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“No,” I whisper.
Phaedron turns to me. His hand pushes back his cloak; his fingers wrap around the hilt of the dagger strapped to his chest. Only then do I realize there’s another voice in this room, another sound making the magic tremble. Someone is shouting outside the door.
We don’t have long. The portal, damn it. I need to open the portal so Phaedron can get back to the Lands Below, so he can rescue his brother Rowan. I blink and shake my head, like I’m waking from a dream.
“What do you need?” Phaedron asks.
There’s a downward pull in his lips and furrows deepening across his brow. I turn to examine the room, to escape that expression on his face, but the unfamiliar weight of his sword strapped to my hip makes me stumble.
Then Phaedron’s hand is on my arm, and the magic in this room claws at the inside of my throat and makes my chest throb with each heartbeat. I stare at him like I’m drowning in the pale blue of his eyes. He’s a good man, Phaedron of the Lands Below.
So was my father, I realize as my gut twists. And yet he did nothing when King Grathgore’s soldiers came to trap me in the palace. Now Phaedron will go to a place where I can’t follow, leaving soldiers behind him, and I have to open the door for him.
I shake my head and gulp at the air. I feel like I’m sinking beneath the surface of a lake, and the water is getting colder and colder as it pulls me under. I find my feet, then drag myself toward the far wall. Phaedron’s sword hits my thigh as I walk.
I know what I have to do, even if my skin crawls at the thought of it. There’s so much magic churning the air around me that I feel like I could do anything right now. Nine hells, I could create a new sun if I wanted to.
But there’s one way to get even more magic. The silver pipes branching off the old god’s cage practically glow with magic. I have no idea how they siphon the god’s magic or where it goes. I have no idea if I’ll even be able to withstand touching those pipes; already the magic feels like it’s trying to choke my lungs and peel the skin from my body.
But I do know the portal that brought Phaedron into my life consumed a tremendous amount of magical energy, so much that it leaked through into my world and left a burned tang in the air. I close my eyes, trying to remember that portal. The scent of the magic, the shape, the way it ripped through the air inside my room.
My room. The sad little bed, the one wardrobe I was allowed. The bare walls where I’d wished for a window. Watching the human servants at dinner, how they smiled at each other, brushed their hands across an arm or a back. The way my chest would echo with pain like a hollow bell struck on the hour, tolling with the loss of my family, the vast, aching absence of anyone who would ever smile at me, who would touch me with love or kindness.
The day they brought my sister Ithronel to the palace, and how my first, horrible impulse was to turn away, to pretend I didn’t know her. As if I could fool King Grathgore. The narrow room with its little window where they made me watch the soldiers whip my sister after I refused to use my magic to craft an invisible arrow for King Grathgore. I made the arrow after that, but still, they found reasons to use my sister to punish me. And once, when I was brought to the courtyard and silently whipped with no explanation, I knew she must have done something to bring this treatment upon me.
And in that moment, I hated her. King Grathgore made me hate the only family I had in his palace, the only person in my entire world who actually cared for me.
I open my eyes. My hand hovers above one of the silver pipes, at a bend where it vanishes into the wall. Magic dances across the back of my fingers, little golden sparks that sting my flesh even as they call to something deep inside of me. Fear trembles in the back of my throat.
I turn toward the old god, my mind screaming about impossible risks even as my heart knows the decision has already been made.
The chained god is small, really. It’s no larger than a deer, perhaps even smaller than one of the great stags the heroes would chase on their wild hunts, although the chains looped around its thin little body make it hard to tell for certain. It has a face like a carved feast day mask, all lines and crevasses around its closed eyes, and six long, thin legs ending in delicate, tapered hooves.
It is a prisoner. It suffers.
And I was a prisoner once.
Another shout cuts through the air, raised voices calling back and forth outside the dark door Phaedron and I opened together. A low, booming thud echoes through the room, and it takes me a moment to identify it.
The door. Someone is banging something heavy against the door to this room, to this prison. I turn to Phaedron.
“Phae,” I whisper. “We have to set it free.”
I’m not sure what I’m expecting, laughter or anger or shock, but instead, Phaedron nods. “Of course,” he replies, and his voice is confident even if the echo is sad. “We’ll find another way to make a portal.”
I shake my head. “No,” I whisper. “I’ll do both.”
And I press my palm to the hissing, burning silver pipe.
Magic explodes inside my chest, searing me from within as though I’ve swallowed a star. I crack open my eyelids and find my arms glowing with cool radiance, like moonlight reflected in water. Magic crackles under my skin, filling my veins, filling my lungs, dragging me under. It is old, ancient, and more powerful than anything I’ve ever tasted; it’s tainted with the rage and suffering of the old god, choking on tears and blood, burning with power that demands an outlet. My head tilts back, and the dark sky above the old god’s cage shifts wildly as magic drifts up from my mouth and nose, from my eyes, rising like streamers of smoke to tangle in the stars.
“Alindra!” someone calls, but they’re so far away.
Something closes around my shoulder, something warm and almost rough that cuts through the hissing burn of the magic. Phaedron shakes me, hard, and then his eyes fill my vision again, shadowed and cold as ice.
Right. I force myself to pull breath into my lungs. First the portal. I remember its scent, the burn of it, the way it danced in the darkness at the foot of my bed.
Magic leaps through my fingertips, funneling out of me and exploding above the swaying seedheads of impossible grass. It’s as simple as lighting a candle with a scrap of leftover magic, channeling this god’s power. Making it serve my will. Ripping a hole in the fabric of reality.
