Page 44

“Powerful necromancy, that.”

“Is it?” I asked, realizing as the words left me that they sounded entirely too eager.

She gave me a strange look.

“It’s just…it’s a new skill I’ve recently acquired.”

“A powerful and potentially dangerous one,” she said, flatly. “If you don’t know what you’re doing.”

Her point was implied.

You obviously don’t know what you’re doing.

I bit down my response to this, watching her as she leaned against one of the spindly trees, propping her staff in a crook of the branches and looking it over.

It was a beautiful weapon. Slightly longer than she was tall, the bulk of it carved from a dark grey wood. Some sort of silver metal wound elegantly around its tip, molded into the shape of a thorn-covered vine. It somehow looked both delicate and intimidating. Several of the thorns flashed in the low lighting—gemstones, I realized. She was inspecting each one, tapping them and occasionally whispering words in another language, both to herself and directly to the stones. Like a musician fine-tuning their instrument.

Several of the stones changed colors and luminosities as she did this, and I couldn’t help staring, mesmerized into silence by the deft way her hands moved over the piece; she reminded me of Orin, the way she moved so chaotically quickly, yet expertly—tinkering, but with purpose.

My chest felt like it might cave in at the thought of my mentor.

Was he managing without me?

It had only been a little over a day, I thought, but it felt like much, much longer.

I cleared my throat, uncomfortable in the silence and the memories it made room for.

Curiosity lit the woman’s gaze once more as she glanced up at me, and again, she was the one to interrupt the quiet. “The language you speak…you’ve spent extended time in the light.”

I considered the words for a moment before their meaning sank in. “In the living world, you mean?”

Her hands stilled against the metal vine around her weapon. She gave a single, curt nod before returning to her work.

“…I’ve spentallmy time there, save for the past day or two,” I admitted. There seemed no point in trying to lie about it. And maybe the truth would make me seem like less of a threat—less like someone she needed to impale with her staff. “And I’ve never met anyone with powers like mine in that world above.”

She regarded me from under her lashes, not bothering to fully lift her head this time. “No. I would expect not. Such things don’t typically last long in the light.”

Twenty-five years,I wanted to tell her.

Twenty-five years I had lasted in that world, magic and all, though somedays I wasn’t sure how.

Mostdays I wasn’t sure how, if I was being honest with myself.

“Then again,” she said, her gaze sliding down the hill toward Aleksander, “things like him don’t typically last long in the dark, either.”

“…Yet here we are,” I mused.

She lowered her voice, even though the others were far in the distance and caught up in what looked to be an intense conversation of their own. “He should have succumbed immediately to the terrors of this realm,” she said. “This is not a place for beings like him.”

“His magic seems to have insulated him and the rest of his followers,” I said. “If such a thing is possible?”

“Yes. It’s possible.” Her jaw tightened, and her eyes appeared to shift from frosted purple to a deeper, darker shade that brought to mind a starless night sky. “Of course, it has a cost. It’s why we’ve been watching the Light Beast since his arrival. His initial landing unbalanced parts of this realm with catastrophic results. And every time he’s woken up over the years, more calamities have ensued, lasting until he went back to sleep. The wall you crossed over was still in one piece seven years ago, for example. And we’ve done what we could to reinforce it with our own magic, to try and keep the destruction from spreading past it, but now…”

Now, I’d escorted that destructivebeastright over their barriers.

Whoops.

Had his magic really unbalanced and broken down that wall, though?