Page 177 of House of Embers
“Do you think you can fix it?”
“The beautiful craftsmanship?” she asked with a smirk. “Don’t think I’m that skilled.”
“The portal,” he said on a laugh.
Kerrigan blew out a breath. Her magic had slowly recovered from use of the crown. Sometimes she still woke in the middle of the night feeling as if she were holding the thing and it was sucking out her magic, but the crown was safely hidden away in Ravinia Mountain and her powers were at her fingertips. Still, she hadn’t tried to do anything this powerful since.
“Guess we’ll find out.”
Fordham stepped back as she moved to the center of the portal. When she made the portals with her mother’s bangle, they were extensions of her own magic. She could only go to places that she had been before. And when they were tied off, they still drained her. It wasn’t a forever solution. In a perfect world, she could tie off a bunch of portals and make transportation much easier between the houses of Alandria. But she couldn’t leave them connected to her magic.
She was hoping that the portal gate would show her how it was done. If she could reconnect this to Emporia, then maybe more gates could be created to hold Kerrigan’s portals without draining her eternally.
She closed her eyes and ran her hands along the markings still visible on the stone archway. She could feel the magic in them. Not ancient Fae but some other long-lost language. One that she could use. One that her mother’s bangle seemed to recognize.
With a twist, the bracelet latched on to her arm and Kerrigan drew a portal door into the archway, thinking of the beautiful country of Byern with its mountainside castle and rolling hills—Cyrene’s home.
For a second, the distance overwhelmed her. Emporia was fourmonthsby sea. It was less time by dragon flight, but even still, the distance was so great that no dragon would make the crossing unless under duress. This would be the farthest she had ever pushed, and she didn’t know if she had enough of her mother’s strength to do it.
Then it was like the magic shifted.
A bridge formed. Not in the place she had been envisioning—ameadow she had landed in on Tavry’s back in battle when she had gone with Helly—but to another gate.
The gateskneweach other.
It was the only way she could describe it. They were meant to join. She didn’t know where this one was. It was dark and shadowed. She had never been there before, so perhaps it would not give up its secrets until she answered the call.
Another moment and Kerrigan could seeallthe potential gates in Emporia. There were at least a dozen—as if all the countries in Cyrene’s world had once been connected by these shadowy gates as well and they had fallen over the years as Kerrigan’s had. If she pushed past that, she could feel the gates left abandoned in her own world. Within the House of Shadows, the Holy Mountain, each of the dozen houses—they were all already there, all waiting. If she wanted to, she could connect them all.
“Yes,” she breathed.
With a blink, it was done. The gates all glowed as one, connected and functional. She held on with a shudder as the final one in Byern materialized and the shimmery iridescence once again filled her portal door.
“To Byern,” she whispered. And then she stepped back, breaking her connection to the portal, her magic gone with it. But the door remained.
In its place was a ruin of a castle.
“You did it,” Fordham breathed.
“I connected them all. All of them in Emporia and Alandria. There’s one to the House of Shadows,” she told him as a tear fell down her cheek. “One in each of the houses.”
“What a magnificent creature you are.”
She laughed. “Shall we walk through?”
“Yes,” he said simply.
They took one step thousands of miles away and went to find Cyrene to tell her the good news.
Chapter Sixty-Four
The Homecoming
With a heavy heart, Kerrigan flew Tieran to Waisley, holding her father’s ashes. They’d used the portal to step into the House of Shadows and back in a matter of hours. She hadn’t had to use a drop of magic. It was revelatory, and there were already talks of them needing to be heavily monitored.
What she had done was a gift; what came out of it was bureaucracy. As with all things.
She was on the new government council to determine the state of affairs and already had a litany of issues to discuss about how to use the portals. But as the leader of the resistance and a council member, she’d bowed out for the weekend. Everyone needed the break.
