Reawakening (31 page)

Tarn turned slowly, his stomach rising and his head spinning.

Not far from him, Cayl still stood over Aline, his shoulders braced and his head up. There were broken arrows scattered around his feet, and he did not move, not even to breathe. As embers sank down through the air, Tarn saw why.

Cayl had turned to stone.

“Esen didn’t know he could do that,” the Shadow mused, shaking her head. “Though there were all sorts of rumors about how exactly that nixie had cursed him. How fruitlessly noble, to sacrifice himself for a dying woman.” She stood up. “Of course, those arrows would have brought her a swifter death had they struck.”

Death after death shuddered through Tarn, and as he tried to step forward, his body shook and weakened.

“They were poisoned, of course,” the Shadow mentioned, walking down the steps toward him, bringing the threads of dust and darkness with her in a thin mist. “I can’t kill you, but a bare touch of any one of those would fell a mortal man. They should incapacitate even you for a while. Perhaps you would be good enough to just go back to sleep.”

Tarn lunged forward at her, but his knee gave out, throwing him awkwardly onto the floor. Gard caught him, his hands warm and steady, and snapped, “I’m not crippled yet.”

“No,” she said, strolling closer, “but you are caught in that human form, aren’t you? And bound for years, once the poison cripples him and sends him back to sleep.”

Gard’s pale eyes widened, and his hands tightened on Tarn’s forearms. He wet his lips, looking between Tarn and the Shadow, and then leaned forward to demand urgently, “Release me.”

And again, the Shadow laughed.

“Please,” Gard begged. He looked like he would have said more, but the Shadow’s laughter drowned him out.

The room was spinning around Tarn, and he couldn’t fight off another blow. Quietly, he released the hold he had over Gard.

The connection between them crumbled like sand, the ugly weight of it lifting from Tarn’s soul even as his heart broke. For a moment, Gard stood, utterly still, his eyes shocked.

Then his human form vanished, and for a moment Tarn held a whirl of sand in his arms.

“Free!”
Gard sang out, and the wind roared up and out, lifting every torn banner in the hall as Alagard, desert storm once more, streaked out through the broken roof, screaming out his triumph and relief.

And the Shadow laughed and laughed.

“And to think you once rode against me with half the world at your back,” she gloated. “Look at you now, old king. Your hoard are dying, your reluctant lover has fled, your new sword arm has turned to stone.” She yawned delicately. “At least I know where to go next. I think the survivors need to hear how you’ve failed. Poor little Esen can run straight back to the Court of Shells and tell the survivors that the Shadow was just too strong for you.” She tapped her finger on her chin, pouting a little. “And then I’ll kill them, of course, but should it be one by one or all at once?”

“I won’t let you,” Tarn managed, the words catching in his throat as he sank back on his heels. The air was full of ash and embers, multiplying before his eyes as his vision blurred.

“You can’t stop me,” she said. “There’s no one left to help you. You’ve lost them all.”

But from the back of the hall, his voice trembling, Zeki said, “He’s still got me.”

“Easily mended,” the Shadow said, raising her hand.

But a quiet little thread settled against Tarn’s heart, young and scared and held together by nothing more than raw courage. It was such a small thing, but he could think again and reach out to touch his power, and so he called up the flames in a ring around himself and the Shadow, cutting her off from the rest of the room and boiling her miasma from the air.

They had been here before, although the Shadow had worn a different face then, and that time it had ended with the whole world torn asunder.

“You and I,” he said to her, weary to the bone. “No more games.”

The air crackled around them, and the Shadow’s face went cold and still. There was nothing playful left in her voice as she said, “To dissolution, no matter the cost?”

Tarn pushed himself slowly to his feet, forcing his knees to lock in place and hold him up. “This is where your hoard dwell. It is your choice.”

“They are distractions, nothing more,” the Shadow said, sounding bored. “They will keep breeding and keep filling up the empty places of the world, however many we kill today.”

A second thread curled around Tarn’s heart, next to Zeki’s—Aline, no longer fading toward death, but gathering strength.

“Why do we do this?” Tarn asked the Shadow, as he had not had a chance to ask last time. “Why must you destroy all you touch?”

She hissed at him, twisting Esen’s face until it no longer looked human. “Because I was here
first!
And you came, you and your kind, into this quiet place and you polluted it with fire and light and life, and there was no more quiet to be found. And I could lay it bare and wipe every foul growth from the earth, and it would still be
ruined.
”

Stubborn, foul-tempered defiance suddenly ran up Ia’s thread, urging him on, and he breathed a little more freely, hoping the Shadow would not notice. And here was Dit, throwing life up the link at him like a burst of fast music, and a new thread, silken, languid, and vicious—Sethan, whom he had never expected to be part of any hoard.

“Poor Shadow,” he said, and it was not all mockery. It had worn a pink-mouthed lisping boy in Eyr, and he wondered if it always took children, who had little knowledge of the true sweetness and sorrow of love or how it felt to create life and companionship and beauty out of simple things.

And, more precious than he had realized, Myrtilis reached out to him, her thread as fine and fragile as spider silk, thin and fraying and worn.

“Tarn,”
she whispered straight into his heart.
“Trust.”

He didn’t know what to make of that, but the new strength they were all bringing him surged through him, making his fires burn hot. His human body was too weakened to channel all the strength he wished to unleash upon the Shadow, so he let it go, rising into a towering pillar of flame.

The Shadow stared up at him, her eyes narrowed in calculation, but he did not become the dragon. Instead, he stayed between the two shapes, burning as a beacon and a warning to all those who thought they had looked on the Shadow and seen true power. He was taller than the hall like this, swelling up into the sky above the palace until his light shone down on every rooftop. The air was cool, stirring around him with the promise of a storm to come. In the east, dawn was limning the far-distant mountains, but in the west the mountains between him and the desert were mere dim, storm-blurred shadows against the clearer darkness of the night sky.

The Shadow’s lips parted with surprise. “I thought we never battled in these forms. We could actually rip each other apart.”

“Yes,” Tarn said, and his voice shuddered across the sky. “But now, when it is just you and I, and the whole world waiting, let it be so.”

And finally, finally, the Shadow rose out of Esen’s body, piling up in a spreading, smearing cloud that veiled the stars.

Tarn struck, hard and sharp, and they met with a crack like thunder, light splintering across the sky. Tarn formed a great spear of fire and reached into the mass of Shadow to rip it apart, but it wrapped around him, smothering out the air that kept him burning, and he had to use his weapon to tear himself free. They recoiled, turning around each other in the sky. Tarn struck fast and hard, trying to catch it unaware even as it crept around and behind him, trying to suffocate away stray flames.

And all the while, the wind was rising, pulling Tarn’s flames out of his control. It hit the Shadow too, thinning it into tatters that could be burned away.

There was screaming below them, running panic in the streets, roofs burning where he had bled flame, but he couldn’t afford to spare any attention. The Shadow was battering him, stealing his strength, and he was forced to grapple with a thing that faded under his glare and reformed behind him to attack from another angle.

The fight swung him round again, so he faced west toward Alagard and the desert. And he saw the storm coming, the very same mass of wind and sand that Gard had left tethered on the far side of the mountains, bearing straight down on them like a spear loosed from a god’s hand.

The distraction cost him, as the Shadow surged up and forward, curving over him like a wave. Tarn ducked and dodged, hurling himself through its heart in one great flare.

And the storm struck, screaming rage and triumph, even as Gard’s voice sounded, fierce as the sun.
“Tarn! Down!”

Chapter 31: Holding

H
E
FELL
back into his human form as fast as he could, but it wasn’t quite fast enough. The edge of the storm caught the last of his flames, shredding them into nothingness before he could pull them into a safer form.

It hurt and left him gasping on the floor, but it meant nothing compared to what was happening in the sky above him. Gard’s storm tore into the Shadow, ripping it apart like a lion on its prey, sand and wind scouring through it. The sky went dark again, but this was the darkness of a sandstorm, all its power focused on one spot in the air above the city.

Tarn didn’t notice the sand falling through the air, soft as rain, until Esen turned over and coughed. He looked away from the storm then, though he couldn’t stop listening to the Shadow wail and beg, and saw Esen push herself up to spit sand out of her mouth, her lashes flickering. Then she sank down again, her cheek resting against a low billow of dust, and he realized the tiled floor was covered with a soft layer of grit, and more was coming down.

He was too weak to move far, but he could reach Esen, and he managed to pull her long headscarf off and toss it over both their heads, trapping as much clean air as he could. The sand kept coming down, covering his feet warmly, and he braced himself against Esen, making his shoulders a roof to keep the sand away as the world went warm and dry and dark around them.

When Esen stirred, the first thing she said was “Tarn?”

Her voice was different, so much more life to it that he wondered how they had ever been fooled by the mask the Shadow had forced on her.

“Ssh,” he breathed. “Do you need a light?”

“No!” she snapped, and then added, her voice very soft and careful. “Fire burns air. We’re buried, aren’t we?”

“Not far down,” Tarn said, though the sand covered him completely now. He thought of the great storm he had seen from the tower in the mountains and shuddered. How much of the desert had Gard just dropped on Tiallat?

The movement shook the edges of the cloth and more sand trickled underneath. Esen said, low and urgent, “Stay still. They can dig us out, but we must save air. Don’t talk.”

He obeyed, bracing himself as the sand began to weigh heavily. Strange to think that this child knew better how to survive a desert storm than he did, who loved the storm so fiercely. The silence was hot and uncomfortable, their mingled breaths beginning to turn it stale.

It was Esen who broke the quiet, though. “Tarn, I’m sorry.”

“Ssh,” he breathed.

“I wanted to warn you all. I wanted to so much.”

“You couldn’t have,” he told her. He’d never known a mortal who didn’t blame themselves for being a victim of this curse, and he ached every time he felt their guilt. He was tired now, though, and the usual words of comfort stuck in his throat. He wanted to sleep, wanted it like he hadn’t since Astalor, after the battle had ended.

He couldn’t sleep yet, though, not while Esen needed his shelter.

For a while, they were quiet again. His chest was starting to ache, and her breaths were getting shallower. He was dizzy again, and he wondered if becoming the flame had been enough to sear the poison from this body, and whether the distant whispers of his new hoard would be enough to keep him strong until they were rescued.

“I’m Alagard’s priestess,” Esen said then. “I belong to him.”

“Yes,” Tarn murmured, not caring.

“But you can protect me too,” she whispered. “If you would like.”

And one more thread twined into place, one more human heart for his hoard, and this one was close enough that it gave him strength both to brace himself against the sand and reflect a little life back into her.

He never knew how long they lay under the sand, Esen’s breath soft against his jaw. The first clue he had that they had been found was a sudden shift in the sand above them, and a hand clamping on his leg.

It was a scramble then, many hands joining to drag them out, and Tarn shook the sand out of his hair and looked for Gard.

Instead, he found Raif, looking exhausted and triumphant by the light of a murky dawn.

“Where’s Gard?” Tarn demanded, still holding on to Esen, who was clinging to his arm, looking around with nervous eyes.

Raif shrugged. “Not here now, though I see he was.” He gestured idly at the sand that filled the court high enough that it was still trickling out of the newly shattered windows with a soft rustle. He looked at Esen then, his brows sweeping into a grim frown. “She’s not…?”

“She is Esen again,” Tarn said and looked up. The sky was still brown with sand, but it was beginning to clear enough to see shimmers of blue through the dust, and he could feel no hint of the Shadow.

There was no sign of Gard either, and Tarn ached for him. But he had set Gard free, and this was all he could expect.

“Aline?” he said instead. “And Cayl?”

“Found,” Raif said. “And she is being treated.” He pointed across the room to where a familiar-looking chirurgeon was kneeling by Aline. “Clever of you to leave me in the care of an ally.”

“Aye,” Tarn agreed cautiously, recognizing the Savattin doctor from earlier that night. “What allies would those be?”

“The resistance,” Raif said, and Tarn narrowed his eyes and looked at the men and women scattered across the court again. There were a lot of them, all wearing rough clothes and mismatched weapons, and there was a grim, disbelieving joy in the way they moved.