Page 11 of Swords of Soul and Shadow (Gate Chronicles #3)

SHE WAS FIRE

Hallie

HALLIE’S brEATHS CAME HEAVY, AND her pack dug into her shoulders. No other sounds followed them down the tunnel or the stilted mountain path to the ruined village. She had no idea if anything was left of the cavern or the soldiers or anything at all.

The soldiers were dead. Hallie had killed them.

Somehow.

She refused to look at her hands. If she didn’t look at the blood, she could pretend it wasn’t there.

The memory of undoing that soldier thread by thread was harder to ignore.

“You did what you had to do,” Niels said as they rounded the last bend of the overgrown trail through the trees.

He’d wrapped his upper right arm with a bandage and a few herbs he’d kept from her father’s stores.

The bullet had only grazed him in the tunnel, like he’d said, but he still winced every time he jostled it.

“Once you’ve calmed down, we’ll go back and help. ”

Calmed down . Like she’d lost her temper, not taken a body apart without a weapon. “I’m fine.”

Niels was the seasoned fighter. He’d been patrolling and conducting sneak attacks on the Cerls for months.

This was Hallie’s first time doing anything of the sort.

She didn’t count the battle in Myrrai when Zeke died; she’d really only run then.

This time, she had killed someone. She felt dirty, like her hands were stained with something worse than blood, like they would never be clean no matter how hard she scrubbed them.

Helping had been her idea, but…she’d killed those people. If she went back, she might have to kill more.

“They were after me.” Her words were measured. She couldn’t afford anger or frustration or crippling guilt. Not now. “It’s better if we keep going. We’ll probably lead them away from the others.”

“And why exactly are we leading them to Ravenhelm?” Niels looked warily at the ruins beyond the trees.

Ravenhelm was something of a legend in the Nardens, a ghost story one told around the dinner fire.

Though only a half-day’s ride away on a very sturdy horse or a mule, very few visited.

The burned-out homes and overgrown town square served as a warning of how quickly a town could be wiped out if they were caught unaware.

Legend said the only survivor of the attack that had razed Ravenhelm was a young boy who managed to kill the Cerl commander with some sort of weapon.

Some claimed it had been a simple crossbow, others a flashpistol; several of the older folk who’d lived in Stoneset at the time swore the boy took him out with only a pickaxe.

Stoneset’s bard rarely told his version, but it was quite fanciful—complete with a glimmering sword.

To hear it told, the boy could have been King Arthur, drawing Excalibur from the stone.

Stories often outgrew their britches in the mountains.

Hallie never knew which version to believe, if any. The only record of the attack lay in oral tradition. Sure, there was probably a military record somewhere, but the attack had been more of an embarrassment for Jayde. It was also one of the many precursors to the Great War years later.

Sticking her hand in her pocket, she found Kase’s goggles and squeezed them, soaking in renewed strength from that small piece of him. She could do this. “That’s where the Passage is.”

Apparently, she’d left facts, logic, and reasoning behind and entered the realm of ‘follow the magical visions in your head.’ The scholarly side of her brain called herself a stars-idiot.

“Passage?” Niels asked skeptically.

“It’s how my great-grandmother got to Jayde.”

“Passage,” he repeated. “Like a…door?”

Always with that doubt.

“An archway,” she corrected. “I think. Not sure what it’ll look like now, as it’s been several decades.”

She squinted at the village. It could hold the archway as it had appeared in Hallie’s mind, but the likelihood of that was slim.

Many homes were empty husks, aged with time and withered vines.

Some were missing entire walls or roofs—as if some vengeful god had smashed it with a fist. The cobblestones below were so overgrown with moss, only a few determined ones poked through the hardy foliage.

She couldn’t tell what Niels was thinking, but he must’ve thought her mad. She certainly did, after all.

Niels paused and rechecked his pistol for bullets. He loaded three more into the chamber. “Hope I don’t need to use this again.”

Hallie looked down at her weapon. The electropistol was easy enough to use. It had one step: pull the trigger. She just needed to aim and pray she hit close to her target. She just didn’t want to think of what her target might be. But was it any better than using her Essence power?

She wasn’t sure.

Throwing her shoulders back, she led the way into the village. “Just let me know if you think anything feels off.”

Niels’ footsteps followed shortly after. She didn’t look back to see what sort of face he made, but she could imagine. It probably rivaled the one he used to wear whenever Jack made him do something particularly dangerous.

Jack.

The flash of memories tasted bitter, like cheap wine left in the sun all day. Each and every memory from her childhood felt that way, even like it belonged to someone else.

Hallie chewed her lip and pressed on, running her fingers along the first home she came to.

The roof was missing—either destroyed in the attack or with the passage of time.

Cracks riddled the foundation like blood vessels.

Dead vines crawled up the wall. The pads of her fingers scraped against the rough and crumbling mortar between the eroding bricks.

The last time Hallie entered an abandoned village, she’d gotten herself kidnapped. Whatever drug they’d given her had muddled the few memories she’d retained of the incident. All she really remembered was leaving Kase outside the inn. Then she’d woken in a leaky dungeon cell without him.

Kase had done his best to save her, had even concocted an entire plan to rescue her with Niels’ help…only for it to go terribly awry.

Heat traveled from her chest to her fingertips once more. She curled her hands into fists and gritted her teeth.

No way to save me this time.

That was, if she didn’t figure out a way to separate the Essence power from the wielder. If she didn’t, she knew she couldn’t hold the power forever. It would drain her, little by little, until there was nothing left of her. The inevitability of it all made her sick.

On paper, Ravenhelm was much smaller than Stoneset, but with the debris still littering the ground fifty years after its downfall, it felt much bigger. There were more nooks and crannies to check. More walls to hide behind. More mysteries and whispers on the wind she couldn’t pick out.

They searched everywhere. Niels was particularly handy when she needed to lift a chunk of crumbling debris in front of a blacksmith’s cottage. The forge lay just behind a caved-in roof, the bellows tossed aside and smothered with detritus.

It was all for naught, but the scholarly side of her brain switched on anyway as they wove through the past. What an interesting tableau of Jaydian history.

Only a smattering of years prior, society had relied on livestock to go anywhere—horses, oxen, or mules being the best choice in the mountains.

No wonder the Jaydian forces hadn’t arrived in time to save the village on their fanciful ponies.

The mountain had reclaimed most of Ravenhelm by now. In the summer, it was probably rife with mountain flora and fauna, an oddly beautiful portrait of such a tragic scene. Now, though, the snow was midway through melting, and it seemed stark, less picturesque, better suiting the history.

With each step she took through the tangled maze, she wished she hadn’t.

Half-melted brown slush squelched as they checked a little nook in one of the toppled houses near the front of the village.

Another winding side street allowed for moonlight to reflect upon the silver patches of snow that had survived the day’s spring sunlight.

Hallie wasn’t sure if it was the village’s aura or the threat of someone else following them, but she felt unsteady.

They hadn’t seen or heard anyone since the caverns, but her neck prickled with anticipation.

With each step she took, her heart ticked up in fervor.

The morbid side of her wondered if she was walking over graves.

She hadn’t done much research into the attack in the past. She’d nearly forgotten about it when she’d been at University and had the resources to do some digging.

She’d simply assumed that the Jaydian forces had cleaned up the bodies afterward and sent the souls to the stars.

But if they’d done that much, why not clear away the rubble? Why not let nature fully reclaim the area?

The moss-covered streets might’ve hidden the worst of the massacre, but what if the crunching sound she heard every so often was the sound of still-decaying bones snapping under her feet?

She turned a corner and heat flared in her body—not painful this time, just an almost-comforting pulse, like fire on a bitter winter night. She stopped, Niels barely catching himself as he ran into her, his lantern swinging.

“This way,” she whispered. She took a step forward, and a pleasant tingling began—soft at first, but with each step, it grew.

She tried not to think; instead, she let instinct guide her as she wandered over upturned cobblestone and slushy snow.

The mountain wind painted her cheeks with pain, stinging her uncovered face and tangling her messy braid as it whistled through the alleyway.

The image of the archway flashed in her mind, fuzzy and glowing around the edges like light gathered in a tangled, fraying rope.

The archway wasn’t made of stone, she realized. It was of light and…time.

How she knew that, she couldn’t say.