Page 343 of Burn of the Everflame

“How much longer?” she asked.

“A few more minutes,” I guessed, hoping I was right. A forebodingly black cluster of clouds had formed over the island. The setting sun was a quickly thinning sliver. If we didn’t make it to Coeurîle soon, the most critical part of this war would be fought in the dark.

A fitting end, perhaps.

For most of my life, my world had been ruled by control. My uncle’s dominion over the realm as King. My father’s manipulation of my family, and especially of me. My self-control over emotions I couldn’t risk revealing. The will of Blessed Mother Lumnos, around which I’d centered every choice.

Control made life predictable. Reliable. Understandable. Safe. It made my choices, and their consequences, easy to see. Even when I hated it, at least it gave me a path that wouldn’t bring my world to ruin—a trail of solid, well-lit stepping stones over the open mouth of a beast.

When Diem came into my life, control became a luxury we could rarely afford. Still, I’d clung to it in every way I could. I set myself aflame to light her darkness, lay my body on the coals so that she might have a safe place to step. Anything to keep her on the path she’d been born to walk.

Now we’d reached the final step. I’d promised Diem that we would have a future beyond this war, but the road ahead had disappeared into the shadows, and I had nothing left of me to burn to light the way.

I held out a palm and called on my godhood. Drained from the battle with Xipherus, it scraped in search of a glimmer of magic to offer to the Blessed Mother—one final, desperate prayer for my mate.

My hand lay empty, and my stomach sank.

Diem shifted in my arms. “What’s that?”

She pointed to Coeurîle. At the height of summer, one would expect its grassy hills to be a lush, vibrant green. Instead, the island was covered in a mottled beige-brown. The nearer we flew, the more it seemed to move.

My stomach dropped lower. “Diem, you broke the spell the Crowns cast on Coeurîle, didn’t you? The one that trapped you on the island and kept everyone else away?”

“I did. Why do you . . .” Her face went slack. “Oh, gods . . . those are⁠—”

“People,” I confirmed grimly.

A lot of them—enough to blanket the island from shore to shore.

“Sorae, circle overhead,” Diem ordered. Sorae gave a trill that sounded closer to a cough, her body shuddering. Diem ran a hand down her neck. “This will be over soon.”

Sorae’s head turned, and her gaze cut back to mine. The slits of her pupils swelled, transforming her golden eyes into ominous obsidian discs. There was a message in their darkness, and though I had neither magic nor bond to read it, I knew exactly what it said.

My grip tightened on Diem.

Sorae turned her focus to the island, shifting her wings to drop us lower in the sky. I felt Diem tense as we approached the shore, and over the bond, cold tendrils slithered through her anger’s flames. Perhaps she was worried the former Crowns’ spell might still have some lingering power to hurt me or Sorae.

But after we safely flew over the island’s borders, her terror began to burn as hotly as her wrath. She shifted her weight, sliding down Sorae’s back until she was pressed hard against me. Her face turned away from the island, wearing a haunted stare.

“You don’t have to go down there,” I said softly. “I’ll lock Ophiucae in his cell. We’ll come back to deal with him another day—when you’re ready.”

Her eyes closed, then reopened. Muscles worked along her throat. Across the link that bound us, fear and fury warred in cataclysmic waves.

She pulled her sword from my belt, then slammed it into its scabbard on her hip. “I’m ready.”

Sorae swooped over the island’s hills, and my apprehension grew as I studied the swarming people. Though we were too far to see their eyes, they moved with the same awkward, aimless lumber of the others whose minds Ophiucae had erased. I feared what it might do to Diem, and to me, if we spotted Eleanor or the others we’d left behind in Lumnos among them.

My focus shifted to the island’s shores, where large wooden ships were tied up at each of its docks, a wind-and-wave sigil painted on the sails. “They’re Merosian,” I said.

“Why did he send them here?” Diem asked. “Why not send them to Fortos with the others?”

I sat quietly, waiting for her to work through what I’d already figured out. Knowing it would crush her when she did.

Ophiucae had been one step ahead of us all day. He’d known exactly where we’d be and when, how we planned to attack, how to lull us into thinking we’d won before showing his hand. Even our plan to bring him here had been prepared for and countered—a plan that Diem had only shared the details of this morning with me and Alixe. Our thoughts had been shielded by godstone against his intrusion . . . but Diem’s had not.

He’d used her own mind against her. Against her people. Against her brother.

When the realization hit her, her wrath blazed hotter than the sun. It seared past the edges of our bond and grew into something bigger, something else. Something that bled into the world, pulsing with a thunderous heartbeat like a living, breathing thing—a vengeful, ancient thing. It whispered and it hummed, and when it did, I heard the faintest notes of an old, beloved song.