Her neck snapped. Her screams stopped, and her body went still. It wasn’t as neat as the Warden’s sword slicing through Nerys the harpy’s neck, but it was better than the Box. Anything was better than the Box.
There.
Her long suffering has ended.
Am I not merciful?
I wanted to lie down beside her and let the snow cover us both. But once she was dead, the Warden’s compulsion died too. There was no need for it now. The object of her wrath, her reason for forcing my obedience, was gone.
Even so, pushing myself to my feet and facing her was the hardest thing I’d ever had to do. She stood in silence not far from me with Brigid and Cira, Glynis and Edra, and even Danesh just beyond her. I didn’t dare look at their faces. They would show me the truth of how awful it had been to hear Posey die.
“Get out of my sight,” the Warden said hoarsely. Her mouth twisted. She was looking at me as though it were her neck I’d broken. Utter gutting betrayal.
I obeyed, hurrying out of the training yard. Roses parted in silence to let me pass, but no one followed me, not even Freyda; Brigid must have wrangled her inside. I couldn’t even feel glad about that. The world was a pulsing blur around me.
I didn’t stop until I reached the temple of Kerezen. A circular building of weathered gray stone, the temple had once been a favorite retreat of mine. The faceless statue of Kerezen and the profusion of ivy vines had reminded me of home.
Now I sat on one of the prayer benches at Kerezen’s feet and stared up at her featureless stone visage, trying to find Mother’s face within it. Depictions of godly faces were considered blasphemous, a tradition that struck me as rather funny. Having now met two gods, I couldn’t imagine any of them would actually care about something like that. How fragile and fumbling we humans were. How easily we could fall apart.
Sitting in Kerezen’s shadow brought me none of the peace I wanted. The childish urge to flee north to Wardwell and hide away with Mother came and went. She wouldn’t be able to help me. Only Jaetris, god of the mind, could scrape memories out of someone’s head, and there was no way to know where he’d gone after my sisters and I had killed his human host in Mhorghast. Some godly scrap of him was floating around somewhere, I assumed, waiting to be resurrected. Or maybe without a body, he had lost hold of himself and his memories and drifted away into nothingness like ashes on the wind.
Numbly, I rose to my feet and stared at the pile of half-melted candles perched on Kerezen’s dais—old prayers, old hopes. I couldn’t drift away like ashes on the wind unless someone burned me, and I didn’t particularly want to die in that way if I could help it.
But there were many other ways to die.
I just had to find one before anyone could stop me.
Chapter 17
My legs carried me to the Old Country with little instruction.
I barely noticed the protests of the four Roses standing guard at the rift in the Middlemist that I chose to pass through—the same one I’d approached before, when Gareth’s page had interrupted my crossing. I muttered something to them, or maybe even shoved them out of my way. Whatever I did, they chose not to follow me.
I passed through the spells crisscrossing the rift, welcoming their crackling sting. This pain was different from that of my bandaged hand or of watching Posey writhe. This pain was of my own choosing and therefore precious. It reminded me that I was still alive, for now, and gave me a tantalizing taste of what I was walking toward.
The Mist here was thick as cobwebs and darker than its usual filmy silver thanks to the corrupting effect of the nearby rift. According to some, such tears in the Mist’s fabric were abominations. They didn’t care that the monks at all five Cloisters, who had devoted their lives to studying the gods, had issued statements denouncing this kind of fanatical thinking. In the minds of these zealous faithful, the Mist was a product of the gods and therefore innately perfect. Flaws shouldn’t have existed, and the fact that they did—that the Mist was failing, thatit was flooding the country, that we were at war with the Oldens—was a sign that we had fallen out of the gods’ favor. We deserved punishment, maybe even extermination by invaders, if that was the will of the gods.
No one had ever been able to coherently explain how that would happen, since as far as they knew, the gods were dead and no longerhada will. And all of this ignored the fact that if the gods had been as perfect as our holy clerics claimed, the Mist never would have existed in the first place—the seal between our world and the Old Country would have been impenetrable.
Fortunately, I wouldn’t be around much longer to debate the issue.
On this night, the Middlemist knew exactly what I wanted. It didn’t sing to me about it, nor did it hiss. In solemn silence, it deposited me in a rocky stretch of Olden Country that I recognized at once. Desolate crags stretched from horizon to horizon, their valleys cloaked in fog. The sky was orange, and the slopes were bare. The air was thin and cold. Crashes of thunder echoed across the dreary landscape though there were no clouds in the sky.
Ghorlock, home of the stone titans. That thunder rumbling in my bones was their distant footfalls.
I nearly laughed. The Mist had a dark sense of humor. What a dismal place this was, its beauty stark and cruel. Ghorlock was in the far northern realm of the Old Country, hundreds of miles from the nearest Order-friendly settlement. Though I had left the Mist far behind, I could still feel its presence in the deep corners of my mind.
You want violence, daughter of Kerezen?
You want death?
As you wish.
And here I was. The titans would be only too happy to oblige me. Stone titans weren’t as easily provoked as their brethren of fire and wind, but even their patience had limits. Insult them with enoughpersistence, and they’d flatten you without a word.
It would be quick.
I wouldn’t feel it.
