Unbound (The Griever's Mark series Book 3) (25 page)

Chapter 36

LOGAN

THE AIR GROWS colder the farther north I take us. While that in itself is not surprising, it shouldn’t be
this
cold. Frost blankets the ground, even though it’s summer. As we travel inland, away from the moderating force of the ocean, snow swirls through the air. As we reach the more remote settlements, crops stand frozen in the fields, and the rivers are ribbons of ice.

I no longer need to confirm direction. I only need to follow the cold. Had we brought Belos only as a guide, we could kill him now.

A lone mountain, white with snow, stabs the sky in the distance.

As we near the mountain, they start to come, flitting around me. They are playful, curious. They tug at me like children asking me to join a game.

They are not the only strangeness in the air. Time plays tricks on me. For a moment, I forget why I’m here. I drift, suspended. I am looking for someone. One of the Old Ones skims around me, laughing. I start toward her before I remember who she is. She tried to sink the whaling ship. Reality reasserts itself. She is not my friend. I don’t know her. Astarti drifts into my awareness, dispelling the strangeness. I speed along again, my thoughts fixed on the mountain.

When we reach the rocky base of it, I shape us from the wind. We sink in snow to our knees, shivering in our thin summer tunics.

“Why did we stop?” Belos asks through chattering teeth. “He’s up there.”

“I know.”

I crunch through the snow, needing to get away from him. Astarti follows.

I ask her quietly, “Did you feel them?”

“Yes.”

“They do something to me. I don’t like it.”

Astarti, arms wrapped tightly around herself, stares into the rocky hills dotted with fir trees weighted by snow. “Every time I’m near them, it’s like time...shifts. Like I’m caught in some dream.”

I turn to her in surprise. “Yes. Exactly.”

Belos crunches through the snow. “Neither of you have any idea what he can do. You have no idea what he really is.”

Astarti turns to look at him. “You came with us willingly. You could have taken your chances with Heborian, but you chose this. Why?”

“Finally, you think to ask.”

“Heborian wanted you to draw them to Tornelaine, and that didn’t frighten you. You still want something from them.”

“You think Heborian wanted to draw them to Tornelaine?” His tone is condescending. “More destruction in his own city?”

“But you said...” Astarti trails off. “You never said that. I said that, and you said nothing.”

Belos’s lips twitch. “Perhaps you’ve been spending too much time around honest people.”

Astarti demands, “But if he didn’t want to draw them back to Tornelaine, why did he keep you alive? Your only use is your connection to Kronos.”

“Hmm,” says Belos. “Interesting.”

Astarti frowns. “But...”

A wind whips around us. Astarti looks questioningly at me, but I’m not doing this.

Snow swirls into the air and gathers itself into a face. The Old One brushes icy fingers across my cheek before floating near Astarti.

She says, in the ancient language of the Earthmakers, “Pretty girl.”

I’ve never heard any of them speak before, and all I can do is stare. When I find my voice, I ask, in the same ancient speech, “What do you want?”

The Old One floats back to me. “Make new. All things new.” Her expression hardens. “But this one.” She darts to Belos, who watches her warily. “No.”

“We will take him to Kronos. Kronos will choose his fate.”

The Old One hovers, undecided, then she starts to dissolve, whispering, “He waits.”

*     *     *

I take us up the craggy side of the mountain. Snow lies thick between the blades and boulders of stone, and it whips into the air with our passing.

I sense Kronos within, a deep and ponderous weight in the heart of the mountain. I’m not confident I can draw the others through stone without harming them, so I hunt for an entrance.

Near the top, I find a crevice that seeps the cold air of the mountain’s belly and take us through. The sunlight is at just the right angle to flood the passageway, and it catches on the rough faces of raw gemstones embedded in the rock. The light falls like a blade on the rough floor of a cavern, flashing against the red, green, blue, and pure white stones. It is like a stained glass window has shattered. No. It’s like a window yet to be made. My imagination expands as I skim over the stone. So many things could be made. So many possibilities.

Kronos sits on a rocky chair of sorts, facing the sun. He is stone and jewel, like the chair. They are melded together; or perhaps they were formed together. Light plays over his gleaming emerald eyes, making them catch fire as the old Runish tales tell. His ruby lips glisten like fresh blood. A cloak of sapphires hangs from his shoulders, and a crown of diamonds rings his head.

As I shape us from the wind, settling to the cold floor, Kronos rises from his chair. Stone cracks and crumbles as he breaks free. The gems glitter and flash with his movements. The image trips and slides. Stone softens into skin, and the gems settle into subtler, more human shades. The crown of diamonds becomes a crown of light, like the pinpoints of distant stars. Yet, the other image overlays this one. He is the man before us, and also the mountain with all its rough riches.

I hold myself still as he approaches. With each step, his feet meld with the floor, turning briefly to stone before they pull free. He stops before me. He is the same height as I—perhaps he has made himself so. His bright eyes gaze into mine.

“I know you,” he says in the modern tongue of my people but with a heavy accent of ancient days.

He does not try to embrace me, and I’m glad. This is no tearful reunion—it’s not a reunion at all. It’s a meeting, and I think we are both more curious than anything. I have wanted this, yes, but I’m not looking for affection. I don’t need him to declare me his son. I want to understand him. I want to understand myself.

He asks, “Will you travel with us?”

“Travel?”

His eyes flick to the cavern roof, but I know he is looking beyond, much as he did in my vision of him in the Dry Land when he gazed across the sky.

“The possibilities stretch infinitely, even here.” His voice hardens when he adds, “But we have learned too much anger in this place, and it hampers our makings. We would find a new beginning.”

Loss cracks open within me, like a fissure in rock. “You’re leaving.”

His eyes glitter with possibility. “You could come with us and begin to make. You also have learned much anger here.”

Here it is. The offer. To leave with them, to cut all the ties on my power and find out what it is to use it, to
really
use it, without restraint, without fear. I would not have to close it inside myself. I would not have to hate it.

But.

I would have to choose that one thing and give up all others. Not only would I lose Astarti—which is unthinkable—I would lose everything I have made of myself. It would make my whole life to this point false and wasted, a series of mistakes.

He is presenting me with the same decision I have been presenting to myself: be one or the other. To go with Kronos would set me free in one sense, but it would bind me in another. It would bind me to that one aspect of myself, as though the rest is not real and valid. It would mean closing something
else
inside myself instead—everything in me that is human.

An inversion, not a solution.

My mind skips back to the hallway at the inn, then to the bathing chamber in Tornelaine. Moments when I have been weakest, yet I found peace at the end of them because Astarti made me look at them, accept them, live them. She didn’t let me run away or bury part of myself.

To go with Kronos would be to continue burying myself, continue turning away, and I am beginning to see that such a thing can never bring me peace. Once, I did not think peace was a possibility. Now, though I’ve felt it only in small moments, I know that it is. Astarti has given me what no one else ever has—what Kronos cannot give me—hope that I will find a balance between these parts of myself. I would rather try to find that than keep running.

And, of course, the answer is simple when I think of Astarti herself. I would let her go, if she asked it, because I would never bind her. But I would never choose a life without her.

She is stiff behind me, expecting me to leave her, as she has expected before. It hurts a little that she thinks I would, though I know it’s my own fault. I’ve turned away from her too often for her to have faith in me.

Kronos reads my energy, the way it flows toward Astarti. He nods. I don’t know if he’s disappointed, but he doesn’t look surprised. A small breath goes out of Astarti behind me. I want to tell her I’m sorry. I want to touch her. But I won’t share that with Belos, who hangs at the edge of my awareness.

I say only, “When do you leave?”

“Soon,” Kronos answers. “But I would cleanse myself first, for I will take no more of this world with me than I must.”

Astarti presses forward. “We’ve brought the Shackle, if you would like to take him into the Drift and cast him out.”

Kronos’s face darkens like a sky ready to storm, but he turns none of his attention on Belos. “Let me see it,” he rumbles.

Astarti unbuckles the pack and pulls the gleaming white Shackle from it. She offers it to Kronos, but he doesn’t take it.

“Do you know what this is?”

“I do,” she says carefully. “I am sorry.”

Kronos reaches out a single finger and runs it along the chain that drapes between Astarti’s lifted hands. “She chose to travel that bend in the river, and she left an echo of herself in this world. I do not mourn her; I only mourn this reshaping of her memory.”

She. Someone specific. “Who was she? Was she the only one that died?”

“No, but she was the only one who loved this world enough to give so much of herself to it. Her name was Gaia.”

That startles me. “Like my mother.”

Kronos gazes again into my face. “Your mother is a distant, distant echo of her, but, yes. Perhaps that is what drew me to your mother in the first place.”

He doesn’t love my mother, even though she still yearns for him. I suppose I should not expect him to love her. Perhaps he does not know love; perhaps anger is all he has learned.

Astarti asks, “Why is the land dead in the place where she died?”

“We abandoned it. She was our mother, and she was gone, and there was nothing more for us there. We wanted something new.”

“You didn’t destroy it?”

“We drew all the energy from it and took it with us to reshape.”

A dark thought creeps upon me. “Will you do that again? Take all the energy from this place?”

“We almost did once. But our children were like crops planted in a field. They did not want to travel with us, nor would they have us take back what we had given.”

Astarti asks, “Is that why they made war on you? Because you were going to strip their lands of energy?”

“We never had the chance to decide,” he says bitterly. “They bound us here with chains forged from our very own essence. We had taught them too much, and they had their own ideas of how to use that knowledge.”

I press the point: “Would you have destroyed them?”

“I do not know. We had not yet learned what it is to suffer.”

“And now?”

He lets out a deep breath, and wind swirls from him through the cavern. He still has not decided. He doesn’t know what he will do.

With his power no longer bound by the limited imagination of another, no longer cut off from the other energies of this world, it is expanding. I
feel
its growth, the way it blends into the world around us—the way they feed each other. Indeed, the world’s energy—its life, on which we are dependent—is his to command. To give or to take.

For the first time, I understand Heborian a little. This world has only two hopes: that Kronos has learned compassion as well as anger, or that Heborian succeeds in binding him once more.

Kronos’s hand closes on the chain, and he pulls the Shackle away from Astarti. “Poor Gaia. How she would have grieved to know that her body was carved into weapons and chains. She did not even know what those were. We never imagined such things.” He slips one Shackle cuff onto his wrist, muttering, “Gaia would understand.”

Belos steps forward.

Willingly, with anticipation in his eyes.

For one foolish moment I allow myself to believe that he only wants his energy back from Kronos, that he wants to be whole.

But when has Belos ever wanted only what belongs to him?

Chapter 37

WHEN BELOS STEPS forward so eagerly, I realize that this is the opportunity he has waited for. I’ve kept him in the corner of my eye, expecting something. I still don’t know his aim, but I can read him well enough to see he has a plan. In the moment before Kronos pulls him into the Drift, I latch onto him. With the same thought, so does Logan.

We are wrenched into the Drift.

The rush of energy along the glowing Shackle chain almost rips me away from Belos. His energy flares as the part of him lodged in Kronos surges back. Even with the return of his energy, Belos surely cannot hope to challenge Kronos. Kronos’s wild power thrums around us, more terrible than the Hounding, more shattering than a bursting mountain.

My mind splinters.

As before when I have been in the Drift near Kronos, time bends and folds. I am layers of myself: a child, delighted by the Drift; a young woman, Leashed and ashamed; my own present self, clinging to this man who has made me all these things. There is nothing I can do but hang on.

Threads of energy twist and tangle through Belos and spool away from him into the Drift. Vaguely, I sense a similar unraveling of my own energy. I desperately will myself to focus on Belos. I brought him here, to this opportunity; I cannot let him get away.

Golden light and raging wind surround us. They blend and swirl in a confusion of substance. Suddenly, the light flares like the sun. It fills me, blinding me, burning everything else out of me. Whatever I thought I could do here, I was a fool.

I am light.

I am nothing.

I think,
I am dying
.

Pressure engulfs me; darkness consumes me.

Suddenly, I am released, and the physical world settles awkwardly around me. Or
I
settle awkwardly, like a sailor on land after months at sea. My body feels strange and heavy.

My cheek is pressed to cold stone. At first, I think I am back in the cavern, but there is too much light beyond my closed eyelids, and the scent of mountain pine is too strong.

Someone groans, and I peel open my eyes to see Logan flop onto his back. His face is white, and his eyes are squeezed shut. I drag my hand out from where it is trapped under my chest and touch him. He is solid, real. We are alive. He opens his eyes and rolls toward me. I run my hand down his body as he runs his down mine. My hand finds only the familiar contours of muscle and bone. I rest my forehead against his, too relieved to think.

I sit up slowly, and Logan does the same. We are on a rocky outcropping on a mountainside, surrounded my scrubby trees and scraggly brush. In the far distance lie wooded foothills that roll and drop, rising to occasional bare hilltops.

“Twenty minutes, at best guess,” hisses a sly voice somewhere below.

I freeze. I know that voice, but it cannot be. He is dead.

A slight scuffing sound jerks my attention to the scrub-covered boulders at my right. Belos! He is creeping away, weaving between the rocks with the Shackle in hand.

I lurch in his direction, but Logan grabs my arm and presses a finger to his lips, then he points down. Slowly, we creep to the edge of our rocky outcropping.

Below stand a dozen black-cloaked figures. No. Impossible.

But it’s not impossible.

Kronos has brought us here—or perhaps Belos compelled him to? Though it’s not a
place
, exactly, but a time.

Straton points to the east. “Arathos will most likely bring his Wardens there. If we bring the Leashed from there”—he points south—“the Wardens will have little warning.”

“See to it,” Belos says.

Belos.

This is not the Belos I know, but a younger version of him than the one which disappeared among the rocks. This younger Belos stares out across the foothills, excitement in every line of his body. There is an air of possibility about him. He is less worn, more hopeful. Yes, that is hope. He sees great things ahead, and that is what tells me this is before his war. He doesn’t know he is about to lose and be driven into the Dry Land.

He sends the others about their duties. There are at least a dozen of them, many I don’t know. I watch Theron, young and not yet weighted down by his crimes, vanish into the Drift.

Fearing our discovery, I shape my spear. But we remain unnoticed. Perhaps we are not fully here.

Just beyond the younger Belos’s sight, our Belos creeps around the boulders. I draw back slightly. Surely not.

He is sneaking up on himself.

With the Shackle.

I dart a shocked look at Logan. His grim expression tells me he sees it too.

Perhaps because I am warier of the Belos I know—the one hardened by decades of loss and planning and Taking—than the one I don’t, I draw breath to shout. Fingers of air settle over my mouth.

Wait
, Kronos whispers and takes his hand away.

I bite my lip and decide to trust him, if only because he has no reason to aid Belos.

The younger Belos yells when our Belos leaps on him from behind. The younger whirls around, but his older, cannier self knows just what to expect. He dodges a blast of energy, which cracks into the rocks behind. When the younger shapes his sword, our Belos ducks under it and slips the Shackle on his younger self’s other wrist.

The energy humming from the Shackle makes the ground shake beneath me.

The Shackle glows bright white then blue then, with a flash, it bursts.

Both of them stagger back, stunned. Our Belos freezes. I have never seen him freeze before. For once, he is out of options. For once, he has reached the end of his plan, and it has failed, and there can be no escape.

He sees it, at last, his folly, and he knows what is coming because he knows himself quite well. He closes his eyes.

The younger Belos yells with rage at having been surprised, and he plunges his Drift-sword into the heart of his older self. When he wrenches his sword free, our Belos falls at his feet.

The younger crouches down, panting, scowling with anger. He nudges our Belos with his foot, rolling him onto his back. The younger gasps and takes a step away. He shakes his head, denying what he sees as he gets his first clear look at the man he killed. He takes another step back, and another, still shaking his head. He vanishes into the Drift.

We wait for a while, expecting younger Belos or the others to return. I stare down at the limp body, scarcely daring to believe. When the others don’t come back, I rise silently to my feet and creep along the path that Belos took. Logan creeps along behind me, and a breeze wafts over us.

Belos is dead by the time I reach him; maybe he was dead when he fell. His eyes stare blindly into the sky above.

Logan says, still stunned by the perversity of Belos’s actions, “He tried to Take his own soul.”

I crouch beside Belos’s thin, worn body. Blood covers his chest from the old wound I dealt him, and I wonder if it would have killed him in time. His face is a bruised and swollen mess from the blows Logan dealt him. He has been in a long process of defeat.

I say, “It wouldn’t just have been his own soul but also the energy he had already harvested from others at this point in his life.”

“Madness,” Logan mutters, unable to comprehend this level of depravity and greed and desperation. “Why wouldn’t he try to take it from someone else instead?”

Kronos shapes himself from the breeze and stands beside us with all the weight and solidity of the surrounding boulders. “This was his river. He could travel no other.”

His words tease something in my memory. “I read a story about your people. They were walking a river backwards. One stumbled over a stone and was surprised because the stone had not been there before. It was time, wasn’t it? They were traveling time.”

Kronos says, “I do not know the story, but time is much like a river—constantly changing, with a thousand million possible courses it could take.”

“But you knew this would happen. That’s why you brought him here.”

“I allowed him to bring himself here. I knew this was a possibility, but it wasn’t the only one.”

“So you would have let anything happen?”

“Gaia gave me a gift, for she loved me best and, perhaps, trusted me most. All time and all possibility flow through me. I touch infinity. I see potential. Belos was closing off other possibilities. Whatever he chose at this point would have led to his destruction. He was choosing death, whether he knew it or not, turning toward it because he lacked the imagination for other possibilities.”

I glance down at Belos once, stunned he is dead. Somehow, despite his brokenness, this doesn’t seem possible.

I look at Logan, who is also staring at Belos. Emotion chases over his face. At first, he looks angry, like he’s been robbed of a fight he longed for. Then he raises his eyes to mine, and the anger eases from his face. The color swirling though his irises slows, like a breeze settling. He pushes to his feet, ready to be gone from here.

I rise and turn away from Belos. I, too, am ready to be gone. When Kronos extends his hand, I take it.