Back into the mountain I sped, against my will, the metallic tang of my blood scenting the dank air.
“Shiori!” Raikama shouted. She caught me by the arms, the slender thread connecting our wrists flickering under the moonlight.
Behind me, the demons clamored for my blood. Soon our positions would be exchanged. I would be trapped forever in the mountain, and they would be free.
My mouth chalky with dirt and debris, I scraped toward Raikama, straining against the Wolf’s pull. So help me, I was not going back into that mountain.
These last few months, I had never given up on my brothers. I couldn’t give up now on myself.
I summoned every ember of strength I had. I’d always had a strong will, but a strong heart? I thought of the pain I had endured to work the nettles—the fiery thorns and sharp-edged leaves—the despair of those long months I’d toiled alone in Mrs. Dainan’s inn, the agony of knowing that a simple sound from my lips would be all it took to kill my brothers.
All of it, I had overcome.
“And this too, I will overcome,” I whispered into the mountain.
The walls trembled, rubble spilling from unseen heights. The stones were small at first, mere pebbles skipping down into the hollow.
Then they grew. Skips turned to thuds, and hulking shadows eclipsed the dappled light shining from Raikama’s heart outside the mountain. Boulders dropped. They were relentless, falling at the speed of my racing pulse. Soon the demons were no longer moaning; they were shrieking.
Amid the uproar, I peered back at the Wolf. His eyes glinted, bright as the blood slicking my ankle.
“Let’s play a game,” I shouted, echoing his earlier words. “You let go before I kill you.”
Even as I spoke, a hail of rocks crashed down, the sound echoing from the walls. They tumbled, brutally pounding against the Wolf. That hurt him, I could tell, so I ordered more to fall. Dust frosted the Wolf’s fur, and the look he gave me was so scathing, so twisted with fury, that I thought the battle was won. Then the corners of his mouth lifted, and a wide smile spread across his face.
“So be it,” he said, lifting his claw from my flesh. My blood soaked his nail, the same red as his eyes.
With a fierce cry, he turned into smoke and disappeared into the mountain.
I didn’t even have a chance to breathe. Raikama pulled me through the fissure and out of the mountain, where I lay gasping in the cold air.
Her pearl shone inside her chest, a luminous beacon of pure magic. She looked more fragile than I’d ever seen her before, her golden eyes tired, her shoulders shrunken, the scar on her face gleaming in the light of her pearl.
“We have to seal the mountain. Lend me your power, Shiori. I fear I don’t have enough.”
I took her hand, grasping it tight. Light from the pearl flashed, overwhelming us. My eyes watered, and I shut them, focusing on the mountain. Smoke billowed through the rip Raikama had created, and my stepmother pressed her back against the rock to keep the demons within.
In one final flare, a burst of light rippled across the face of the mountain itself. And then silence. I couldn’t hear the demons crying anymore. No smoke rippled forth.
When it was over, Raikama sagged to the ground.
I dropped with her, and her snakes parted to make room for me. They were slithering over a satchel covered in snow. The same one I had dropped—the starstroke net.
“Stepmother?” I whispered.
I was still holding her hand. The last time I held it, I had been a little girl, and my tiny fist could barely wrap around two of her fingers. Now my hand was larger than hers, my scarred fingers longer than her smooth ones. But her skin was cold, as it always had been. When I was little, I loved trying to warm her fingers with my own. I had marveled that I couldn’t.
“Thank you,” I whispered, crawling to be closer to her. “You…you came for me.”
She touched my ankle where the Wolf had clawed me, and the wound closed slowly, leaving but a crooked pink scar. “Do you remember what you said when we first met?” she asked.
“No.”
“I had taken my first steps onto Kiata’s soil. I had been many weeks on the boat, and I was tired. I was nervous, too. But I wanted to make a good impression. Especially for you, Shiori. Your father had told me so much about you. He’d said your mother had died a year before, and you were inconsolable.”
The memory, distant as a dream, came rushing back. I hadn’t been able to stop staring at her—not for her beauty, but because her smile had seemed so tentative, so nervous when she met my brothers and me—and when it came time for me to greet her, I did something that horrified Father’s ministers. I embraced her.
For a moment, she had glowed—just like Imurinya.
