A tentacle shot towards his face. Rafe flung up his arm, caught it on his wrist. It stung, fierce and painful. He cried out.
The voice rose to a crescendo, overwhelming Rafe with hunger, cold, need.
Eat eat E
AT
… want want W
ANT
… need N
EED
N
EED
!
He drowned in emptiness, choked on bottomless desire.
“Rafe!” Isabella was there, on the other side of the predatory darkness, surrounded by a silver glow. Light flashed and the pain around his arm eased. A howl reverberated in his skull, shuddered through his jaw.
Isabella slashed at the darkness with a long knife that shone like a mirror shard, winking and crystalline. The dark fluidity rippled in response, surging away from the blade, snaking tentacles from behind, trying to pull Isabella into its oily embrace. She moved like a dancer, light-footed and full of lethal grace. Her other hand held something black, the dark twin to her shining moon-knife.
Rafe tried to move, but cold had settled into his bones like lead. A shiver ran over his skin, and a frost spread towards his heart and lungs. His fingers clenched around the Key, seeking warmth. A tingle relieved the numbness in his arm.
Isabella maneuvered to get to his side, but the darkness surrounded him, holding her at bay with arms that slapped and grabbed.
“Rafe, here!” Her voice was funny, coming at him as if through under water. Her silver knife arced through the air, the darkness drew back from its path, and it fell at Rafe’s feet.
Shuddering, Rafe forced his knees to bend. It took an age—an age in which Isabella danced in stately slow motion—but he clenched his hand around the knife. It was hard and crystal in his grip, glimmering faintly, its light dying as cold seeped out of him and into it. The darkness surged for him, and panicked, Rafe thought,
Light! Light!
Radiance burst out from the dagger. Rafe winced away from the glare, eyes watering, but he held up the dagger like a sword. A screech tore through his head, worse than a raptor-screech, a sound of complete collapse and disintegration. Over it, Isabella screamed, “No! Drop it, Rafe, drop it!”
Heat washed over Rafe. He dropped the dagger and in its dying light, the darkness writhed and bucked. The world felt distorted, time stretched so thin it felt it would snap.
I’ve done something wrong. Something very wrong.
Isabella dashed forward, threw herself into the darkness. The thing, whatever it was, clutched at her, spiraled around her hand, but Rafe was beyond comprehending it now… it was so cold and dark in the world, with a bleak wind howling…
“Rafe, Rafe!” Light in his face and he shuddered away from it, screaming as it touched the fabric of his soul, unraveling, shredding, destroying.
“Fight it,” she cried. “It’s not you!” Her hair tumbled in silvery waves down her back, her eyes were lit up with a weird flame. “Come on, up!”
Shivering, teeth chattering, burning hot and freezing cold, half in his body and half out of it, Rafe let himself be harangued and bullied to his feet. He sagged against Isabella and she pulled him to the mine entrance.
He winced against the stars wheeling in the sky. Light exploded in his head.
“I’m going to be sick,” he whispered through cracked dry lips, and retched, heaving up everything in his stomach.
H
E WAS TEN AND
he was going to die.
The last thing he remembered was tumbling out of bed and into his clothes, shoveling oatmeal and berries fresh from the terraces into his mouth, and running happily for the caves before his mother or his tutor could call him back.
That at least was normal.
What was not normal was running full tilt into the main cavern, under the smiles and averted eyes of the indulgent workers, and being slapped by a wave of light that threw him to the ground, bored holes into his eye sockets, and screamed pain and hate and rage into his ears.
Rafe clawed at his eyes, convulsing in the dirt. He barely heard the cries of alarm, hardly noticed when someone picked him up and ran with him, probably back to the main house. He dimly registered the panicked voices, the jolting, being deposited in his own bed, because most of him was still in a sea of wild white light, drowning.
When he finally clawed his way up to the surface, the room was dark save for an arrangement of candles. A dark-haired blue-eyed girl sat in a chair next to his bed, hands folded primly in her grey-clothed lap, watching him.
He moistened his cracked lips, and managed to get out through his raw throat, “Who are you?”
She was silent for so long that he thought she had not heard him. Then, “Your sister.”
He stared at her, confused. “Don’t. Have. One.” The words stumbled over his lips in a limping whisper. Oh, he was so thirsty!
She smoothed out the already-smooth fabric of her skirt. “I live at the Point.”
“Oh.” Knowledge came back to Rafe in bits and pieces. His tutor droning on about the Law of Limited Heirs; the servants pointing out the Sisters of Selene with their winged caps and starched gowns, as they came to take in the orphaned and unwanted back to their isolated mountaintop; some awkward conversations with his brother; his mother’s frequent sighs and the wounded look in her eyes when he’d made off-handed comments about girls. “I’m. Sorry.” And he was. The girl looked older than him. If so, then she’d been disinherited to make way for
him
. The second son. The spare.
“They say you’re going to die,” she announced. She considered him. “Are you?”
His attention was caught by something on his bedside table. A carafe of water, with a glass by its side. It might as well have been on the moon.
She followed his gaze, and, understanding his desperation, poured water into the glass. It glided down the inside and splashed into the bottom, smooth and clear and wet, so different from the dry crackle of the current he’d fought for so long.
Rafe couldn’t hold back the prickling tears as the girl—his sister—propped him up on pillows and helped him drink. He couldn’t make his swollen lips move much, and water dribbled down his chin and splotched his clothes. When he finally got some into his mouth, it lay cool on his tongue, each swallow both pain and pleasure. Once he was done, he turned his head away. “Thank. You.”
“The sisters of Selene teach us to care for the sick, the young, and the old,” she said primly. She put a cool hand on his forehead, the touch light and clinical. “You have no fever,” she informed him.
He was drowsy again, but he fought it because he didn’t want to drown again. Instead, he lifted a weak hand in the vague direction of the candles, arranged around a chalked five-pointed star. “What’s that?”
Her gaze never left his face. “Selene healing ritual. I learned that too, at the Point,” she said, importantly. “You should sleep. It’s night and everyone else is abed. The Sisters say sleep is the best medicine.”
He shook his head. His passionate denial yielded only a slight side-to-side movement that exhausted him. “Don’t… want… go back.”
She shifted, leaning near, casting a shadow on him. “Don’t worry. I’m here. I won’t let it go on.” She took his hand and grasped it tight, too tight, but Rafe clutched hers as if it were a lifeline. Her fierce and frowning face was the last thing he saw before his eyelids dropped shut. But he needed to know one thing, and desperately. He managed, “’m Rafe. You…?”
“Bryony,” he heard her say. “My name… Rafe…” But he’d already slipped away from the waking world and into….
She’d lied. There was no merciful darkness, no sweet peace awaiting him. A net of wire trapped him, cut cruelly into his flesh, while pieces of something
else
roamed his body. But Rafe was stronger now. He fought the bindings, pulled himself back into the world in fragments, in shattered pieces of sight and sound.
A voice of rock, broken and crumbled, “Can’t bring him… he’s krin-touched, Isabella!… they’ll never…”
“I won’t leave him, Burgess…. you and the rest go…. will be fine.”
Blankets tight around him, pinning his arms to his side. Candles in a star-shape and Bryony in the center—no, not Bryony, but another, hair silvery not dark, too old, too tall.
Long naked knives by his side. Moon and night.
A sharp prick in his hand and he twitched aside. Silver hooks reached inside him, sank into the clots of darkness traveling his blood, dragged them out. Cold bled out of his bones, and the mesh around him loosened.
Memories leaked through his consciousness. His mother, wan; his father, hooded; his brother, afraid; Bryony, determined; Uncle Leo, disappointed; Karzov, mocking. Faces drifted in and out of his dreams. He shivered.
Cool hand on his brow. “Won’t be long now.” Strong, reassuring.
Something acrid against his lips. He twisted his head, but hands grasped his jaw and dragged his teeth apart, stuck something bitter on his tongue. He spat out as much of it as he could.
His back hurt. He was being moved and his legs hung down, heels kicking rock.
He shuddered as someone stretched him out on the ground, tucked him tight in warm blankets. His lips formed the words
Don’t leave
, but nothing came out.
He stared at the stars, unable to move, head hurting.
Flames came into view, made him blink. Faces above him, questioning, anxious.
“Who are…?”
“Sir?”
“Oakhavenite?” The heads wore helmets. Light played over an insignia of crossed swords above a tree.
Rafe found his voice, his name, and his indignation, all in one rush. “I’m Rafe Grenfeld and I escaped from Blackstone. Let me up.” He struggled with his bindings, winced as they helped him sit up on the crude litter he’d been dragged on.
The truth hit him with a punch to the gut.
He’d been drugged and dumped on the Oakhaven border and Isabella had done this to him.
“A
LL THIS FOR A
scorched nursery tale and a bunch of dried leaves?” Leonius Grenfeld, Minister of Information, raked his large square hands through his thick grey hair. “Our people are in Blackstone dungeons, we’ve lost all our contacts in the resistance, the Protector has moved war machines up to the Treaty Line and the rest of the ministers are scared witless. And all I have to show for it is some story about a mythical pillar of quartz rising out of the Barrens? Great Sel!”
Rafe said nothing as he stood in Leo’s tobcco-scented study, crowded with real wood furniture. He stared woodenly at the glass-fronted display case beyond his great-uncle’s shoulder. The Renat Keys within seemed to wink at him—or was it just the trick of the light? No, some of the other objects in his uncle’s study also glowed to his sight. Leo was a collector of mage-era artifacts and in latter years Rafe had taken over much of the legwork for the man he looked up to as both mentor and the father he’d never had. Mage-made objects did contain small quantities of quartz, but they had never bothered Rafe before. A constant headache had dogged him throughout this interview.
Had his quartz-sickness become worse? Or had the drugs Isabella used on him increased his sensitivity to quartz?
Leo stared at Rafe from under bushy drawn-together brows. “Not that I blame you for any of this, Rafe. You did the best anyone could’ve hoped for. If we had known that the Blackstone dissidents had been drinking poor man’s brew, we’d never have let things go that far. They told us they had something of vital military value to sell. I thought it would be news of Blackstone’s latest weaponry or troop movements. Tower of Light, indeed.” He poked at the dragonlace on the polished surface of his antique mahogany desk.
“I believe that is genuinely dragonlace, sir.” Rafe spoke around the sinking feeling of having let his uncle down. “You can ask for confirmation from the University. Professor Comstock in the Botany Department could give you…”
Leo drummed his fingers on the dark expanse of his desk, all restless energy. Sitting behind his desk, with the large wheels of his invalid chair hidden and his wasted legs concealed by a lap rug, Sir Leonius looked the picture of larger-than-life masculine health. “I don’t disagree with your identification, Rafe. All right, so this
is
dragonlace. So what? Who’s to say that it wasn’t found growing in some drone’s lightbox or in one of the agri-caves? There are weeds in Grenfeld, right? Why not in Blackstone? Yes, it hasn’t been found in over a hundred years and perhaps it did come from a vein of unpolished quartz in the Barrens somewhere. What does it help Oakhaven? We’d have to secure it and keep it safe from Blackstone, and I don’t need to tell you how hard it would be to maintain a military outpost in the Barrens. And getting it up and running could take years. We wouldn’t see a bean pod’s worth of production out of it in all that time.”
“Sir.” Rafe removed his gaze from the Renat Keys, each a solid brilliant color—red, yellow and purple—and inlaid with delicate gold patterns. They were so different from the battered specimen in his pocket that his presumption of having laid hands on a fourth Key was laughable. He dared not offer it to his uncle, in case it was yet another disappointment. “Quartz is our lifeblood. We haven’t discovered a new vein in half a century, not even a minor one. If we do not secure Furin’s find, then Blackstone could hold supplies of food hostage over us should our need increase.”
“If it comes to that,” said Leo, softly, “I’d rather see the quartz destroyed than in Blackstone hands.”
Rafe took in a sharp breath. Once shattered or cut off from a vein, quartz ceased to hold light. “It won’t come to that, sir. I’ll find the quartz cavern—Tower of Light or not—and we’ll secure it for Oakhaven. We need that food.”
How to explain it to his uncle? He was a Grenfeld, yes, but he’d lived most of his life away from the family agri-caves. Leo had forgotten that all life rested in the fecundity of the caves, in the heat of the gestating earth, the light from the huge lamps and most of all, in the snaking veins and upthrust pillars of quartz.
Leo smiled, briefly. “And you’ll go out in the Barrens like this, swaying on your feet? You’re not recovered from the drug Rocquespur’s witch gave you. No, I need you for another task. You’re the only one who can identify this Isabella woman. I need you to link her to Rocquespur, so we can prove to the Assembly that the Marquis’ been acting in Blackstone without official permission. And go back to your investigations of illicit trade between Blackstone and Rocquespur’s coterie. That was a better use of your time than the debacle in Blackstone. We might’ve had the rope around Rocquespur’s neck by now, if I hadn’t sent you off on that mission.” He tapped his desk for emphasis.