Lichgates: Book One of the Grimoire Saga (an Epic Fantasy Adventure) (24 page)

“You’re lying,” Carden snapped. “You would never have allowed him into your home if you knew.”

“I never lie. He will be more powerful than me, someday, and is already more skillful than you if this is the best you can do. I saw his potential. He is capable of good, even though he was bred to destroy. He needed a second chance.”

“This is a surprise, I suppose, but irrelevant. I need my son to return to me, my Queen, and I have reason to believe that your son isn’t as wise as you are. When he reigns, he will send Braeden back to me.”

The Stelian king swung the mace and missed her jaw by inches. She rolled away and tightened her hands around her sword’s hilt.

“Gavin will surprise you.”

Blood Carden swung again at her neck, but she ducked her head beneath it. It sailed overhead, and a spike sliced off a trailing lock of her hair, which fell, smoking, to the ground. Carden continued twisting until he spun around completely. He aimed his left fist toward her jaw.

She pressed her hand to the ground and the soil convulsed at her touch. A wave of dirt and rocks melted beneath him like an ocean, twisting as it swallowed his legs. The forest rumbled and the wave bent with his weight, pulling him into the earth as Lorraine lunged for his neck. She swung as he was pushed off balance, but he managed to twist just out of her range. She missed his neck, but the blade dug deeply into his wrist instead.

He yelled in agony. Her Sartori’s poison seeped into his blood and settled deeper along its deadly course. She could feel its movement as if she directed it: deeper, deeper through his veins, headed for his heart.

This would all be over once it found his tiny, black heart.

The wave of soil and dirt froze, but he broke through it like a hammer through ice. He rolled onto the grass beside the chasm, cradling his hand, and even though he had overcome the liquid rock which she’d used against him, she smirked.

“At last, you prove your worthlessness,” she said, sword point to the grass. “A quick battle is all it took? You should have known not to underestimate your opponent, however fragile she may seem.”

Lorraine lunged for the Stelian king’s chest, certain, now, that this was the end. Braeden would become the Stelian Blood, yes, but she could teach him to master the darkness. He would learn to control the rage and then, once he was ready, she would tell Hillside. Her adopted son would no longer have to hide who and what he really was.

But as she charged, she fell into Carden’s trap.

Carden spun with a sudden force and knelt, catching her arm. He stood, pulled her around, and slid behind her. His Sartori shifted into a simple black dagger that he sank into her lower back. Its handle pushed against her spine. Nerves snapped. Bones shattered. Her blood raced to the wound, but the poison kept the healing stitches at bay. Her senses quickly faded, and numbness seeped into her fingertips until all she could feel was the soft wind on her dry lips.

A thick hand cradled her jaw. Her eyes shifted, slow, to see the Stelian king’s thick black gaze so close to hers. He brushed back the hair hiding her ear.

“You failed to take your own advice, pretty little Queen. Never underestimate your opponent,” —he chuckled, the noise rumbling in his chest—“or his tolerance for pain.”

He released her face and yanked his Sartori from her back, letting her crumble to the ground. There was a dawning thought that her hands were empty, her Sartori gone. She heard a sizzle. Carden held the green sword with a grimace as his skin burned on the hilt he was not meant to touch. She wanted to scream at him, but her throat was dry. Parched.

None should touch the Sartori but its master! I am its master. I am not yet—I am not yet—

She meant to think “dead,” but her mind went blank as she watched the Stelian Blood retreat. His breath came in ragged gasps, and his jaw was tight from the poison seeping through his veins. His entire hand was soaked in black liquid that dripped over the hill, hissing as his acidic blood burned away the rich meadow grasses. He paused and looked back over his shoulder, turning toward a sound she couldn’t hear.

“Your son is quick, but not fast enough.” He winked. “How sad that your senses are almost gone. You will barely hear his voice when he does arrive. Still, try to tell him that I send my best.”

He peered once more into the woods beyond her vision before he turned away. Something scampered onto his shoulder—or was that just a play of the light? The air around him cracked after a few limping steps, and a thick black mist erupted around him, swallowing him entirely. The smoke engulfed him, marring the summer morning like dark dust tumbling from a fan. When it cleared, he was gone.

Lorraine sank her cheek into the grass. The light began to dissolve into white spots across her vision.

Gavin caught only the sinister glare of his mother’s attacker before the man limped off and disappeared into a thick black fog. The wind blew it away in a matter of seconds, so that all that remained in the meadow was bright sunlight and his mother’s labored body.

He leapt from the wolf before it stopped and ran to her. Mastif crept up behind him, whimpering, as Gavin knelt and lifted his mother’s head into his arms. The whites of her eyes flickered beneath her eyelids as she tried to see him.

“Gavin,” she whispered. Her voice broke on his name.

He shushed her as the wolf lay down and cried again, setting its nose gently by its master’s thigh. It whined and nudged her.

“Mastif, good boy—” She lifted a hand, and the wolf set his massive nose inside her small palm.

“Mother...” Gavin began, but he couldn’t think of anything else to say. He moved her hand away from her wound. Her blood bubbled, reacting to the poison left behind by what could only have been a Sartori. Tears bruised his eyes. He fought them back so that he could see and hear her.

“Mother, who did this? Who was that?”

“Carden.” She was weak, her voice soft.

He pulled her in tighter and stroked her hair, but she set a finger on his nose to get his attention.

“I cut him, so he took my—your Sartori. In each sword lies the antidote to its poison. He has your blade. You must retrieve it.” Her voice became softer and more distant with every word.

Gavin just nodded, without the faintest idea of how he was supposed to do that.

“How can we heal you, Mother? Is there anything but the Stele’s Sartori? Anything?” The pain in his throat burned his words. Tears snuck by, unbidden.

She just smiled.

“Tell Richard that I will wait for him.”

“You can tell him. Just hold on. Hold on for me.”

She shook her head, eyes closing.

“I knew this was—” She sighed. “The world is changing. I am not strong enough, any longer, to survive it.”

She licked her cracked lips and paused, so he stroked her hair and held her tighter. There was nothing else he could do.

“You are worthy, son. You will make me proud.” Her voice trailed off into a whisper, and she smiled again. Gavin laughed along with her, the sound broken and humorless.

Her eyes snapped suddenly into focus, as if she’d remembered something crucial, and she tried to speak, but her voice came out too soft to hear. The sound was just a rush of air through her lips, which Gavin could barely read. All he caught was his brother’s name.

“What about Braeden?”

She nodded and continued to mouth broken words. He tried to follow, but the movement ate the last of her energy. Her lips slowed, she closed her eyes, and she faded. He cradled her until her lungs stopped.

When her last breath left her, it seemed that his next breath burned him more than any fire ever had. His lungs stung, as if filled with needles that tore through his body with a life of their own. His veins melted. The echo of his yell rang through the forest before he realized he was screaming. The woods were quiet after his noise: breathless, waiting, lost to his agony as he became Hillside’s next Blood.

He curled around himself in the meadow. The charred, broken grasses brushed his face for what seemed like days until the searing blister abated. Even then, he couldn’t move. He lay there, wishing he could still cradle his mother, but unable to budge. He was somehow determined that he could bring her back out of sheer will if he could only touch her.

A dead leaf tickled his wrist as he pulled himself to his hands and knees and crawled back to his post at his mother’s side, pushing through the rippling pain that cascaded through his body at each movement. But as he reached her, as he finally brushed her face and could no longer control the wet splotches at the corner of his eyes, the first bits of her began to dissolve into the wind. Flecks of green, shimmering dust chipped off of her face, revealing a second layer of skin that glowed with a dark green light. A single piece of her dust floated away here and there as the wind picked at her body and drew it away, grain by grain.

She was dead.

Footsteps crunched the grass behind him. He spun around with what energy he had left, but saw only Richard. His father stood at the head of an army, his face twisted in a mask of sorrow, and forced himself to close his gaping mouth as a single, thick tear coursed down his nose.

Richard helped him to his feet as Gavin tried and failed to stand. He leaned in and choked on his mother’s last words.

“She said she will wait for you,” he muttered, his fingers and toes and chest all numb. “But you can’t leave me yet.”

Two hours later, Gavin waited in his mother’s study to bide his time before her sunset memorial, tormenting himself in the silence.

Things might have been different had she not needed to summon the Sartori. He wondered why she’d been so far from home, why she had chosen to fight instead of retreat. Guilt ate at him. Had he pushed her from her throne? His daydream of being Blood had been just that: a daydream. This was too real. This was life and death. He was not ready.

An uncomfortable calm had settled upon him. As he’d ridden home on Mastif, he hadn’t said a word to Richard or to anyone else. He’d expected to go into a fury when he returned to the castle, to burn and break and destroy. Those who manned the castle halls had prepared for this as well; the paths to his room and to his mother’s study had been empty.

But he was calm.

He didn’t have any desire to yell or throw things or eat. He sat in his mother’s chair, watching the sun through the bay window as it retreated from the empty, mourning city. When the smoldering horizon ended the day, he would be expected to deliver an old adage to the kingdom:

Through the darkness of this night, there will be no master. There will be no light. All will mourn so that the morning might shine brighter for our loss.

Tomorrow, he would be their Blood. They would celebrate. He would grieve.

Gavin ran his fingers over his mother’s books, reading and rereading her half-written speeches. He even savored the lingering smell of the powdered sugar from the three lemon cookies still sitting on a plate at her desk, awaiting her return.

He glared at the flowerbed into which the sword had vanished. He now understood why she kept an open garden in her study, where she’d always stowed her Sartori. She must have summoned it somehow through the soil. Hillsidians preferred to draw their energy from the earth. It made sense. He crossed to the headless stalks of clover and knelt.

The dirt was hot and stuck to him when he dug his hands into the soil. It was soft and light. He wriggled his fingers and thought of the blade, envisioning the sword in his mind: the hilt’s emerald base and leather handle; the ivy scrollwork etched into the thick steel. He remembered its weight.