I chuckled. Kael frowned.
“Loren, fetch traveling clothes from Magister Corvo’s quarters and bring them back to my door,” Kael said, his tone cold and entirely indifferent.
Lo stared, mouth open. Then the order settled, and he snapped his jaw shut. “What hue shall Ifetch?”
Kael’s glance warned him. I only laughed harder.
“I think the only other wool tunic I have is beige, so beige will do,” I said. “And Kael, say please.”
Shock carved itself across Lo’s face. Kael shot me a look, but his shoulders eased.
“Please,” he growled, or grunted. I could not tell.
Lo tried to swallow his laughter, though it escaped in thin cracks. “Don’t think I’ve ever heard you say that word, Magister.”
He caught himself then, straightening, unwilling to step too farover the respectful line he kept with Kael. I supposed my presence shifted that line a little.
Which would not be so bad.
Lo darted out of the quarters, moving at a pace that suggested he was fleeing the scene. I let myself breathe as Kael conjured water into the bath and warmed it with the power of light.
Then we bathed together, his hands rubbing slow circles along my back. The scar on my shoulder no longer burned, and I wondered if it was because I had stood in the eye of his storm and accepted it for what it was, that the pain had finally eased. We spoke quietly as the water warmed around us. I asked him about some of the things I had seen in the echoes of the last night. The she-wolf who had shielded him as an infant from prowling predators and tried to raise him as one of her cubs. He told me he had seen her again years later, and that he had been with her when she had died of old age. I had felt his grief for the elves, so I asked him about Mauriel, his mother. He spoke of her gently, touched by fondness, but also pain. For the power in him had grown too great for even a mother to tame.
Kael spoke honestly and hid nothing. He did not need to anymore.
Henrich Eisenberg had taught him to cage the storm, which Kael calledthe wolf. I found the image fitting. A caged wolf that clawed at its bars, aching to be free. And I remembered, in one echo I had seen, that the storm had howled exactly like one.
Kael asked me about Sud and whether I missed my family. It was a difficult question, for I had always been cast aside once my seerling powers had begun to show. They’d feared I might be discovered, so they’d forced me to make myself as small and unnoticeable as possible. Feeling as though I could not be myself with my own kin, did I truly miss them? I did miss my mother’s food—that was certain.
Kael frowned at the mention of my powers. I could not read what passed behind his eyes.
I wanted to ask him about the other echoes I had seen. That I had realized he had noticed me long ago, and that he had watched me foryears from the shadows. I wondered what he had seen in me that had held him there. I did not understand it, but I was grateful it had happened. Grateful that someone like him had ever seen someone like me. But we had too little time left. We had to make a move.
My clothes had been neatly folded and laid beside Kael’s door. We dressed quickly. I had a set of brown leather breeches and a thick beige wool tunic. Lo had also brought my warm wool-lined cloak, which would serve me well at the summit. Kael chose his usual black leathers and his elven sword. He draped a long black cloak over his shoulders, its fabric falling like shadow.
We walked out of the castle and across the courtyard on foot, for a horse would have strained too heavily the higher we climbed. The sun shone softly in a clear blue sky. Scaffolding already rimmed the walls where Kael’s storm had torn stone and wood. Within the hour, the repairs would resume. The city lay strangely silent, as it should on the first day after a siege. The markets were closed. No crowds gathered to greet the morning.
We left the city and began the ascent of the mountain, my heart thudding as I stepped toward the unknown. I had no idea how to stop the blight, but I knew I needed to stand near it, breathe the air around it, feel its weight, if I ever hoped to understand it at all.
The ground pulsed beneath us,dark tar oozing by our feet. The blue sky had turned into a dark void looming above the summit, invisible to anyone who wasn’t caught in its darkness. Somehow the sun still shone, but everything around it was black and stripped of color. Drachenfels Keep stood before us, swallowed by black vines. The ground beneath our boots was made entirely of tar and ash.
On our way here, we had fought through several vine blights, each angrier than the last, each falling easily to the storm. But this place, the true root of the blight, only hissed when Kael struck it, as though it had expected us.
I went down on one knee to touch the ground, to feel its energy.The instant my hand met the soil, my vision blurred. I jerked my hand back. I did not want to faint again as I had the last time I had touched one of these vines.
“What are you seeing?” Kael asked, stepping closer.
The dark energy here was strong, immensely so, yet it was not the core. Something deeper waited beneath it. I needed to see them—the dead, those who lay at the heart of the keep. If I saw them, I would understand.
Vines slithered toward me, and I drew away.
“Show me where you discarded the corpses,” I said. “I need to see the root of it.”
Kael’s jaw tightened. He hesitated for a moment, as if wishing that one part of his past could remain buried forever. But when his eyes met mine, his features softened.
“Very well.”
We entered the keep. The vines recoiled from Kael’s steps, as if they remembered his storm. The keep, drowned in darkness, brightened each time the vines shifted aside, letting thin rays of sunlight pierce its walls. Those rays seemed to guide us to a staircase yawning into the dark below.
