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CHAPTER FORTY

GABE

I sing of Hestraon, god of fire and forge, whose every feeling burned.

G abe burned and burned and burned. Seeing that shape, white wings that spanned the whole of the island below, made Hestraon surge forward in his head, a storm of sorrow and longing and deep anger.

That’s Him , Hestraon said in Gabe’s skull, echoing like the hiss of flame. That’s Him.

He let loose another gout of fire, roaring, heedless of Bastian’s voice yelling at him to stop. The dead were still coming, still climbing up from the depths to attack Caldienan and Kirythean and Auverrani alike, but those ships were well behind them now, left in their wind-sped wake.

Up ahead, the Burnt Isles.

It was strange to pass them, these islands that had been talked of like one of the myriad hells for as long as Gabe could remember.

The two closest ones, first, where the mines were, carving out the riches that Apollius and Nyxara had rained on the earth as They tried to kill each other so long ago.

They were near enough to the shore to see people on it, a horde of inmates that looked nearly as numerous as the dead, staring at them, shouting, trying to figure out what was happening.

He wondered, idly, how many of the dead in the sea had been prisoners first.

Then they were past the prison islands, urged to impossible speed by Alie’s winds.

They skipped past beaches that had been hidden in ash for five hundred years.

Another with people on the shore, all dressed in the same pale fabric, half of them staring at the passing ship and the battle on the horizon, the other half looking fearfully up into the sky, to the god hovering there, white wings and gold and horrible light.

More islands, uninhabited, burned out and dead.

And finally, the Golden Mount.

Alie’s now-gentling winds pulled them right to the beach where he’d slept with Lore, the same sands he’d kissed her on. The trees were just as dried out as on any of the other islands, but the sand was pristine in the shadow of the looming mountain. The shadow of those wings.

Gabe didn’t wait for the gangplank. He jumped off the side of the ship, his knees protesting the landing, but he barely felt the pain. “Malcolm, I need that piece.”

“Wait, Gabriel.” Bastian, jumping after him. “We have to—”

“He’s up there,” Gabe snarled, throwing his hand in the air, to the shining winged thing that could only be Apollius. “He’s up there, and He’s done something to Lore, and He possessed you. I am going to make Him pay for it.”

“I’m on board with that,” Bastian snarled back, “but we have to have a plan .”

Apparently, all of them were forgoing the gangplank; Alie climbed down, dazed from channeling so much magic.

There was a strange ghostliness about her hands, making them almost translucent.

Lilia was behind her, and Val and Mari had already jumped into the surf, eyeing the god in the sky with expressions that vacillated between curiosity and awe and terror.

Malcolm clambered to the beach behind Bastian, the piece in his hand. He hissed as if it burned his fingers. “I assume the Fount is probably exactly where He is? Because of course It would be.”

Lilia’s eyes narrowed at the sky, her face blanched in fear and resignation.

The resignation seemed odd to Gabe, but not enough to make him stop and consider it.

He grabbed the shard from Malcolm, his hand going numb to the elbow.

That only made him hold it tighter as he whirled toward Alie. “Give me the other one.”

But she was eyeing the god hanging above them with nearly the same trepidation as Lilia, a more personal kind of horror seeping into her expression. “Gabe, shouldn’t we—”

“Give it to me.” His voice crackled like kindling. The flames at the corners of his vision were constant, an endless flicker distorting everything.

The Fount piece shone in Alie’s hand, retrieved from a pocket, bright against the copper-brown of her skin. She turned it nervously. “You shouldn’t go alone.”

“He won’t,” Bastian said, at the same time that Gabe said, “I won’t let any of you get hurt.”

They looked at each other, brows lowered in twin expressions of wariness. Bastian would stay here. Apollius had hurt him enough. Gabe would fight tooth and claw before he gave the motherfucker another opportunity.

Even if it meant he had to fight Bastian first.

And it looked like Bastian knew it. His dark eyes went flinty, something in them calcifying. “My love,” he said quietly, “don’t make me do that.”

Gabe said nothing, still holding his hand out for Alie’s shard.

She hesitated, still, turning the thing over and over in her hands. Finally, with one more look at the god above them—the god that was barely moving, other than the occasional beat of those giant wings, as if something else held the majority of His attention—she let the stone drop into Gabe’s palm.

Gold opened before him, a gilded road in the air leading straight up the Mount.

Just as the masts of ships appeared on the horizon.

Whatever lead Alie’s wind had given them was gone—the rest of the fleets were fast approaching the Golden Mount, Kirythea and Auverraine chasing Caldien, some still ablaze, others snuffed out. Gabe wasn’t sure if it was on purpose, or if they were just trying to escape the dead.

The distant sounds of screams and gunshots said that even if they hadn’t brought the dead with them, they had certainly brought the war.

He turned, his edges already fading to ember-shimmer, prepared to phase through every iota of heat in the atmosphere to get to the top of the Mount. A hand on his arm stopped him just before he disappeared into a shower of sparks.

Gabe whirled, expecting Bastian, but it was Malcolm standing there. Malcolm, a determined clench in his jaw, his hand outstretched. The tiny leaves that had flecked his nail beds and the corners of his eyes were withered and brown, falling away.

“Take it,” he said.

At first, Gabe thought he meant the shard, that he’d somehow forgotten already handing it over. But then, shining in Malcolm’s palm—a pool of clear water.

Malcolm was unsteady on his feet, but he looked better than he had in months.

Gabe hadn’t noticed just how drawn his face was, how stooped his posture, until he stood here unencumbered.

He held the power of Braxtos in his hand, the sip of the Fount that had given him magic and damned him, and he offered it to Gabe.

Alie’s eyes kept flickering from Malcolm’s hand to Apollius hovering above, as if expecting the god to swoop down and take the offered water. But if Apollius was aware of what was happening right below Him, He didn’t show it. Bastian, too, was peering up at the god, looking almost puzzled.

The shouts from the ships drew closer, more appearing on the distant sea. Pennants in blue and purple and green, the cloud and boom of cannons.

“I never wanted this,” Malcolm said. A tremor ran through him, rippling the mirrorlike surface of the water in his palm.

Dead leaves shed from his hand. “And I don’t know how this is going to go, but even if it doesn’t work out the way we want, I have to be free of it. I can’t live with it anymore.”

Not exactly a vote of confidence, but Gabe understood. He said nothing, just lifted his friend’s hand to his mouth and drank.

It tasted like starlight, at first, impossibly cold and clear.

Then the grit of dirt, earthy green. Gabe could feel every dying tree on this island, every run of roots that had gone dry and desiccated in the burned-out ground.

He took a shuddering breath, the power of earth melding with fire in his veins, his vision a dancing tangle of green and orange.

Another whispering voice in his head, not as loud or as close as Hestraon, but with the same unearthly resonance. This is a dangerous game.

Braxtos said nothing more. Or, if He did, it was lost in the rush of magic, drowned by the waters of the Fount making a home in Gabe. Washing him out and settling into the hollows.

One last voice. Not-voice, low, a register nearly too deep to recognize.

Another way, perhaps.

Alie stepped up while Gabe shuddered. When he opened his eyes—flames still flickering in the corners, but with a green tinge over everything now—she stood before him with her chin tilted and her eyes shining.

“Alie.” Warning in Bastian’s tone, but a lost kind, as if he couldn’t quite figure out what he was warning against.

She shook her head. Brought her hand to her mouth. Spat, as if the magic within her was a sickness. Then she held out her mouthful of the Fount, the skin of her forearms looking more opaque, somehow, a strange ghostliness gone. “I can’t fight a god, but maybe you can.”

Something in the way she said you . Gabe was different now from the boy she’d grown up with, the man she’d known. Something stronger, something stranger.

But he took her hand and drank down her power, the starlight-cold this time giving way to a light and airy taste, almost bitter.

He stood and shuddered through the change, shaking as all that magic swirled, carving through him like a river making a way through a mountain.

No words from Lereal, just a fleeting sense of worry before They were washed under.

Half the Fount in him. Half in Apollius.

In his mind, grouped with the other gods, Hestraon shimmered with impossible heat. A lurch of god-thought, hidden behind his own.

There is still one more piece. But now You have half of the world’s soul. Maybe He will love Us now.

Gabe grew taller. His eyes were fire, his hands were translucent, tiny leaves pricked from his nailbeds. The apex of heresy.

So much magic made it hard to know which element to dissolve into, so he turned and started toward the burned-out trees, toward the golden path that tugged him on from the Fount pieces in his hands.

Memories torrented through him, none his own.

The Mount as it had once been, his vision wavering between a burnt forest and a lush one, his ears hearing peaceful stillness for a split second before going back to screams and gunfire.

“Wait, you asshole.” Bastian, though it took him a moment to put a name to the face, the feeling. He was something the gods in his head had no concept of, someone entirely Gabe’s own.

And he was furious , his teeth bared as he made Gabe turn around, shoving his face so close that his mouth nearly collided with his cheekbone. He’d punched him, once, broken his nose all over the wallpaper and then healed it just as fast. It looked like he wanted to do it again.

“You are not going up there alone.” Every word punctuated by a shake, their chests pressed together like they had been this morning in that tiny bunk, a different kind of passion. “You don’t know what you’ll find, what you’ll have to do, and you will not do it alone.”

On the beach behind him, the ships were close enough to the shore for sailors to start jumping down, making their way to the island.

What they’d taken as the sounds of fighting among three armies was instead those three armies taking on a common enemy—the dead were still rising, the dead were still coming, the dead were here.

Still, this was a safer place than the Fount would be.

They stood in the cover of burnt trees. The dead seemed only interested in the sailors, in keeping those on the beach from coming any farther onto the shore.

Bastian would be safe here, in the remains of the forest.

Gabe knew just where to press on a neck to steal away consciousness.

Even now, with so much magic and so many voices tangling through him, he remembered being a Presque Mort.

So he reached up, as if he would embrace this man he loved.

And he did, for a moment, kissing him like he’d never get the chance to again, because there was just no way to know.

Bastian kissed him back the same, their mouths opening like they could swallow the other down and keep them safe that way.

When Gabe stepped out of Bastian’s arms, they were limp. He caught his King, gently lowered him to the ground, hidden in the dry remains of underbrush.

Finally , Hestraon said as Gabe made his way up the Mount. I’ve waited for this for so long.