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Alindra’s curls whisper across my chest, still glowing softly with the faint, distant magic of another world. With another low moan, she rolls off of my body and into the snow. I sit up, my head throbbing as I move. Anger makes my throat tight, anger and fear, and suddenly I’m standing outside Charay’s hut again, listening to my mother scream as Rowan comes into the world.
“How could you?” I snap.
Alindra sits up slowly. She’s moving like her body hurts. Silver light flares and dies around her, tracing a path down the back of her cloak and flashing like lightning in her curls. She’s shivering already, some part of me notes. When her eyes finally open, they glow like burnished silver.
“What?” she whispers.
Her voice is hoarse, as if she’s been screaming. I force myself to my feet, trying to push the jumble of nightmare images out of my head. The pool of blood on Charay’s floor was so dark it was almost black. Rowan’s screams, and the dark tendrils of magic they called forth even then, even as Charay wiped the birthing blood from his tiny body. How quickly the warmth faded from our mother’s hands, as if nothing warm could survive the Lands Below.
I spin back on my heels, choking with rage and with rage’s twin, fear.
“How could you?” I demand. I’m almost screaming.
I’ve built my entire life around control. I had to. I had my brother to protect, Rowan and his horrific magic. Someone had to be the calm center, to counterbalance the darkness inside of him. And then, once Rowan was more or less grown up, I decided to join King Galan’s Royal Guard, to train and study, to master myself in order to apply. And apply. And apply again, always with professionalism, always with a new list of ways I’d made myself more acceptable to Orryen or Aloserin or whoever was sitting in the Guard’s Tower in the far-off Crystal City, passing judgment on the sheets of parchment that represented my entire life.
And when that judgment came, when I faced yet another inevitable rejection from King Galan’s Royal Guard, I closed an iron fist around my rage and disappointment, smiled, and vowed to try again. Only Rowan had any sense of how deeply those rejections cut, although we never talked about it. Because I never, not once, lost control.
But now, standing in the ice and the darkness of the Lands Below, watching my weak little illusion cast its weak little light on the shivering figure of a woman who can’t possibly survive down here, my control snaps. Rage climbs my spine like Rowan’s magic shattering the frozen earth to spread like black ink across the fresh snow.
“You can’t be here!” I scream. “This place will kill you!”
I take a step forward, my left hand rising like smoke. Snow cracks beneath my boots.
And Alindra flinches.
It’s a subtle movement, something so small it’s almost invisible. But it hits me like a slap across the face. I know what it means to flinch like that, to pull away from anticipated pain. My father’s bootsteps echo heavily through the buried years of my memories. I can still feel the sting of his open palm.
The heat of rage bleeds from my body, leaving something cold and empty in its wake. The woman I love is going to die here, in the Lands Below, and I won’t be able to save her any more than I was able to save my own mother. Only this time, it will be my fault. Because I brought her here.
Alindra scrambles to her feet. She’s shivering so much that her motions are awkward, and they look painful. When she turns her scowl toward me, her eyes have lost some of the silver glow from the old god’s stolen magic.
“How dare you,” she snaps, in a voice that’s more of a growl.
I take a step back, away from the ferocity of her gaze.
“You think I should have left you up there?” she demands. “Left us both up there to die?”
My chest feels hollow, and suddenly, I’m more exhausted than I’ve ever been. No, I wanted to live. I wanted a life with Alindra, with her child in my arms, and now that’s all over. Now the darkness and the cold and the void will win. Again.
“You’re pregnant,” I say, in a whisper. “You can’t survive down here.”
Alindra glares at me like she’s trying to kill me with her mind.
“Two years!” she screams. Her voice is so loud in this frozen landscape that I take another step back. “It takes two years to grow a new life, Phaedron!”
Her words escape in little puffs of steam as she clenches her absurdly thin cloak tighter around her trembling shoulders.
“I’m barely four months,” she continues. “We just broke into the T-Towers, damn it. What, you don’t think I can f-find a way out of here in a year and a h-half?”
A dull flicker of warmth stirs somewhere deep inside my chest, something that’s dangerously close to hope. Alindra is still glaring at me like she wants to run me through with my own sword, and honestly, she’s got a point. But she doesn’t look quite so fearsome anymore, now that the strange silver light has faded and she’s shivering so violently she looks like she’s about to fall over.
I think of our journey through the Barrier Mountains with that damn horse, of all the nights I made sure to sleep as far from her as possible. Of all the times I moved across the road so our hands wouldn’t brush together. All the times I wanted to touch her and did not.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
My words sound like something breaking. Ignoring the throbbing ache in my skull and the churning turmoil in my chest, I walk across the ice and pull Alindra into my chest. I close my eyes as my cloak wraps around both of us.
She smells good, this woman from King Grathgore’s court. The woman whose life I interrupted, whose every plan I ruined. This beautiful, brave magician I couldn’t leave behind, not even to save my own life. Not even to save Rowan’s life.
