Page 56 of The Cruel Dawn (Vallendor #2)

Elyn searches the aerie. She looks beneath worktables and scans the bookshelves, her face tight and her eyes narrowed. She mutters under her breath as she opens drawers and cabinets, as she paws through papers and maps.

I stand silently at the aerie’s threshold and watch her.

She senses that she’s being watched and spins around, wide-eyed.

Caught.

“What are you looking for, Adjudicator?” I ask coolly.

She shakes her head. “Everything. Everyone.”

I look around the bare room before gazing steadily at her. “No Agon?”

She exhales hard. “No, and the other wisdoms won’t tell me if he’s still here on Vallendor.” She scans the aerie once more.

“And so you’re looking for him in the drawers?” I step across the threshold with my hands clasped behind my back.

Elyn says, “Ha. I’m looking for any clues on his whereabouts, or about what we should do.”

“Like the Librum Esoterica .” I wander over to the aerie’s sole window and gaze at the windswept bluebells below. “In your search, did you happen to find any other solutions?”

“We don’t need the Librum ,” she says. She looks up and rushes over with a grin. “Usese gave you a new sword. Let’s have a look.”

I know she’s changing the subject, but I slowly pull the blade from the sagging scabbard.

She gasps. “That is the most beautiful weapon I’ve ever seen, Kai.”

“Anyone who dares to touch it—mortal or immortal—will die,” I say, watching her. “It’s the most powerful blade on Vallendor.”

She snorts. “Unfortunately, it isn’t the most powerful weapon on Vallendor. Jadon is still the most powerful weapon on Vallendor.”

“And yet I’m still supposed to kill him… somehow .”

She stares at me, tilting her head. “Yes, you’re supposed to kill him. We’re supposed to kill him. It was never supposed to be easy. What’s wrong? Why are you acting like someone’s plotting something behind your back again?”

I laugh without humor. “Because many people have been plotting behind my back. Because everyone I thought was a friend has now become my enemy!”

Outside the abbey, the sky continues to change, shifting from that sickly pink to a deeper indigo streaked with corpse gray. Impossibly, the Aetherium itself is rotting because of Vallendor’s march toward ruin. The Aetherium is rotting because of me and my failures.

Bursts of lightning suddenly flash behind thick, swirling clouds. The wind picks up—these aren’t frantic prayers of the realm-born calling on the gods for help. No, this wind slips through the cracks in the abbey’s stone walls. This is Vallendor collapsing.

I hold my breath as I wait for the storm to break and unleash the violence building in the sky—and in my uncle’s aerie.

Elyn says, “You can’t be suspicious of me again. What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking… She knows where to find Agon. She’s looking for the Librum Esoterica . Killing Jadon can’t be the only way to save Vallendor.”

“What?” Elyn screeches.

“Zephar’s betrayal changes everything.”

“Kai-—”

“I’ve accepted that I must kill Danar Rrivae,” I say, holding up a finger. “He’s told me that I must die for him claim Vallendor.”

I hold up a second finger. “I’ve accepted that I must kill Zephar Itikin. He plans to strip me bare and murder me in my sleep.”

I let my hand fall. “But Jadon has never expressed intent to kill me,” I say.

“ You’ve said that Jadon wanted me dead.

” I stare at her and watch her begin to squirm.

“My dear uncle has also said that Jadon means to kill me. You and Agon have plucked my wings and restricted my movements and lied to me about who I am, what I’ve done, and how my actions have threatened Vallendor and all the other realms.”

Elyn and Agon control Vallendor because they control me . Anyone who possesses any more power than they do endangers the plans for this realm…a realm without me as Grand Defender.

I step closer to Elyn. She has to look up to meet my eyes.

We stare at each other for a moment before she relaxes, and a laugh bubbles up from her chest. “You’re fucking with me, right?” she asks.

Before I can speak, a steward enters the room holding two bundles.

Even with the chaos all over the abbey, he moves with an assured grace.

His simple robes, a deep blue-gray fabric, blend into the shadows of the room.

His pale freckled face is stern, and he bows low before placing the scented bundles on the worktable.

The parcels, wrapped in coarse linen and tied with thick twine, smell of fresh-baked bread, recently harvested herbs, and glazed sugar. Their intoxicating aromas fill the room, bringing warmth to this cold space.

Elyn quickly unties the twine and unwraps these gifts. Her eyes light up at the loaf of still-warm bread, its crust golden and perfect. “I asked for food and water for the both of us,” she says, a little more relaxed in the presence of good food. She points to the second bundle. “That’s yours.”

I narrow my eyes at her again, still unsure. “They aren’t the same?”

Elyn doesn’t answer right away. “Yes and no. Yours is heavy on honeycakes while mine…” She smiles and pulls out a cookie with a thumbprint of purple jam. “Mine has these.” She takes a bite and ties the bundle back up. “But I’ll trade you some.”

Cookies for honeycakes? No. Absolutely not.

This could still be a distraction. All of my friends are enemies now, so why not Elyn? Especially since we’re no longer friends? What was she really looking for as I stood at the aerie’s threshold?

I join her at the table and peer at my unopened parcel. “What if we don’t kill Jadon—?” I hold up my hand before she can object. “What if I could control him instead? What if I could use Miasma against our enemies instead?”

She gapes at me. “You’re…weakening, Kai. You aren’t thinking straight.”

“Bullshit,” I say. “I don’t know the cooks who prepared this pack.

I don’t know the ingredients in these honeycakes or the cleanliness of the water in this canteen.

Who created these tonics? Who cut and prepared these bandages?

Trusting anything and everyone is a thing of the past. That’s not my mind dying . That’s making connections. ”

Elyn doesn’t want me to control Vallendor again.

That makes more sense to me than suddenly coming back into my life, acting like my best friend.

She’s still the same woman who said I’d never be the god that Vallendor needed and deserved.

Does she think she’s the god Vallendor needs and deserves?

Is she tired of being a fucking librarian and a judge?

Vallendor is already teetering on the brink of destruction, already mired in calamity, in need of a steady hand to guide her back on the right path.

What I see as an end, she sees as the beginning.

Yes, Elyn sees an opportunity with Vallendor, which means she must kill Jadon—and me. Unless…she only wants me gone.

I remember how she looked at Jadon after that fight in Fihel, at the camp that night.

I remember how gentle she was, touching him.

She’d draped her hand on his cheeks and pursed her lips to blow the splinter from his eye, and there was joy, not duty, in her smile.

She’d drawn that intimate sketch of his hand tattoo, in so much detail.

She couldn’t have drawn that without seeing it up close.

I don’t want her wings. I want my own wings—my own power—back.

And I want the Librum Esoterica . To find the answers I seek, I’d study the book myself even though I’m no scholar.

“Where’s Jadon?” I ask Elyn now. “Where is he?”

She grabs her parcel of food and frowns at me. “Something’s bothering you, and I wish you’d just say—”

“Did you help him escape?” I ask, closing in on her again. “Did you promise him another gift, like last time?” At the Sea of Devour, I’d discovered she had promised Jadon that she’d remove his mark if he killed me. He failed, of course, and the mark remained.

“How was it that, back in Gasho, he was with you one moment,” I ask, “and then, the next moment, he wasn’t?

” I wait for her to respond. When she doesn’t, I add, “At the Sea of Devour that last time, you said that Jadon was the weapon who’d served both Danar’s purpose and your purpose. What did you mean by that?”

Elyn flushes, realizing finally that something is off in this room, that something is seriously out of tune. The quiet hum of the abbey now feels suffocating. She glances at the door, then over to the window, as if she’s trying to pin down what she hasn’t been able to see until now.

“Is there someone in my life I can trust?” I whisper. I don’t want to believe the answer—but reality sinks in with a cold, cruel certainty.

There’s no one in my life I can trust.

POP! POP! POP!

The abbey shakes. It isn’t supposed to.

Elyn and I exchange a brief glance. We rush over to the window again.

Stewards now take to the sky. One moment, they stand in the field of blue flowers; the next, they’re gone in a burst of light. The whole abbey shimmies. It’s obvious they’re trying to get the fuck out of Vallendor right now.

A chill runs down my spine as I realize that this isn’t a drill. This isn’t a false alarm.

They’re evacuating .

The corpse-gray sky darkens as the air grows heavier with evacuees. We’ve crossed the line of no return.

“We should go,” Elyn says, eyes on the sky.

“Where are they going?” I ask, watching her and wondering what she knows that she isn’t sharing. “If they’re leaving Vallendor, why aren’t they using—?” I point down to the Raqiel guards who remain standing at the Glass of Infinite Realms.

“Because they aren’t going to another realm—”

I shake my head. “They can’t just hide in the Between for too long. They wouldn’t survive. They must be going to some other—”

“Kai, it doesn’t matter right now—”

“It matters to me ,” I shout over her. “It doesn’t matter to you because you haven’t been sentenced to die here. You can leave Vallendor anytime you want.”