Frost Like Night (28 page)

If he admitted he couldn't do this, what other declarations would come streaming out of his mouth?

I can't save her.

I know I can't save her.

She'll die, and I'll stand there helpless to do anything but watch her go.

Mather doubled over, forehead to his knees.

This test was seeping into his mind. He just needed to get
out
. He'd get out and—she would still die.

“I can't do this,” he spit, fury boiling in his gut.

Nothing happened. Mather pulled himself up, glaring
at the darkness. The magic here knew his heart. He had to be honest,
humble
.

Fine.

He might not be able to save her. But he wouldn't let her do it alone.

He swallowed, willing his lips to move and release the words with intention, with submission.

“I can't,” he said, muscles hard, “do this.”

The ground trembled again, a gust of air billowing coolness in a much-needed burst of relief. Mather's tension sloshed away the moment he saw the door open in the wall.

White light seeped into the maze, glaring after the utter darkness of the halls. Mather leaped to his feet and plunged into it.

“Meira!” he shouted. “William—”

The names echoed back to him much too loudly, a rebound of noise that spoke of far smoother walls than the carved stone of the labyrinth so far. His eyes adjusted to the light, pain lancing through his head as he took in the room. A tiled floor of black and white squares spanned in a perfect rectangle with pillars of white guarding either side. The ceiling—there was none. Just those pillars stretching on and on, ending in a cloud of brilliant ivory light.

Mather's instincts raged anew and he scrambled for more weapons. A dagger and one of the swords he wore across his spine. He spun, weapons raised, body yearning for a fight
while his mind tried to speak rationally against his euphoria at having an enemy he could
see
.

Because . . . well, he could see this enemy.

And seeing it conflicted with every logical explanation Mather could dredge up.

Three figures stood in the room. One was Meira, a bit more dust-covered than she had been, but uninjured; another was William, hands free of weapons and face completely blank in a frightening, deathlike sheen that Mather couldn't understand.

Until he recognized the last person in the room with them.

As a child, William had found a number of books on the Winter Kingdom, and in one, a portrait of Queen Hannah showed her as a small, pretty woman with long white hair and a serene stare. Mather had stolen glances at that picture whenever he could, desperate to feel some connection to the woman who, at the time, he thought was his mother.

Now that painting came to life before him, and he found himself staring at Queen Hannah Dynam.

“You've reached the end of the labyrinth,” Hannah said, smiling. “You've come so far.”

THE CLOSER CERIDWEN
drew to the Ventrallan queen, the quieter everything became. As if all her other senses demanded her attention more, drowning out her ability to hear anything but the echoing
thump-thump
of her heart matching the cadence of her feet on the earth. The handles of her knives dug into her palms. The crisp, bitter air of Autumn met the frigid air of Winter, weaving into a blanket of iciness that burned Ceridwen's lungs.

This was war.

The Autumnian, Summerian, and Yakimian armies ran alongside her, the impact from their steps vibrating up her legs. But nothing penetrated her fog of concentration, the bumps sprouting along her arms the only thing telling her that her army shouted a war cry. True war cries didn't need to be heard—they were felt.

It had been too much to hope that Raelyn would surge
forward along with her soldiers—instead, she hung back at the rear. She'd make Ceridwen fight her way through until, by the time they met, she would be tired and bloodied while Raelyn remained poised and whole. And were this a normal fight, Raelyn would need such an advantage. But Ceridwen had seen the power Raelyn wielded now, how she had snapped Simon's neck with a flick of her wrist.

It was Ceridwen who would need any advantage she could get.

Lekan's shoulder jostled into Ceridwen's moments before they collided with the Ventrallan army. A wordless signal, one they had shared dozens of times—a swipe of his hand on her arm before an attack, a bump of her fist to his back before a rescue.

I'm here. I'm with you.

Ceridwen was never more grateful to have him by her side.

They fell into a routine as they always did, as if this wasn't a war, but rather one of their many missions to free Summerian slaves. Her left shoulder angled to his right, pivoted to create a deadly barrier with him slashing one side, her the other. When he ducked, she knew to duck too; when she deflected an enemy to take on another, the soldier stumbled into Lekan's blades. Against a dozen or so slavers, such maneuvers brought them quick victory—but never had they been forced to use it in a battle, where each soldier they felled was replaced by two more.

Nor had they ever used it on soldiers possessed by a deadly magic—not nearly as strong as Raelyn's grasp of it, but each enemy they met moved faster than they should, weapons puncturing the air in rapid blows that Ceridwen could barely see. Only her fighter's instincts kept her alive—she had no time to plan any attack.

These soldiers are using Angra's Decay.

But only Angra himself could spread the Decay. He was the source, as Meira had said. Until he showed up here, no one fighting against him needed to fear becoming like the soldiers they encountered, attacking as if they personally loathed each enemy they came upon.

One pause, a break in the wave of Ventrallan soldiers, and Ceridwen gasped icy air. They were in Winter now, snow matted and brown beneath the chaos, and the frigid air clung to Ceridwen's skin, making her nauseous with the discomfort. But these were prices she would willingly pay—for when she took stock of the area, she spotted Raelyn only four soldiers away.

Ceridwen met Lekan's eyes. He nodded and dove for the men, who advanced on him with howls of warning. He dropped the first two, ducked under the third, and impaled the fourth as Ceridwen dispatched the one he had avoided.

Raelyn watched this happen without moving. There was no weapon in her hands; she didn't even wear armor, just a simple black riding outfit and a small black mask, as if she had wandered into this battle while out on a leisurely gallop
through Winter's ivory forest.

Lekan slid to his knees from the momentum of gutting the final soldier. He stabbed his blades into the frozen earth to free his hands so he could interlace his fingers into a solid cup against the snow.

Ceridwen backed up, then took off at a sprint. She landed one of her feet in the cradle Lekan made and he lifted, jolting her into the air. Her bloodied knives glinted as she reared, body arching to send her soaring toward Raelyn, high atop her horse.

For the smallest flash, Raelyn's eyes widened behind her mask. She shot her arm out and an invisible force smacked into Ceridwen, spinning her body to the side, her knives dipping just shy of plunging into the Ventrallan queen's chest. Ceridwen slammed into Raelyn, knocking both of them so they landed with a heavy thud on the trampled snow.

Ceridwen lost her grip on her knives, her fingers going numb in the snow's chill. She scrambled to her feet, shuddering from head to toe, holding her breath against the aching shivers that hammered her from the inside out.

Raelyn shot upright as well, the half skirt of her riding outfit swirling around her tight black pants. Her mask did little to hide her furious glare.

“I had no idea you were so anxious to follow in your brother's path,” Raelyn snapped.

Ceridwen said nothing, partly because she had to grind
her jaw to keep from shaking to pieces, and partly because she hadn't expected to end up like this, facing Raelyn. The power the Ventrallan queen wielded was too much for her to take in this kind of confrontation—stabbing her quickly had been Ceridwen's only plan.

Now Raelyn would kill her.

Ceridwen darted her eyes around. The Ventrallan soldiers nearby gave them wide berth. Lekan had been drawn away, fighting alongside a group of Winterians who stood back to back, a knot of weapons that, even so, would soon be overwhelmed by the sheer number of Raelyn's troops. The only thing that Ceridwen and Lekan had had on their side was speed—and now that their momentum had been broken, reality set in.

They didn't have enough numbers to fight this battle. Especially when every attacking soldier could move so quickly. As Ceridwen watched, one of the Winterians in Lekan's group took a sword to the chest, causing another to cry out before Lekan corralled both of them into the middle of their circle, protected as much as they could be on a battlefield.

“Is my husband here?” Raelyn's voice scratched at Ceridwen.

“
Your
husband?” Ceridwen smiled. If she would die, flame and heat and burn it all, she'd die with a wicked grin on her face. “I'm fairly certain it wasn't your name he called out on our wedding night a few days back.”

Raelyn snarled and punched the air, lurching Ceridwen back beneath a force that rammed into her chest, emptying her lungs of breath. She went down in the snow, wheezing as she rolled onto her side in time to see Raelyn stomp forward, punching the air again. Ceridwen's head crashed back into the ground, her limbs straightened, every muscle pinned as Raelyn stopped over her, one leg on either side of Ceridwen's chest.

“Dear girl, you
really
don't want to start sharing stories like that.” Raelyn crouched down, her smile sickly sweet. “You're the one who truly cares, not me. You care so much, about so many things. Like your brother—shall I tell you what it felt like to kill him?”

Ceridwen jerked against the magic that held her, but nothing relented, and Raelyn leaned closer, stroking her finger across Ceridwen's cheek.

“It felt delicious,” Raelyn purred. “To have the power to end a life with your own hands—” Her grip tightened, nails sinking into Ceridwen's face. “You can't imagine.”

Raelyn pushed herself upright, standing directly over her again, and curled her hand into a fist. Raelyn's magic left Ceridwen's head free, so she turned to look at the battle around her, the last fleeting moments she would get to see the fate of her friends. Lekan and the Winterians had retreated beneath the swelling flood of Ventrallans. Which left her with Raelyn, alone, separated from any of her allies by lines of deadly soldiers.

She blinked, brow twitching.

Not all the soldiers around her wore Ventrallan armor.

She strained against the magic to look toward the line of Winterian trees. More fighters ran to join the Ventrallans, adding numbers alongside a few great iron contraptions rolling on creaking wheels.

Angra's army. And they had brought his cannons—not many, few enough to allow them to travel quickly, but even as Ceridwen analyzed this new addition, one sparked to life and shot a burst of black smoke behind a deadly stone ball that tore into the lines of fighters.

They had already been outnumbered against the Ventrallans. Now . . .

Ceridwen's heart shuddered, and it had nothing to do with the bed of snow cradling her.

Raelyn too noticed the influx of fighters. She cackled, giddy, and her eyes landed on something just as Ceridwen's did.

An impenetrable black cloud polluted the air at the line of trees.

Angra.

Ceridwen should have been incapacitated by horror.

But as she lay on that awful cold ground, pinned by Raelyn's unbeatable power and watching Angra drop into the valley, she saw a way, the only way, to fight the Ventrallan queen.

Angra strode forward, his Spring armor gleaming as he
moved from shadow to sunlight. A figured dropped out of the blackness behind him, the remnants of smoke wafting up into the trees.

No.

Theron caved forward, wailing as though every nerve had been frozen, burned, and frozen again. Angra had brought himself and Theron to this fight—by magic.

And if he had brought Theron, that meant Angra had first gone to Jannuari to retrieve him.

Ceridwen gagged. Meira—what had he done to her? How had Angra even used his magic to bring Theron here? She knew Meira could use her magic to transport other Winterians, but Angra shouldn't be able to affect Theron, a
Cordellan
, like that. Unless this was a further trick of the Decay? All Ceridwen knew was Theron screaming, rolling in the snow. Whatever Angra had done to get him here, it had worked, but it didn't seem . . . right.

Angra paid Theron no heed, simply marched toward the heat of the battle, his posture tall and his face livid.

That alleviated Ceridwen's worry. He wouldn't be this furious if he had succeeded in killing Meira.

Raelyn applauded his arrival. Clearly she hadn't yet figured out what Angra would do, but Ceridwen had. They had anticipated that Angra would attempt to infect the opposing army with his Decay, and Ceridwen had been ready to block him.

But the seed of an idea blossomed in her mind, making
her grit her teeth. Angra's Decay would latch onto everyone in this valley, and though most would fight it, it would eventually worm its way through and infect them with the same mad power that encouraged Raelyn's evil.

Please, Meira.
Ceridwen sent the thought out into the void of her heart, holding it against the choice she was about to make.
Please hurry.

Angra kept moving, gliding past Raelyn and Ceridwen. As he did, more of his cannons fired behind him and he stretched out his arms as a father would to intercept a child. But his face told a different story—lips curled, teeth bared, eyes ablaze.

He jerked his arms forward.

Murky blackness streamed out of him, snaking through the armies. One tendril broke off and barreled straight at Ceridwen, and Raelyn watched, waiting for her to writhe and struggle.

But she didn't fight it.

The magic collided with Ceridwen until she was nothing more than power and strength. Angra pumped as much into her as she wanted, poured it over her like bucket after bucket of water on a dry, dusty ground. She felt his desperation in that offering, how he wasn't holding back as he had with the small amounts of magic he had given to his soldiers.

This was the final war for both sides, and he would make the world his.

Ceridwen met Raelyn's eyes.

“When you want to kill someone, kill them, don't
taunt them
,” Ceridwen grunted, and jammed her arms up at Raelyn, shattering the magic's hold with her own influx of Decay.

Raelyn's face took on a look of utter shock just before her neck popped. The Ventrallan queen's body dropped to the snow beside Ceridwen, her eyes frozen in a permanent state of surprise.

Ceridwen shoved to her feet. The Decay filled every corner of her body so thoroughly, she thought she might burst from the burden of it, full of such endless, glorious strength that the world would stand in awe of her destruction as they would a wildfire desecrating a forest.

She was a flame, and she was the fuel, and she was the light that would blind every sad, weak creature in Primoria.

If all of Angra's allies felt this good, no wonder they'd sided with him.

Ceridwen shook her head.
No; remember all he's done. Remember who he is.

But this is power. THIS is strength. I've never had this before.

Ceridwen found herself running, barreling for the Autumn-Yakim-Summer army ahead. Any retreating had stopped, most soldiers now squirming in war with their minds as Angra's Decay pummeled for control. He still stood on the battlefield, black snakes of magic streaming out of him, his face swelling with demented joy.

This is power. This is strength. And these people are fighting it. They deserve to die.

No!

But Ceridwen's protest went unheard by her body, and she felt her legs propel her toward a group of Summerian fighters. They grunted and sweated but held, resisting Angra with more finesse than most, thanks to their years of fighting Simon's magic.

They need to die for it.

NO!

She leaped at them, and they saw her coming, their eyes registering their leader in a sweep of awareness. But they couldn't process her attacking them—she, of all of them, should have been the last to fall to Angra, and truly, that was the only reason she had any clarity at all now.

“Run!”
she screamed at them, one garbled plea that shot through the hatred burning in her. Flame and heat, she hadn't even hated Raelyn with this much passion—but she hated
them
, these ignorant, righteous idiots who would keep the world weak.