Page 135 of A Song of Ash and Moonlight

But before he could answer, he was gone, sunken back into thedepths of theytheliadcurse that bound him to Kilraith’s will. That he’d been able to fight the curse for long enough to share with me what he had… I shuddered, imagining the agony of it. I held his face in my hands and searched for any lingering glimmer of godly gold, but staring back at me were two ordinary eyes, blank and understanding nothing—the gaze of the horribly unlucky human who’d been born with a god inside him. Imagining my mother in his place—all of Kerezen’s godly power bound to Kilraith while trapped inside the body of the innocent human Philippa Wren—I felt choked with sadness; all of this was so horribly unfair. What was this man’s name? What had his life been before the god in him awakened?

Then a great force threw me back from the throne, and I landed flat on my back. I gasped, seeing stars, and Ryder came into view. His skin was ashen, and his shoulder was bleeding, but his eyes were clear and strong.

“Is it really you?” I said hoarsely. I realized that I was crying. My head hurt so terribly I was convinced it would split open. A shimmering white aura suffused my vision, turning everything dreamy and glittering.

Ryder helped me rise. “Yes, love,” he told me. “It’s me, and I’ve got you.” His hands were warm and familiar. I clung to them, gasping, and leaned hard into the warm mountain of his body.

“We have to kill Jaetris,” I said.

He stared at me. “What?”

“Nothim. Just this body.” With Ryder’s help, I staggered toward Gemma and Mara. “The egg… He said we had to kill this body he’s in to get at it. It must be destroyed.” I couldn’t stop crying, everything I’d seen beating on the inside of my skull with iron fists. “He’ll come back, he said, and I believe him.”

Grim and pale, my sisters joined me at the throne. Dimly, as if from a great distance, I realized what was happening all around us.Kilraith’s illusion had crumbled, and now all of Mhorghast was emptying out of the giant arena above us. Father was free and on his feet, a blur of speed. He was fighting a clutch of gray stone-nymphs with white eyes and boulder fists, and past him raced Nesset. With a fierce cry, she jumped onto the back of a fae with skin that gleamed like green jewels. She plucked a long red thorn from the knot of flowers sewing up her cheek and stabbed the fae in the throat. Talan, still in his beastly disguise, tackled a chimaera with plates of bone jutting out of its back. He swiped black claws across its face and sent it tumbling.

“Gareth,” I croaked. “Where’s Gareth?”

“He’s unconscious but alive,” Ryder replied shortly. “I won’t let anyone touch him.”

I had no idea how he could promise me such a thing, but I chose to believe him and turned to my sisters, heart in my throat, pain smashing my temples like battering rams. Two words darted like panicked birds through my mind:Ankaret. Yvaine. Ankaret. Yvaine.

They were the same. They were the same, and she hadn’t told me. Why hadn’t shetoldme?

“Do we have to kill him in a particular way?” Mara was asking.

I could only stand there, trying desperately to think and blinking back hot, overwhelmed tears. I didn’t how to answer her. From behind us came a scream I thought might belong to Father.

Suddenly Jaetris lurched forward on his throne chest-first, as if someone had thrust a spear into his ribs and yanked him toward them. He let out an agonized scream, horrible, like metal scraping against metal. A cold force pulled at my back as if trying to drag me away along with him. Mara grabbed on to him, her arms glinting like swords. Caught between her sentinel strength and Kilraith’s furious, ravenous will, the gilded throne twisted wildly in place, its back legs tearing divots into the ground. Gemma let out a triumphant cry, and suddenly black roots limned with silver burst out of the ground wherethe throne’s legs had cracked it open. I felt a burst of hope. She had found, in all of this illusory chaos, a piece of nature. A fierce, proud love blazed up inside me as I thought yet again of young Philippa Wren, born with simple botanical magic that she would someday pass on to her youngest daughter, not knowing that her body housed a sleeping god.

Gemma flung the roots around Jaetris and his throne, helping Mara hold him in place, and I started singing an aria from the final act of one of my favorite operas—the heroine, triumphant, feels the sunlight on her skin for the first time after years of unjust imprisonment.Strong, I thought, staring at Jaetris, at the throne, at my brave, bright-eyed sisters.Hold.

Once my grip on the song was sure, I looked back over my shoulder and saw Kilraith coming at us. His grasping shadowed hands were huge as trees. His mouth yawned wide. He was storm and lightning, he was shadow, he was a monster. He was a vestige of the gods—lonely, vengeful, burning with hate. His wings blacked out the world. Through the dark haze of his attack, I saw Ryder kneeling over Gareth’s body, shouting desperately at a swarm of birds swirling in the air near him—hawks, starlings, Olden birds with silver eyes and brilliant plumage. He’d wilded them from somewhere, I supposed from the chaotic streets of Mhorghast. They gathered into a mass like a fist and flew at Kilraith—huge, fearless—but as soon as they hit the crackling mass of his fury, they disappeared, burned to ash in an instant.

I closed my eyes, a sick peace falling over me. I didn’t know what had happened to Ankaret—toYvaine—but I knew I was going to die. We were all going to die.

Then a roar of heat shot down from the sky, and when I opened my eyes, tears streaming down my face from the sudden blaze, I saw Ankaret standing before us—a solid tower of fire with one snapping wing outstretched, holding back the tide of Kilraith’s wrath. The reliefof seeing her gave me new strength, and yet the despair of knowing what she really was—whoshe was—nearly felled me. I thought her name desperately, the most earnest prayer I’d uttered in years.Yvaine, Yvaine. Why didn’t you tell me?

“Gemma!” I spoke quickly, afraid what would happen if I stopped singing for too long. “Like before, with the crown!”

Gemma’s face was hard, her eyes glittering. She had torn the crown from Talan’s body; she could tear the egg from Jaetris’s. I hoped, Ihadto hope.

She placed her hands flat on Jaetris’s chest, seeking, and when her fingers began to glow, she choked a little, her stony expression faltering with horror.

“It’s inside his heart,” she cried. “It’s hidden deep, underneath a whole lattice of glamours, but I can see it. I feel it!”

“Get it out!” I cried. “Now, hurry!”

Gemma set her jaw. She pulled a knife from her boot, hesitated only a moment, then drew it fast across Jaetris’s throat. Within moments he was dead, and my baby sister was soaked with his golden blood, and shaking horribly, but at least now Jaetris—and the body he’d lived in—would feel no pain.

“Hold him, Mara!” Gemma cried, tossing away the knife.

Mara obeyed, her whole body beginning to coruscate as if she were a river shimmering beneath the sun. With a great cry, she tore one of her arms from around Jaetris and flung it out like a whip, knocking away with a boom of power a whole swarm of attackers that, in my panic, I hadn’t noticed were almost upon us.

Gemma screamed, and I looked back in terror to see her glowing hands pinned to Jaetris’s chest. His flesh and bone were opening at her touch, peeling outward like bloody petals. The protections Kilraith had glamoured into Jaetris’s body were fiercer than those with which he’d bound Talan to his crown. Sweat poured down Gemma’s body,her slim frame straining with the effort. New roots sprang up out of the earth at her command and dove into the bloody cavity of Jaetris’s chest to help her. Her power crackled furiously; brilliant bolts of light burst from her fingers and shot into Kilraith’s seething darkness. I was reminded of the two comets I’d seen in Jaetris’s vision. So much new knowledge bubbled inside me, and if I looked too hard at it, I’d lose my nerve, my song, my self.

Instead I closed my eyes and kept singing that same soaring aria.Hold strong.But my mind careened between so many fears and feelings, so many worries for all my loved ones around me, that I could feel the song’s focus start to split in different directions. At first, I choked on the feeling. It was as if all the power inside me was at war with itself, each branch of my music fighting for supremacy. I felt stretched thin, pounded flat. My whole body ached from the strain of forcing out my confused song.

But out of this chaos rose a memory, like a single blossom that had been plucked from a meadow bright with color. A humble gift for me alone. It was Philippa’s voice from her quiet kitchen at Wardwell.You are the daughters of Kerezen and therefore demigods of the body, of the senses. Fighting and creating glamours and making music—these things you can already do. But there is more buried in your power, and I can help you find it.

---