KANE
IKNEW THIS TIME IT was my rib that had cracked.
Each inhale sent the mismatched shards straining from one another
and pain radiating into the pummeled muscles of my back. Sitting up was marginally less painful, and I sucked in a slow, bracing breath.
The scent of pine and blood filled my nostrils.
When I blinked my eyes open, they raked down the cascading wall of solid, glinting ice that I’d plunged from—its peak still hidden behind thick white clouds, the smooth face marred only by the cracks and dents where I’d jammed my fists and feet, unsuccessfully attempting an ascent.
First you failed them. Then you failed her. Now you’re failing again.
Anguish pierced my heart anew. Fresher, every fucking day. Wasn’t grief supposed to dull with time?
I stood, chest still constricting with two very different types of pain, and brushed snow and dirt from my backside. The motion aggravated deep scrapes along my palms. Whatever protective ward the White Crow had cast around his home atop that glacial mountain was inhibiting all aspects of my lighte—barring me from shifting into my dragon form, halting my accelerated Fae healing…
I trudged through near-blinding white back in the direction of the town at the base of the mountain. I’d only made it a few feet when the bruises,
scrapes, and blisters across my body began to fade. My toe cut across the snow, demarking where the ward appeared to end.
I winced with the movement. The rib was going to take longer to heal.
If I were smart, or patient, I’d retreat down to town, get a room at the unsavory, sleet-coated inn, and lie still in devastating silence until I recovered.
But I wasn’t smart. I wasn’t patient.
And I didn’t mind the pain.
I was so cold these days it was almost preferable, feeling something ache inside my bones.
Pressing my palm to the radiating volleys of pain in my side, I appraised the ice-cold mountain range for the hundredth time. Beyond bare ponderosa branches thick with hoarfrost, and snow prints from hares and caribou, that towering rise of jagged hunches rose and rose and rose, gobbling up the skyline.
“You planning to become a dragon and fly at it again?” a crotchety old voice called from behind me. “That almost worked.”
Gods damn it.
“No,” I growled.
And that hadn’t almost worked. It had only gotten me high enough into the air to spy the tiny stone cottage that topped the peak, observe the elderly sorcerer tending to a flourishing root vegetable garden, and then, as soon as I flew for him and through his wards, shift against my will midair and plummet to the ground.
That fall had yielded me one crushed kneecap, a concussion, and two dislocated shoulders. None of which had rivaled the experience of waiting days for my knocked-out teeth to grow back—nothing humbles a man quite like teething in adulthood.
My body shattering against packed snow hadn’t been all bad. In some ways, I’d welcomed the pain. It allowed me to feel what Arwen had felt— that same gruesome powerlessness. Sailing through the air, instincts screaming at me to fly despite my brain’s roaring that I couldn’t—
“You’re not going to die.” That’s what I had told her. A grimace twisted my face at the memory.
So I’d tried again the next day. And the next.
The second time I fell out of my dragon form, I’d broken my back in two places, and lost the use of my legs. I’d lain there for half a day, inside the White Crow’s wards, unable to heal, unable to move, until this mouth breather had stumbled across my prone form and, upon my very clear instructions, dragged me back toward town until a tingling in my calves told me I’d started to heal.
I appraised him now as he stood expectantly with that yoke across his shoulders. The wrinkly, crumpled do-gooder was named Len and had a long face and thin lips that he used to smile far more often than necessary. A dishwasher in the town’s only tavern, Len climbed up the hill for fresh water from the well each morning, and once told me he was all too used to seeing sorry assholes like myself up here, trying and failing to reach the White Crow.
“Don’t beat yourself up,” Len said, eyes crinkling. “It’s a feat when someone can even track the old nutter down.”
Pressing against my aching, splintered rib, I cut a glance at him. “On your way now, Len.”
The older man raised his hands in mock surrender. “All right, all right.
Come down to the tavern if you need to refuel.” “Will do.”
But I wouldn’t.
“FUCK.” I GRUNTED, SLIDING DOWN the face of the mountain, hands clawing for purchase against the rocks I’d driven into the smooth ice to serve as handholds. My chest slammed into one and I spasmed for air, landing hard against the snow. Through my blurred vision, I watched several brown rabbits scatter for the powdery brush.
“You’re going to kill yourself before you do whatever you came here to.”
“Why are you always here?” I croaked to Len through a mouthful of ice. “This is where the damn well is!”
I craned my neck. Len gestured at the water source, yoke balanced across his back, twin pails spilling water from either shoulder. “Help me bring these down the mountain and I’ll buy you a pint.”
“There isn’t time,” I said, ragged, bearded cheek growing numb in the slush.
It had been months. If Lazarus had destroyed the blade already…then actually I’d have nothing but time. A miserable, aching eternity.
I swallowed a dry heave at the thought and sucked in more frigid air, rolling onto my back with a groan.
Don’t think like that.
That sick, wounded yearning took root in my chest as it always did when her voice resonated in my head. Like bells. Like sweet music.
Arwen would tell me that I couldn’t know anything for sure until I made it to Lumera and found out for myself. And I couldn’t do that, couldn’t confront my father until I, too, was full-blooded and had a chance of destroying him.
Which was why I had to get up the fucking mountain.
Up there—where the impenetrable clouds met an icy summit.
I squinted. If there had been a sun to see, it would have sunk behind those peaks hours ago. I could tell by the dim, cerulean light dulling the snow, and the cold seeping into my bones.
In the first days of my journey to the Pearl Mountains, a few residents told me I’d just missed the bright, clear-skied summer. It was cold year- round in the floating kingdom—something about the altitude, or the magic that kept the city hovering among the clouds—but it was especially brutal in both fall and winter months, when there were fewer than eight hours of daylight and near-nonstop snowfall. It was even worse here in Vorst, the region that served as home to the White Crow.
Meanwhile, Shadowhold was probably just reaching the tail end of autumn, the Shadow Woods likely replete with toadstools and blackberries.
Another swift kick to the gut. That’s what thinking of my keep felt like these days. Not because of how much I missed my people, or Griffin or Acorn. Not because I longed for the comforts of lilac soap and whiskey and cloverbread.
But because even if this treacherous, frostbitten climb was possible, even if I reached the White Crow, convinced him to turn me full-blooded, stomached whatever anguish that might entail, and somehow still arrived in one piece back to my shadowed, familiar castle…
Arwen wouldn’t be there.
Her books, filled with flattened petals, unopened. The side of my bed I’d so foolishly hoped would be hers, eternally cold. I’d never hear that peal of laughter again, nor smell her orange blossom skin.
I’d watch my home become a crypt.
I rolled over, burying my face in the snow, and roared until flames ran through my lungs. Until tears burned at my eyes and my chest rippled against the ground, the agony, shredding me, the guilt, the untenable sorrow
—
“Stones alive,” Len breathed. “You need a break.”
“No,” I grumbled, spitting ice and pushing myself up from the ground. “It helps. I’m fine.”
“It’s almost nightfall. You can’t scale a mountain of ice in the dark with a broken rib and a punctured lung. Are you trying to die, boy?”
I’d asked myself that same question so many times I’d lost count. “Depends on the day.”
Len offered me a flat expression. “One pint, a hot meal, and you’ll be back to falling off the mountain again by sunrise.”
Perhaps he was right. I was slinking dangerously close to that tipping point. The one wherein my own death was looking just a bit too attractive. Where I’d either join her or stop having to live each despicable day without her. But then her sacrifice would have been for nothing and that—that I couldn’t allow. In life, or in death.
Dry wind bit at my skin as I limped toward Len with a grunt. Alarm erupted on his face as I drew near, but I only lifted the pails from his shoulders and moved past him, prowling down the mountainside. Len’s sigh of relief was audible as he stomped through the snow after me.
Vorst was barely a town. It was barely a village. That aforementioned seedy inn, a nearly bare general store, a temple, and Len’s quiet stone tavern were all it had to offer. Populated only by those passing through, solitary lifelong merchants like Len, and the rare scholar or priest who sought remote corners of Pearl to study or serve the Stones in peace.
Len’s tavern—which he made clear to me three different times on our trudge over was not his tavern, but his cousin, Faulk’s—was a frostbitten slate-gray hovel on the outskirts. I had to duck to enter, and, due to the low, slanted ceiling, hunch once inside, which sent currents of pain through my still-bruised abdomen.
With few options—the grim space had only a handful of mismatched stools and one bench with a man snoring beneath it—I sat down in a back corner beside the tavern’s hearth. My table was built from an overturned pig trough. A single pillar candle melted atop it, stuffed into an empty wine bottle and flickering for its life.
“What can I do you for?” Len asked, prodding at the crackling fire.
The heat permeated through my stiff, wet clothes. Remnants of ice and snow were melting beneath the layers. I removed my gloves, brushing frost from my beard and flexing my hands closer to the flames. “I’ll take that pint. And whatever you have to eat.”
Len nodded once, returning minutes later with a foamy ale and a lukewarm meat pie. One bite told me it was mostly gristle but I ate the entire thing regardless and then asked for a second. Being this far from the White Crow’s wards had bettered both my appetite and my injuries. I twisted to loosen my rigid spine.
“Want to know what Faulk tried to name the tavern?” Len asked, pulling up a low stool across from me and draping some animal’s hide over his knobby legs.
Irritation pricked at my neck. I couldn’t tell the elderly man to scram when he had offered me the first hot meal I’d had in days. But I really, really would have liked to.
When I remained silent he said, undeterred, “The Frozen Yak.” “Yeah…that’s terrible.”
“I told him every patron will think of rock-hard vomit when they eat.” My eyes found the soupy pie before me, and I lowered my fork.
“You’re obviously not from here, but in Vorst, yaks—” “No offense, Len, but I’d prefer a bit of—”
“Solitude?”
I let my silence answer his question.
Len only leaned forward. His cracked lips spread with a curious grin. “What do you want with the old Crow anyway?”
The fire popped beside me and the snoring man bathed in shadow rolled to his side. I sighed like an ox. “Is it even him up there?”
Len sniffed, the wrinkles on his face creasing with ease, as if he did that all too often. A chronic dripping nose from chronic winter. “It’s him, all right. He’s come down once or twice. Bought seeds for his garden.”
“Does anyone in Vorst speak to him? Is there any way to send word?” Len shook his head.
“Not even for—”
“The king of Onyx?”
I choked on a piece of lard-laden crust.
“People talk,” Len said, leaning back. “Even in towns as small as these. Your land’s been missing a king for the last two months. And not so many men can turn into dragons. Only two, by my last count.”
Suspicion ground my jaw shut. “What do you know of my father?”
Len made a face. “This whole kingdom is made up of scholars. He’s a Faerie, right?”
I said nothing, back rigid, narrow fork mangled in my grasp.
“Why’d you abandon your kingdom?” Len plucked the knife from beside me and twirled it across his crooked fingers. “Are you not at war?”
The rage that spiraled through me nearly blew out my fists and into the thin man. He was only spared by the equal rage directed back at myself— the truth in his words, all my mistakes, being forced to travel here and leave them all behind.
“I didn’t abandon them,” I growled. “My men are preparing for battle.
I’m here to retrieve something we need in order to win.” “And what’s that?”
Len’s curiosity had graduated from mildly irritating to deserving of a fork through the throat.
“C’mon,” he pried. “Who am I going to tell? The rodents?”
I took a breath. “The man I seek to destroy can only be killed by a certain type of Fae. I need the White Crow to make me…able to beat him.” I said the next words very slowly, as to infiltrate Len’s feeble mind. “Can you help me reach the sorcerer?”
Len’s eyes softened, and for a moment, I thought he might actually answer me. “Why now? When you’ve been at war for years?”
I stabbed my warped fork into the soft center of the pie, ignoring him.
Two more mouthfuls and I’d head back up—
“If you answer me, I might be able to help you contact the wizard. I have lived beneath him for sixty years.”
I didn’t want to talk about her with this toad. I didn’t want to talk about her with anyone.
Len’s eyes held my glare like he hadn’t a fear in the world. If I left now, I’d never know if a single ounce of kindness to this man might have made all the difference. It’s what she would have encouraged me to do.
“We had someone else who could kill the man,” I finally said. “Someone very dear to me. She died.”
Len nodded slowly, as if my coldness to him finally made sense. “My condolences, boy. I recently lost a woman I cared for myself. Hadn’t seen her in many years.” Len sniffed again. “Still hurts.”
The unmistakable scuttle of rats’ claws tinkered against the low roof and drew a grunt from the man still sleeping under the rot-holed bench beside us.
Len leaned back again, even closer to the hearth. “What would you give to bring her back?”
Anything.
I only finished my ale.
“C’mon, boy. What would you give?” Len pushed.
This dishwasher’s hunt for companionship was grating my last nerve down to a fine thread. “Why ask such a thing?”
“Why not?”
“I don’t dwell on hypotheticals.”
Len snickered, toying with the knife still in his hands. Then he reached for my supper, and broke off a piece of crust, crumbing it in his hands and scattering it at our feet.
The fat, wiry rat crawled out of the floorboards, tentatively at first. Drawn to the scraps, but no fool. The rodent waited with practiced patience until Len scooted closer to the makeshift table and turned his back on the scene.
“What are you doing?”
“I don’t want you to dwell, boy.” Len had faced me, but his eyes were on that rat, grasping at greasy crumbs with reedy pink hands. Before I could stop him, Len lashed at the creature with his knife and speared the thing clean-through in a gory crunch.
“For Gods’ sake, Len…” The man was senile. And all alone in this icy, lonesome town. I stood to leave, wondering if there even was a Faulk.
“Sit,” he commanded, laying the impaled rat on the table. Its meager blood pooled around my half-eaten pie.
Mists of shadow twined around my fists. Though irritated, I had no real desire to hurt Len. But this was—
“And none of that,” the old man said, jerking his chin at my hands. Len removed the knife, placed it on the table, and waited. I had no reason to stay, but some curiosity, perhaps some long-buried loneliness of my own, kept my feet from moving, and I watched as Len drew one wrinkled hand across the rat’s plump corpse.
With no incantation, no lighte, no otherworldly glow, the rat twitched. And twitched again. Len hadn’t said a single word when the rodent’s curved spine reattached with an audible crack. The long-tailed vermin released a disturbing, harrowing squeak before rising and scampering across the table. It crawled to the ground and back through the gap in the floorboards from which it came.
My heart rattled my broken rib cage. It was more than Briar Creighton herself could do.
Necromancy.
My eyes shot up to Len once more. That crinkle at the corner of his eyes. The smirk playing on his lips.
“It’s you. You’re…”
“Now answer me, boy.”
Knees loose, I dropped back down into my seat.
The White Crow had been with me all evening long. I was a fucking fool.
And now I knew his question for what it was.
A test. One which I didn’t have the right answer to. I knew the truth— that I’d give anything, any limb, any life, any realm, to bring Arwen back. That I would shear the skin from my own bones, tear the world to pulp to hold her in my arms even just one more time—
But I had no idea if it was the response the White Crow sought.
“I’d give more…” I managed on a breath. “More to bring her back than you could ever know.”
“What if it spelled your own death?” “In a heartbeat.”
“Yes, that’s an easy one, isn’t it? What about an innocent’s? What if her resurrection demanded an equal debt paid—”
Suddenly I was back aboard a ship in the heart of the Mineral Sea, reaching for a tear-stained, blood-soaked Arwen. “I knew I couldn’t go through with it. Not even for the good of all of Evendell…Do you hear me? I was willing to sacrifice the entire world to keep you alive!”
“Yes,” I admitted. Shame thick on my tongue, eyes down on the drying river of rat’s blood, tacky and near-black on the tabletop. “I’d kill for her. A thousand times over.”
“And if I raised your lover from the soil, brushed her off and made her new, and gave you the full Fae blood that you seek? If I said neither of you had to die, then what would you do?” The White Crow’s teeth flashed in the fading light, breath swirling in a room now icy cold. I hadn’t realized my bones were chattering.
“Would you still take your new skin,” he continued when I remained silent, “reborn as full-blooded just as the prophecy required, and slay your father? Knowing you were fated to die, as she once was? Knowing you could have lived a near eternity beside her? Would you still sacrifice yourself for the good of the realm?”
No.
If the Gods were that cruel, and somehow this wily, wicked sorcerer could turn me full-blooded Fae and resurrect Arwen…Then, no, I wouldn’t leave her side ever again. There was no use lying to myself. Pretending to be some selfless man I wasn’t, and could never be.
“A great disappointment.”
The breath shot from my lungs. “I didn’t say—”
Another swipe of that wrinkled hand and the old, nameless tavern of Vorst transformed.
When the spots cleared from my vision, my hands were braced on a rich maple dining table. Clean, polished, sparkling in gentle candlelight. The room glowed with dozens of the waxy, lit pillars.
Not a tavern anymore, but a bachelor’s den: plush periwinkle settees, layers of mismatched cream rugs, exotic bottles of wine, and crystal decanters filled with spirit. Wood and leather and the smoky, spiced aroma of incense.
I hadn’t even noticed how earsplitting the endless howl of wind whistling through the mighty trees had been until it was gone. Until that roar was replaced by indulgent silence.
And that veil of frigid cold—gone. Instead, a light, warm breeze rustled loose curtains. It felt like honey in my lungs. Despite the elevation and season here in Vorst, Len’s magic had doused the entire hideaway in temperate air.
And still, my blood chilled as my mind stuttered to a halt. Not magic.
And before me…not Len. Or, still Len, but perhaps as he’d looked thirty years ago. Virile, wise, angular. The kind of man you’d trust with your life, but perhaps not your woman.
Len, the White Crow…whoever he was, was no mere sorcerer. “What are you?”
