Page 187 of Brimstone

And then I saw him, lying on the ground, shielded by the tall grass. His face was pale, his eyes closed.

No. No, no, no, this wasn’t happening. He wasnotdead. I didn’t drag him all the way here for him to be savaged by a fucking feeder on a hillside in the middle of nowhere. He was alive. He was—

Hewasalive. Gods and martyrs, I could hear his heart beating—his pulse was shallow, but it was there. I dropped to my knees, patting him down, grateful when my hands didn’t come away bloody.

“He’s okay,” Foley said. “He’s just unconscious. He passed out. We knew he would. Here, take this a second.” He handed me his unusual weapon. It was even heavier than it looked. Unwieldy, too.

“Whatisthis?”

“A flail.” Foley picked Hayden up and slung him over his shoulder. “It was the first thing I found when I came through the shadow gate. Very effective at caving in the heads of your attackers.” Now that my brother was secured over his shoulder, he held out his hand requesting it back. “Maybe not as effective as a god sword, but still handy to have. Come on. The fighting’s dying down. There are fewer feeders now. We should find the others.”

Lorreth was the easiest to find thanks to the Angel’s Breath that rippled from Avisiéth as he fought. Carrion was with him, Simon held aloft, his copper hair sticking up in three different directions. I watched, half impressed, as he fended off a feeder, twisting the god sword I’d forged for him with a reasonable level of expertise that hehadn’tpossessed when he’d arrived in Yvelia.

The feeder sagged to the floor, lifeless, head cleaved from its body, and Carrion looked up and saw us.

It was a strange thing, to make eye contact with Zilvaren’s cockiest smuggler and find no smile on his face.Reliefflashed over his features when he registered who we were. Then the smile came, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Ahh,hereshe is,” he said, his chest heaving. “Too used to queenly perks these days, are you? Leaving us to do all the heavy lifting?”

I looked down at myself. I was drenched in blood. I couldsmellit, drying on my face. I had clearly carved my way through hell itself in order to stand in front of him, and he knew it.

Suddenly, I was in Lorreth’s arms. “Fucking merciful gods. Thank you. Thank you,” he chanted. He hugged me so hard, I couldn’t breathe. When he pulled back, I saw the state of him and nearly wept. His hair plastered to his cheeks with sweat. There were two huge rents in his leathers. His arm was bleeding profusely. It was rare for anyone other than Fisher to wear a gorget, but Lorreth was wearing one now, and it looked like it had saved his life. Deep grooves were gouged into the metal protecting his neck, giving the impression that something had tried—and mercifully failed—to rip his throat out.

“I sent Te Léna and Maynir down into Inishtar with Everlayne, Zovena, and Iseabail,” he said. “Hopefully they made it.”

“And Tal?” Foley asked.

Lorreth let out a deep breath. Avisiéth rested point-first in the ground at his feet; he must have speared the god sword there when he’d swept me into that bone crushing hug. He collected the sword now, handling it reverently, sliding it back into the scabbard over his shoulder. “I told him to go with the others, but he refused. He started burning the blood out of feeders left, right, and center. The last I saw of him, he had a sword in his hand, and he was cutting the bastards down like a farmerscything wheat. I couldn’t keep up with him. He threw himself into a pack of feeders back there somewhere. I haven’t seen him since. We’ll find him, though. Come on. We need to get down into the town. The place is starting to burn.”

Foley and Lorreth started making plans. It was only when they started walking down the hill at a fast clip that they realized I wasn’t following. My hands shook as I opened the book. Not one of the ones we’d brought from the library. This was the one I’d been carrying in the front of my leathers. My most prized possession, alongside my short swords: Edina’s book.

“What are you doing, Saeris? We need to go!” Foley called.

Carrion hadn’t left my side. “What does it say?”

It took a moment to flip through the front half of the book.Come on, come on, come on.It was here. It had to be. There was no way the book didn’t have the information I needed. An eternity passed while I scanned through lines of text relating to Alchemy and my power. My breath stalled when I found the page I’d read back with the others at Cahlish.

Read on at the white cliffs.

Edina was going to tell me where to go, where to find him, and everything was going to be okay. Hope soared in my chest when I turned the page for the third time, and . . .

I blinked, trying to understand what I was reading.

Read on after the trade.

What? Thetrade? What the fuck didthatmean? Where was the message? This was another cue to proceed onto thenextmessage. But the one I was looking for wasn’t there. I flipped back to the previous page and saw only “Read on at the white cliffs.”

The pages were stuck together. They had to be. My fingers plucked at the paper, trying to will there to be two sheets fused together where there was only one. No page had been torn out. The message just wasn’t there.

“Saeris?”

I looked up and found Lorreth looking down on me with worry-filled eyes. “There’s a lot to figure out, but we can’t do it here,” he said. “I’m sure there’s a perfectly good reason why Fisher didn’t come through the gate. I’d bet good money he’ll be with us by morning. In the meantime, I have to get you inside. He’ll murder me if I let anything happen to you out here.”

I let him guide me away. I tucked the book back inside my leathers, trying to believe Lorreth’s reassurances, but it was impossible to make myself believe. Deep down, I felt it. Something wasverywrong.

On a clear day, you could see the archipelago that defended the island court of Lissia from the chalk cliffs of Inishtar. The islands were known as the Shield. I’d read that in a book recently. There had been an illustration of the small town, built into the cliffside by the proud satyr population that called Inishtar home. The satyrs were architects. Engineers. Mathematicians. They loved music and art, and taught their children to conquer their fear by challenging them to scale the vertical cliffs of their home and dive into the sea.

That was not the Inishtar we were met with as we made our way into the township. This was an Inishtar on fire. An Inishtar dressed in blood. Wives shed tears in the cobbled streets, cradling their husbands. Children wailed, wandering through the confusion, trying to find their parents. Nearly every window was smashed. A thick carpet of glass crunchedunderfoot as we passed countless homes with their doors hanging off their hinges. The homes still stood, at least. They had been constructed out of granite and limestone to withstand the rigors of the salt-laden coastal air. Doors could be replaced. The windows, too. But the lives that had been taken . . .

Lorreth and Foley led the way. They knew how to move through the smoking ruins of a city without letting the horrors of it crush them. This was new to me. Carrion wore a dark look on his face as he walked beside me. Hayden had woken and insisted on walking, but he had completely shut down. He was somewhere far, far away, pretending that none of this was happening, and for a brief moment, I was jealous. How nice it would be to retreat inside my own head and block out the world, knowing that someone else was making the decisions and dealing with the repercussions.