I need to find her. Need to be on the right side of the stars and in the same world where she exists.
My boots slam through the snow as I race past the quiet village. I’m so focused on getting to the rip, on getting to her, that I don’t even notice just how quiet things are. Don’t notice that there’s no one out, even in the middle of the day.
Ryatt shouts my name as I sprint for the cave, but I don’t slow as I continue up the stooped hill, boots slipping on the snow as I go. I reach the cave, pass my mother’s house, steps echoing through the blue-lit hollows.
Almost there.
Just when I round the corner, just when I reach the opened up cavern and I should feel relief, I skid to a stop.
I blink. Again and again. Look around, left and right. Because surely, surely my vision is wrong. Or I took a wrong turn. Or—but no. No, because I know this cave, know this exact spot, and—
“Slade,” Ryatt pants as he catches up, nearly knocks into me, both of us blurting words at the same time.
“Everyone is—” he begins, and, “The rip is—” I start.
“Gone.”
Our words join together with an echoing blow I feel punch through my gut.
The rip is gone.
The people are gone.
Auren is gone.
And my fucking power to get to her is...
Gone.
EPILOGUE
QUEEN MALINA
“It’s time.”
I slowly turn my head from the window I was watching to see the twins standing there. I’m not sure how long I’ve sat here, blinking out at the swirling mist. Sometimes, I think I nearly get a peek at what’s beyond, but it’s far too thick to see through it. Yet now, it’s pitch-black, so I know night has fallen long ago.
With a smile, I rise to my feet, glancing down at the white and blue dress draped over my body. I don’t remember putting this one on, but it’s thick and heavy, probably in preparation for tonight’s ritual.
I follow behind the brothers, and it seems like in no time at all, we’re already outside. Like in a dream, when you go from one place to the next in an instant, without any time or effort.
The night is so dark I’d be blind out here if it weren’t for the row of torches stuck into the icy ground. It makes the snow look like it’s on fire, and I shy away from the flames, a bead of sweat collecting just at the nape of my neck.
Fassa and Friano lead me behind the castle and right to the end of the world.
With my feet poised at the edge, I look down into the brink. Just darkness and gray mist forever. Land and then nothing.
“This way, Majesty.”
I turn and follow their voices until I find Pruinn standing beside some sort of pillar right at the rim of the land.
No, not a pillar, it almost looks like—
“Are you ready, my queen?” Pruinn asks, expression full of joy, his silver eyes pulling me in.
I breathe in the fresh, cold air.
“I am.”
The soft music that I’ve had stuck in my head since I got here seems to grow louder. I hear it in my ears, feel it reverberating in my bones. The light of the torches seems to intensify too, though I don’t like the heat. I wish I could sit in the snow and let it soak through my dress to cool me.
I can’t sit though, because Fassa and Friano are both taking my hands, and then Pruinn has a small blade that he pulls from his pocket. The music is so loud, the firelight so hot...
The dagger is pulled across my palms in a single line that spreads from one hand to the other, cutting through the lines and marking it with the red of my blood.
“Repeat after me, Your Majesty.”
So I do.
“I am Queen Malina Colier of the Colier royal bloodline, and I willingly give my blood to restore what was lost and to gain what is new.”
I’m not sure what magic feels like.
I never felt anything with Midas, and aside from feeling watched, I didn’t sense the assassin.
Yet I feel magic now.
Fassa and Friano slam their palms against mine, threading their fingers in, turning my hands so that my blood coats their skin and then drips into the snow.
And magic roars.
Like we’ve awoken a slumbering beast from the belly of the earth, and it’s come to claw its way out. Every drop of blood that seems to paint the ground pulls something from the center of my gut.
The world spins.
The magic bays like a wolf at the moonless sky.
Then comes the wind and the quakes.
The earth begins to shake so hard that I get my prior wish and go crashing down to the ground. My knees smack painfully into the ice, the splatters of blood blotched into the snow where it’s dripped.
Everything shakes so violently, the wolf now sounding like it’s grinding its teeth against the bones of its prey, gnashing and smashing.
I have no idea where the twins or Pruinn are. There’s too much noise to call for them, and the world is rocking like a ship on turbulent waves, so my eyes cannot search for them either.
I clutch the ground like a safety net, the snowy mesh dissolving between my fingers. I get tossed aside, rolling until my back crashes into the pillar that I noticed before, the single stone post pitted but still standing.
Pain shoots down my back and shoulder, but then there’s a new ache. Something not from the hit but in my veins. As if the pain is traveling through my very blood, from ankle to temple, freezing it in place.
My heart goes gluey, my pulse sluggish.
And the heat from the torches no longer bothers me, because I am blessedly, thoroughly cold. As if ice now pumps from my heart and frosts down my veins.
I’m not sure when the ground stops shaking. When this pain ebbs. But I pull myself up, hands gripping the pillar for support, and when I stumble to a stand, I turn around to look at the land.
But...Seventh Kingdom hasn’t been restored.
The snowy land hasn’t been pulled back together, healing the rifts or filling the cleaves. From what I can see lit up by the hundreds of torches, it looks exactly the same as before.
“It worked.”
I spin around at the twins’ voice to see both of them and Pruinn standing just beside me. Yet instead of looking at the land, they’re looking at the endless chasm behind.
I realize right then that what I’m holding isn’t some broken pillar. It’s a banister. And it now has another identical one, both caught between a strip of gray, endless land stretching like a bridge. I stare down its length as far as my vision takes me, to where the mist now clings to the roped railing along the drooping path that stretches across the eternal abyss.
Clarity, sharp and cold, pierces through my mind.
Like I was asleep and then, suddenly dropped into the middle of an icy lake, I wake up.
Wake up, and don’t smell the flowers, Cold Queen. Before it’s too late.
The kingdom isn’t restored to its former glory. The light of the torches shows me it’s just as crumbling and ruined as I thought when I first got here. And there is no scent of flowers in my nose or music in my ears.
There’s blood and something that seems to drum from the bridge.
Like the pulse of a beast.
As my hands clutch the banister, ice frosts beneath my fingertips, spreading down the restored stone pillar. I snatch my hands up, staring at the shards of ice stuck to my palm.
And that sound keeps pulsating from the ground.
I look up at the twins, fear freezing my heart. “What did you do?” I whisper.
The twins turn to me, and they seem more frightening somehow. The angles of their faces more severe, their eyes holding no kindness. Even Pruinn, whose gaze has always drawn me in, seems to somehow deter me now, especially when he accompanies it with a flash of a grin revealing sharp canines caught in his gums.
“You mean what did we do?” They and their mingled voices sound like a razor dragged across glass. But it’s their ears. Their ears—
“With your blood and our magic, we restored what was broken.”
My eyes cast down the bridge. To that drumming that travels down its length in a steady beat. Because I know the tale of this bridge. Every single Orean knows about it.
This is the Bridge of Lemuria.
My mouth goes dry. Gaze drags back to their sharpened faces, to the points of their ears.