “Do you have a mirror so she can see what she’s done to herself??”
Rosetta’s eyes flicked to the turned-back mirror on the wall, and then she answered, “No.”
“I saw the bell,” I said insistently, “and I think I can track it down. Things were so hazy and changing so quickly . . . I was just getting the hang of how to see what I needed to see. But maybe, if we found another place to use. One with more power . . .”
“There’s not a—” Rosetta stopped as it dawned on her. “You don’t mean . . .”
“Aren’s tower,” I said with certainty.
“The last time we were in Achlev,” Kellan said to me, “it was on fire.”
“I saw the tower while I was in the Gray,” I answered. “I know that’s where I need to go.”
“?‘I’?” Kellan questioned. “Not ‘we’?”
“I want you and Onal to go back to Greythorne,” I said. “I saw Arceneaux in the Gray. She’s set herself up in the village, and she is doing . . . awful things. Arcane things. And she’s planning to infiltrate Greythorne. You’re needed there. You should go as soon as—”
