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Helia placed the other on Dimitri before I could answer.
Magic flashed, a second explosion of green and silver, and a new bond formed.
“Cut your hands and say the words,” Helia said, somehow following my train of thought and trusting me, the sister of her kidnapper, and mind witch who had impersonated her to get close to her future husband.
“There’s no need,” I said, as it anchored to my very being, the core of magic and hope. “We’re already bound.”
Eydis had prepared for this. Feared it.
She wouldhave been alone, like I had believed myself. I no longer did.
I reached for Dimitri on one side and Lumi on the other, connecting king, magic, and death.
Someone screamed in unimaginable terror behind us. Dimitri clenched his bloody hand to mine.
Sigils shone across the arch, spinning as if alive. It knew what it needed, seemed to sense the urgency as the ceiling shook and glass trembled.
We were opening the Gate and mending what our ancestors had destroyed.
The words came unbidden.
“I swear to protect Tal, to ward against the darkness and give the dead peace. I swear that I’ll protect the Gate in death and beyond. I bind myself to you.”
Spirits streamed into the cave from above, their lights reflecting against the wet stalactites. Ealhswip had compelled them to help her. It no longer mattered. The Gate was calling them home.
Lumi’s magic spread, and through her, I felt the pain of each one, their life stories trapped inside the glowing cores.
The Gate’s shine dimmed until only the unending light of the Spirits remained.
My ears popped; a winter gale tore through the previously still air.
Before the three of us, the Gate of the Dead opened for the first time in three centuries, and I clung to the two people I loved as the first dead streamed past us.
Beyond the light, Ealhswip roared her rage. On the other side of the quicksilver surface, the shadows answered.
Chapter thirty-one
Vanya
The green-silver magic latched on to Lumi and pulled. She was going to the other side—the land of the dead, a dominion of the Goddess we knew nothing about—and it was tearing me apart. I could not lose her when we had just found each other again.
Trapped between life and death, I clutched to my incorporeal sister on my left and my love on my right.
I was dead and alive, whole and broken.
Vanya and Lumi, light and dark, on one side.
Tempest and king, blood of Ealhswip and Herebov, on the other.
The bonds stretched until I felt Lumi’s touch on my cheek—so like Mother when she sang us to sleep—and opened eyes I had not realized I’d closed. Lumi stood by my side, her cold blazing light flowing into the quicksilver, my own shining like the sun.
“Let me go,” she said so only I could hear.“I understand now. A queen left; a queen must return—and with Popova’s curse broken, we’re one as we were always meant to be.”
A matching, glowing crown had appeared on Lumi’s head as she pushed her hand through the portal. A queen of the dead.
The Gate echoed her words as the cracks at the base of the arch widened, splitting sigils and text in the old language. Maksim pressedhis hands against the splintering as if he could fuse them through willpower alone.
My sister was half gone, arm and shoulder disappearing, where I could not follow.
