Page 90 of A Crown of Darkness

Finn’s hand spasmed and he dropped Nightbreaker, Anselm kicking it deftly out of the way in a moment.

And just like that, the light of the Aurum fluttered back to something manageable and contained inside him. Finn blinked, trying to right his vision, as his flailing body was brought back under his own control.

Healed from that which he had never dreamed would be a threat to him.

‘Olivier?’ he whispered and strength left his body. He heard his friend swear softly as he tried to catch him and slow his fall.

‘It’s all right, I have you. You’re going to be all right.’

Was he? Was Wren? He felt wrung out and lost. How must she be feeling? He tried to say her name, to ask how she was, when he heard someone cry out in alarm.

There was a commotion by the circle of the Aurum, the place where the throne had been moved to, where the flames had once danced. People scattered back from it again, former hostages and Ilanthians alike.

Lynette of Goalais stood there, her hair unbound and her eyes wild with grief and rage. Blood smeared her face and covered her once fine clothes. Like something from a tale of the darkest night, she held the crown in one hand and Nightbreaker in the other.

‘Thank you,’ she snarled. ‘The last pieces of the Nox and the Aurum are all I need. I am witchkind and the old magic will at last be mine, restored and triumphant. We will live free, all of us, though it cost everything. You took my sisters, you took my Yvain… I am going to make you all pay.’

CHAPTER 52

WREN

It wasn’t like sleep.

Wren was lost, helpless, trapped in an empty, brutal place. She was cold and hollow inside, like something had scoured out all that made her whole. And all she wanted to do was lie there, alone, at peace. It might hurt, but that was nothing to what she had felt, the agonies that awaited her if she woke. Better to be here. Better to remain lost.

There was no light in the beyond but no darkness either. If this was where the Nox had been trapped for twenty years no wonder it was insane.

‘You must wake up,’ said a small, solemn voice, so very gentle. She remembered it vaguely from somewhere. It sounded like the voice of a young boy, or maybe a girl, or maybe both.

‘Why?’ she whispered, and her voice rasped against a throat which felt like she had spent days just screaming. ‘Haven’t I done enough?’

There was laughter then. Not cruel, or mocking, but light, a sound of joy, like birdsong. Wren used to make a sound like that herself once, long ago, when she would run through the forest and she would hear it echoing back at her from the trees. Itwasn’t a sound of shadows or darkness. It had nothing to do with their whispers.

But she remembered it now. And it was the sound of magic.

‘None of us can ever do enough, sister.’ A small hand touched her face, wiping away tears she didn’t know she was still crying.

Wren opened her eyes to see two children, a boy and a girl, with bright green eyes.

‘You?’ She knew them, somehow, perhaps from a dream or a distant memory. Something from when she was still so small, when Elodie had wrapped her up in her cloak and brought her to Cellandre, when they had first come to the tower in the forest, after that first night when the shadow kin had tried to take her away.

Elodie had gone to the trees and the forest itself and made a promise, an offering. And something had answered. She had made a bargain, but not with the darkwood. With something else.

‘It’s time to come home, little sister,’ said Robin, his eyes so solemn. ‘There’s still work to do.’

‘Finn needs you. Elodie needs you. And Roland…’ Lark smiled brightly.

Robin and Lark…those weren’t their names, she thought. Not really. But they were the names they had chosen here and now, in this place. The names they had given themselves.

‘You know Roland?’ Wren asked, bewildered. She didn’t even know how she knew their names, but she did, as if they had always been there buried at the back of her memories, faces and voices that had slipped through the cracks and hidden there, lost to her until now, but so familiar, part of her.

Sister, they called her.

‘He’s a good man,’ said Robin. ‘A good father. We like him. You chose well.’

‘I didn’t choose…’

Lark tugged at her hand, trying to drag her somewhere. ‘Of course you did. And we did. And Elodie did. Life is all about choices. You can’t do that here. Now hurry, or we’ll lose everything. The raw power unleashed will rip apart the fabric of the world. Lynette doesn’t realise what she’s doing. She thinks she’s helping witchkind, but she isn’t. She’s going to destroy them all. Her heart is broken. So, I fear, is her mind.’

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