I watched transfixed, as her skin greyed and slackened. Her golden hair thinned into brittle straw, then white wisps. Her posture crumpled, the spine curling in on itself. She withered, revealing the creature that had existed beneath the glamour, a woman hollowed out by envy, eaten alive by the dark ambition she’d nurtured.
“I was beautiful,” she croaked, her voice a dry rattle, staring at her skeletal hands. “I was perfect.”
The stone floor beneath her groaned. The earth itself, sick of holding her poison, opened up. The fissure widened to claim its debt.
Kelda looked up at us one last time, her eyes milky and blind with terror. The raw energy surged, wrapping around her ankles. She screamed once, the sound cut off as the floor dissolved. The ley-line swallowed her whole, dragging her down into the crushing depths of the earth, sealing her into the foundation she had tried to enslave. The crack snapped shut with a sound like a thunderclap.
Silence rushed back into the room, so sudden it made my ears ring. The geyser was gone. In its place, a steady, rhythmic pulse of silver-gold light glowed softly from the sealed floor, beating in time with my own heart.
One moment I was a conduit for the earth’s fury, vibrating with borrowed godhood, and the next, the Dragonheart elixir abandoned my veins, leaving me a hollowed-out husk sliding against Fenrik’s chest. The silence of the cavern pressed against my ears, but within that void, a door unlocked in my mind. Maybe it was the proximity to death, or the raw, unfiltered magic still vibrating in my marrow, but the memory Kelda had poisoned clawed its way to the surface. Blended with the illusion she’d spun, I could hardly feel the truth beneath it. I closed my eyes and reached for it, grasping through the dark. I was twelve again. The infirmary smelled of antiseptic snake-root. The maddened wolf-familiar was lunging, its jaws snapping at my throat. I remembered the terror, the instinct toQuietit, to shove the silence down its throat before it tore me apart.
But then... I felt the hands. Warm, calloused hands on my small shoulders. My mother. In Kelda’s lie, my magic had struck backwards, freezing my mother’s heart as it froze the beast. But now, with the ley-line’s song still humming in my blood, I felt the current as it had truly flowed. My mother hadn’t pulled away in fear, she had leaned in. I felt the surge of her own essence, warmed by love, pouring into me. She had been the fuel for my power. She saw her daughter faltering against a monster and she had made the ultimate calculation.Take it,her grip had said.Take it all, Lysa. Hold the line.Tears leaked from my closed eyes, tracing hot paths through the stone dust on my cheeks. She hadn’t looked at me with accusation as she fell. The face fading in my memory was fierce and proud.
You are strong enough,she had whispered.
“I didn’t stop her heart,” I said. The crushing weight that had sat on my chest for a decade, the conviction that I was a monster, a weapon that misfired, evaporated into the dark. “She gave it to me. She passed the torch.”
Fenrik’s arms tightened around me, holding me up when my legs refused, but I didn’t need the support. Not for this.
“And I am not going to let it go out.”
Above us, the mountain exhaled. The Manor was settling its weight into the earth, shaking off the itch of the curse like a dog curling into its basket after a long hunt.
I blinked, waiting for the aftershock, but the world held steady. I looked at Fenrik. The shadows that had haunted the hollow of his throat for weeks were gone. No silver veins pulsed at his temple; no fever-bright glaze coated his iris. His skin was pale under the grime, but it was the pallor of exhaustion, not of sickness. He was just a man. A terrified, beautiful, gloriously human man breathing air that didn’t hurt him.
He stepped closer, his hands coming up to cup my face. His thumbs brushed my cheeks, anchoring me when I suddenly felt untethered.
“You did it,” he said, his voice rough. He searched my eyes, looking for the cracks, his forehead resting against mine. “Lysa, you—“
I tried to smile. I wanted to tell him that we made a decent plumbing team, or crack a joke about the mess Kelda had left, but my tongue felt like a block of lead in my mouth. The goldenfire that had been roaring through my veins was extinguished. A few moments ago I was infinite; then I was a girl who had borrowed starlight and now had to pay the debt.
The glow in my vision faded, greying out the edges of the room until even Fenrik’s face grew dim. I knew, with distant detachment, that the gold in my eyes was gone, leaving behind only dull hazel. My reserves were scraped raw.
“Lysa?”
The sound of my name seemed to come from underwater. My knees unhinged. There was no pain, only a sudden, overwhelming gravity. I crumpled. Fenrik caught me before I hit the stone, his arms a solid band of heat against the encroaching cold. I couldn’t feel my fingers anymore. I couldn’t feel the floor. There was only the scent of him, rain and ink and life, and then a silence deeper than the ley-line, pulling me down.
twenty-six
Lysa
Idrifted towards consciousness on a tide of warmth. For weeks, waking at Stormgarde Manor had meant bracing myself against a permeating damp, a chill that lived in the stone and settled in the marrow. But this... this was actual comfort.
I blinked, my lashes fluttering against a beam of sunlight. The windows, usually begrimed, were sparkling. Actually sparkling. Had the house done the washing up while I was unconscious? I tried to sit up, but my body felt heavy with the wonderful weight of being rested. And there was a sound. Or rather, the absence of one. The grinding moan of the ley-line was gone. The shriek of the walls had vanished. In their place was a low, rhythmic thrumming that vibrated right up through the mattress springs and into my spine. The Manor was purring.
I shifted, intending to stretch the stiffness from my limbs, but my right hand was anchored to something solid. Fenrik wasasleep in a high-backed velvet chair he must have dragged from the corner, pulled so flush against the bedside that his knees were pressed into the mattress. The silver veins that used to map his skin had vanished, leaving only pale complexion and the darker stubble of a day’s growth. His black hair fell over his forehead in messy waves, stripped of its severe styling. He looked younger.
His head lulled uncomfortably to the side, his neck exposed in a way that would have been a death sentence for the wary creature he’d been two days ago. But his grip on my hand? That was iron. Even in sleep, he wasn’t letting go.
I squeezed his fingers—just a twitch of muscle. There was no groggy waking, no blinking or yawning. One moment he was deeply asleep; the next, his spine snapped straight, and his eyes flew open. They were storm-grey: opaque, clear, and terrified.
“Lysa.” He breathed my name like a prayer.
Before I could even manage a rusty hello, he slid out of his chair to his knees beside the bed. He lifted my hand, the one he’d been guarding like a dragon’s hoard, and pressed his forehead against my knuckles. His skin was warm, but fever-free.
“You’re awake,” he murmured into my skin. “The house... it stopped screaming. I thought...” He took a shuddering breath, and I felt the tremor of it run through his hands into mine. “I thought the silence meant you were gone.”
“I’m here,” I rasped. My voice sounded like I’d swallowed gravel, but I couldn’t stop looking at him. At the way the sunlight hit the sharp line of his cheekbone, devoid of anycurse-mark. “And the house isn’t dead, Fenrik. It’s purring. It’s vibrating my backside.”
