Chapter 67

Zor carried me to Darkspire, soaring through the night on wings as black as coal, Tristan beside us, cutting an elegant, golden slash through the darkness.

Raz, Tavion, and Bex—Sylvaria—hung back, hopefully timing their departure so we'd all arrive at the same time.

I carried Tristan's keystone and clothes, the iron key to the tower, and kept the sword strapped to my back with a leather harness of Raz's creation. My leathers were stiff and uncomfortable from the cold, and somewhere, somehow, Tavion had managed to secure me a pair of boots that pinched in all the wrong places.

Hiking up the side of a mountain tomorrow would be miserable.

Besides my footwear situation, things were going better than I could have hoped.

"Look up," Zor whispered, his wings outlined by so many stars the sky looked like it was on fire. Gold and white and red danced amongst the darkness, not a single cloud in the sky, last night's crescent moon brushing the mountaintops ahead of us.

"Wow. They're so beautiful," I breathed, leaning back in his arms, his legs tangled around mine. "Close enough I could touch them."

"Beautiful, indeed." He burrowed into the hollow of my neck, lips nibbling, my fingers curling into his shirt as heat built inside me. "When we land, you know what to do."

I buried my face in his chest so he wouldn't see me roll my eyes. "Stick close to Tristan until everyone arrives. Then we all go in together."

"I mean it, Anaria. There is no guarantee this place is safe. Even Bella doesn't know for sure, and neither does Bexley. And that key might not work. And you can stop rolling your eyes at me any time now."

"You can't even see me. How could you possibly know I'm rolling my eyes?"

"Trust me, by now I can feel those eyes rolling, princess." He nuzzled against my throat again. "Like I can practically hear you thinking what an overprotective, fuss budget I am."

I smothered my chuckle. "I was thinking no such thing," I said, even though I totally was.

"We don't know what we're walking into, and I won't apologize for keeping you safe. You can think anything you want. Princess." He nipped my ear. "Unless you know something I don't."

It took every ounce of willpower to suppress my grin.

Because I most certainly know something you don't.

Sylvi built this watchtower three centuries before she forged the knife. Not only was the watchtower safe, we'd definitely be getting inside. But I chewed my lip as Zor dropped lower.

Bexley…Sylvi—I really needed her to pick a form and stick to it—had given us a brief explanation of the stones. At least, his theory of what the stones were. He'd long suspected they were linked to the Old Gods, something our visions confirmed.

On our home world, they may have been little more than good luck charms, but here…here they became lodestones, reservoirs of latent power that we could access at will.

Or use to control and track others.

That's how the Oracle always knew where you were, Bex informed us regretfully. The energy in the stone answered only to her. All those times, I only thought I'd accessed the power, but it had always been her.

I'd never experienced the true power of a keystone, not like the others, and even though I didn't care about fancy boxes, I felt a little left out.

"Well, I'll be damned. There it is." Zor turned us slightly so I had a better view of the mountains and the small, dark pillar shooting up from the base of the Ironhearts. If you weren't looking for Darkspire, you would never spot the black spike built from the same dark slate as the surrounding craggy mountains, their slopes streaked with red.

Legend claimed the hearts of the mountains bled, and looking down, I wouldn't disagree.

"We'll make two passes before we land, making sure the area is clear. If we timed this right, the others should arrive soon after we set down."

I gripped Zor's shirt tighter, the mountains rising up to meet us.

Rivers of blight flowed like creeping fingers across the flat gray of the Pale, smaller tendrils fanning out across the plain. Likewise, the rocky slopes were solid black except for the untouched, perfectly delineated circle around Darkspire.

Dry grass crunchedbeneath our feet. Tristan curled around me like a bad-tempered, overprotective watch dog while Zor prowled the building's perimeter.

Darkspire was bigger than I'd imagined, at least eight floors high and as wide as two houses. Part of me was desperate to get inside and look around. The other part wanted to turn tail and run, because once we went in, I had this terrible feeling there would be no turning back.

Raz landed with Tavion and a half-frozen Bexley.

I rushed forward, swinging off my cloak and wrapping it around the mage. "Why doesn't he have a cloak? He could have frozen to death, Raz."

Raz scratched the back of his neck, his head cocked. "He said he was ready to go. I didn't think I needed to dress him. He's a grown arse male, for fuck's sake."

Tristan snorted out a noseful of sparks as I steered a shaking Bexley toward the door, fishing in my pocket for the key. "I do have a question for you."

"Ask away since I know you will anyway." Bexley tugged the cloak tighter around himself, teeth chattering.

"Why a male? Why not a female? Why not young, or beautiful, or strong, or?—"

"Why not all the things I am not?" Bexley's mouth curved up, the sardonic expression exactly like Sylvaria's. "Because a mousy, cowardly male is not a threat. Because no one will look at him twice or guard their words around him, or even bother questioning how he smuggled an entire laboratory past the wards around the Wynter Palace."

His smile faded to a frown. "But mostly because young, beautiful women are seldom taken seriously. That is why."

I sighed. "You're right. And those are all valid reasons." We stopped in front of the door, my hand trembling around the key.

"Last chance to walk away." Sylvi stared at that door as intently as me. "Raziel wants to whisk you across the ocean to the Ascher Islands, you know. I would think you would be safe there for a few years. This path is not written in stone, Anaria. You could let this realm die, let the twins glut themselves until there is nothing left."

"No. I won't run away from this." I shoved the key into the door. "And I'm not letting them destroy one more thing."

"Then, by all means." Bexley looked up at me with a small, secret smile. "Welcome home."

The first thing that struck me when I stepped inside was the warmth. Instead of cold and stale, the air was suffused with welcoming heat, wrapping around me like my favorite blanket, tinged with hints of woodsmoke and cinnamon like someone was baking cookies.

Then there was the light, glowing from torches and candles and faelights hovering near the ceilings, all of them giving off a pale, golden glow. "This is…not at all what I expected." I stopped craning my neck to take in the comfortable living area, mismatched velveteen settees piled with colorful pillows pulled close to the fire, the floor layered with rugs of every design and size.

This place was the antithesis of cold.

This was…I reached up and rubbed my suddenly aching chest.

"The tower has been spelled to cater to the needs of whomever keeps the key. What you see before you is your vision of home, Anaria," Bex explained softly, sweeping his hand across the room. "This is how you would live if the tower belonged to you." He squeezed my arm. "And so long as you have the key, Darkspire is yours."

There were pastries in the kitchen and bowls of fresh fruit, some so out of season I couldn't help but take a handful, moaning at the just-picked taste. Pitchers of ice-cold lemonade, condensation dripping down the sides. I wandered from room to room, touching everything from the soft, plushy blankets to the stone mantle warm from the fire to the cool stone counters in the kitchen.

There was a library—apparently not under my jurisdiction—as Bexley pointed out, crammed full of information about the Mystara. "A lifetime of collecting." Bex lovingly ran his hands over the spines. "We amassed every scrap of information about the Old Gods, anything we could weaponize or use to slow them down."

"We could have used this information months ago." I couldn't keep the bitterness from my voice.

"You had everything you needed, Anaria. Nothing in this library would have stopped the blight from spreading. Nothing in this library would have taught you how to trap Gelvira in her own head with a blood circle. That was your cleverness, Anaria."

Maybe Sylvi was right. Maybe none of this would have made a difference.

But I was so tired of secrets.

"There is one thing that doesn't make sense to me—why would the Oracle choose her brother over herself? I mean, once Corvus destroys our world, there won't be anything left for her to survive on."

"But she is choosing her own survival."

"Not if this world dies." I blew out a breath. "I saw what they did to our old world. I—Amalla—was going to end everything there, you know. Let our kind fade away into the ether. Then Gelvira forced me through one of her portals into this realm, and here we are."

"The two are twins, Anaria. Their magic is so connected, there is no telling where one begins and the other ends. She can't kill Corvus, not without killing herself. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

Suddenly, there wasn't enough air in the room for me to catch my breath.

"If I kill Corvus, she will die too?"

Bexley's brown eyes gleamed. "You just have to get close enough."