"Nanny," he said, his fingers turning white on the windowsill. "Why are the monsters coming to get us?"
Nanny's hands were warm and wrinkled on his shoulders. "Because the Blood Sorcerer wants to steal Elden."
"He can't, can he?"
"No," Nanny said, but Micah heard a hesitation in her voice, and it scared him.
Below them, the horrible monsters crushed the soldiers, and though Micah knew he was supposed to love his subjects as family, he was only a child who knew the man who was the foundation of his world fought below. "Father," he whispered. "Father."
"He'll be fine," Nanny said, her hands tightening on Micah's shoulders. "He is the king and kings do not fall." The absolute conviction in her voice convinced him, but he couldn't turn his eyes from the carnage below, the air filled with screams and scents that made his stomach churn.
It was as the Elden forces began to fall back that Micah saw the man in the center of the chaos of spiders. Tall and spidery thin himself, he held a staff of twisted and blackened wood, his fingers appearing like claws to Micah's suddenly crystal-clear vision.
Magic, he'd realize as an adult; it had been magic that had let him see so clearly, forged from his natural connection to Elden. But that night, all he knew was that he could see the monster within the other monsters, and a chill came into his heart, his young mind comprehending that that one was the worst of them all.
Then the man with the nightmare face looked up, his gaze zeroing in on the window from where Micah watched. It was a child's urge to hide, to turn away, but he locked his eyes with those of dirty ice and saw the bad man's lips form the words, "I'll get you, boy."
"No," Micah whispered. "You never will."
Chapter 20
The memory fractured, but it was all there now, just waiting for him to look, to see. As the Arachdem who hadn't been impaled screamed and scuttled away, giving up the fight, he opened the mental doorway a little. Names and places, scents and sounds, and pain, such pain rocketed through him. He'd been thrown through time and space itself, his body locked in a spell meant to protect and cast in desperation as Elden fell.
His mother's spell had found unlikely expression in the cool, quiet room below the Black Castle, where it was said the new Guardian always appeared when it was time. But he'd been too young when he arrived, had spent years in sleep, rising only when he could take on the mantle. Of the old lord, he knew only what the ghosts had told him - that he had chosen to return to the place from whence he'd come, to spend the rest of his years far from the Abyss.
But none of that mattered. What mattered were those eyes of dirty ice.
Retracting the spikes formed of the earth's elements once he was certain the spiders wouldn't regain their courage and return, he held up his exhausted body through sheer strength of will as he turned to face the woman who scrambled up to her feet, unhidden concern in her expression. However, he halted her with a palm held flat out when she would've touched him. Those eyes...those eyes looked at him with a dawning comprehension that turned them dull and distant. "You know."
"You lied to me, Liliana." He'd seen storm skies in those changeable eyes, and yet all this time, they had been filled with lies.
She flinched, stayed silent.
"You didn't tell me your father is the sorcerer who stole my parents' lives." He couldn't bring himself to ask about Nicolai, Dayn and Breena.
Swallowing, she fisted her hands. "I needed you to trust me, to remember."
"Why?" Something niggled at him, a half-remembered dream.
"The twentieth anniversary of Elden's fall is almost upon us," Liliana said, hugging herself. "You must be at the castle before midnight on that day."
Micah gripped her upper arms. "Why? Tell me."
"At midnight, Elden will die...and so will your siblings." Instead of attempting to break his rough hold, she touched hesitant fingers to his chest. "After today, there are only two more days left and the road to Elden is long and filled with many dangers. I may be able to take you halfway using the spell that brought me here, but it'll drain me - and I must fight beside you, for my father is an evil man bloated with power."
Letting her go, he stepped away from her touch. Hurt filled her eyes and it made him want to rage, but he was so angry at her, the wildness of it leaving him near wordless.
"I know," she whispered in a broken kind of a voice. "I know what I stole from you. I don't expect you to feel the same toward me now that you know whose blood runs in my veins, but please, Micah, you must believe me. You must or your family will be forever lost."
"It's not your blood," he said, rising into the air, rejuvenated by the powerful magic of the Abyss. "It's the fact that you lied to me."
Liliana watched Micah disappear into the clouds on those strange leathery wings that had formed from the ether, aware he was chasing the last of the Arachdem to ensure they wouldn't return. But he was also getting away from her - a woman who had lied to him. However, regardless of what he'd said, she knew that couldn't be the sole reason for his fury.
How could he bear to touch her when her visage was an ugly feminine echo of her father's? When her eyes were those of the Blood Sorcerer? When her hooked beak of a nose was a replica of the man who had murdered his parents? There was nothing of her mother in her beyond the color of her skin, as if he'd stolen that, too, when he locked Irina in a spell of haunting blindness to the child she'd borne.
The sky above her began to fill once again with blue, the purity of it mocking her pathetic attempt at escaping the truth of her murderous lineage.
"I'm sorry," she whispered. "I'm so sorry."
But Micah wasn't there to hear her, and when the sun blazed dark orange as it sank toward the mountains, the kitchari having cleaned up the Arachdem corpses and returned to the earth, he wasn't there to hold her...never would be again. Forcing herself not to think of that lest she become paralyzed by the pain, she spent the last half hour before sunset working with Jissa to pack enough supplies for the journey to Elden, though she didn't yet know how they would cross the border between realms, or navigate her father's vicious traps to reach the castle. "We'll find a way," she said. "We will."
"What?" Jissa asked. The brownie was more than a little confused over Liliana's sudden desire to pack supplies, but she was doing everything she could to assist.
"Time," Liliana answered. "We just need enough time, for though he'll lose the power of the Abyss after he leaves this realm, he is an earth mage, and will have not only his personal magic but the strength of Elden at his command once we reach the kingdom." Except his land was crushed and broken, its spirit in tatters.
"Liliana." Jissa's small, warm fingers on her arm. "Why are you crying?"
"Oh," she said, trying to rub off the tears and failing because they kept falling. "I must look a fright. Worse than usual." Grabbing the handkerchief the brownie held out, she slid down into a sitting position in among the bags of apples and flour, the chittering mass of the Bitterness whispering around her, their tone as close to a croon as the creatures could manage. Her oldest friend in the castle snaked in between them to nudge at her with his nose, his small magic sparking in distress.
Their tenderness only made her cry harder for she deserved none of it.
"Liliana." Jissa's concerned voice. "Come, come."
Somehow, she ended up with her head in Jissa's lap, crying her heart out. The brownie stroked a careful hand over and over her hair, murmuring things Liliana didn't really hear, but that gave her some small measure of comfort. The gaping hole that Micah had made in her when he walked away would never heal, but this brittle healing, it would allow her to get through the days to come. There wouldn't be many - the death spell would ensure it, cleansing the taint of the Blood Sorcerer once and for all.
She was sitting in the bath off her room just after sunset, trying to wash off the stink of her own perfidy when Micah walked in. Heart a giant twisting pain, she looked up to find him covered neck to toe in armor. "Are you ready to leave?" she asked, barely keeping herself from begging for something to which she had no right.
"No." A single hard word. "I must remain here tonight to ensure the Arachdem don't return."
"Yes, of course." Her father's creatures had just enough cunning for that, but they wouldn't be capable of waiting beyond that time. "You'll be going out into the night again?"
"There's no need. The land knows to be aware - it'll warn me if it senses their approach," he said in that same harsh tone so unlike the Micah she knew.
And loved. So much.
"Now," he ordered, "you will tell me everything."
So she did, laying out her vision, what she thought would happen, what she knew. "The watch in your room - I think the queen anchored the spell to it, so you'd know when time was about to run out."
Arms folded, he stared down at her. "You didn't tell me this at the start."
"I tried. You weren't ready to listen, to remember."
A scowl. "You didn't try very hard."
She'd thought she had, but perhaps she hadn't. Maybe she'd actually been doing everything she could to extend this fragile fantasy of a life with the man who had become her very heart. "I'm sorry." Putting the soap on the rim, she wished for him to pick it up, hold it away from her, anything the old Micah would've done, the one who hadn't looked at her with that dark judgment in his gaze.
He didn't move.
Biting the inside of her lip, she pushed back wet strands of the hair she'd pinned up and said, "Elden Castle is very well fortified." If she focused on the practical side of their task, then maybe it wouldn't feel as if knives were shredding her to pieces from the inside out. "It stands in the middle of a lake."
