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“I’m all right too,” he said.
“Promise?”
Draven stomped from the snow. “Come, before we freeze.”
We stumbled to our feet in deep snow. “Well?” I asked Lark again. He smiled, but like before, it lacked warmth. “Promise.” He turned to Draven. “Can you keep hold of Love’s crown? You appear to have a habit of losing them.”
“I’ve got it,” Draven grumbled, wading ahead.
We plodded through the snow, following Draven’s wide tracks. We shivered, wet and bruised. But we were alive.
Razak was, in all likelihood, alive too. I still felt some cold, barbed part of him inside me.
This was far from over.
CHAPTER37
Lark
“It’s over,”I said.
We couldn’t stop Razak. We’d tried and failed. In the past few weeks, Arin had been beaten by Pain’s council, accused of treason, thrown into a prison cell, and almost had everything that made him brilliant ripped from his body. Itwasover.
The only thing we could do now was run.
“It’snotover,” Arin denied, speaking to our group as a whole. We sat huddled around a campfire, in the ruin of someone’s home. Its roof had long ago fallen in. Draven paced behind Noemi, who stared at the fire as though she could will the answers from its flames. “Razak caught us off guard, my head wasn’t clear, Lark was missing, and Draven, well… Draven had his own problems,” Arin went on. “We have failed, and people died, that is true, and I’m sorry for that.” He paused a moment, probably thinking of his court, his family, while I thought of how Danyal had thrown himself at Razak’s mercy to save Arin. “But we just need to regroup, to heal, and to understand the power Razak has so we know how to beat it, and him.”
Understand it? We couldn’t understand it.
I’d seen it… Beneath Justice, I’d seen how it was too large a thing to be contained. The unleashed thing was desire with no boundaries, no limits. Razak had mastered it because, like it, he was a creature of endless wants. It was almost as though it had been waiting forhim, its maestro.
And I’d given it to him.
“It doesn’t kill them, not directly,” I said, thinking of Soleil and Danyal. “It’s worse than that.”
All eyes turned to me. Draven even stopped pacing.
Arin rested a hand on my knee. It burned there, like a brand. Guilt, hatred, frustration, self-loathing—all the things Danyal had suspected of me—swirled around my head. Danyal was gone now too, gone like my mother. Sacrificed for me, the same as she had been. All the good people died.
Yet, I went on living. The most unworthy of us all.
I brushed Arin’s hand off and stood.
They’d soon ask what had happened; they’d ask how Razak had come to be in possession of the crowns, the key to control the font. It was me. Like the fool I was, I’d handed him everything.
Arin wanted to ask; I saw it in his eyes.
“He takes his victim’s desires,” I explained. “Their will to live. He takes everything that animates us, makes us love and laugh, makes us different from beasts. And he tears it out. But they’re not dead.” I paced and stared at the ground, not at their faces, especially Arin’s. I couldn’t meet his gaze knowing I’d been the one to give Razak control.
“Lark… what happened?” Arin asked, like I’d known he would.
I shook my head. I couldn’t tell him what I’d seen, how the seal had opened beneath my feet and swallowed me. I’d been lost there, in the dark, surrounded by nightmares. And then Razak had come, Soleil too, but it was Razak who had called out to me in the dark. And in the madness, I’d thought he’d meant to save me. I’d reached for him. Hehadsaved me, like he’d said. And I didn’t know what to do with that. With any of it.
I hadn’t known the seal would open; I hadn’t even known I’d stumbled upon such a thing.
And now he had control of it—some of it. We had Love’s crown, and separating the crowns should weaken him.
We had to get the crown as far away as possible. Take it to the edges of the shatterlands and throw it into Dallin’s Ocean. But that wouldn’t stop him. I felt his stain on the part of me I’d never let anyone touch, except perhaps Arin. It made my skin crawl and my guts heave to think on it.
