Page 10

Chapter 10

Rev

After I’d escorted Ilyenna back to her room to rest, and checked in with the channelers nursing headaches, I headed back toward Viridis . I needed a place where I could sit and think through our plan in peace.

Just as we had planned months ago in Hyrithia with the leaders of the isle, we would gather our extra channelers and train them quickly. We needed to destroy the Blightress’s heart before she showed her next move and became too powerful to stop.

I palmed the massive rhyzolm at the ancient doors of Viridis and murmured my name into the dark corridor. A viridescent portal bloomed, and I stepped through. The waves of lavender and jasmine on the breeze welcomed me back to the sanctuary I had missed all those seven years Karus had been gone from herself. She was right to push for its return. She was right to trust that I’d make sure she made it out of the Simulair Solum spell she had used to destroy the Blight , which had desecrated this place months ago.

I eyed the spaces that needed the most work, agreeing with Ilyenna that those bannisters on the third level looked more than weakened. They looked as if they’d crumble to dust at the slightest touch.

I shoved my hands into my black pockets, squeezing the rhyzolm for the tenth time in the hour since I’d left Karus , urging her to try to get something in her stomach. I felt her somewhere near the foyer of the Fortress , or at least, I felt our child there. She was the only living thing I could sense anymore with the rhyzolm.

I stepped down the marble stairs into Viridis’s courtyard. Peeling white birch trees and mounds of flowers greeted me while bees buzzed and birds flew above. All was as it should be in the garden library of Felgren . Wandering my way through the paths, I sat against a tree, pulling on a wide blade of grass and holding it taut between my hands. I blew into it, and a loud whistle floated on the breeze. Pompeii had taught me the trick when I’d first arrived in Felgren as a young man determined to prove himself worthy of the title of Baron . I hoped to someday teach the skill to my daughter.

I leaned my head back against the tree, arms draped over my knees, promising myself I wouldn’t let my exhaustion catch up to me as my eyes drifted closed. My thoughts wandered to what Karus had told me she discovered this morning. The Blightress was in the minds of anyone diseased by the Blight . How many survivors of the Black Fever were there? Thousands of lives had been lost from the disease Heimlen had created in order to get Karus to Felgren , but we needed numbers on the amount of survivors who now bore the mark of the fever in black hands and wrists.

The Blightress had told Karus the power of Baron came from her. Lia confirmed it, so was she there somewhere in my own mind?

“ You won’t find her here.”

The voice startled me, and I opened my eyes to find I was no longer lying against a tree in Viridis .

I blinked rapidly and rubbed my face before squinting in the dying light of a sunset that filtered through the trees of my childhood home. The muddy town of Mire lay in the distance, with its marsh forest and wood cabins trailing smoke from chimneys.

Instead of a birch tree in Viridis , I found myself leaning against one of the great marsh trees from which rhyzolm was mined. A man sat across from me, around the same age as myself, his eyes closed to the orange sunset. His dark brown hair was cut short with a longer length on the top that curled across his widow’s peak. He wore a Baron’s clothes, and when he opened his eyes, a dark hazel gaze stared back at me.

“ Why am I here?” I asked, reaching into my pocket for the rhyzolm to find that it wasn’t there.

The man shrugged. “ You’re the one who brought us here, not me.”

I gripped the tree root to rise, and his hand shot out to pull me back down. “ Where’s Karus ?” I demanded.

“ She’s fine, Revich . She’s with Thalia in the cellars. You’re dreaming in Viridis . Nothing to get all heroic over.”

I studied him. “ I know you.”

His laugh came in a boom, and he swept his hands down his face, responding, “ I would hope you know me.”

“ If I’m dreaming, why are you here with me? You’ve never been in my dreams before.”

He shrugged again. “ You were the one asking questions before you fell asleep. You must have found that place.”

“ What place?”

“ That dark cavern you love to keep locked. The one where the true amount of power you hold resides.” He rose a brow. “ The place where I gave you everything I’ve given all Barons , and you decided you wanted to hand over half of it to your lover.”

I took a deep breath, filling my lungs with the scent of my upbringing—moss and mud. I leaned forward, holding out my hand.

His lips tilted upward as he took it.

“ Rev ,” I said with a shake.

“ Adaynth ,” he replied.

I took my hand back, resting my arms at my knees. “ So , Adaynth , first Baron of Felgren , do you live in Karus’s dreams, too, or just mine?”

He chuckled, letting his head fall back against the massive tree root. “ I live in the minds of all Barons . It’s where I’ve been since my body gave out, and I discovered a way to keep my power from going back to Visalia .”

I nodded slowly. “ Do you talk to Karus in her mind, too?”

He shook his head. “ Not since the day you put her through the Baron trial.”

I nodded again. “ How do we stop the Blightress ? How did you do it before?”

He stared up at the tall trees with spindly leaves at the top. “ It won’t work like before.”

“ Then help me figure out how to do it now. She has threatened to take our child. She has threatened to take our power.” I leaned forward, trying to catch his eye. “ Tell me what to do.”

“ She’s broken.”

“ I don’t care what she is—how do I stop her from destroying our lives?”

“ I don’t exactly know.”

“ What can you tell me, then? What happened between the two of you hundreds of years ago that made her into this?”

“ Our daughter died at birth. Did you know that? Of course you did.” He took a breath, folding his legs and leaning forward.

I swallowed heavily. “ I’m sorry. I truly am, but I won’t let her take mine. I won’t let her take Karus . I will do anything, Adaynth . I will do whatever it takes to?—”

“ I kept her heart locked under the Fortress for about eight hundred years.”

Shocked into silence, I frowned at the first Baron across from me.

“ You didn’t know that, now did you?” He laughed, shaking his head. “ Absurd , isn’t it? I remember the day I told her she had my heart just as well as the day she forced her own from her chest and handed it to me.” He swept his fingers through his hair. “ Blood and all. She couldn’t die by it, and she told me she couldn’t live by it either. She said that to me on the day our child was stillborn. The woman I loved ripped her beating heart from her chest, Revich , and gave it to me like it was nothing.” He wiped a hand under his nose and sniffed, catching my eyes with his. “ That is what I mean when I say she is broken.”

A shiver ran through me, and we sat still in the silence of the Hallow Marshes . Time passed. Minutes went by. I carefully observed him as he gazed out into the marsh. There was more to this story that he wasn’t telling me. I could feel it there between us, hanging heavily in what he didn’t say.

“ So you kept her heart with you?” I asked under my breath. “ Beneath the Fortress ?”

He cleared his throat in a rasp. “ I did. When I had the Fortress built to have a place to train channelers, I kept her heart beneath it. Without it, she’d changed. She wanted to find a reason why our child was dead.” He looked back at me stating, “ There wasn’t one. Regardless of who she decided to blame, there wasn’t a reason for what happened to us. She grew cold. She grew dark and angry—wrathful. When I would visit her, she began to speak of taking back all the power she’d ever given. To me. To Lia . To Felgren . She created the Blight then. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen.”

“ How did you?—”

“ The sun.” He nodded toward the last sliver of light on the horizon. “ I discovered that warmth and eternal rays of light around her heart could hold her power at bay. It was an accident, really. The story goes that the great Baron Adaynth took up his mantle as savior and stopped her. But that wasn’t it. No ,”—he shifted, running a hand through his hair that fell over his face—“ I just wanted her to be warm again. I saw her as often as I could, but she wouldn’t let me touch her after our child’s death, so I gave her my warmth the only way I knew how. I kept her heart under the Fortress and used everything I had to hold the Simulair Solum spell around it. She never once asked where I had taken her heart, and I never revealed it.”

I suppressed a chill, finally getting answers to legends we’d only guessed at for hundreds of years. “ You kept the Simulair Solum spell around her heart to dampen her power?”

“ Yes . I used my love for who she once was to strengthen it. And it worked for so long. Even when I’d had enough of living in the flesh without her and gave up my body, I discovered I could reserve some of my power to hold her heart there.” He sighed, shaking his head. “ That was until Ereyth .”

Hatred sifted through his expression. “ I knew he wasn’t strong enough to withstand her. I knew she’d been attempting to get her heart back from the Fortress . For what reason, I didn’t know at the time. Now I understand it was to regrow her power. Ereyth was weak, preferring channelers based on their bodies rather than their talents.” He shook his head. “ When he let her into his mind, I tried to force her out, and then we held a silent battle. She won. She convinced him to find her heart in the Fortress and bring it to her on the night of the Offerings in Hyrithia . Ereyth desired more than power—he desired her, and she promised him many things. On the night he murdered his channelers in his madness, she hunted him down and killed him, taking her heart with her. I saw her there in his mind right before he died. She smiled at me like she knew I could see. Then the power shifted to Thalius , and I didn’t know what happened to her heart after that.” He glanced at me. “ I do now.”

“ You’ve seen it? In Karus’s mind?”

“ No , but I’ve heard things here and there. Enough to know she’s grown it. It beats in rage, Revich . It fuels her.”

“ So what do we do now? Can we destroy it?”

“ I don’t know. You can certainly try.”

I nodded. “ Can she be killed?”

“ She doesn’t think she can.”

“ Do you think she can?”

“ She’s already dead in my eyes, Revich . She died a long time ago.”

I swiped my hand over my mouth, hiding the surprise of that admittance. “ What else is she capable of?”

Adaynth cocked his head and held out his hand. “ Would you like me to show you?”

Taking a deep breath, I nodded and reached out again to grip his hand in mine.

* * *

Desolation .

Desolation of a vast, empty land.

No , not empty.

Wrath and fear seeped from every inch of the Blight around us.

Every crater of pitch black, every strangle of abyssal dark vines, emitted a hatred so thick, I could choke in the dense pressure of it.

I’d never gone into the Blight except for the one occasion Karus ran through it to save Moira from a sure death. Back then, I hadn’t taken in just how devoid of life the Blight really had been, or how it was now, deep in the depths of Adaynth’s memories.

“ This isn’t even her worst,” he warned, standing next to me in the desecration of his memory’s Felgren Forest .

I surveyed the Blight some more. Enormous black vines, the width of tree trunks, wound over the soil which bloomed in white patches of death in a sure sign of decay. Thorns , sharp as knives, rose from each one as the vines moved, encasing the once-living trees in an embrace of death. Mist wove through my hair and across my cheek as a beckoning—a pull to lay down into the damp soil and dissolve into the earth just as thoroughly, just as slowly, as the creatures who had once roamed the forest had done.

The stench alone was enough to bring bile into my throat, and I swallowed back the vomit. The decay of bodies and blood poured through every inch of my skin, choking me in a successful attempt to force me to retch. I covered my mouth and nose, inhaling short bursts of breath to avoid taking in the scent of rotting decay all at once.

“ This is what she did before her heart had grown,” Adaynth murmured, arms crossed at his chest. “ This is nothing compared to what she is capable of now. Revich ,”—he grabbed my shoulder, forcing me to look at him instead of the silent rage around us— “do you hear me? She can do more than this. Before I dampened her power through my warmth, she was beginning to create…things. Beasts and creatures that had not existed before.”

“ The fae?”

“ Yes , but more than that. The fae creatures as you know them are mere children compared to what she was attempting just before…” he choked a moment, coughing into his sleeve. “ Just before I was able to stop her for a time.”

I shook my head, surveying the hatred around us once again. “ We cannot stop this as we are now. We will need time to train more conduits before we can rid the isle of this. How do we get more time?”

Something ticked in his jaw for a moment before it was gone.

“ What is it?” I pressed. “ You’re keeping something else from me.”

“ I’ve done something. Something I wasn’t sure was possible, but she asked, so I tried.”

“ Who asked?”

He flicked his gaze to mine. “ Karus . That day she accepted the power of Baron , she asked for the power to make you safe, happy, and loved, Rev , and I tried . I did what I could.”

I swallowed back my rising anger. “ What did you do?”

“ I don’t think you’ll ever know. But this”—he gestured around us—“this can be stopped.” He sniffed, his face blurring before me. “ This does not have to be your future. Either one of you.”

The dull glow of Viridis grew as my eyes fluttered, and I tried to keep my focus on the first Baron’s face.

“ If you’re strong enough to stop it.”

My eyes shot open under the birch tree as I woke in the library. I panted, inhaling the fresh scent of grass and newly grown blooms that surrounded me in the garden where I had sought rest for just a moment.

I reached into my pocket to find the rhyzolm. Karus was still in the foyer of the Fortress . Or the cellar, according to Adaynth .

If you’re strong enough to stop it.

I knew I was. Whatever choice came before me, I’d choose the one which kept Karus safe. Which kept our child safe. There was no other choice for me, regardless of what that meant for my own future.