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Melany did not reply. Instead, she coiled her Shadow tighter around us. I clutched Kalen with all my strength. She had taken him from me. She would not take this moment too. I deserved the death Ione was eager to give. I thirsted for it. The only sound was my heaving lungs and the clack of her shoes as she walked towards the pitiful sight. Bending at her knees, I scented his blood splattered on her and in the pool around us.
“You killed him,” I growled at my own face.
There was no irony in that, and for a moment I wished her hair had not been so dark, just so that it could have really been me I was talking to. She had killed him, but it was my fault. I knew his fate the moment he’d walked into the Council last night. I should have killed her then, too. So why didn’t I? Why didn’t I Yield Kalen the second I’d known I was in love with him? He had begged me, not once or twice, but enough times to fill our conversations for seven years passed. Now he was truly dead, Melany’s scheme to Yield him was simply a farce to lure me. She’d wanted to kill him all along.
Why hadn’t I doneanything?
“Yes,” she said softly, almost cooing at me. “I killed him, and you ask Why?” She did not wait for my answer. “Because you wouldn’t,” she spat. “For three thousand years, I have watched you conquer, torture, thieve, and connive. For three thousand more, I would haveadmiredyou for it—and then you met the mortal boy.”
She brushed the golden hair from his porcelain face and it took everything in me not to reach for my dagger and cut off her arm. She caressed his cheek with a pout, “Tell me, Sister. What is it about this face that made you want to forsake everything that you are? I can’t say I see anything worth that kind of sacrifice.”
“Is that what this is about?” I snarled at her, hot tears mixingwith the wetness of my mouth. “You want to teach me some lesson about self-preservation?”
Melany’s expression banked. “You were going to give him the Light, Gwynore. Power. Coveted by all, and gifted to you.”
“It is mine! It was my right to share with him!”
“Right?” She laughed. “You have no rights. You were created to rule, as we all were. Do you think that I had any rights when Father decided that the Light of Truth should govern nobly while I sat wasting in the Shadows? When he pitted us against each other and made it clear to everyone that he was betting on you?”
Melany stood and paced along the walls of her Shadow, never dropping her gaze from mine. “I never wanted to be this thing that I am. I was born with the gift of Shadows, but I was made to be feared. And you. Do you know how long I have tarried under that power of yours? One thread of golden stitch separating me from the throne at the canyon’s edge of Leoth, yet you would give it away.”She took a step back, sneering, “To a mortal, Gwynore.”
“I loved him!” My scream was so haunting...desolate, broken. My body shivered in its wake.
“You loved him,” she nodded, truly somber. “Now here he lays. A bag of bone and flesh on the floors of my court. So the lesson, dear sister, is this: love is never a good enough reason to give yourself up.”
I looked up at my sister, whose face, arranged in a display of pity, was off-center through the blur of my swollen, tear-soaked eyes. She shook her head, muttering “rights” to herself once more, then disappeared through the Shadow. From somewhere in the hall she said, “I will leave you to grieve.”
A sob barked out of me.
“But not for long,” she added. “I’ll expect your wrath to follow swiftly...as usual. I must admit I look forward to whatever fresh hell you will let loose on the morrow.”
And then Melany was gone.
I was alone in the Shadows, Kalen still prostrate on my lap, my hands and my leathers sleek with the oil of his blood. I could not say for how long I sat stroking his head and singing him songs and whispering his name over and over.Kalen, Kalen, Kalen. Like an incantation.
The pain was unbearable. When I closed my eyes, white flame was all I could see and it burned deeper than any other. I thought of begging Mother. I did beg Mother. But there was no answer. I wondered if she grieved for Thesion, at present and when he’d had slit his own neck all those thousands of years past. Was this what she felt? A hollow ache of despair. Did she fill it with her own blind anger?
That was what Melany expected of me.
I tried to imagine it, the way she pulled herself apart just to give my father life again. Forging herself into all that was him. The Time he counted on her stars were the freckles Kalen numbered with his hands along my face. The swells of the Sea that raised wind and tousled his grey hair were the breath Kalen took whenever I looked at him. The Land beneath my father’s feet crunched in between my lover’s hands at our meadow. And the Light. The Light that my father was to the Mother, so Kalen was to me. The Shadow that I was despite myself, with all the horror the universe and I created. It was his to keep.
Whatever force had allowed the Mother to break apart her soul, tugged at mine now. I listened to the call, crammed my eyes shut, and focused. I loved him, I loved him, I loved—a rumble of the earth. The clatter of stones hitting the floor. I looked one last time at him and truly laughed as his wound began to mend itself with little rays of dawn. Kalen’s cheeks pooled with new blood, his lips no longer muted in gray as I kissed them. I only wished I could stay to see the blue of his eyes, but I knew I could not.
Melany was right. Even if Kalen did come back, even if he wasokay. She had killed him, I had watched him die. And father…By the Light, what had I done to our father? That alone was all the reason I needed to let my grief consume me, to go on hurting everyone I loved, hurting everyone I didn’t love, hurting anyone I saw fit. On purpose or just because I was too prideful to really understand. Somehow, this would happen, again. Tomorrow, or a month from now if Ione failed to kill me on her first try. She wouldn’t.
If there was any chance of my survival, I had to leave—now. Kalen would have the Light. He would take my place as Preserver and the faction would protect him in ways I could not. The leather of my sleeve caught the slick of snot running from my nose. I leaned down, pressing a kiss against the curve of Kalen’s jaw, and said, “I guess I was wrong. You will have to find me, my love, wherever I am.”
I looked to the skylight, behind the wing of a black crow, and found the Guiding Star. With one hand bracing the floor, and the other clutching my heart, I projected one final time. To a place where the Sea met the Land, the Light shared the sky with the Shadows, and Time protected it all in a quiet stillness.
When I woke fromthe vision, my eyes were still burning with Light. My mouth tasted sharply of Shadow, and there was a heavy weight upon my arms that I couldn’t make sense of.
Before I could see again, I heard. Somewhere to my right, Kalen was mumbling my name.Finally,I thought.You found me.I tried to reach out towards that weak rush of words, but my body wouldn’t listen to reason. I pulled at my limbs, but they were stuck on something—that weight...was it the ceiling? Had I brought Sythe down around us all?
I pushed against the heaviness again, and light and color began to leak back into my vision. I managed to pull my arm from whatever wreckage I’d caused, feeling the weight hit my lap in a solid thump. Gasping, I panicked and began moving my legs around wildly, thinking I would be caught under the shifting rubble. But the mass against my thighs moved flaccidly in sync with me.
I heard Kalen move closer, and though I was still mostly blind, I knew he reached for me. I let out my free hand towards his shapeless form, but he jolted away.
“Please,” he said, his voice clear now and riddled with worry. “Gwyn,please.”
