Chapter 19

T he descent into the belly of the mountain is slow but productive: we come across six more mixed groups, and each time they all take the mark, encouraged by the army swelling in numbers behind me, all bearing my mark.

By the time we reach a staircase carved out of stone, lit by strange flickering blue-white glamours, the army behind me is over a hundred strong.

Unease roils in my belly, though. This has been too easy.

As we descend the stairs, I call Amara up to walk beside me.

"Can I ask you something?" I say.

She looks at me, nervous, surprised. "Of—of course, ma'am."

Ma'am. I fight the urge to correct her, to laugh at a woman who must be three hundred years old calling me ma'am.

I fight the whispers in my gut: imposter, imposter, imposter…fake, fake, fake.

"The mark." I gesture with the hand above which the glamour hovers. "Explain it to me, please?"

She blinks at me. "Ma'am?"

I shake my head. "I'm nineteen and was raised mortal. I have received absolutely zero formal training in glamourworking, Amara. A few informal lessons with Aeldfar, and that's it." I consider how much to say. "The details are complicated, but I have this…ability, I suppose…to perform glamours I don't understand. It's like an instinct, but I literally have no clue what I'm doing. I just…do it."

Amara frowns, nodding. "Strange. I've never heard of such a thing."

I laugh. "Yeah, well, that's me."

She smiles, and points at the glamour. "That's called a mark of fealty. It goes back….oh gods and Blood… millennia. Emperors, generals, and warlords have used them since time immemorial to mark their warriors. In one sense, it's just a mark, an identifier so you know who's on your side. But the magic of it goes deeper. It binds. Once you take the mark of fealty, you bear it forever. If you betray the wielder of the mark, you are scarred—marked again, but this time as a traitor. Everyone will know you as an oath breaker. It doesn't compel loyalty in and of itself, but to take the mark of fealty is no small thing." She glances at me as we hit a landing and continue downward. "No one has used a mark of fealty since before the Treaty. Gods, it's been a long time since I thought about this, so my memory is rusty. If I recall correctly, King Louis the Fourteenth was the last to wield a mark of fealty. He was quite a unique male."

"He was fae?"

She nods. "Many of the famous kings and rulers were, although mortal history texts have been altered to erase this little fact, obviously."

"So the mark. It never goes away?"

She shakes her head. "If I change my armor, it will transfer to what I'm wearing. If I'm naked, it will appear like…" She indicates my chest, and the bond-mark there. "Like that." She eyes me curiously. "Could I ask you a question?"

"Yeah, sure."

"Why are you naked?"

I look down at myself—naked, my bond-mark glowing dimly, blood from the battle on the mountainside spattering my fair skin. "I was kept naked as a prisoner. A form of…intimidation, perhaps, or for psychological effect. Or maybe an attempt to humiliate me? I don't know. I glamoured myself some clothes when I was out there," I gesture above us. "But the glamour dissolved when I breached the doors. And now I've got to preserve my prana for more important things. I've honestly forgotten that I am because I have been for so long."

"'You wear nothing, and you wear it so well,'" Amara says, her tone that of someone quoting something. When I eye her curiously, she shrugs, a sheepish expression on her face. "Dave Matthews Band. Mortals make strange music, but him, I like."

I laugh. "Dave Matthews Band, huh? Okay."

"Can I ask something else?"

I shrug. "Of course."

"How did you escape?"

I sigh. "Through The Dreaming." She stares at me as if waiting for more, but I just shrug. "I can't explain it. I just…" I watch Wolf, sniffing the floor and the air as we reach the bottom of the stairs. "We went through. Caleb and I together."

"You went into The Dreaming with your physical body?"

I nod. "I did."

She's silent for a long time. "I did not think such a thing was even possible."

"I don't know what's thought to be possible or not, Amara. It's an advantage in some ways, I think, because I'm willing to try things without knowing the risks or whether it should be impossible."

"You are wise beyond your years, my queen."

God, that just feels so fucking weird to hear that and know she means me . It makes me so uncomfortable that I fidget and grit my teeth to stop myself from correcting her.

"I was desperate. They were coming to execute me," I say, eventually.

Wolf is looking at me, growling. He glances over his shoulder meaningfully.

I look past him. We are in a low hallway, the ceiling barrel-vaulted. It's cold here, and damp. Something drips somewhere, echoing.

A shiver runs through me. We're among the cells, now. I hear voices—moans of pain, cries for help. Caleb is cowering, whining, shaking his huge shaggy head as if in debilitating pain.

Amber light flares, and he's curled in a ball on the floor, naked, shivering, shaking, sweating, moaning, clutching his skull in both hands.

"Caleb?" I rush to him. "Caleb!"

"Pack," he snarls through clenched teeth. "Dying."

I lurch to my feet and rush for the doorway separating us from the cells; the stairs behind us curve up and away, my little newfound army waiting, shuffling, coughing, muttering among themselves. The door is thick, dark, old wood, strapped with tarnished, rusting black iron, and has a small square barred window near the top. There is no handle, no keyhole. No way to open it.

I move to simply push it open, but Amara snags my hand and stops me. "Apologies, my queen, but it is warded."

I blink and focus, and then I can see the ward, a golden web of strands woven around it. I'm still not very good at figuring out what a glamour does just by looking at it, so I glance at Amara.

"What does it do?"

She touches the door with a shockstick—golden light flares, and she's knocked backward several steps; she drops her shockstick and shakes her hand. "That."

"How do we undo it?"

She picks up her shockstick and sheathes it in a holster at her back. "I don't know. I'm not trained in this sort of thing. I can see it, and I can tell what it does, but picking it part?" A shake of her head. "Beyond me, I'm sorry to say."

I close my eyes and draw prana. I don't feel Mother's Spirit here, so I guess I'm on my own. I peer with maya-filtered sight at the ward and try to pick apart the thousands of threads, trying to find a start or an endpoint, thinking maybe it's like a knot that I have to undo.

After several silent, tense minutes, I growl in frustration, no closer to knowing what to do.

In an act of petulant frustration, I lash out with a lance of prana, smashing it right through the center of the ward. White light bursts behind my eyes and pain flares in my skull…

Time stutters.

I feel myself being flung backward, but it feels like I'm moving through taffy. A mote of dust, lit by the light of the glamour, shimmers and winks in front of my face. A strand of my hair, glowing incandescent white like an LED lightbulb, shifts across my vision, moving a millimeter at a time.

My lance of prana is stuck to the ward, and the light of the ward has shifted from gold to red, and now creeps up the stream of my magic connecting me to the door.

Shit, shit, shit.

I focus my will on my prana, and, as has served me well so far, I push . Exert my intent on the magic. Open —I command the ward to obey. OPEN. OPEN .

The red creeps closer, and I feel it, an oily stain on my magic, and I know if it reaches my chest, I'm in for a world of hurt.

I pour more prana down the line and push it into the door. It feels like trying to bench press a barbell when someone is sitting on it, and someone else is sitting on your chest. Everything shakes, and pain flares in my skull, behind my eyes.

Behind me, Caleb howls in pain, the sound both animal and human—and it is excruciating to hear.

Fucking wards.

Anger pulses through me.

I discard caution, abandoning the attempt to preserve my prana for the coming conflict with Zirae—something I know in my soul is inevitable. I pour everything down the line, and golden light swells in my gut, the line of my prana expanding and the glow shooting out of me and down the thin stream, expanding as it goes. It overtakes the creeping crimson stain, floods it, devours it, and then I feel a silent concussion, and something smashes against my spine and my skull.

Dizziness wobbles through me, my vision tunneling.

Hands grasp and lift me—Caspian, Fin.

"Maeve?" Caspian's voice is distorted. "Talk to me."

"C-Caleb?" My throat feels tight.

"He's…not good."

"Ward?"

"Down." A hesitation. "And there are a lot of Tribunal forces on the other side."

I blink hard, dizziness making things swim. "How long—how long was I out?"

"Out?" He sounds puzzled. "You reached out for the door, and just before you made contact, you flew backward into the stairs. The door blew up. The whole thing took less than ten seconds."

"The Tribunal forces," I say, hoarse. "Think they'll join us?"

I can barely stand upright, and everything is swimming and multiplying. I see figures moving, rushing, dodging, spinning. Light flares. A gun cracks. Sound washes over me, fuzzy and distorted.

"Fucking wards," I grumble.

"Are you okay?" Caspian asks.

I squeeze my eyes shut and draw a deep breath. "I have to be."

I let Caspian and Fin help me down the stairs—I flew up the stairs, apparently, and left a wake of shattered rubble. Their touch helps, and as we clamber down the shattered stairs to the doorway I feel Alistair's hand on my arm and Stirling's around my waist.

Caleb.

He's on the ground, writhing, screaming.

His obvious agony energizes me, clearing the dizziness with a shot of adrenaline. "Caleb!"

"Pack…pack…" he growls. "Channing, Sierra, Connor…Saige, Callahan, Colin…" he chants the names again and again in a variety of orders, and then he flips to his back, spine arching almost double, so hard I hear the joints crack and pop.

"Fuck this," I snap.

Power jolts through me and I stomp through the doorway—shards of wood and bits of metal and pieces of stone lay in piles, but I barely feel them as I step over them and enter the scene.

A large open room lays beyond the doorway and the stairs, a bright open space lit by a fifty-foot by fifty-foot version of the skylight-mirrors. Pillars run the perimeter of the circular room, a doorway leading to a hallway between each set of pillars.

The room is a warzone.

It would be incomprehensible chaos without the marks of fealty branding the warriors who have turned to my cause. As it is, everything is moving so fast it's hard to follow. Hastaxi orbs shimmer and wobble, devouring people and carving through pillars and walls—those things are fucking hazardous, I decide. Guns crack. People scream in pain. There's hand-to-hand fighting with swords and shocksticks and shields. Fae warriors on both sides swing a sword with one hand and cast glamours with the other—bolts of lightning, balls of white fire that engulf their target and set them ablaze, screaming. Roots reach up and tangle legs and reach down throats.

It's a lesson in offensive glamour-casting all on its own.

No time for that, though—my forces are outnumbered and being overrun.

My prana is dangerously low, and my body is working overtime to heal me from the impact of being thrown across the room—after healing me from the first ward, which consumes prodigious quantities of blood.

I turn to Fin and point at Caleb. "Guard him with your life." I grasp his hands and squeeze. "No one comes near him but me."

Fin's grin is savage. "Yes, my queen."

I glare at him. "This is not time for teasing, Fin."

He grabs my hair, jerks my head back, and kisses me, hard and fast. "Who's teasing?" He swats my ass. "Go kick ass, WorldBreaker."

He turns me by my shoulders and shoves me hard into the fray.

A female fae wielding a sword and a shockstick turns on me—no sparrow adorns her Elite armor. She stabs at me with her sword, and I barely react in time to twist aside, and now I feel Mother's Spirit flickering to life—or maybe it's just plain old-fashioned instinct to fight, to survive, to not die.

I grab her sword arm and send a blast of power into her—unformed, raw magical energy. She screams, a bloodcurdling howl of agony that deafens me, and then goes limp, blood spurting from her mouth, nose, and ears. I haul her into my arms and can't fight the hunger, the thirst. I sink my fangs into her throat and drink, pulling at her vitality at the same time. The suppression of the sexual component is almost second nature, now, but even still, I feel her soul shivering and screaming—she's barely older than Caspian, little more than a child by immortal standards. I catch fleeting glimpses of her life, snatches of days and nights, parents and lovers and tests and training…

I release her when I feel her blood run thin, and set her on the ground, wiping my lips on my wrist. One of my people is locked in battle with three vampires, and losing. He's a shifter, and I can sense him trying to change, but every time he does, one of the vampires attacks and he has to abandon the shift—apparently, Caleb's ability to shift almost instantly is a sign of his much greater power because this shifter's change is slow by comparison.

I sprint across the room, dodging a person here and a hastaxi orb there, deciding mentally to outlaw the damn things if such a decision is ever actually up to me.

I reach the shifter, who has a vampire on his back, fangs seeking flesh—the other two circle warily, waiting for a chance to jump in, but the shifter is a canny fighter, swiping with his sword to keep them at bay while fending off the vampires' fangs with the other.

My toe smacks against something hard, sending it clattering—a dropped sword. I scoop it up and skid to a stop in between my shifter and the vampires. Fear flickers in their eyes—both male, older than Caspian, and wearing the jumpsuits, wielding swords.

I'm going to have to get sword training in, I think—if I survive this.

I swipe with the sword, a clumsy, awkward move, and one of the vampires snickers…and leaps at me with vampiric speed, all smoke and shadows and steel. My body reacts—a desperate leap backward, bringing my sword just in time. The impact shivers down my arm and he's already gone, flashing to the side; I spin to keep him in front, but this leaves me vulnerable to attack by the other.

Why am I playing at swords? Fuck this.

I lash out with prana with one hand, sending one of those nifty, vicious little fireballs at the vampire attacking from the side while reaching for the other with a second stream of magic.

It lances into his chest and I yank, hard. His whole body jerks, his spine snapping in half, and his blood sings, swirling around the lance of magic and into my palm.

An idea occurs to me, and I execute it before I have time to rethink it: I guide the blood over my skin, tell it to coat my arms and my hands and my shoulders, my chest and breasts and thighs and feet, until every inch of me from neck to toes is wrapped in a skintight crimson shell, a scarlet version of the chitinous armor worn by the Elites. Despite its rigidity, it somehow moves easily without creaking or resisting.

What good it will do as armor, I don't know, but it feels good to be covered.

I see Stirling across the room, a dancing dervish of death, a pair of short swords in his hands flashing and spinning as if he's merely going through a kata. Every movement spills blood and snuffs out a life. Caspian is beside him, wielding a single sword which he uses to similarly devastating effect.

I feel Caleb's agony, a sour aching pulse in my chest, and I know I'm out of time.

I look back at him, and his eyes are open, fixed on a single point. He's trying to crawl, even as spasms wrack his body.

Fin! I call across the bloodlink. Bring him.

Fin scoops Caleb's huge, naked, writing form up in his arms and sprints across the battlefield with him—Cas and Stirling feel their brother and move in unison, clearing the way with an ease that speaks of long practice fighting together.

Caleb, I whisper into his mind. Where are they? Show me.

He snarls, roars, his head spasming backward, spine arching so hard I worry it'll break. He manages to lift a shaking, trembling hand and point at a particular opening.

Caspian, Fin, and Stirling need no orders from me—they take off with vampiric speed for the indicated hallway.

Alistair speaks to me across the bloodlink. GO, Maeve! I'll direct things here.

I follow Caspian and the others as we weave and dodge across the huge room, slashing at enemy fighters but not stopping to fully engage. Caleb's bellows of agony echo over the cacophony of battle, and my heart clenches, his pain searing across our bond and causing me to stumble. Caspian hauls me upright and we run side by side between the pillars.

A pair of Elites guard the opening, hastaxi aimed in our direction.

Desperation guides me—I shoot out both hands at once, sending fireballs at them, but they bounce harmlessly off the fae armor, dissolving. A purple orb wobbles for me, and I duck under it, slashing with my sword, my blade clanging off of a hastaxi. I lash out with prana again, this time calling roots up from the earth, up through the floor, causing it to crack and split and shake, and the roots—tiny tendrils at first—wrap around their ankles and snake up their calves, thickening as they creep upward. Panic fills both of the Elites, and they drop their weapons, pulling at the creeping vines as they coil around their thighs and waists and chests, now thick as arms and growing. Coiling, constricting, tightening. Bones crunch and crackle and their screams echo and gurgle.

The scent of fae blood fills the air and it's pure gut reaction to call it to myself, both hands reaching with prana and jerking the blood to my hands. I feel it soak into the blood armor and then into my skin, flooding my veins. Their prana surges into me, and my reserves swell and brighten.

I wish I could do that, Fin says across the link. Looks handy as hell.

I spare no time for a response, sprinting down the corridor with the others hard on my heels. Screams of agony reverberate off the walls of the narrow hallway, which features six doorways and six wards.

I skid to a halt in the middle of the hallway, scanning the wards—not as dense or vicious as the one that warded my door, nor the one on the door to this prison area, but there are six of them.

I feel Caleb dying.

"Bring me blood. Fae. Living or freshly dead," I snap. "And stand back. This will get messy." I suck in a breath and blow it out, shaking my hands and rolling my shoulders. "Fucking wards."

I feel my coven moving to do my bidding. Fin sets Caleb down on the floor behind me, gently, reverently. Caleb, wracked with spasms of agony, screams, and reaches for the doors, clawing across the rough stone floor with such desperation he rips his fingernails off.

I close my eyes and feel for the wards—six spiderwebs of glamour, six intricate knots. And one little me.

I tune out doubt, tune out pain. Tune out Caleb's dying agony.

I send a needle-thin thread of power into each ward. At first, just to feel it out. Instead of visually seeking the weak point, I feel for it. Each ward is identical, a copy-paste ward repeated six times—so, find one nexus, find them all. The needle of prana wiggles and worms across the strands and intersections of the wards. It feels excruciatingly slow, but it's the only way, I think. Brute force takes too much out of me. Each knot I find, I test, prodding and poking, but they hold.

Caleb's roars of pain reach a crescendo, and I feel tears slip down my cheeks. I just found him. I can't lose him now.

There.

At the very center, buried inside a Gordian knot of pranic ley lines, is a weak point. A place where the thousands of threads all begin, tied off together.

I send my needle into it, thread it through the knot, weaving my power into it. And then I do what it seems like I do best: PUSH .

I send my power into the six needles, and expand them into threads, into hoses, into dense, rushing, turbulent rivers. More, and more, and more.

I feel my power depleting; now comes the trickiest part. I divide my focus, seeking the fae blood I have to trust my coven to have provided. I sense it, taste it. They're dying, weakening by the second, which means their blood will thin and their prana will dim by the second, losing potency.

They're not people, now, they're batteries. Fuel for what I must do to save my mate.

It's the only mindset available to me, or I'll go mad with guilt.

A sharp dagger of pain splits my skull in two as I force my focus to divide, still pouring prana by the gallon down the lines and into the wards, feeling the wards glow and heat and strain and begin to crack; internally, my well of prana is dim and weak, my circulatory system guttering and sputtering as it devours my blood to keep my prana flowing—it's all one system, I finally understand, in some distant side-pocket of my brain. Something to chew on, later.

I reach out a hand and call the singing blood to myself, and when I call their blood, their prana comes with it, visualized in my mind's eye as a flat ribbon of crimson woven through with golden strands. Instead of jerking it all to me at once, I force the stream of prana and rakta to flow into me at a steady pace, replacing my reserves as they deplete.

It feels like juggling three balls in my left hand and three in my right, in different rhythms, with my eyes closed.

Caleb's bellows of pain go hoarse.

Time is up.

With a scream that comes from the very pit of my soul, I shove everything I have down the lines, pulling blood and magic at the same time.

A series of explosions rocks the mountain, one after the other in such swift succession they sound like one long detonation. The floor rocks under my feet and I topple backward, tripping over Caleb's prone form, now gone still and silent.

My ears ring.

I taste stone dust and blood. I blink, but I can't see—only a red haze.

I scrub at my face with my hands, but my sight doesn't clear.

"Caleb?" I say—or try to, but my voice is a raw, guttural croak.

"Maeve?" Caspian's voice at my right ear.

"C-can't—can't…s-see."

"Your eyes are bleeding."

"C-Cay… Caleb? Pack?" Talking feels like knives slicing my throat.

"He's not moving, Maeve."

"Touch. They…he needs to touch them."

I hear feet scuffing on stone, and then a series of soft thumps of bodies being set down.

Caleb's spirit is weak—I feel it. He's slipping away.

I do the only thing I can think of:

I slip into the Dreaming.