“What is he doing?” I asked, uncertain if I was referring to Sain or to Edmund—not that it mattered anymore.
“Walking around the cathedral, trying to make you show him the way inside.” It was Rosy who answered, her body not so much as moving from where she lay against me. However, her voice had lost all of the excitement, dragging in a kind of exhaustion that sent the mother in me into high alert.
“Rosy?” I asked, but she didn’t so much as move.
“She’s fighting his control,” Cail supplied, his voice awed as he leaned over to me, his hand soft as he ran his hand over the crown of her head. “She’s disrupting his connection.”
I looked between the two of them in confusion when a sharp pain shot through my hand. I gasped at it, lifting the culprit to eye-level, expecting to see some kind of bug or snake, but there was nothing there, not even blood, something I was sure I would feel running over my palm, over my arm.
“You can feel it, can’t you? Where the blade is?” Cail asked as he snapped another twig into smoke.
I nodded, confusion still rampaging over what exactly I was going through.
“That’s how he controlled Ryland. You know this. I was the one who impaled you with the blade the first time, after all.” Another snap of a twig, his fists tight around the two pieces in his hand. I didn’t need to look at his face, at the way his brow furrowed, to see his temper rising.
Hundreds of years ago, I would have calmed him. I would have shielded his heart. Right then, I sat, not convinced of what I was looking at or even which Cail I was dealing with.
The thought slapped me in the chest, the similarities painful. He had broken his mind when he bound the curse, just as mine was bound. Each of us, essentially two different people trapped inside a whole, every part fighting for space.
Even Rosy, in a way, was shattered into many: a child, a woman, an immortal trapped in a forever, having to live with what had been done to her.
My hold on her tightened again at the thought, but this time, she grunted, the stress finally getting to her.
“So he’s controlling me the same way.”
“Well…” Cail answered, a small smile playing around his lips, all sign of his agony lifting, “he can try. As we said, Rosy is very good at stopping him. He is not a fan of her.”
“It’s my soul,” she answered, her voice the same exhausted sigh as before. “He used my soul to make the blade. It’s all of me. Everyone else is part of me—my soul, my blood. He can control it because he is my grandfather, because a tiny part of him is here, too. But I can stop him. Stop him from hurting my family—Uncle Cail, Uncle Ryland, Aunt Joclyn. All but Sain. Sain controls me. I don’t like him here. That’s why I couldn’t see you before. But now you are here!” she finished happily before she collapsed on me again, her weight comforting against me.
“Now I am here,” I whispered, the palm of my hand running over the crown of her head with a comforting weight that even she seemed to respond to. I was kind of enjoying having her against me, enjoying the ability to run my fingers through her hair. To smell her.
“Where did you find the blade?” Cail asked after a moment, his voice tender as he pulled me away from the partial nirvana I had found.
“Inside of Ryland,” I whispered, my heart tensing with the fear that inhibited the memory. “I could hear Rosy call for me.”
“So one of the five…” He sounded like he was talking to himself.
“Five?” I asked, not following what he was saying.
“Yes.” His dark eyes pierced mine as I met his gaze, the intensity of them frightening me for a moment.
I inhaled sharply out of habit, glad when his lip twitched enough to remind me of the brother I knew and loved.
“I’m assuming you want to release us,” he finally said, his calm voice putting words to my unanswered questions.
“Well, that’s the plan, yes.”
“Then you will need all of the fragments of the Souls Blade. You have to put it back together.”
“You sound like you are sending me on some epic video game quest.” I could barely keep the laugh in.
He couldn’t.
“Maybe I am.” His deep chuckle bounced around the smoke trees that surrounded us, sending the distorted trunks into some kind of belly dance.
“Well, if that’s the case, I am going to need a better weapon. Maybe I can find one in a cave that’s guarded by a dragon.”
“He’s inside,” Rosy whispered from where she lay on top of me, her tiny proclamation pulling me out of my musing. “I’m trying to find Ilyan or Ryland so they can help.”
“How long do we have?” Cail asked, his body rising above us as the trees distorted and swayed with the movement.