The Queen of the Dawn, page 19
part #5 of Shadows and Crowns Series
Casia arched a brow. “Of punching him, I assume you mean.”
“Whatever’s best for him,” Elander said with a shrug.
She fixed him with a stern look at first, but then came a break in the gloom that had settled over them—she smiled back at him.
The sight of it chased away the last bits of darkness in his mind.
He pulled her to her feet. She briefly steadied herself against him before hurrying to her friends and embracing each of them in turn. She held on longest to Rhea, drawing back only after one of the faral struck the barrier they’d created.
It didn’t break through, but it caused a strange sensation to ripple through Elander as the power of it was tested—and through Casia too, judging by how she jumped.
She walked the edges of that barrier, studying it. He joined her, as did Laurent. The shield was already fading under the realm’s spell. But as weak as it was, it still seemed to be doing its job; most of the shadow creatures on the other side cowered at a distance, and the few who gathered enough courage to strike it were quickly driven back by flashes of light.
“What are those things?”
“Faral,” Elander told her. “Creatures born of Shadow magic. They use that magic to dig into your mind and root out your deepest fears, which they then use against you.”
Casia’s gaze drifted back to Rhea as he spoke. Her body seemed to seize up for a moment, as though she’d forgotten how to breathe.
What had she seen while under the faral’s spell?
He waited, but she didn’t seem to want to talk about those visions. He didn’t make her. He didn’t particularly want to discuss what he’d seen, either.
“It’s over now,” he said quietly. “And it was nothing except trickery.”
She nodded, but her eyes never left Rhea. Her fingers dug into her palms, and her voice was tight, quiet, and full of anger when she spoke again. “Every time I think our enemies can’t sink any lower, they manage to surprise me.”
“Fear has long been a tool of evil,” Laurent said. “Usually when they get desperate—so at least we know we’re making them feel more desperate.”
“They’re mistaken if they think it’s a tool that will work against me,” she said, as much to herself as them. “I’ve been carrying on in spite of my fear for my entire life, and I don’t plan to stop now.”
Over the next hour, Casia withdrew into her thoughts, moving along the created barrier and reinforcing it with a haunted but determined look on her face.
Elander let her be, joining Zev and the others as they worked to make sure everyone and everything they’d left Mistwilde with was accounted for. There was another route around the steep dunes he’d climbed over, it turned out, and they were able to lead the riders they’d left on the other side back to them.
Once they were all together, they went about setting up camp at the lake’s edge, having decided not to risk anymore travel for the night. They soon had tents pitched and a campfire roaring, and all of them gathered around the warm blaze—aside from Casia, who remained on the edge of their campsite, speaking with Laurent and one of the Mistwilde soldiers.
No one around the fire felt much like talking. Not even Zev. He lasted no more than half an hour before he got to his feet and stretched.
“Well, I don’t know about all of you,” he said, “but I’m thoroughly traumatized enough for one evening, so I think I’m going to call it a night.” He didn’t wait for anyone to reply before he retired to the nearest tent.
He was quickly followed by the majority of the others, aside from the ones assigned to the first watch.
Elander had put up the tent he and Casia had shared countless times in the past, but he opted for carrying his bedroll close to the fire and sleeping under nothing but the sky instead. He had never liked the confines of tents when he was on edge like this. No tent was going to protect them from anything they faced; it would only slow down his counter attack. Casia felt the same, he knew, and so he gathered a second roll of blankets, preparing it for whenever she managed to settle her thoughts and find her way back to him.
Though he doubted either of them would get much sleep.
Morning came, but Elander didn’t realize it when he first opened his eyes—eyes that he had only closed an hour ago. The sky was still unusually dark, a foreboding, steely shade of grey, even after his sight fully adjusted. It always had a dark tint to it lately, it seemed like.
And it was getting darker by the day.
When he sat up fully, he spotted Casia nearly in the same place she’d been before he fell asleep, standing at the lake’s edge with her arms folded around herself. She appeared to be studying the sky’s reflection in the water.
He walked over to her.
“Do you think it’s the unstable state of divine magic that’s making the sky look so strange?” She didn’t take her gaze from the reflection of it as she spoke. “All the shifting energies that Malaphar and everything else has caused? The constant cloudiness feels almost like a symptom of the greater sickness. And it keeps getting worse. Darker. Like he’s determined to black out even the sun itself before our final battle.”
Elander stood beside her for a moment, studying the same stretch of sky, feeling for those unstable energies and attempting to understand it all as much as she was.
He soon gave up on this and lowered his gaze, studying her instead. His faint-hearted yet fearless queen. His clarity, no matter how dark the skies became.
“I don’t doubt he’s trying,” he told her. “But I don’t think he can extinguish the sun.”
She inhaled deeply, steeling herself before glancing his way. Her eyes held his for a moment, shimmering with unshed tears. She rapidly blinked them away and looked back to the water just as quickly.
“Did you sleep last night?” he asked.
She gave a barely noticeable shake of her head.
He hesitated. “We could go back to the palace if you need to. Regroup and refresh.”
She only shook her head again. “I sent riders out at dawn to scout the trails on both the eastern and western sides of the lake. I go back with Crownkeeper or not at all. I’m…” Her fingers had started to tap against her side. She paused to focus on stilling them, clenching them into a fist that she tucked under her arm. “Tired,” she finished. “But there will be no rest for me in that palace. Not while the sky looks like this and the shadows keep pressing in.”
Elander nodded. He was worried about her, but he felt the same. They couldn’t go back yet.
This feeling was reinforced—and the fate of the day sealed—only moments later, when the two riders Casia had sent came racing up the beach toward them.
The rider in front leapt from his saddle before his horse had come to a full stop. His face was bright red and his voice winded from the hard ride as he finally said the three words Elander had been waiting to hear for what felt like an eternity—
“She’s close by.”
Chapter 19
Several waterways ran away from the eastern side of the lake, each one they encountered more twisted than the last.
They followed the fourth branching river they came upon, trusting the scout’s reported sighting of multiple riders traveling along the northern side of this river. The scout believed they had been members of Sarith’s personal guard, judging by their armor and the dress of their horses.
It quickly proved the most promising trail they’d followed yet. Elander noted countless hoof prints and broken foliage that suggested many horses had recently passed this way. No birds sang. No creatures rooted among the leaves, nor scurried between the branches above. Even the wind had grown calmer, the breezes almost hesitant, as though frightened into silence.
“Sarith will be very familiar with this part of the realm,” said one of the Mistwilde soldiers as they rode cautiously along. “There was once a sprawling residence on this side of the river—Mistedge. It was her family’s home for a time, given to her father by King Talos. Unfortunately, that gift caused another crack in the already strained relationship between them, as Rumil—Sarith’s father—believed his brother was trying to push him out of the family and away from the crown by building him such an elaborate home so far away from the central palace and the royal city.” He lowered his voice before adding, “He wasn’t entirely wrong.”
Elander peered through the trees on either side of him, searching for signs of movement but still finding none. The path they trotted along grew increasingly overgrown. His skin crawled with warning, heart speeding up with every strange sound and shadow he noticed.
“Anwyn mentioned this place to me,” Casia said. “When the disagreements between the brothers came to a head decades ago, Sarith’s father apparently set fire to the main residence of Mistedge. There are no buildings still entirely intact, she told me.”
“Correct,” said the soldier. “But some of the magic that protected the grounds remains. So we should tread carefully.”
“What kind of magic are we talking about?” asked Zev.
“It’s hard to—”
Silverfoot cut the explanation off with a sharp bark. An instant later, the horse at the front of their party reared, nearly throwing its rider to the ground.
Elander jerked his horse to a stop alongside the others, watching as the ground before that rearing horse crumbled swiftly away, leaving a deep ravine.
Seconds later, the earth moved again, closing the wound and smoothing it over as though the gash had never been there at all.
They all stared.
Nobody moved.
Nobody spoke, until finally Rhea cleared her throat and said, “Silver sensed that coming—he was growling well before it happened.”
“The horse obviously knew enough to stop in time as well,” added Nessa.
“These woods are silent because the animals know better than to tread here,” muttered Laurent. “So we’ll follow their lead.”
They did precisely this as they slowly continued along, following the growls of Silverfoot and the uneasy steps of their horses, pausing to throw stones at suspicious areas where those horses refused to trod. The stones triggered the spells as well as any movement did, and they managed to reveal several would-be death pits in this manner.
But there was more than shifting ground to contend with. The deeper they rode, the quieter and darker their surroundings became—a quiet darkness that seemed unnatural. Even the air itself was untrustworthy; they would walk through what appeared to be clear patches of forest only to feel the air shifting, sliding like gritty sand over their skin. It felt almost as if they had passed through Air-kind portals. Those portals never took them outside of the forest…
But Elander swore the trees and bushes around them shifted every time they passed through one of these unnatural air pockets.
After a few minutes of silently trotting along, the soldier continued, in a voice much quieter than before. “Rumil’s father was one of the elves who first experimented with creating the unnatural crystals of magic that so many still use in the Kethran Empire. And Rumil himself was allegedly involved with even more of this questionable, fringe magic. Some say the fires that burned the Mistedge manor were, in truth, accidentally set—an experimental spell gone wrong.”
They walked on, Casia moving to the front of the group as the first glimpses of something grand came into view—grey towers peeking through the evergreen trees. Her attention was so captivated by one of these towers, by a tattered banner still flying from its top, that she ignored her horse’s frightened signals, urging him onward until it was almost too late.
Silverfoot’s bark brought her back to her senses. She veered sharply aside and, with some effort, brought her spooked mount to a controlled stop.
Elander felt her heartbeat—her magic—speeding up right alongside his own, followed by her desperate attempts to settle it. She signaled to Nessa, who fired an arrow directly into the space her horse had nearly stepped into, revealing the trap awaiting them.
Unlike the ones they’d encountered thus far, this trap did not collapse the ground. It heaved it upward instead, launching earth and stones into a chaotic cloud that swirled menacingly for several moments, uprooting several trees before it settled. Their party scrambled backwards, narrowly avoiding the shower of rocks and limbs and dirt.
When the dust cleared, they finally saw it through the cleared trees: The main dwelling of Mistedge.
Much of it blended with the rocky hillside rising at its back, its towers made of the same stone and jutting about in a way that mimicked the wild landscape, which made it difficult to judge the true size of it.
“The ruins of Mistedge,” their most-informative soldier announced, cautiously leading them closer.
Ruins was an appropriate enough description, though it still had an unmistakable grandness about it. The main section was wrapped in moss and littered with fallen branches and leaves, and parts of it had collapsed, while others still bore what looked like fire damage around their broken edges. But as they carefully made their way around the front of the building, the damage was less noticeable. The front of the building was faced in white rock, which stood out among the grey and the green, making the sheer size of it apparent—it stretched too wide for Elander to see the actual end of it.
They dismounted, secured the horses, and moved to search the interior for signs that someone had recently been through, or even camped within, what remained of the rooms.
“Stay together,” Casia ordered—which wasn’t difficult, as most of the rooms inside were expansive, and several were missing walls. They swept from edge to edge of the residence as a large group, avoiding more pockets of strange, unpredictable magic—wayward spells that split the ground, that breathed life into the overgrown plants and turned them hostile, that seared the air and made it difficult to breathe at times.
After a close call with a stone pillar that cracked and collapsed as they passed by—nearly bringing part of the roof down on top of them—Elander and Casia risked trying a bit of magic themselves; they worked together to wrap their party in a shield. His own power came eagerly, as if it knew precisely what was at stake in this desolate place—that this was not the time to ration his magic.
She’s close by.
He couldn’t explain how he knew this, he simply did.
Casia drew closer to him, as if she felt the same truth coursing through her as well. The closer she drew to him, the more powerful his magic became, surging with no more effort than breathing required. His senses seemed to heighten with her nearness too—so much so that he felt the next trap coming even before Silverfoot gave his customary warning bark.
He heard a tiny crack from above, spreading through a wooden beam supporting what was left of the ceiling. His gaze swept along that ceiling and he noticed a strange waviness to the air, like a sign of sweltering heat on a summer day. It engulfed the beam, splitting it in two, and he had a vision of it all falling, wood breaking and burying them—
He didn’t think. He only reacted. He grabbed a fistful of Casia’s coat and slung her out of harm’s way just as the beam snapped and brought part of the roof clattering down. A second beam snapped to his left, and he narrowly avoided the deluge it triggered by half-jumping, half-stumbling backward.
He escaped the brunt of the falling wood and stones, but in the process he blindly passed through yet another strange pocket of air. He felt the same uncomfortable grittiness on his skin as before, and there was no mistaking the unnatural shifting that accompanied it this time. He blinked, and the lighting had changed. The walls had closed in. The roof was suddenly gone, there was a strange humming in his ears, a chill biting at the back of his neck…
He had been transported to somewhere else.
And he was alone.
His magic surged, reaching for Casia. No response. He felt nothing—not of her or anyone else. His magic still felt more powerful than usual, yet centered directly around him, unable to stretch far beyond where he stood. Something was pressing back at the edges, trapping it around him.
He gripped Caden’s sword and started to walk, coming upon a room that was missing a significant portion of its ceiling. A second story was visible through the largest of the gaps, and it appeared to be mostly intact—he could even make out a few broken pieces of furniture. Beyond that, he saw the jagged silhouettes of distant trees through a fallen wall, as well as a dark grey sky peeking through a hole in the roof.
He still didn’t see—or sense—Casia or the rest of their group.
He had started to turn back when a voice trailed down from somewhere above, icy and smooth, freezing him in place.
“I’ve finally caught something useful in my snares, it seems.”
That voice.
Months’ worth of smoldering, restless violence burned through Elander’s blood at the sound of it. His hand went again to the grip of Caden’s sword, and he lifted his gaze and spotted Sarith in the room above, lazily unfolding from one of the broken chairs and coming to sit upon a break in the floor, her legs dangling freely down toward him.
He kept his voice as chillingly calm as hers, refusing to take the bait of the mocking smile she greeted him with. “And what usefulness do you believe I’m going to provide you with?”
She studied her nails for a moment before replying. “That remains to be seen, I suppose. Why don’t you start us off by telling me what brings you here, of all places?”
He considered not dignifying her with a response, but the words slipped out of him in a growl, heavy and dark and cold as a grave. “We have unfinished business, you and I.”
“We certainly do.” She stood and stretched. “Though rest assured—I have been trying to finish our business since the moment you all left my side in Moreth. So I’m only too happy to see you here now. Though I can’t imagine why you’ve come to this realm. Mistwilde is a bit out of the way, isn’t it? Given all the other things you should be focusing on. The mortal realm is a bit of a mess, isn’t it? Tragic, really.”
