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I knelt before him and clasped his face between my hands, my mouth turning dry at the sight of him. “Malyr, pour your shadows into me.” When he showed no reaction, I lifted his pitch-black eyes to mine, black droplets running down his cheeks like spilled ink. “Malyr?” No recognition. “Malyr!” Nothing. “Anoaley!”
His fingers slowed, his eyes finally settling on me in the dim darkness. “I have to get her out.”
“We’ll get her out. Look, I can already see her.” Sebian grabbed the first large boulder in reach, carefully lifting it off a splintered grayish rib that protruded from Naya’s smashed corpse. “Can you tap into his core? Suck them out?”
“I… I don’t know.”
I tortured my upper lip for a moment until a distant memory from the orchard came to mind, when Malyr’s eyes had been black one moment, then clearing the next. I pressed my absorbing hand onto his chest the way I had done that day.
His eyes lightened.
My chest darkened, like an eternal eclipse that slowly settled over my mind as a strange sensation swept through my core. A… tingling? No. Scratching and scraping, like claws threatening to tear me up from the inside.
Shadows ever so cruel.
ChapterThirty-Five
Galantia
Present Day, Valtaris
The black shingles that crowned Valtaris easily soaked up the warmth of the winter sun during the day, keeping the city pleasantly mild. A large triangular scarf knitted from shadows was all I needed as I crossed the Perch, the fox-lined dress I wore beneath matching the setting sun’s deep orange rays.
In front of it, Malyr stood at the edge of the plateau that overlooked all of Valtaris, a large clay vessel clasped between his hands. To the right, black stairs a furlong wide led up to the Winged Keep. The city itself spread out along the hill chain in several areas of different heights, most of them connected by narrow stairs. Left of us, too far for my eyes to see, lay the Temple Plateau.
I wasn’t allowed there.
Not yet.
A sight too gruesome for me to stomach, Malyr had said, since the temple was where the women and children had taken refuge during the siege. The shadows hadn’t killed them, only trapped them, leaving them to die slow deaths fueled by panic as water and food, perhaps even air, grew scarce.
For three more days, I’d cleared the most important parts of the city, allowing us to rest at ease within the sparkling ruins. Rooms had been cleaned and assigned, foods had been carted into the kitchen and larders, and servants had been hired and instructed.
I watched how Malyr tilted the vessel ever so slightly, his black robes drifting left with the breeze—as did the ashes he’d collected from his family’s pyre, spiraling downward like a storm, only to dissolve in the looming dusk.
“I know you are there,” he said as he tossed the vessel to wherever it may land and shatter. “I can feel you.”
Arms wrapped around myself, I walked up to stand beside him. “I’m sorry if I interrupted… or if you wanted to be alone.”
A slow shake of his head. “Sebian?”
“He went to help Marla clear out the chimney in the home you assigned them.”
He nodded, then turned to look at me, his eyes neither red-rimmed from pain nor glistening from grief, but calm. “Can I show you a special place? The only way of reaching it is by flying.”
A tingle rose in my chest at the idea of exploring. “I’d like that.”
“Follow us,” he said through the burst of feathers and shadows.
It took but a thought for me to shift. We beat our white wings, leaving the plateau in pursuit of those black ravens ahead. They dashed through narrow alleys, dove to a lower level, then rounded the face of the mountain on which sat the Winged Keep. We followed, slipping into a sort of wide cavity that looked as though a giant had bitten into the mountain, ripping a large chunk of stone out and leaving behind a pool of water.
I reshaped near a rock-carved, gold-painted column that supported the overhang, the steam that rose from the water’s surface seasoning the air with minerals and sulfur. “What is this place?”
“It is a natural spring that, at some point in the past, carved itself to freedom and created this,” Malyr said where he stood on the damp rock on the opposite side of the pool, first wiggling out of one boot, then the other. “The spring is vast and powerful. The pressure of the heat causes the obsidian in the mountain to compress, which createsaerymel.”
Pure awe trickled through my veins as I looked back at the entrance, many of the lower areas of Valtaris sprawling out before us. “It’s why this place has so many different plateaus. The compression made the ground shift and sink over time.”
He stared at me for a long second, nodded, and pulled his robes up over his head. “Not much escapes you, does it?”
