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Beside me, Davorin spit and hissed. I sat up, ready to strike at him, but as with Saga when she stepped into my dream, he was fading.
“I won’t let her go, Awakener,” he said, voice distant, like a shout from across a wide river. “Our fates were joined before yours, but I’ll be sure the scarsare too deep to heal this time.”
Logically, I knew I could not reach him. Whatever tale used to bring Saga to me had more power. It faded him out of reach, and the battle lord was pulled to nothingness by the time I snapped to my feet. The sight knocked the air from my lungs. I doubled over.
Manacles locked over her wrists. Quilts were askew, her body unmoving. Only shallow breaths gave away that she lived at all. My Saga, my fierce raven, was soaked in blood, and not all fresh. Lashes had scabbed and putrefied from the tops of her feet, her thighs, her neck. Bite marks marred her flesh. Bruises in the shape of cruel hands, thumbs, fingernails.
Queen Anneli sobbed and dabbed Saga’s broken skin with pungent oils and tonics while guards scrambled at the rage of their king in the corridor.
I knew—gods, I knew he’d tried to break her—but this? This was more than my own dark thoughts could create. He’d peeled her apart time and time again, only to piece her back to start over with a new torture.
Davorin would greet the Otherworld in pieces. Then, when he passed over, I’d find a way to follow, and cut him into smaller bits.
“Sing with me, little rose. We’re gonna help her be happy again.”
“Sing a bwight king?” The childish lisp of a young little followed.
“That’s right. Sing with me.” A soft whisper drew my haunted gaze to the corner of the doorframe.
The two children, the king’s ward and tiny heir, huddled together. No one seemed to notice where they’d hidden, not in the chaos of finding a royal in such a state. The boy spoke to the child in low tones, but slowly, together, the children began to hum. A sweet sound, eerie and gentle.
“Don’t cry, little rose,” said the boy, blocking the torture on the bed when the child tried to peek. “Keep going; you have the words.”
I was locked in a stun as the young ones sang. The child murmured soft words to the melody hummed by the king’s ward. Golden skeins of light unraveled from the two littles, they slithered into the corridor, chasing the ones who’d get tangled in their grasp.
Thechildrenopened the paths?
All this time, I thought the king had written the curse that created the broken kingdoms, but the paths that would split to different worlds, only to bring us back together again, were caused by . . . the littles.
I jumped when a presence came to my side. Wraith, masked and haunted, emerged from the darkness.
He kept his eyes on the two children. “The king did not sing the song of a beast and his rogue queen, nor of a thief and her dark love. He did not sing of a broken-hearted raven and her golden king. Riot Ode’s song divided his power over magicks. He gave his gifts to the land to hide for others to find. He sacrificed his life for a curse that went against a natural order. It destroyed him but allowed another’s song to take shape.”
Wraith faced me, his eyes burned in torment. Words dried on my tongue, and one of a few times, I could think of nothing to say.
“I wanted to help, Ari. Nothing more,” he said softly.
My lips parted. I looked at the king’s ward again, then back to Wraith. “You?”
“I cannot sing alone.”
It was then I noticed the golden flash of the fated threads coiled around the boy’s wrist and the king’s child, the two tethers knotted between them. Fate-bonded as I was with Saga.
“Our song was to protect the raven princess from more pain. I didn’t realize by singing her a tale of a love that would be gentle and passionate and honorable would unravel a world.” Wraith stepped closer to me. “But I wouldn’t take it back. It gave King Riot a new way to defeat a powerful enemy. When the battle lord grew too powerful, the fate king realized he had a new way for his power to live on, a hope that the gods-magic could rise stronger against an enemy he could not destroy.”
“These . . .” I swallowed. “The moments you showed me, they wereyourmemories.”
Wraith held my stare. “Does it surprise you? Seidr was the vein where all the magicks were held. Even the gift of memory walking like the shadow queen you know. The lands are more connected than you’ve realized, and now you have seen that you were the catalyst for uniting them. The Golden King and his Raven Queen were the first song of a new path. The first tale that opened the way for others.”
“Uniting them forwhat?”
A sobering shadow spread over his face. “For the final fight of a broken world.”
I shook my head, slicing my fingers through my hair.
Wraith gripped my shoulder, eyes alive with a new kind of fire. “Accept your place and your importance, or you are at risk of damning her—” He pointed at the carnage of my wife on the bed, “to return to this for all time.”
My jaw pulsed in tension. “He won’t touch her.”
