Unbound (The Griever's Mark series Book 3) (6 page)

Chapter 8

LOGAN

ASTARTI AND I stand aside while Heborian and his Drifters blast at the flat, hard earth. The sun bleaches the blue flares of Drift-light, but the occasional tremor through the ground tells me how much force they’re exerting. Still, they’re not making much progress. Astarti grins at me. I feel myself smirk in response. It
is
rather amusing.

Horik straightens, digging his fists into his back and stretching. He calls, “Are you two going to help or not?”

Astarti laughs. “Oh, no, it looks like you’re doing just fine on your own.”

“Piss off.”

Astarti chuckles.

Heborian stalks over to us. “Are you going to make me ask?”

“It’s good for you.” Her expression is playful, but I know she won’t yield.

So does Heborian. He sighs. “A little help?”

That, apparently, counts as “asking” to him.

Astarti sniffs and takes her time. She looks a question at me.

I shrug. “If you think they’ve embarrassed themselves enough.”

She’s suddenly hesitant, uncertain. “I don’t know if I can do it.”

My heart thumps. If she can’t, I’ll have to. But I say, “Just relax. Don’t pressure yourself.”

She nods. Her skills are improving. She’s sensing the elements more easily, learning to blend herself with them. I’m not much help in teaching her. I can’t explain what I do. Actually, some of her explanations have helped
me
better understand. She’s smart like that. She figures things out, puts them into words.

Astarti says the key for her is finding a balance between her own will and that of the elements, finding a way to work together. It’s not that I don’t believe her; it’s just that I don’t feel that. She enters the elements and remains herself.

I do not.

I try, I really do try, to hold onto my thoughts. I keep them for a moment, then I’m just gone. And it feels so good. Even now I itch for it.

That’s the problem: I
want
to let it take me.

I’ve spent my whole life denying myself that release. Now that I’ve started using my power again, letting it take me over, I don’t know if I can stop, and that scares me.

All my effort last night to pummel that deep inside myself, and it’s already rising up.

I take three deep breaths, calming myself with the exercise I’ve used all my life. Heborian, the bastard, watches me do it.

Astarti stands a little ahead of me, her head bowed in concentration. She starts to vanish then solidifies. She tries several times before shaking her head in defeat.

She returns to me and Heborian looking frustrated. “I can’t get to it.”

She shouldn’t be so hard on herself. “It’s more difficult here than anywhere else. The earth is less responsive.”

“Logan?” prompts Heborian.

I scrub a hand through my hair. Already, the two halves of me are splitting: the one that wants this and the one that doesn’t. I’m trembling with anticipation, and yet, there’s a cold pit in my stomach. The more often I do this, the more I let out, the harder it is to draw everything back and put it in its box again. I didn’t expect to do this today. I just got back to being myself.

I could refuse. I
should
refuse. But I say, “Clear out.”

The Drifters have moved back several paces, and Heborian strides away from me.

I laugh humorlessly. “You’re going to want to stand a
lot
farther back.”

Heborian warns, “Don’t destroy the bones.”

I keep my back to him. “I can’t promise anything.”

When I have a half mile radius, I try to relax my mind as I told Astarti to do, but that just lets everything creep in. I don’t like when I do things I don’t understand. I want to scoff at the idea that something drew me to this spot. I want to say I don’t expect to find anything. I wasn’t thinking about the bones, wasn’t choosing a path. I shudder at the possibility that my mind is not in control even when I think it is.

I exhale slowly, letting that go. I’ll think about that later, when I don’t have people watching me.

I feel for the deep, sleeping power of the earth. It’s not a conscious thought but more an extending of my senses, of my very self. I try to do it with restraint, to tease out a thread of power from the clenched fist inside me.

Nothing.

No, not nothing. Something dark creeps along the edges of my mind. I ignore it and try again to open that fist, but it’s clenched tight, resisting.

I pry at it, annoyed and impatient. Then memory slips over me like a cold shadow.

This place.

I’ve been here.

With
him
.

I thought I could keep those memories at a distance. They like to slither into my dreams, but I can usually hold them off until then.

It’s this place.

This is where he raped my mind. Again and again, he forced himself on me. He made me nothing.

His voice echoes:
Submit yourself!

I shake my head to clear it.

Your will is mine!

And just that easily, memory makes me powerless, a thing in his hands, less even than an animal.

I bend over my knees, dry-heaving.

I close my eyes, praying Astarti is too far away to see me. I take three deep breaths and swallow the bile sliding up my throat. Belos isn’t here. No one is forcing me. I make myself straighten.

I wipe sweaty palms on my leather pants, willing the tremble to go away.

I stare into the blinding sun and let it burn away all thought. I can’t hover in this space between my two halves. I can lock everything away, or I can let go, but nothing is more dangerous than the space between.

I choose.

I let the sun fill me. Soon, I can’t see anything but brightness, neither before my eyes nor within my mind. I am clean and empty of thought. I am earth and air, water and fire. I am not a man at all.

I am more.

I am power.

The fist holding everything inside me springs open. All the energies of the world are there to answer me: the faint, anemic sighs of the wind; the distant, angry sun; the deep, buried power of the earth with slender fingers of water sliding between its bones. They call to me from their dim dreams. They want me, and they promise me release.

I plunge into the sleeping mass, and it awakens at my touch. This land wants to be more again. Its craving answers my own. I tear through it, stirring it to life. I draw the waters up until they are exploding around me. The release is so powerful that I feel my mind splinter and dissolve in it. I shout with joy, and my voice is a rocky grumble, a stream of water.

My elemental senses brush something. I feel another power, something sleeping. Many somethings. They are scattered around me like jewels in a mountain, sparkling as light filters into the dark. They are earth, yes, but they are all the other elements as well, even that strange, tingling element that is the Drift.

But they are death also, which the elements cannot be. Loss echoes from them.

Bones.

Awareness creeps through me, weighing down my freedom. I’m supposed to be doing something.

I sweep around the bones, wondering whose they were, wondering at the power echoing within them all these ages later.

I hear a voice from a great distance. I hear a name, and it takes me a moment to recognize it as my own.

I charge on, churning through earth and water, skimming over the bones.

I hear my name again, shouted in fear, and I can’t ignore her voice.

With more will than I thought I possessed, I disentangle myself from the elements and force myself to become nothing but a man again. I draw away and tighten that fist inside myself once more.

I stagger, oppressed by sudden heat, dizzied by harsh light and shadow. Hands touch me.

I blink to clear my vision and look down into Astarti’s worried face.

She glances at our feet, and that’s when I feel the water. We’re standing in a narrow crevice, a roughly cut trench of stone. Clear, cool water washes over our toes, seeping through the leather of my boots.

With one hand still on my leg like she’s afraid to lose contact with me, Astarti bends down to scoop up a handful of water. She splashes it over her face.

That fist is threatening to spring open inside me again, teasing me with whispers of power and freedom, so I sink down on one of the tumbled stones and put my head in my hands. I take three deep breaths. I do it again.

Astarti’s hands are in my hair. Her fingers trace the tendons of my neck. Arousal fires through me, but I breathe it out. Her fingers dig into the tension in my shoulders, and I lean against the stony wall with a sigh, letting some of the tension go. Not all of it, because I need some, but a little.

“Look what you did,” she says. For a second I think it’s an accusation, but then I see her smile. “You found water. In the
Dry
Land.”

“There’s more. It’s just deep down.” My voice comes out rough.

She scoops some up and splashes me. The coolness hits my hot face. I sigh comfortably. “Do that again.”

She splashes me, grinning.

I love that grin.

Looking at her, I am centered. The fist closes, and I am myself, back in my skin. I know that skin is fragile. I feel that sickening need to punish it, to get control of it, but I can’t right now. Focusing on Astarti works just as well, but it lasts only so long as I don’t take my eyes from her. That’s the problem. I can’t rely on that. I have to control myself on my own. But since I can’t do that right now, I let Astarti help me, whether she knows she’s helping or not.

She scoops up more water to wash her face. The combination of yellow-gray dust and water has turned her clothes to a muddy mess. I glance down at my own and find them equally filthy.

I scoot off my rock to crouch in the water. My left knee, the bad one, cracks loudly.

I scrub my own face with the cool, clear water. When I stand, Astarti is looking down the length of the crevice. There’s a bend ahead, so we can’t see anything, but I hear the sound of voices.

I follow Astarti through the water, catching her when she stumbles. The earth is a rocky mess, the stones slippery. When we round the bend, the crevice opens on a basin. Heborian and his Drifters splash through hip-deep water, gathering floating pieces of white bone. Though they are fragments, they’re clearly too large to be human. The men toss the largest pieces up onto the ledge of the basin and leave the splinters floating.

They have no right to disturb these bones, to mine a power not their own.

Heborian hurls a long, heavy bone up to the dry ground. He catches his breath and says, “Good work.”

I close my hands into fists. “You shouldn’t take these.”

He gives me a measuring look. “No one needs them. Except me.”

I bite out, “And what will you do with them?”

“I thought I made that clear. These will be weapons to defeat our enemy. Isn’t that what you want?”

Astarti touches my wet sleeve. “Logan. You’ve seen the power of the knife. We need everything we can use against Belos.”

Logically, I know she’s right, that Heborian is right. But in my gut, this feels wrong, wrong, wrong.

*     *     *

We travel the Drift back to Tornelaine with the bones and our half-dead prisoner in tow. As always, I hate being here.

Energy swirls around us. Astarti, beautiful in her energy form, looks at me with worry, as though I am doing this. I don’t think I am. I try to bury all the energies threatening to escape my control. Maybe something is getting out.

Energy whispers over us. The Drifters speed up, and Astarti pulls me along faster. I know I should be able to move myself through the Drift, but to do that I would have to release some of my energy, to use it.

I don’t want to do that. It would be like trying to pump a cupful of water from the ground and accidently bursting a dam. I let Astarti pull me along instead.

As we draw closer to the bright glow of Tornelaine, the energy around us grows increasingly agitated. It passes over all of us, lingering on me, swirling around the gleaming white energy of the bones.

When we reach Heborian’s barrier, I brace myself for the squeeze, then gasp in relief as I am thrown into the physical world.

As the guards swing open the heavy gates to let us into the courtyard, the hair rises on the back of my neck. The air crackles with energy, much as the Drift did. Clouds roll in with unnatural speed, and thunder booms overhead.

Everyone goes still.

We aren’t alone.

Lightning splits the sky, then the rain starts. Light at first, then it comes in heavy, angry drops.

A figure appears in the rain, and I recognize the Old One who tried to sink the ship. She is both part of the rain and not. She floats to the pile of bones, which someone dropped. She traces a tender, ghostly hand over them.