Memory's Wake (31 page)

Memory’s words ended as Veil mist spread in curls below them, across the ground, leaving behind a man’s body as it passed.

Eloryn’s nose twitched, and her tears came again.

She found comfort that, in death, Alward looked at peace. Wavy graying blond hair he never managed to brush if she didn’t remind him, a thin face with kind eyes, the face she knew better than any other. No outward signs of injury. No torture. No expression of pain carried with him to death. He seemed to be asleep, but was no less dead for that.

She gripped the shirt at his chest in both hands with tearing strength and wept into it.

“You died for me. And lived for me,” she whispered into his cold body. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. What I am, my useless title that causes all this damage... I will make it mean something. I will own it. I will never, ever forget you.”

Eloryn knew she was watched, knew they all listened to her and waited for her. She still let herself cry some more.

Sitting up, she looked down into her hands. Plenty of her blood on them still. They shook visibly.

“Memory, I need your knife.”

“Are you sure you want to do this? Maybe sometimes it’s better not to know,” Memory stammered.

“Please, Mem.”

Memory placed the folded iron blade into her hands.

Eloryn delicately, slowly, pulled it open and held it point down above Alward’s no longer beating heart.

A silent snarl bared her teeth, and she rattled with erratic nerves, but could not push the blade.

Not only was her body stubborn, but her mind was in turmoil.

Roen knelt on her other side. “Are you sure?”

Eloryn nodded without really knowing.

From one side, Roen placed his hand onto hers. From the other, Memory did the same. And they pushed.

Eloryn cried out as though the blade pierced her own heart.

The three of them became ghosts; misty forms in a forest. Not this one, but another that they knew. The very place Eloryn and Memory had first met. Eloryn knew the trees well, having spoken to them, though here they were smaller, the brush thinner, making a small clearing. Alward ran toward them, more solid than them, or his dead body on the ground. He was young and fresh with the look of courageous purpose.

Wisp light filled the woods. A dozen men and women bearing weapons followed Alward through the dense trees.

He stopped and stared straight past Eloryn, Memory and Roen with a look of horror. All three followed his gaze.

A gruesome scene like an illustration from the books of blackest magic stood behind them.

Dark hooded figures circled Loredanna, turning on the forest floor in fits of hard labor. Young Thayl assisted anxiously as the baby came.

Behind them, swirls of Veil mist tore the air, outlining a hooded shape that held aloft another newborn. Screaming and wet from birth, blood spilled from the baby’s chest, a rune freshly carved into it.

“Stop. Stop this evil!” Alward yelled.

The leading figure loosed a disturbing chuckle from beneath the hood, and rolled the crying baby off long finger tips, letting it fall alone through the tumultuous Veil door.

Figures clashed around them, through them. Guards and chambermaids fought fiercely with those in hoods and cloaks, fighting for their Queen, and giving their lives.

Insubstantial as air, Eloryn, Roen and Memory stood back to back, watching the vision around them. Each swung sword or club made them flinch, only to pass harmlessly through.

Alward stood next to them, scroll in hand, reading words of power.

As more fighters fell, between individual battles, glimpses could be seen.

Thayl pulled Loredanna to her feet. No longer torn by labor, blonde hair stuck to her cheeks with sweat. Another newborn lay on the forest floor, lying silent as bodies fell around it.

Thayl scooped Loredanna up into his arms, turning his back on the battleground and the newborn. Loredanna struggled, weak with exhaustion. She cried out, reaching desperately for her baby that was left behind.

She flailed. “No! Let me go. My babies, I won’t leave them!”

Fingernails tore his cheek, and she ripped free of his hold, pushing past him, switching their places in the most fateful of moments.

Then she froze, arms still reaching toward her child, struck by a red bolt of magic.

Thayl cried out, catching her falling body.

Next to them Alward also stood frozen, one arm outstretched. The scroll drifted to the ground, dropped from his other hand. Horror dawned on his face as the last of Loredanna’s protectors were dispatched around him.

“Loredanna. No, no, no. Loredanna!” Thayl cried as her body gave in, piece by piece in his arms.

She only had eyes for Alward, arm pointing to her child, as she breathed out words. “Save them. Keep her safe.”

Watching through time and death, Eloryn could feel the tangible power of her words; words imbued with a force stronger than any behest.

Alward moved in an instant, snatching up the newborn, tucking her into his cloak.

Thayl dropped Loredanna to the ground, roaring into a charge at Alward who backed away with the tiny, precious bundle.

Behind Thayl, Loredanna’s last breath passed through her lips, bringing with it final words of magic. Alward faded into the Veil, taking with him the newborn, just now starting to cry.

The vision faded away. Eloryn whispered some words, and watched Alward’s body sink away into the earth. As the body sank, a pure white stone as large as Eloryn rose in its place. The knife, rejected, glinted on the freshly turned soil.

Eloryn placed her hand on the stone tenderly. A few more words and she dropped her hand away, but the impression of it remained, permanent in the smooth facing of marble.

“Goodbye.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

“That was-?” Eloryn began saying, turning away from Alward’s grave.

“That was me.” Memory bent down gingerly and reclaimed her knife. She wiped it on her already filthy skirt and put it away. “Look, I don’t get all of it, not by half, but the baby with the cut chest; that was me. That was this,” she said, tapping the front of the corset where it covered her disfiguring scar. “Thayl told me, just before the dragon got you; he said we were sisters. I didn’t know then whether it was true, how it could have been true.”

“Twins.” Roen coughed a weak laugh. “To think we were worried that you looked so much like Eloryn. The resemblance is even clearer now the Princess has lost weight.”

Memory fixed a glare on Roen. “You better not start calling me Princess.”

“Alward never said a thing, nothing at all about a twin. But, there was always something he searched for, something he said was lost. His research into the Veil, his experiments in the woods... Are you sure it was you?” Eloryn asked.

Memory gave a wry laugh. “How the hell could I be sure? I’m just trying to add up what I’ve found out so far, and that’s what it seems to come to.”

Eloryn took a step forward, raising a hand. “May I see how you appear without the dye in your hair?”

“Uh, I guess?”

Eloryn whispered a few words, and Memory felt no change.

Roen however blew a soft whistle. “There’s no question. Identical.”

Memory reached and twirled a lock of hair in front of her eyes, finding it the same ivory blonde as Eloryn’s. She wished for a mirror, to see if she really did look just like the beautiful, delicate creature Eloryn, whom she’d spent unconfessed time envying. It made sense, more than any other explanation had so far, but it just seemed surreal not only to now have a sister, but an identical twin. Whenever she imagined finding her family, she imagined happy smiles and hugs all around. Now, she stared at her twin, too awkward to move. Eloryn stared back mutely. Memory waited for some overwhelming joy or familial love to wash over her. It didn’t come. She felt for Eloryn, undeniably, but was it the way a sister feels? Maybe she was in shock. Maybe the unanswered questions still blocked her.

She pounded her forehead with her palm. “But, but, but… We saw when we were born, but what happened next?”

A quiet voice came from the shadows nearby. “You always said you were found as a baby, right near the orphanage. All cut up with that wicked scar you like showing people.”

Will, oh God, I completely forgot he was here. Still watching me from hiding,
Memory thought, unsettled by the idea. Will told her he wanted to protect her, but his fairy friends didn’t seem to have the same intent. She couldn’t help wondering whose purpose he served first.

“And I grew up there? In some other world? How could there be another world?”

“There were other lands, once,” Eloryn said. “Before the Pact. But the fae foresaw the end of days, which is why the Pact was made. Avall was separated into the Veil, to save the fae and the people of Avall from the hell that would swallow the rest of the world. Maybe, maybe some human life has survived beyond Avall?”

“Our world wasn’t Hell.” Will shifted in the shadows, his voice quiet and hard.

“I didn’t mean...” Eloryn dropped her head, then looked back up at Memory. “I’m just saying what I know of Avall’s history. To travel across the Veil into other lands simply isn’t done. The fae used to, to bring back imports to trade, but even they haven’t for centuries.”

Memory paced short, shaky steps, putting together the pieces of her lost life. Her body felt weak and wasted, but her mind ran on overdrive. “Thayl travelled through, Will saw him. Thayl came after me, to steal the magic from me, when I was like this, same age and everything. He took my memories, my powers, and all three of us fell back through.”

She faintly saw Will nod in the darkness of the oak’s shadow.

“You got there at the same time as Thayl. Dead bodies all around, you said, so it was before he took over, just after we were born? Oh God, that was sixteen years ago.”

Memory ran out of direction for her mind and her feet. He’d waited for her, lost in the forest for sixteen years? How could she possibly have been a good enough friend to have deserved that? Her current record didn’t feel up to scratch. She turned away, suddenly finding it hard to look at Will. Her next question came out in a whisper. “But I didn’t get through. I was what, just gone all that time?”

“The place we first met, where you appeared in my Veil door, it was the very same clearing we were born,” Eloryn told her. “It makes sense. If that is where you left this world from, that is where you would return into it. If you were lost in the Veil, time within it does not behave the same. You did not change, age, even think for all the years you were held by it. In magic, like calls to like. When I stumbled through, a troubled Veil door already, it pulled us both out there. It is all I can guess.”

“Same DNA definitely falls in the alike category. And if you hadn’t? I’d still be what? Nowhere? Forever?”

Eloryn bit her lower lip and shrugged.

“Uh, but I still don’t get it! Thayl had no magic, right, only got it from me? The magic he used to kill the King-”
My father?
“and the wizards right after we were born, but he took it from me when I was this age? Thayl said we were connected, in space and time. Could he have travelled forward in time into the other world to find me even though it was right after we were born here?”