My fingers dig into Mather’s arm, my heart freezing.
“Sir?” I breathe.
The tension in my chest loosens. It doesn’t matter who I am now, queen or not, because Sir’s here. Sir’s alive. And he’ll be able to help me through this.
When I look at Mather, he nods. “You healed him, Meira. Everyone thought he was dead, but when he awoke after the battle, he told us you healed him. A fluke in conduit magic that somehow you harnessed,” Mather whispers.
I grab onto his words and try to fit them into the gaping puzzle around me. What I remember most about Sir’s death is my desperation, my thoughtless need, pure and strong, for him to live. Maybe that was a type of surrender—opening myself up to anything, everything, that could save him. An unconscious decision, like when I healed the boy.
Mather reads the distance in my eyes, my swelling exuberance. He bows his head. “My queen.”
That pulls me back to the present, roaring and horrible. To Mather, a broken look in his eyes.
“You know?” I gasp on the words and feel everything else come crashing down on me. All of Mather’s worries and concerns and strain, how he wanted so badly to be enough in a station where he never would be. And now—none of that matters, because it isn’t him anymore.
Mather bobs his head again. Around us the battle rages on, but in that one moment of looking at each other, I can’t tell if he’s relieved or scared. All I can feel is his strength, the determined way he looks at me, a soldier to his ruler. He’ll hold on as long as I need him to.
The locket half still sits around his neck, a physical reminder of the lie of his life. My eyes lock on it before swinging away, a rush of adrenaline pushing through me as I look back at Angra and Sir trapped in a flurry of swords. Angra’s conduit dances through the air and Sir’s focus follows it, his gaze hungry and desperate.
A weight drops in my stomach. Sir needs to know what it really is, what he’s really fighting. The way he looks at Angra’s staff, like he wants to obliterate it into a million pieces—that cannot happen. Angra’s conduit cannot be broken, the magic allowed to link with him in an endless feed for the Decay.
A blade comes out of nothing, the cannon debris making the air a dark and dangerous place. I scream and shove Mather down, buckling under the sword as the Spring soldier continues his swipe through the air. Mather turns, throws me his blade, and I grab it midair before barreling headfirst into the soldier’s stomach. We fall, rolling down a slight incline in a fit of darkness and dirt as my sword slides home into the soldier’s gut.
A series of screams. Names shouted in rapid order, panicked screeches that make me pivot in the dirt.
“Mather, grab it!”
“William—”
“MATHER!”
I struggle to my feet, eyes flashing over the space now between me, Mather, Sir. A swell of horror pulses in me and I’m frozen, watching it all happen.
Sir knocks Angra’s staff from his hands. It flies through the air, flipping end over end to land in a clatter at Mather’s feet. Sir lunges away from Angra as he reaches out to Mather, something horrible and terrified exploding out of him like nothing I’ve ever seen. Panic pushes up my throat, tasting like the iron tang of blood.
Mather picks up the staff.
“Break it!” Sir’s voice is strangled. He swipes at Angra, knocking him to the ground. “Destroy it!”
“I will kill you!” Angra screams, scrambling against the dirt. He flies up and Sir tackles him next to Mather’s feet. One of Sir’s curved knives slams into Angra’s shoulder, pinning him to the earth with Sir hovering a breath above him.
Mather looks at me. There’s that determined severity again, some great pull of desperation. He’ll protect me. He’ll keep me safe. He can still do this one thing, even if he isn’t who he always thought he was.
He raises the staff over his head. Angra’s conduit. The Decay that overtook the land, the hideous, unstoppable evil that came to Angra, joined with him and has been gaining strength from his corrupt magic use. Mather’s arms tighten against the coming impact as he pulls the staff through the air, a slow and painful draw.
Dismay overcomes me, so palpable it rushes in molten rivers through my body as all the last lingering pieces click and I fly forward, scrambling toward Mather.
“Mather, no!” I shout. “Stop!”
But he doesn’t hear me. He doesn’t know, doesn’t even think about it. No one did. No one would have thought the answer was so simple, the power so close.
The staff cracks against the earth in a glass-shattering burst. Darkness explodes out of it, a storm unleashed, a funnel of smoke that erupts in a shaft of black. In the chaos, the surrounding battle halts, the wind whipping into screams, desperate fingers of sound that plunge through the crowd of watching soldiers. The column of black launches up into the sky where thick clouds have gathered, twirling around and around in a vortex that will destroy us all.
I throw my arms around Mather and pull him back from the shattered staff, the embodiment of all that has held us captive for so long. We collapse on the ground, my arms around his shoulders, his eyes twisted in confusion. Around us, everyone has stopped. Spring, Cordellan, Autumnian, Winterian—everyone casts aside their fighting to gape in unabashed wonder.
Everyone except Angra. His eyes meet mine, barely two steps from where I cling to Mather. The hilt of the knife sticks up in the gap between Angra’s breastplate and arm piece; blood runs from a gash through his cheek. But his eyes flash, the pale green depths reflecting the whirring gale. The expansion of magic in the Royal Conduits that even he didn’t know about until he saw me, until he pieced together my use of the magic without the locket and realized what I am now. The magic and Decay that are locked in his conduit will join with him, feed into him, become one. He will be able to use his magic for evil at an unstoppable rate—without a staff or an object conduit, because he will become the magic’s conduit, and the Decay will grow more powerful than anyone can control.
The column of black sucks into a thin line and holds, waiting, ticking through time. On a great gust of wind it explodes, slamming into the ground and unfolding over us with a powerful burst of air and debris. Mather throws himself on top of me, and we bury our faces in each other as the force tosses rocks through the air.
It’s over. Just like that. No final explosion, no departing scream of death. Just nothing, like it was never anything more than the shattered ball of glass and metal at Mather’s feet.
I push away from Mather, but I know what I’ll see before my eyes find it. The magic in me whispers it in the deepest, most open parts of my mind, a quiet nudge of knowledge.
Sir sits back on his heels, staring with wide eyes at the empty splotch of dirt under him. His knife still sits in the earth, poised vertically against the gentle current of wind.
But Angra is gone.