They’d drugged her.
The damned Archon had decided on it, so that when she awoke at the site of her trial, she wouldn’t know where she was or how she’d gotten there. As though throwing her into these trials the day after her testimony, with no time to train with her father or study with Tal, wasn’t enough of a punishment for her many lies.
Indeed it was not, according to the Archon.
“Perhaps, Lady Dardenne,” he had told her blandly, his watery dark eyes fixed unblinkingly on her face, “if you had chosen to reveal yourself immediately following your mother’s murder all those years ago, things would be different now.”
“And as a five-year-old child,” she had snapped, unable to keep quiet, “such a choice had been solely my responsibility, I suppose?”
The Archon had folded his hands in his lap, seven rings glittering on his soft white hands. “Even children,” he had said, “know it is wrong to kill.”
Open your eyes, Rielle. Her brain was screaming at her, or perhaps someone else was nearby. Maybe one of the council members overseeing the trial. Maybe Tal.
Maybe that strange voice had returned.
Open your eyes!
She forced herself upright, her limbs clumsy and leaden. Her vision rocked violently back and forth. She placed a gloved hand on either side of her throbbing head.
Then she sensed the heavy press of something rising high above her, cold and unrelenting.
Stone.
Be prepared to move as soon as you awaken. Tal’s instructions from earlier that morning drifted through her mind like sticky fragments of a dream. They won’t give you time to recover.
He had refused to look her in the eye, and she had refused to beg him for it.
A rumbling from behind and above snapped her head around. Like a series of gut punches, her senses crashed back into place:
The clean bite of ice.
The air, thin and freezing.
Her fingers, mostly numb. Cold seeped in through her leather boots and the thickest trousers she owned, neither of which were warm enough for such an environment. But the Archon had decided she had given up the right to proper clothing, that she could only use whatever she already had in her closet, and she would not be allowed any other aid. And so, twelve hours later, here she was, thrown out into—
The mountain.
It was falling down around her.
Not one of the little mountains from the Chase route, but one of the monstrous peaks that formed an angry, snowy spine heading east from the capital.
Move, Rielle!
She stepped back, looked up, stumbled over chunks of ice, caught herself on a snow-crusted boulder.
As she watched, sheets of stone slid off the nearest peak, crashing into the snow piled on their slopes and sending up glittering sprays of ice. Suddenly she was back on the Chase course, watching the mountain pass crumble and not caring—because how was she supposed to care about falling mountains with Audric in danger?
But Audric was not here. Rielle was alone.
Twelve tiny lights glinted high above, surrounding her.
Her sluggish mind caught up with her rapidly awakening body.
No. She was not alone.
Those lights belonged to elementals: Grand Magister Florimond and her earthshaker acolytes from the Holdfast. A dozen of them formed a perimeter, castings in hand, ordered by the Archon to bring down the mountain and flatten her.
This was the earth trial, the first of seven that would decide her fate.
They’d rushed things—angry with her, possibly afraid of her. This was sloppy and uncharacteristic of the Church, done without witnesses, pomp, or ceremony.
But that hardly mattered. If she didn’t run, she’d be crushed.
Rielle, run!
Down the mountain she bolted, darting past trees, leaping over veins of frigid rock. She jumped over a fallen tree half buried in snow and dropped into a drift three feet deep. Lost her balance, lurched forward, sank into the snow, and inhaled it, coughing. She fumbled for a grip on the ice, pushed herself to her feet, looked back over her shoulder.
The wide snow sea was now a churning wave cresting hundreds of feet high, devouring everything in its path. Black pines snapped in two; fleeing foxes and deer disappeared, sucked beneath the furious white rush. Great slabs of rock rode the wave, tossed and tumbling.
Terror shot through Rielle’s body, drowning out everything else she knew.
She looked ahead once more. The pass sloped slightly upward before her. If she could make it to higher ground, she could perhaps escape the avalanche’s path.
Or, said the voice, abruptly returning, you could—
But Rielle couldn’t hear the rest over the roar of the thundering mountain. Pine branches and fistfuls of ice rained down upon her. Her lungs burned, each frigid breath searing her throat as she fought her way through the snow. She clawed against trees to propel herself forward and scraped her gloved fingers raw.
There: a slight rise of rock, dotted with stumps of trees whose spindly roots cascaded down the rocks like snakes slithering for their holes.
Rielle leapt for the rise of rock—and missed.
No, she didn’t miss.
The earth was opening, her path falling away beneath her feet.
She reached out blindly, desperate for a handhold. Caught a lip of frozen rock with one hand, crashed into the rock front-first. Hung there, dizzy, gasping for breath.
A light winked at the corner of her left eye.
The earthshakers weren’t going to let her escape so easily.
Her feet dangling over the widening chasm, she flung up her other hand, grabbing for a better hold. She tried to pull herself up, every muscle straining.
When she made it home, she would have to ask her father for help strengthening her body.
If she made it home.
Would this be it, then? Would she die in this first trial, hastily slapped together as if it were nothing of importance? As if her life, and the fates of Tal and her father, meant nothing?
No, she damn well would not.
That, said the voice, is what I like to hear.
With a ragged scream, Rielle pulled herself up, her body burning in protest. She wondered if her arms would snap off, then scraped her knees against rock and scrambled to the top of the rise.
She ran to the left, her breath punching in and out of her lungs in ice-cold fists. Stone rose ahead of her in pillared clusters, ribboned with snow and mud. The path was solid. Hope swelled in her chest.
Then, with a great echoing groan, like the plates of the earth had been shoved out of alignment, the path before her cracked open. Tiny chasms snaked across the ground, widening like the swarming mouths of subterranean creatures eager for a kill.
Rielle’s stomach plunged to her toes. But there was no time to waste. She closed her eyes and jumped.
Her feet slammed to ground.
She opened her eyes. Still alive, still breathing.
She jumped and jumped again across the shifting patches of rock. The chasms widened; the ground quaked and jerked, trying to buck her off. A violent shudder threw her to the side. She fell—scraping her arm and knees raw—pushed herself up, and ran.
The air churned with shards of ice and rock. The avalanche blocked out the sun and sucked the air from the sky. The world above her was white and roaring; the world beneath her was coming apart like it must have done when God first breathed life into the universe.
I will not die here, she thought.
She pushed herself faster, her entire body on fire. Past the trees ahead there had to be a path to safety, ground too high for the avalanche to touch. If she could just make it a bit farther—
Then she saw the truth:
Beyond the trees, there was no path.
It was a sheer drop. A canyon—and no way across.
Her mind screamed that this was the end.
Her body decided to disagree.
“No,” she whispered.
No, agreed the voice. Not today. Not ever.