“If you don’t let go, it will kill you,” Rayna insisted as noise began to start up all around them.
The warriors were beginning to move, flexing their arms and legs each in turn, as if stretching after a long rest.
“Please!” Lisabet sobbed, running over to grab her mother’s arm, only to be thrown back by the force of the essence crackling through her now.
Sigrid had turned whiter than white.
“Let go!” Anders cried.
“I won’t,” she insisted through gritted teeth. “They have to be powered. Vallenhasto be protected!”
But a moment later she did let go, her hands flexing and opening as she collapsed on the ground.
Anders kicked first one cord and then the other away from her, afraid to touch them with the bare skin of his hands.
Then he dropped to one knee, and leaned down to hold his fingers in front of Sigrid’s slightly open mouth, afraid of what he would find.
No breath came from it.
He rose slowly to his feet, and—more reluctantly than he’d ever done anything in his life—he met Lisabet’s eyes.
She gave a quiet cry of pain, and around them, the artifact warriors slowly began to settle once more, growing still, becoming silent.
For a very long moment none of the three elementals moved. Then there was a soft noise from nearby.
It was Drifa.
Anders was running toward her before he knew he was moving, and he dropped to his knees in the pool of water around her, carefully lifting her head to cradle it in his lap as Rayna took her hands.
Drifa’s brown skin was tinted gray, and when her lashes fluttered, Anders saw that her brown eyes had been washed the palest of blue. But his heart soared to see her lashes move—she was alive, if only just.
She looked up at them, drinking in first his face and then Rayna’s, and her lips moved to an exhausted smile.
“My darlings... ,” she whispered.
“We’re here,” Anders told her, choking on a sob. “We’re both here.”
“We love you,” Rayna murmured, her voice breaking.
“You have to finish it,” Drifa managed. “What Felix and I tried to begin. What even Sigrid wanted, in her wrong, twisted way. There has to be peace.”
“There will be,” Anders promised. “We’ll do it together.”
“I know you will,” she breathed. “Finish our work, then live happy lives, my darlings. I’m so proud of you. Your father would have loved every inch of you.”
She let out a long, slow breath, and then she was still.
She was so completely motionless that Anders knew she was gone. His throat closed, and his heart beat too hard in his chest, and everything around him seemed to come into perfect focus. He could have counted his mother’s eyelashes in that moment. He could have described every stitch of her clothes in perfect detail. He could have doneanything, except speak the truth out loud.
His heart was breaking—his mother was gone, the leader of his pack’s urge to protect those in her charge had pushed her to this. Everything was upside-down, and everything was wrong.
Sigrid was gone.
Drifa was dead.
Chapter Fourteen
THE CAVERN WAS QUIET ALL AROUND THEM, THEartifact warriors unmoving, the twins crouching by their mother. Lisabet stood near them, Sigrid still on the ground. Anders heard a soft dripping as the ice that had surrounded Drifa continued to melt, then a soft crack as a piece split away.
