I had not told him that our peace would be short-lived. That my journey was not yet over.
‘You can choose not to do as the Creator has asked,’she said gently.
But I sensed that would not be wise, not to mention the Creator gave me a second chance at life. I wasn’t going to go back on any word I’d given him.
‘I will help you end it. Together we will end magic.’
We hadn’t talked about it, but there it was out in the open between us.
It sounded cruel to take something so precious from an entire population. But just thinking of the Elites and how they looked down on those of us without magic, had a rightness sitting in my chest that I would remove that very magic from them. Who was I to question the Creator’s will? What He gave, he could take away.
Elites had been given great power and abused it. Now, Valkaryn and I were going to set it right.
‘Then we will find the Creation Stone,’Val said. ‘And we will pay what it asks.’
‘The Creation Stone?’
‘The birthplace of magic. At the Steel Mountain. Where I was forged.’
I gasped. Where her blade was forged? Or where the Creator placed her soul inside of it?
Pay what it asks…
I thought of the shards of Mind Render on the hall floor. I thought of the way Valkaryn’s light had broken them. The Creation Stone, a fitting word for a place older than both Valkaryn and Mind Render.
Kaelric stirred and made a small sound. I froze as guilt washed over me. He didn’t wake, but turned his face into my hair and breathed me like he wanted to permanently imprint my scent into him.
“I will tell him,” I said into the quiet room. “Not today. But before I go.”
It would be cruel not to. I had no idea what the cost would be for ending magic.
My life?
‘Good,’Val said.
I fell asleep on his chest and woke a few hours later, restless. It was still bright out, but considering both Kaelric and I hadn’t slept the night before, I was grateful for the nap.
Kaelric slept with his arm around my waist, the gray blanket pulled to my shoulders. His breath warmed the back of my neck and rose in a slow rhythm.
In the brightness of the afternoon, I slid my fingers over his wrist and lifted gently until his arm loosened. He murmured and shifted. I held my breath. When he settled again, I eased out from under the blanket and sat on the edge of the bed. The floor was cold. The room smelled like wood smoke and lavender.
Valkaryn waited in the bathroom, perched against the tub where Kaelric had left her. I strapped her across my back and pulled on my trousers and boots. My thigh throbbed where Mind Render had cut it, but it was nearly healed. I stepped out of the room as the setting sunlight reached into the room and bathed Kaelric’s face in a golden glow. The mere act had him looking like a small boy. A boy in his childhood room. A small smile graced his face, even in sleep, and suddenly I was grief-stricken.
How could I tell him I was leaving on a dangerous quest the mere night after all of his dreams had come true?
‘He will understand you have to follow your heart,’Val coached me.
‘He will try to stop me, or come with us,’I told her.
Silence. Because she knew it was true.
I stood at the door and looked once more at him. What good would telling him do? What if the Creation Stone required my life in order to end magic? What if the Creator just gave me alittle bit more time, not a lot? What if last night, in all its beauty, could be the way Kaelric remembered me?
‘If you want to change your mind and stay, I will understand,’Val said, very quietly.
I remembered the sweet way in which the Creator had asked me for a favor. How he’d asked me to help Valkaryn fulfill her destiny. Without me, she had no legs. Without me, magic would live on, and the Elites would keep lording it over the magicless, and in another hundred years, there would be a new Dregs with a new population of people they could lord over.
‘I’m going,’I whispered.
