Page 137 of A Song of Ash and Moonlight

But Ryder wouldn’t allow death to claim me. He came out of the shadows and helped me to my feet, everyone else just behind him— Gemma and Talan, Mara and Nesset. Father had Gareth slung over his shoulder. Ryder lifted me into his arms, shouted something to theothers, but my shock was too complete to understand him. I pressed my face against his chest and hummed my song into the folds of his coat.Are you there?It was the most desperate prayer I’d ever known.Yvaine. Are you there?

No answer came to me. I knew it wouldn’t. Past my closed lids shone the glow of fractured moonlight. I clung to Ryder and let him carry me home.

Chapter 30

Somewhere on the moonlight road that brought us back to Ivyhill, I gave in to the pain that had been battering my head since Jaetris had planted his visions in me. I slipped into blackness, and when I next awoke, I was in my bed in my room, my body aching, Osmund curled up in a tight ball against my side.

Immediately the loss of Yvaine rose up inside me, a pain in my throat that made it hard to swallow. Everything made it hard to swallow; my throat was raw, and each breath was fire. Suddenly I wanted to be rid of all the blankets on me. I tried to sit up and free myself. My movement disturbed Osmund; he jumped down onto the carpet with a disgruntled meow. The sound ripped something open inside me, and I let out a choked sob.

All of this brought Ryder in from the bathing room. He was drying his face with a towel, which he dropped to the floor when he saw me. He paused at the foot of the bed, then started to come around and reach for me, then stopped. His expression was grave, his eyes soft. There were fresh cuts on his cheeks and neck and arms, but they were healing nicely. A drop of water clung to his beard, just to the left of his mouth.

“We’ve been watching over you in shifts,” he said at last, his voice rough. “You’ve been falling in and out of consciousness for three days. Madam Moreen didn’t know what to do for you.” He cleared his throat and rested his hands carefully on my polished footboard. He considered me for a moment longer before lowering his gaze to his fingers.

“Shall I get one of your sisters?” he said quietly. “Do you want me to leave?”

His voice was gentle. He looked unbearably dear standing there, big and brawny and quiet, very still, as if he’d entered a temple to pray, and in the lines of his face I could see the echo of the boy he’d once been, the boy who’d run through fire for me. The boy who had saved me. I began to cry then, truly cry. The weight of everything that had happened pressed against my chest.

I held out my arms to him. “Please don’t go,” I whispered. “Please, Ryder, come here.”

He did at once, crawling into the bed beside me. He wrapped me up in his arms and in the blankets, in the cocoon of his fierce love. I touched his face, his beard, and cried against his chest. He held me to him, his hands warm on my back.

“Farrin, love,” he said hoarsely. “I’m so sorry.”

For a moment, I considered trying my song once more. I felt it building inside me, stubbornly hopeful:Are you there?But I decided that if I asked again and still heard that awful silence, the lack of Yvaine in the world, I wouldn’t survive it.

Instead I held on to Ryder and cried until I couldn’t anymore. My exhaustion was mighty, my headache constant. Ryder rubbed slow circles between my shoulder blades. The rhythm of his touch helped me find sleep.

***

Two days later, I sat on a sofa in the morning room, searching for courage.

It helped to have Ryder beside me, and to know that everyone in this room loved me: Gemma and Mara, Father, Talan. I tried not to think about Gareth lying silently upstairs. He ate and drank obediently, but he hadn’t spoken since returning from Mhorghast, not even angry or confused words like Alastrina’s. He’d been utterly silent, his eyes glassy and distant. When he’d first seen me, a look of relief had passed quickly across his face, but still he had said nothing. He just lay on his bed in one of our guest rooms and slept, or else stared at the ceiling.

It was the sight of him more than anything that had gotten me downstairs. I was wobbly on Ryder’s arm, brilliant flares of pain still pulsing in my head, but I’d done it, and Gemma had fed me breakfast tenderly, fussily, as if she were bottle-feeding a kitten—never mind that after the onslaught of magic in Mhorghast, she could barely hold herself upright without Talan’s help. And now, with my belly full and my chest in knots, I would tell them all what I had seen.

“What I saw is difficult to understand,” I said first. “Jaetris didn’t explain any of it for me. I’ve had to interpret it on my own, and I think I’ve done it right, but we will need to study it further. Gareth…” I swallowed. “Gareth, when he’s well, will be useful in that regard.”

They said nothing, waiting patiently for me to find my words. I kept my eyes trained on the designs in the plush carpet under my feet. They were vines, of course, an elaborate swirl of greenery dotted with pale flowers that mirrored my mother’s handiwork on the ceiling. The thought sent a pang of longing through me, which I furiously dismissed. I didn’t miss her or want her, certainly not in any sort of maternal capacity. She hadn’t been there to see what I had seen, to watch Yvaine die right before her eyes. She didn’t deserve my company; she hadn’t for years, and the fact of her godliness changed nothing.

To get her out of my mind, I started to speak.

“On the day of the Unmaking,” I said, “when the gods came together to create Edyn and then died, two pieces of their joined magic flew out from the cataclysm in opposite directions. Each piece contained the remains of the gods, a remnant of each of their five powers. One of these entities crashed into the sea south of Aidurra and was lost to the depths for…” I shook my head. “I don’t know how long he lived there. But that being became Kilraith. And the other…”

I paused, struggling for composure. Ryder put his hand on the cushion beside me, palm up, and I grabbed it and held on until I caught my breath.

“The other fell into the Bay of the Gods and became Ankaret, otherwise known by the name she took in her human form, Yvaine Ballantere. What she truly was and where she came from, she didn’t know. She only knew that she wanted to protect Edyn—I don’t know why, perhaps some lingering instinct of the gods—and so she assumed that the gods had chosen her for that task. She came to Fairhaven, and they saw her power and believed her. Legends grew up around her. She became the high queen of Edyn.”

I drew in a shaky breath. “She didn’t understand what she truly was until very recently. That was the reason for her strange behavior, I think—her lost memories and declining health. Perhaps it began when Philippa started becoming aware of herself, or when Kilraith found Jaetris and bound him. I can’t be certain. But I think she rediscovered Ankaret unintentionally, and that whatever power brought her back to that form—her true, original form—was beyond her control. Until…” I stopped, swallowing hard. “Until I called her to me. Until Mhorghast.”

“Perhaps,” Talan suggested thoughtfully, “an instinct awoke in her that sensed the growing danger of Kilraith, prompting her to take the form of the creature who could most effectively protect us.”

I nodded, grateful to have heard a voice other than my own. “That’s what I suspect as well. And then…” I paused, closing my eyes, thinking back over the images I’d seen in Jaetris’s visions. I’d spent the last few days sorting through them, trying to organize them in a way that made sense, but already they were beginning to fade. A protective measure, I assumed; Jaetris wouldn’t have wanted such a story to live inside me forever. I was only a demigod, after all, and even Jaetris himself had fallen prey to Kilraith.

“Kilraith wants to destroy them,” I whispered. “All the gods. He found a way to wake them—I don’t know how—and now he wants to kill them truly, as they didn’t succeed in doing themselves on the day of the Unmaking. He hates them for his own creation, for the years of agony he endured alone in the ocean, for the conflict of five gods living forever inside him. He has never been able to make peace with this confusion of power, as Yvaine did. Perhaps he carries more of their darker, baser instincts than she does, or maybe everything he suffered is what corrupted him. Whatever the reason for his nature, it’s one of anger, vengeance, and hatred. He wants to tear down all boundaries between Edyn and the Old Country—the Middlemist, the Knotwood, the Crescent of Storms. It wasn’t Yvaine’s declining health sickening the Middlemist; it’s been him all along, though I don’t know how, and neither did Jaetris. What I do know is that Kilraith believes the separation of humans from Oldens to be subjugation. An unfair restriction on those in the Old Country made only for the sake of humans, whom he believes to be inferior and undeserving of the gods’ affection. He believes we are the reason for all the pain he’s endured. And once Edyn is destroyed…”

I opened my eyes. Tears streamed silently down my cheeks. “Then I think he will destroy himself. His life has been a torment, too many clashing powers trapped in one form. He blames the gods for the aberration he is. In his eyes, they are irresponsible, careless, cruel. And he loves only one thing: his equal and his opposite.”

This time, when I tried to say her name, I found that I couldn’t.

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