Wide, muddy wagon-wheel tracks showed that the bandits had continued north, no doubt headed for the next city on the trade route. I trailed behind as Ina hurried among the other houses of the village, which were silent in the way that only dead things are. She combed through people’s homes in a panic. Objects the bandits hadn’t taken littered the rooms—everything from books to wool-stuffed sleeping mats to barrels of pickling vinegar.
Waves of horror crashed through me as we approached the meeting hall. Burned corpses littered the ground, bodies twisted into unnatural configurations where they had fallen. I choked on the stench of charred meat and scorched hair. Not a single body showed signs of life. Ina stopped over one and covered her face with her hands. Her breath came shallowly.
Resting over the corpse’s exposed organs lay a silver belt buckle tarnished by fire—an intricate design of looping branches and leaves framing a leaping stag.
I numbly led Ina away from Garen’s body.
By the time the sun had begun to edge toward the western hills, it was clear that the bandits had left no one and nothing. Our desperate search for survivors ended in front of the smoldering remains of the meeting hall. In the fading twilight, I could now barely make out the outlines of bodies amidst the rubble. Ina crumpled onto a stone bench chiseled into aspects of all Six Gods—fire, wind, earth, water, shadow, and spirit. Not one of them had watched over Amalska today.
“What did my people do to deserve this?” she asked, her voice hollow.
I tried to say more, to offer her some explanation, but the words caught in my throat. My chest felt like it was caving in. No potion could bring back the dead. I couldn’t rewrite the past without sacrificing my life, and there were no guarantees it would even go right. Miriel’s loss ached more keenly than ever. Perhaps she would have known what to do.
Images of the villagers I’d known and loved raced through my mind—an older couple who had always brought me honey candies when I was still a child; a young woman whose breech baby I’d helped Miriel deliver one stormy autumn night; and most of all the children, who hid behind their parents, cautiously peeking at the “witch” while their parents bartered with me for tinctures at the vista. I dropped to my knees, taking perverse satisfaction in the discomfort of the chilly mud and the cold that seeped into my bones.
After a while, Ina knelt and bowed her head alongside me. I spoke the prayer of the shadow god over and over, but it brought no solace. Even as I stole melodies from the wind and the water to sing vespers of comfort, the hole of loss continued to deepen. I stayed in place even as my knees grew stiff, even as the breeze grew cold and biting when the sun slowly sank over the hills. When it finally touched the tips of the mountains, the hazy sky turned red as blood. Shadows closed in on us.
Ina did not speak until the first stars glimmered in the sky, barely visible through the clearing smoke.
“I can’t let them die in vain,” she said. “I know what to do.” The certainty in her voice was cool and detached, a turnabout from her earlier tears.
A spark of fear kindled in my stomach.
“What?” I said, my voice coming out like a croak.
“My manifest will be my revenge.” Ina got up and walked off with purpose, leaving me to clamber to my feet on unsteady legs.
“Wait!” I called, but she had already disappeared into the night. Though I had spent most of my life alone on the mountain, somehow the solitude of this moment was more total, the shadows darker, the sky more empty. Embers glowed in the rubble, still sending up tendrils of smoke that scratched at my nose and throat.
“Ina!” I called.
Only the distant hoot of an owl answered me as dread climbed up my spine with clawed hands.
I hurried through the town, shouting Ina’s name. Then something pulled at me—a strengthening current of magic, insistent and deep. The flow of power tugged me nearly all the way back to the base of the trail leading up my mountain.
Up ahead, a flame guttered in the wind.
Ina had lit a candle to begin the summoning of her manifest. She sat on a rocky expanse of ground, chanting over the flame. Power gathered around her like a whirlpool. This was the old manifest, the blood rite, and it was too late to stop her now. If I interrupted the ritual, it could backfire on her and irreparably damage her mind and soul.
“No,” I whispered, anguish strangling my voice. When I’d written her manifest in my blood, this wasn’t what I’d imagined.
Her eyes were closed, her cheeks pale. She shouldn’t have attempted to do something like this with her emotions running so high. It required strength and serenity to summon an animal and merge with its spirit, even if she had been doing it with a god to guide her. By the time I reached her, she had disappeared into a trance. The flickering candle flame reflected in the glassy darkness of her dilated eyes.
Power unspooled from her, reaching tendrils far into the sky and up the mountain. My hands shook, though whether with cold or fear I was no longer certain. The only certain thing was the way the wind rushed past my cheeks and whipped at my hair, yet the flame of her summoning candle steadied.
Ina’s eyes slowly began to focus again as something appeared out of the darkness. It gathered before her like living smoke. Huge white wings fluttered into view, followed by serpentine eyes that caught and reflected the candle flame in their icy depths.
She had called the dragon.
She would die.
CHAPTER 6
INA STOOD AND FACED THE DRAGON UNAFRAID, EVEN though it towered over her with feral hunger in its gaze. This wasn’t a quiet serpent still lazy with winter torpor. It was a predator as wild and angry as Ina herself. Unlike a normal manifest, in which a person peacefully invited a creature to share her life, the blood rite had brought the dragon ready for a fight. It snapped at Ina with fangs as long as my forearm, but she ducked nimbly out of the way and drew a knife from her belt. Then she screamed a wordless challenge to the beast.
It roared in defiance, flames pluming from its mouth into the nearby treetops. Cinders rained over us as pine needles sizzled into ash, caught and scattered by the wind. I scurried behind a nearby boulder, choking on smoke and fear.
The dragon circled Ina, then bit at her again. She didn’t even flinch. That kind of confident recklessness would get her killed. Panic crashed through me in drowning waves. I had to do something.
“Ina!” I called to her, but the wind tore the word out of my mouth. Only the beast heard, pausing to fix me with a stare as cold as the heart of winter. I stood frozen for what felt like an eternity but must have been only a heartbeat.
Ina took her advantage.
She hastily swiped her knife over the palm of her hand, then caught the dragon on one cheek with her blade. The creature hissed as she pressed her bleeding hand to the side of its jaw. Magic shimmered in the air around them, called by the blood and the summoning to lock them both in place. The dragon’s hiss dissipated into the wind.
“No!” I shouted, even though it was far too late. If she ended the ritual now, the dragon would turn on her.
Terror consumed me. She was all I had left.
Ina chanted,
“I gift you my blood so that I may serve my kingdom.
I take your blood so that I may be more than myself.
My heart is your heart.
My life is your life.
Until the blood of us both is but memory and dust.
Together, we take a new name.
Together, we rise as one.”
My horror intensified with every word she spoke. This was my fault. I had given her the rite and written it in my blood. Everything I wrote had come true, even the unspoken intention behind the words.
Ina would never marry Garen, because he was dead.