I had to keep going and pray my circle held. Pray the gods took pity on me and blessed me with the Rooke magic. I lifted my left hand and pressed my other palm against the Thorn's edge. The blade bit deep, blood welling up immediately—darker than it should be, threaded through with veins of gold that glowed in the darkness.
Rooke blood.My blood.
Magic made manifest.
Magic drawn close to the surface. Magic I couldtaste,like bitter berries.
Ariel let out a low, keening moan, reaching, reaching, trembling fingers toward me before she yanked back with a hiss.
I let my blood drip onto the Mirror's surface. One drop. Two. Seven.Thirteen.
The Mirror drank my blood like a drowning man gasped for air. Greedily, every drop disappeared, then the surface rippled, igniting with inner light—black shot through with veins of gold. The faces of my ancestors became clear, a sea of dark blue eyes opening one by one, all of those judgmental gazes fixed on me.
Don’t fuck this up, seemed to be their message.
Believe me, I’m trying not to.
Now, the grimoire had instructed.Drive the Thorn through the Mirror's heart.
I gripped the Thorn with both hands, my palms slick against the golden handle. I raised the blade high, the tip pointing downward, and for a moment I hesitated. This was irreversible. Once the Triune was bound to me, I would become its keeper, its key, its prisoner.
“By thorn and crown and silvered glass, I lock these powers deep,
I call you from the shattered past and wake you from your sleep,
Become my blade, my crown, my right, the weapon of my line,
And wake the sleeping might of all my ancestors in kind.”
“Noooo,” Ariel screamed, throwing herself against the ward with a thundering crash.
My entire world tilted sideways, the Thorn slipping from my hand, clattering onto the floor, spinning round and round through the edge of the blood circle…
Landing right at Ariel’s feet.
46
LYRAE
“The bastard’s almost here. He’ll want your sister; he’ll want the artifacts. If he gets them back, this is all over and then…”
The rest of Ryland’s warning was stolen away by the wind, and I ground my teeth together as hundreds of soldiers poured onto the frozen surface, that hideous cracking never letting up. I kept waiting for the entire army to just disappear, but so far, the ice was holding.
Probably because of the bursts of cold blue scattered across the front lines, ice magic, I assumed, reinforcing the unstable surface as the enormous force began to inch toward us, a dark smudge against the night.
Too bad the Grimbeasts couldn’t have been more selective in their killing.
Too bad the ice wasn’t thinner.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
A shard of panic shoved up, that miserable twist in my gut that always came right before a battle. Worse, now that I had so much to lose. I glanced over to Ryland, sword in hand, staring furiously across the frozen plane, then thought of Varian, somewhere inside, watching over my sister.
My whole family, finally united, with a monster poised on the opposite bank, waiting to tear us apart.
And Rooke…the key to this whole thing, the fulcrum upon which we succeeded or failed, and right now, I felt like fate could tip the scales either way.
“We have to buy Rooke enough time.”
