Rise (39 page)

As he lifted the sword, Bosque rasped in fury, “This will not come to pass.”

With one stride, Bosque launched himself into the air, every muscle in his body working to power the stroke of his blade. His sword hit the sphere, barely piercing the surface of shimmering lights.

The sphere shuddered and burst. The explosion was deafening. It sent Bosque hurtling through the air until he landed in a heap on the far side of the room. The stained-glass windows of the hall shattered. Thick branches of the dead tree cracked, groaning as they sheared off the trunk and slammed to the stone floor.

Eira fell to her knees, but not because of the explosion. Where the sphere had been, Cian was floating in the air. Eira knew it wasn’t truly her sister. Whatever this spirit was, it had Cian’s features, but the hovering figure was transparent.

Cian was speaking, her words in Latin, filling the room as loudly as Bosque’s roar had, but not with a furious cry. Instead the air trembled as Cian’s words became a song, a melody that blended aching sorrow and unflagging hope.

Stunned by her sister’s transformation, Eira couldn’t make sense of what Cian’s spirit song meant. She was only able to discern the final phrases:

Prolem cruces ferat
.

Crux ancora vitae
.

May the Scion bear the Cross.

The Cross is the anchor of life.

Cian spread her arms to the side, and her body became light, so bright that Eira could barely look at her. As Eira watched, the light separated into four distinct pieces. They grew larger, taking on the characteristics of the portals that Conatus’s clerics wove. Through each shimmering doorway, Eira glimpsed a different landscape. The first revealed a pine-covered slope and the dark opening of a cave.

Haldis.

Eira heard Cian’s whisper. It hung in the air for a moment. Then the portal curled in on itself, becoming a flaring ball of light.

Through the next doorway Eira saw the snowcapped peaks of mountains and the silver-blue of ice.

Tordis.

Like the first portal, at Cian’s whisper, the door shuddered, contracting until it too had been reduced to a ball of light.

The third doorway opened to the bluest seas Eira had ever set eyes on. More lustrous than the Mediterranean, the waters were surrounded by dense forests of a kind Eira didn’t recognize. The trees were short, ropelike vines twisting between trunks. The leaves were thick and broad, gleaming jade green.

Eydis.

Eira gasped, stepping back at the vivid imagery held within the fourth portal. Glossy black rock and rivers of fire. The earth belching ash and molten flame.

Pyralis.

When the final door swirled into a ball of light, the four spheres brightened to the point that Eira found it hard to look at them. Like falling stars, they shot from the room, blasting through stone, wood, and glass as they escaped the great hall, each flying in a different direction.

And then they were gone. The chamber was silent, and Cian’s body was nowhere to be seen.

THE EXPLOSION FINALLY
ripped Alistair and Barrow apart. Their fight had been relentless and ugly. A fight with no honor, only animosity. Too close for clear blows, the knights had been reduced to biting, ripping, and tearing at each other like wild beasts. Neither gained the advantage, but both were so consumed by hatred that they willingly embraced the futility of their struggle.

Alistair didn’t see Eira slay her sister. He took no note of the strange object that consumed Cian’s body. All he did see was the man he despised, a man who wanted to steal what was his. He kicked and twisted in Barrow’s grasp. Cursing and spitting, they wrangled each other along the stone floor.

When the room filled with light and sound, an unknown force threw Alistair and Barrow against the wall. For a few minutes, Alistair was knocked senseless. When he opened his eyes, the room was blurred, and the ground felt as if it were shifting beneath him.

“Fall back!” Lukasz’s command reached Alistair’s ringing ear. “Get to the portal!”

More shouts and the pounding of feet above him in the gallery compelled Alistair to rise, despite the wave of nausea and dizziness that crashed through him. He stumbled forward, drawing his sword. A single thought had taken hold of Alistair’s mind.

He could not let Ember leave.

Alistair began to run, gulping air to help clear his head and clinging to his singular purpose.

“Rhys!” he shouted. The wolf leapt from the shadows to run at his heels.

Reaching the gallery steps, Alistair took them two at a time. At the top of the staircase, he threw himself forward, hurtling wildly ahead as he saw a shimmering door appear at the far end of the hall.

Barrow had reached the gallery just ahead of Alistair. Ember gave a cry of relief as she threw herself into Barrow’s arms. He lifted her up, his mouth crushing into Ember’s as she wrapped herself around him, welcoming his embrace in a way Alistair would never know.

Alistair opened his mouth and what emerged from his mouth was a howl of such anguish that it sounded inhuman.

Ember broke from the kiss at the sound of his cry. Grief etched across her face. Pushing Barrow toward her sister, Ember took a step toward Alistair.

“Ember!” Barrow called in warning.

Looking over her shoulder, Ember said, “Get my sister and mother to safety.”

“I’m not leaving without you.” Barrow glared at Alistair.

“Give me one minute.” Ember took another step forward, away from Barrow. “I’ll be right behind you.”

Something in Ember’s voice must have silenced Barrow’s protests. He nodded grimly. Taking Ossia Morrow’s hand, Barrow guided her to the waiting portal.

“Alistair,” Ember said softly, coming toward him. Her eyes flicked nervously toward Rhys. “I don’t know what’s happened to you, how Bosque has twisted your heart, but I can’t believe you fully belong to him. I remember the boy who taught me to fight. I remember my friend.”

Alistair lowered his sword, watching Ember approach.

“Come with us.” Ember stopped, just out of reach, and extended her hand. “I cannot give you what you want, but I swear you will always have my love in friendship. Is that not enough?”

“Enough?” Alistair repeated. Casting his gaze upon the wolf at his side, Alistair said, “Your time has come, Rhys. Retrieve my ring.”

Ember flinched when Alistair looked at the wolf, but not quickly enough. In a flash of fur and fangs, the wolf leapt at her. She threw her hand up to guard her throat, but that was precisely what Rhys wanted.

The wolf’s jaws closed on the fingers of Ember’s left hand. She screamed, and Rhys jerked his head back.

Barrow had been shepherding Agnes toward Rebekah’s portal, but turned at Ember’s cry. He lifted his sword, but Agnes moved even faster. Her eyes had locked on the young wolf that had knocked Ember to the ground.

And suddenly it wasn’t Ember’s sister lunging at Rhys, but a snarling she-wolf. Her fur shone with threads of pale gold; her body was heavy with the baby she carried. Agnes snapped her teeth, and Rhys jumped back.

“To me!” Alistair shouted, and Rhys darted to his side, matching Agnes’s snarls with his own.

Transfixed, Alistair stopped and then took a step back, then another. Agnes bristled, her teeth bared as she stared him down. Alistair’s rage gave way to a surge of triumph.

Despite her wound, Ember uttered a tremulous cry of shock. The sound brought Agnes’s head around, her ears flicking toward Ember. Then Agnes was a woman again, and her body began to shake.

“Barrow!” Lukasz shouted to the huddled trio from the edge of the portal.

Barrow scooped up Ember with one arm and stretched his other hand to Agnes. She stumbled toward Barrow, grasping his fingers. Alistair watched as Barrow dragged Agnes and carried Ember to the waiting door. Lukasz stood guard as they rushed through the portal and then he followed. The gleaming door vanished; they were gone.

“Your friendship would never be enough, my love.” Like a man entranced, Alistair put out his hand, and Rhys dropped Ember’s two severed fingers into Alistair’s palm. One was encircled by a golden band.

THE SUN DISAPPEARED
behind the mountains as Ember joined Agnes at the water’s edge.

“The stew is ready,” Ember said quietly. “If you’re hungry.”

Agnes nodded, but her expression was distant.

“It’s not so different from home, is it?” Agnes gazed out over the fjords.

“I suppose not,” Ember answered, not wanting to disagree with her sister, but although the Norse country was wild and rugged like the highlands, the air carried unfamiliar scents, the slope of the hills was a bit too rough, and the sky was too bright. It wasn’t home, and Ember doubted she’d ever feel a true sense of home again.

Agnes sighed, her hand moving to her swollen belly.

“Are you unwell?” Ember asked.

“No,” Agnes said. “Just tired.”

She hesitated, the skin around her eyes tightening. “Ember, do you believe my child to be anything other than a monster?”

Ember thought of the boy in the cage. The boy who abruptly vanished and left a snarling young wolf in his place. Rhys had attacked her at Alistair’s command. The wolf-child had taken two of her fingers. But Ember chose to remember the fear she’d seen in the boy’s large yellow eyes when she’d first encountered him. In a moment of crisis, Agnes had transformed from woman to wolf, but she’d done so to protect her sister. There was nothing monstrous in that.

“You’re not a monster, despite what Alistair and Bosque did to you,” Ember said. “Why should your child be so condemned?”

“The others are afraid of me,” Agnes answered. “If they fear me, they must fear what grows within me.”

“No one knows whether the magics worked on you have affected your child,” Ember told her. “And they aren’t afraid of you, they’re afraid
for
you.”

“You believe that because you are my sister.” Agnes sighed. “But you don’t see how they look at me. You can’t smell their fear.”

Finding no reply, Ember took Agnes’s hand. “Come to the fire.”