Sorrow's Peak (Serpent of Time Book 2) (57 page)

The fire burned low, casting the thinnest veil of orange light in a radius around the pit, but the heat it put off was a welcome invitation she obliged without a second thought. Arms wrapped around herself, she hunkered down in the dry, yellowed grass and dropped onto her backside to sit with her legs crossed and limbs hugged close.

Staring into the coals, the colors mingling white and blue against the brilliant orange in the center, she focused on that eerie light without even realizing she’d allowed it to lull and carry her away to a place where she felt at peace with the things she had to do.

It was a rare thing to find that place inside herself.

Most of her thoughts were frayed around the edges and tinged in self-defeat.

She’d taken the entire quest at face value ever since it was presented to her. From the time Rhiorna told her she was meant to do something great until the moment she sat down in Yovenna’s cottage and listened to the old seer spin yarns from a dream, Lorelei allowed the excitement of having her own purpose cloud her judgment. She’d done her best to take advantage of Gwendoliir’s wisdom, but what more could he have told her than he already did. She needed to keep Finn alive, or all was lost. But obviously she failed at doing just that a countless number of times. How was she supposed to change it? Why hadn’t anyone been able to tell her that?

Inevitably, the serpent that spun against the world, the one the old Alvarii claimed she shared a soul with, would bring them back to do it all over again.

There were so many questions she should have asked, but what did she know? She was only seventeen… No, wait. Was she still seventeen? What month was it? What day? Had she rolled right through her naming day and not even noticed? For the life of her, she couldn’t put her finger on the date. She only knew it was autumn and she’d been born in autumn, on the eleventh day of Deceliir. Oteraan was almost spent when she departed Leithe with Trystay and there were six weeks until her eighteenth birthday. Trys promised her a celebration the likes of which she’d never seen, but she supposed such promises were easy to make when one had no intention of keeping them.

Had it really been so many weeks since she ran from the caravan, stumbling into the Edgelands with Trystay’s hounds yowling and giving chase through the night? Had she missed her birthday?

Try as she might to tick off the days in her mind, she couldn’t account for them all. It felt like it had been longer than six weeks. Sometimes their journey through the frigid and unyielding terrain of Rimian seemed as though it lasted months and time itself felt lost and muddled in her mind.

Either way, seventeen or eighteen, she spent the years of her life hidden away in a tower with her sister, being taught lies about the world and believing she had the power to make a difference in the outcome of her own future if she just squawked a little louder in the company of her kingly father’s steward.

A cracking twig under foot jolted her from the depth of her lament. Head jerking up, a startled gasp caught in the back of her throat and was lost in the heated pop and spark of the wood in the fire. As the flashes cleared, thin puffs of smoke lingered in the aftermath. She leaned forward, relatively certain there were two eyes staring back at her through the protective magical veil around their camp.

Were she standing, she wouldn’t have come eye-level with them, and at first she was convinced it was only a bear, or some other nocturnal animal, but then it tilted its head, stared directly at her with a sense of compassion that signaled a deep whining sound from the creature’s chest. The sound stirred strange emotion inside her.

It could see her. More than that, it was staring directly at her, and then she caught glimpse of a silver essence several feet behind the creature, gliding across the stone-thin grasses to stand beside it. It wavered, taking shape and casting a warm glow on the beast it stood beside, and as her eyes clued into what stood before her, the emotions swelling in her chest were almost more than she could bear.

“Mother?” she whispered, scrambling to her feet so quickly she kicked dust and stone into the fire pit and made it smoke.

“Lorelei…” Her whisper echoed through the night, loud enough it should have woken her sleeping companions, but no one stirred in the tents at her back. Finn’s snores remained steady, the flaps of Bren’s tent unmoving.

“Mother?” It couldn’t be real. “Mother, am I dreaming?”

“Lorelei, come with us.” The wispy essence of her mother brought a hand up to touch the veil between them, fingers passing through it and reaching toward her. “Come with us, Lorelei, and we will show you the way.”

Tentatively, she stepped toward the barrier, eyes cast toward the hulking, shaggy figure beside the ethereal being that spoke with her mother’s voice. Stretched across its broad neck she caught the glint of amber and moonstone, dark bronze and her hand instinctively lifted to the amulet around her own neck, knowing instantly it was the same one.

A rumbling voice sounded in her mind, its baritone reminding her immediately of her brother. “My daughter,” he said, “I have longed to look upon you since you were little more than a flutter in your mother’s womb.”

Her mother’s hand slipping through the veil was so close, she could almost touch it, but she was afraid to reach for it, and with the last syllable of her father’s voice still echoing in her mind, she took a tentative step back before that hand could touch her.

“Mother,” she shook her head, “Father, how are you here?”

“Come, Lorelei,” Rognar said inside her mind. “There is something we must show you.”

Again, she could feel her head moving back and forth, denial coursing through her as she retreated further from the reaching hand. “No,” she declared. “This is some trick, some magic from the monster we face in the mountain.”

But the reaching hand gripped the fabric of Lorelei’s tunic, curling and bunching like a fist around it and dragging her stumbling through the barrier. She absorbed the magic, felt it falter and dwindle at her back, and then her mother’s essence was all around her, the familiar scent of her perfume—lilac and summer berries—filling her senses and overwhelming her to tears.

Along with that essence, a series of images flashed through her mind. Pahjah and her mother in conversation, the pact between two women to save a mother’s children at all costs, Pahjah’s freedom and Mirien, Lorelei’s little sister, passing one last desperate look at Ygritte before Pahjah gripped her sleeve and drew her away. She saw her mother pacing the floors of her confinement, the long tail of her dressing gown swishing across the floor, the occasional brief glance at her own reflection in the mirror. The reflection was pale, the dark circles beneath her eyes a telling tale of sleeplessness, hunger, woe. The Alvarii servant who brought her last meal to her prison, protected by a host of guards. A note flashed as she lifted the bowl, four words scrawled across a stained bit of parchment:
Free yourself, my queen
.

She watched her mother eat that slip of parchment, then drink down the soup quickly, as if she feared she’d lose her nerve. Bits of liquid dribbled down her chin, spilling onto the front of her white silk dressing gown. Her vision blurred, no, not her vision, her mother’s vision, as she realized she was her mother. She was seeing these images through her mother’s eye, and those eyes were blinking heavily, the world beyond the lids darkening as she faltered with dizziness that sent her crashing to the floor.

A jolt of pain as she cracked her head on the hard stone, and then there was only darkness.

Lorelei tried to withdraw from the vision, from the lifting of spirit, the beckoning howl of the wolf drawing her essence to the window, where she escaped the prison that had been her life all those years she was married to Aelfric.

“Rognar.”

“Ygritte,” the wolf called out to her. “Come, my love. The cycle has begun anew, and never will we be parted again.”

Then, and only then, did her mother withdraw her vision from Lorelei’s mind, the wisp of spirit diminishing, reforming into the recognizable memory of her mother before her and hovering in the space beside the ethereal wolf that was her father.

Her parents were… no. It was too much.

Throat tight, the muscles contracting against a tidal wave of confused emotion rising inside her, the only sound to escape her was a strangled gasp.

Ygritte was… dead.

“No,” she murmured through strangled cords.

The woman had always been a mystery, and yet she was still her mother. In that brief flash of memory she’d come to know her in a way she’d never done during their seventeen years together.

Lifting wavering ethereal hand, she felt the scarcest whisper of a touch upon her cheek, swiping through the tears she hadn’t realized dripped down her cheeks.

“Don’t cry for me, my little love,” her mother whispered. “Rejoice for me, for I am now free.”

“But…”

There were no words. Her mind still believing the whole charade was in some small part a trick, some elaborate hoax plotted by the enemy they faced in the mountain, but when her father lifted the clawed paw of his hand to the other side of her face, the gentle and affectionate touch of both her parents filled her with such grief there was no way the intensity of the emotion could be a hoax.

Lorelei closed her eyes, allowed the memory of that moment, of the only time in her life she’d stood before both of her parents, felt their love pouring through her from across a veil of time and memory. It would haunt her for the rest of her days, filling her with love and sorrow until she felt as though her body would burst and send her essence spiraling up to join the stars in the sky above.

Gone was the anger she felt upon learning her own father offered her to Heidr before she was ever born. He had no choice. Her soul was never hers.

“You are the everlasting symbol of our love,” her mother said. “You are our triumph over all that fought to destroy what we had.”

“But if I’m destroyed… If Finn dies…”

The wolf wavered before her, dwindling until a man stood in its place, lingering so near her mother they were practically one essence. Even as the trees at their backs were visible through them, she felt a great sense of relief to look upon the man who brought her into the world. As everyone said her brother was his image rebranded, and Lorelei did, in fact, have his eyes. No wonder her mother faltered every time they came face to face, turning her stare away when she spoke to her own daughter. What pain it must have brought to find the man she loved staring back at her.

But she could have, in some small way, celebrated his memory by loving the daughter they brought into the world. A momentary twinge of regret and bitterness welled in her heart, making it difficult for her to breathe.

“There is not time to linger on regrets, little girl,” Rognar said. “The gods alone know we spent our existence dwelling on them, our moments stifled by all we did or did not do, but there is more than the things we do. It is your power to make things right, and you must not let fear hamper your actions as you venture forth on this journey.” Both hands cupped her face, his broad grin rising as he touched her. “The things you do will set the world back on course and moving forward again, but we cannot linger here. You must come with us now so we can show you the way.”

“The way? What way?”

“A hidden path into the mountain,” her mother explained.

“But Finn already found it.”

“One path, yes,” she nodded, “but there is another. Hidden, unguarded, forgotten.”

“Dangerous,” her father added.

“How… how do you know of this? Have the gods shown you?”

“Beyond this moment you cannot rely on the aid of gods, child. Even now we take great risk revealing ourselves to you,” Rognar told her. “The others have their own agendas, and it will not be long before even the gods seek to steer you from your path.”

“But why? I don’t understand, Father.”

“There is power within you to rival even the oldest among them. You are the Light of His Light.”

“What does that mean? What am I, Father?”

A reverent smile lit his face. “You are all.”

His revelation terrified her, but there wasn’t time to dwell on fear because they each reached down and took a hand, drawing her to join them through the shadowed trees.

Her bare feet scuffed across stone and dew-soaked grass, shuffling forward without thought as her mind raced through a thousand senseless revelations. Her guides spoke no more, simply led her onward for what felt like miles until they came to a hidden passage in the mountain marked by a star-shaped rune that shimmered and shone in the moonlight breaking through the clouds and dancing across the stone.

“This is the way.” Her mother gestured toward the incline. “Follow this passage, preserve your mage’s energy for when you enter the mountain hall, for there you will need his protection.”

“We are with you,” her father said. “Always.”

And then they leaned in together, each of them touching ethereal lips to her cheeks in a collision of strange light that sent her staggering backward in a daze. The next thing she knew a pair of frantic claws were dragging her from her stupor, spinning her around to face the pale light of dawn and a trembling black wolf with wide, terrified white-blue eyes.

“Finn?” She took a startled step away, the sharpness of those claws cutting into the cloth of her shirt, piercing flesh and exposing bare skin to the cold kiss of the morning air. “What… What are you doing here?”

Lorelei’s mind felt fuzzy and strange. She kept trying to make sense of the night before, but no matter how she tried to wrap her head around it, there was no sense to be made of it. Replaying Rognar’s words over and over in her mind didn’t make them any clearer.

You are the light of His light. You are all.

Finn hadn’t said much of anything to her since he’d shifted back into his skin. He stalked behind her, naked as his naming day, always two steps back and completely oblivious to his own exposure. She avoided looking at him, even when he barked at her in short, angry sentences.