A Threat of Shadows (32 page)

She stared at him, then looked out the window at the elves below. Those changing were still caught, others sat senseless on the ground or stumbled about as though in darkness.

“How many are free?”

Elryn looked at her. “Three.”

King Andolin dropped his head into his hands.

“Father,” Elryn said matter-of-factly, “it is time.”

The king sighed deeply then straightened his shoulders and looked at Ayda. His eyes drew her in and surrounded her.

“I have always loved you, my daughter,” he said, pulling her into an embrace. Then he stepped back and held her firmly by the shoulders. “Will you help me?” His voice was pleading. His eyes burned with the question.

“Of course,” she answered. “Anything you need.”

He opened his mouth for a moment, then closed it again. Turning abruptly away, he strode from the room followed by Elryn.

Ayda looked again at the eastern sky. The smoke spread across the blue sky like a stain.

She ran after them back down to the glen.

Elryn was standing at the eastern entrance of the clearing. He faced down the avenue that wound away under the tree, holding a longbow in his hand.

“What are you doing?” she asked, running up to him. She looked down at the handful of arrows stuck into the ground by his feet, waiting to be shot. “What are we going to do against him with a few arrows?” Still, she turned and stood next to him, facing down the quiet forest path.

“Not we,” he said. “Me. Our father has need of you.”

“I’m not leaving you,” Ayda said. “You can’t defeat him alone.”

“Our father has need of you,” he repeated. Then he pulled his eyes from the path and looked at her, smiling reassuringly. “I can if everything goes right. Now, go.”

She hesitated a moment. Elryn’s face was filled with… something. Fury? Determination? Agony? He leaned forward and kissed Ayda on the forehead. “I love you.”

His kiss burned slightly, as though she had been touched with a coal. Or maybe some ice. “And I love you.” Her brother nodded and turned to face the avenue again.

Ayda ran to the king who was shepherding the elves into one large group. She began helping, guiding the ones that could walk to sit among the half-transformed trees. The ones that couldn’t walk, they carried. Some rocked, curled on the ground like infants, some shrieked, some were bent and deformed, some had boils and sores.

As gently as she could, with tears spilling down her cheeks, Ayda herded them together.

“Someday,” her father had told her the day she had refused to be named his heir. “Someday, you will realize how much you love your people.”

And here, with the fire and darkness approaching from the east, she knew. She worked tirelessly, her heart breaking over and over.

When they were as collected as was possible with only a few of the half-formed trees sitting outside of a tight circle, Ayda sank down onto her knees.

Her father was pale.

“How do we protect them?” she asked.

He looked at her with desperate eyes. “I wanted you to be queen because there is a strength in you that is different,” he said, coming to her and grasping her hands. Then he closed his eyes. “May that strength sustain you.”

“Father?” she said uncertainly.

He dropped her hands and turned back to the circle of elves. Without looking, he waved in her direction. Ayda felt the air stir around her. She looked down and saw that her clothes had changed into a white robe covered in clear crystals.

The queen’s gown.

“Father,” she said with more steel in her voice. “This belongs to the queen.”

King Andolin looked sadly at the closest tree. There, her face frozen in pain and confusion, stood Queen Alaine, not fully a tree but far from an elf.

“She’s not dead!” Ayda cried. “And even if she were, you are still here and so is Elryn.” She gestured across the clearing to where the crown prince still stood firmly before the eastern entrance. The smoke and darkness were almost upon him.

Suddenly, flames blazed out from between the trees, and a thin, black figure strode into the clearing. The air around him rippled slightly, and even from across the glen, Ayda could feel that the trees near him were filled with loathing.

“This will be your end, Rivor,” Elryn said calmly.

Mallon laughed and looked across the clearing. “You don’t have many to fight with you.”

“We have what matters.”

“Yes, I see you’ve collected my curses. You do realize that just means that now I control all of you as I once controlled others. I could take all your brethren and use them as my own personal army, if I needed an army. Or just set them to killing each other.” Mallon smiled. “Or I could just leave them here to rot, haunted by my spirit for the rest of their long lives.”

“That’s what we were counting on,” Elryn said with a smile.

Before Ayda could understand what he was doing, Elryn nocked an arrow and sent it deep into the Rivor’s heart.

Mallon stumbled back a step, then stood straight and looked quizzically at Elryn. “Do you think you can kill me with an arrow?”

“Not yet,” Elryn answered.

Ayda was distracted by the movement of her father as he reached his arms out over the elves. He closed his eyes, and Ayda felt the spirits of the elves fight to give him their attention. Each elf pushed aside the power of their curse for just a moment to answer the call of their king. She felt their agreement, but her attention was too divided between them and Elryn for her to understand what was happening.

“Aydalya,” the king said gently.

She turned back to him just as he opened his eyes.

“It was our only choice.”

She wasn’t sure if it was an explanation or an apology.

At that moment, each elf gave a long sigh and toppled lifelessly to the ground. Thin wisps of light rose from their bodies, slowly curling toward the sky.

Ayda’s breath caught in her throat in horror. “No!”

Her mind spun as a darkness tore out of each figure and rushed across the clearing toward the Rivor.

This was how they would defeat him. As each elf died, each curse was set loose and flew back to its master. Almost all of his power would be held again in his body, and that body would be mortal.

Mallon cried out and grabbed at his chest where the arrow sat.

Elryn smoothly drew another and sent it sinking in next to the first. The Rivor hissed and threw a burst of flame at Elryn. He screamed as flames engulfed him. Ayda took a step toward her brother.

Her father stepped between her and Elryn, stopping her. The flames grew and a growing darkness spread out behind him.

A terrible blackness, solid and living, shot out of Mallon toward the prince. The Rivor dropped to his knees as Elryn raised one hand and the darkness shattered. Pieces shot off him and flew throughout the glen. Elryn faltered then collapsed. Ayda screamed his name. A sliver of darkness shot toward her father’s back. She shoved him out of the way.

The shard spun deep into her chest. It stabbed into her, shooting out tendrils, wrapping and crushing her.

“Ayda” her father’s voice was strangled as he reached for her.

Inside of her, the darkness spread, consuming her. She dropped to her knees, gasping for breath while everything inside her burned with darkness.

The king reached his arm out toward the wisps of light floating up from the elves. He breathed out a command, and the tendrils streamed over to Ayda, as though carried by a wind.

A flood rushed into her. Voices clamored and wept and commanded. An enormous weight settled on her and she fell to her knees. She clamped her hands over her ears to block out the roar, but it was within her, stretching her, deafening her.

There was a roar of fury, and the elves inside of her tore into the darkness, ripping the fingers of darkness out of her and shoving them into a small ball. Then they wrapped themselves around it, smothering it inside of her. With the darkness contained, the voices stilled and drew back to the edges of her mind, but they did not leave.

Fire spread across the glen. The trees burned, their cries of anger filling Ayda’s mind.

Her father moved in front of her again, sheltering her from the backdrop of flames and darkness. Tears streamed down his cheeks.

“I will stay to finish this. You must leave, Ayda. You are all that is left.”

She pushed at him, trying to get to Elryn. Past the king’s shoulder burned a wall of fire. Mallon stumbled out of the flames, but the prince was gone.

“Ayda,” her father’s voice snapped her attention back to him. “Run!”

Chapter 39

Alaric blinked. He was staring at Ayda, their horses walking calmly along the road still damp from last night’s deluge. Ayda dropped his hand. She looked down, letting her hair fall forward in front of her face.

“My people are not dead,” she said softly. “But they are not alive, either.”

Alaric couldn’t find any words. The elves, all of the elves who had sacrificed themselves were inside of her. No wonder energy flowed out of her. She was like a dam holding back a flood.

“My people are bound to me. They exist in a half-life, a shadow world contained inside of me. They give me their power, but it bleeds them dry of their own… essence… their own souls. Yet they cannot die. They cannot change or heal or free themselves. They just continue, tattered remnants of a once formidable people.

“They crowd my mind. They fill everything. They infest…” Her voice trailed off. She picked a twig from her horse’s mane.

Alaric’s attention was caught by a movement of the stick in her hand. What had been nothing more than a sliver of wood swelled to the size of a nut. Ayda’s hands still rolled it unconsciously between her fingers as it lengthened into a thin stick. The stick sprouted branches with tiny green buds.

“They saved me from being consumed by Mallon’s darkness. I should be grateful.” Ayda’s features hardened. She squeezed the small tree, now clearly a maple, in her fist. “But they left me alone, and yet I’m never actually alone. I carry the weight of them always, every day, no matter where I am.” Her voice rose. “I can’t speak to them, but I also can’t get away from their presence.”

The little maple tree burst into flames.

She looked back at Alaric. Her eyes were dark with anguish. “So yes, when this is done, I will sleep. What was my life ended eight years ago.”

Alaric pulled Beast away a step, looking at her warily. Catching sight of the burning tree, Ayda snorted in irritation and tossed it aside. As it fell, the flames solidified, just like the flame on Alaric’s necklace, and a perfect model of a burning tree fell to the ground. She didn’t even look back as the spot of orange disappeared behind them on the road.

“There is too much power…” she said. “Too much for one body. It flows out too quickly. It trickles out when I don’t know it. This… person, this… thing that I have become is not a good thing. No one should be able to flatten hills or level a city on a whim.”

“Like Mallon?” Alaric asked.

Ayda nodded. “And so I am still with you, and not sleeping yet.” Her face grew pensive again. “I wasn’t there when they began to fight him.”

Alaric nodded, remembering her racing to the glen. “Would you have made a difference?”

“No. I was no stronger than the others. Weaker than many. I would have died like the rest. But my people sacrificed our whole race to try to destroy his power. I cannot stop before I have tried to do the same.”

Ayda fell back into silence. Everything about her made sense now. The effortless way she performed magic, the tortured limbs and faces when she was changing back from a tree. And the fact that she was now part of this group, truly part of it, because she wanted to defeat Mallon. At least that was a goal that Alaric could trust. As long as he was trying to destroy Mallon, Ayda would be with him.

They rode on next to each other in silence. Alaric mulled over her memory for a long time. Will was right. Ayda did have darkness within her. Whatever blackness Mallon had attacked the glen with, a piece of it was inside her. If it weren’t for the power of the elves, she surely would have been destroyed.

The only question now was what that darkness had been doing for the last eight years.

The Scale Mountains drew closer as the day went on, their barren slopes rising like jagged teeth. The lower foothills were carpeted with dark green pines, but the taller slopes were bare rock.

The western road ran up against the foothills of the Scales before intersecting a narrow dirt track that ran north and south along the edge of the range. They turned south and Douglon took the lead, walking off the road along the base of the slope, looking closely at every nick in the mountains. He stopped them several times while he explored small paths they came across, but came back each time shaking his head.

“Faster, dwarf,” Ayda chided him. “I thought you’d been here before.”

“I came from the mountains north of here last time, not from the east like this,” Douglon said, glowering at her. “I only passed this way on the way out, and it was quite dark. But these hills are wrong. These were carved by a glacier. Kordan’s valley was behind a mountain that jutted up from the west.”