Tylar stumbled from the alcove. He sensed in his bones that whatever had entered Punt had vanished away. Still he dared approach no closer. He headed away, past the bodies of the slain. Sprawled in their blessed cloaks, the knights seemed like ghosts, blending with the shadows. Though the wearers were dead, the cloth still maintained its Grace, working to hide its owner even in death.
As Tylar skirted the square, the scent of flower petals and warm sun swelled around him. He turned, knowing the source. The pale, misty beauty remained unmoving on the stone. From this angle, he spotted the black hole pierced through her chest, as wide as a fist, blackened and wisped with curls of smoke.
He sensed it was down that hole that the darkness had vanished away, the well through which the enemy had escaped.
Though the forces at work here had nothing to do with a fallen knight, nor a broken man, he found his feet walking him toward the woman.
As he approached, he attempted to keep his feet from her glowing blood, but there was too much. He moved into her light, careful of the slick stone. She surely was a noblewoman of high stature. It was seldom someone was blessed with such a degree of Grace. Perhaps she was even one of the eight handservants to Meeryn, the god- made-flesh of these islands. Such servants dwelled in the god’s castillion, harvesting and preserving the humours from the god they served.
Tylar eyed the castillion blazing atop the isle’s highest point, Summer Mount, the seat of Meeryn. If he was right, if the lass had indeed been in service to this realm’s god, he pitied the hand behind this attack. A god’s vengeance knew no pity.
He reached the woman’s side. He stared down into the wan beauty, brought low here. She was young, no more than eighteen. Her face glowed with a fading brilliance, gone to embers. The blank eyes, as blue as the seas, stared skyward.
Then those same eyes twitched in his direction, seeing him.
Tylar clenched back a step in shock.
She did indeed still live! But surely not for long…
“Child,” he whispered, not knowing what words he could offer at this last moment.
He crouched, soaking his pant leg in blood. As the dampness reached his skin, he realized his mistake. The blood burned his flesh-not like fire, but like spiced wine on the tongue, as much pleasure as pain. It was a burn to which he was well familiar.
Crying out, he fell backward.
Fingers latched onto his wrist, holding him, squeezing like the iron manacles that had bound him for five years.
He gaped in horror. The woman was not dead. Then again, how could she be? She was not a woman at all.
Tylar knew who lay before him now, who clutched him.
It was not a handmaiden.
It was Meeryn herself… the immortal god of the Summering Isles.
Fingers squeezed and drew him closer. Her other arm rose and reached toward him. The palm was bloody. Tylar had neither the strength nor the will to fight.
The reaching palm struck his chest as if to push him away, while the clutching fingers pulled at him. The blood on the outstretched hand blazed through both the rough-spun cotton of his shirt and the soft linen of his underclothes. It touched the flesh over his heart. This was no spiced wine. He smelled the smolder of seared skin. The pain was excruciating, but at the same time, he never wanted it to end.
It didn’t.
The god at his feet pushed deeper, stretching for his heart as it fluttered, a panicked bird in a bony cage. He gasped out fire as burning fingers entered his chest. The stone of the square vanished from his eyes, snuffed away like a pinched candle. The small sounds of the night blew out. The hard grind of stone fell away under his legs.
Only now did he understand the lack of substance behind reality.
Yet sensations remained.
A palm pushing at his chest, a hand dragging him down by the wrist.
He spun in these contrasts, but here, where there was no substance, both were possible. He felt himself shoved up into a brilliance that blinded, while dragged down into a darkness that was somehow just as bright. Where a moment ago he had stood at the edge of a bottomless abyss, now he hung over the same. But as he spun, he recognized his mistake. There was not one abyss, but two — one above and one below.
Both stared at him as he hovered between, his bones burning like a torch.
This was more than death.
I am undone, he thought, knowing it to be true.
Then a wash of coolness drenched his form, drowning him, driving him back to the slaughter of the square, back into his own body. He struck it like he had the broken cobbles outside the Wooden Frog: hard and abrupt.
Sensations filled him again-but the palm on his chest no longer burned. From the god’s hand, a chilled wash spread out and through him.
He knew this sensation, too.
In a different life, he had bent a knee to the god Jessup of Oldenbrook. Then, too, he had been filled with Grace. And like Meeryn, Jessup had borne the aspect of water. To many, this aspect was the weakest of the four. Most of his fellow knights had sought out gods of fire, loam, or air. But not Tylar. He had been born as his mother drowned aboard a sinking scuttlecraft off the Greater Coast. Water was his home as much as shadow.
So he knew what filled him now.
“No!” he gasped. Grace flowed into him, drowned him, a hundredfold richer than when Jessup had ceremonially blessed him. He didn’t deserve this honor. He could not face it. But he also could not escape it.
Grace swelled in him, stretching him.
No… too much…
His back arched. He remembered his birth, shoved brutally and lovingly out of the warmth of his mother’s womb and into the cold seas of Myrillia. Then, too, he had breathed water, momentarily one with the sea-until salt burned and lungs fought to cry. He would have died had not the net of a lobsterman hauled him from the waves.
But who will save me now?
Water surged through him. He could not breathe. He craned, stretching for air.
Too much…
Something gave way deep inside him. The swell of water spouted up and drained down, spewing from him in racking spasms. He felt part of himself given away with it, released, stolen, shared-and at the same time, something entered, swimming up the flowing channel and into his chest, settling there, coiling there.
Then the water finally emptied from the broken vessel that was his body. Tylar collapsed in on himself, spent and drained. The momentary blessing was gone.
The hand on his chest fell away. His wrist was released.
He stared down again into Meeryn’s face.
Her soft skin no longer glowed, but her eyes still stared at him as dawn finally broke over the island, taking the edge off the gloom. Meeryn would recover. Like all the gods, she was immortal, undying, eternal.
Her lips moved, but no words were spoken. He thought he had read the word pity on those perfect lips, but maybe it was just something in her eyes. What did she mean?
“Lie still,” he urged, leaning closer. “Help will come.”
A small movement. A tiny shake of the head and a sigh. Her lips parted again. He cocked his head, bringing his ear closer. Her breath was cherry blossoms on a still lake.
“Rivenscryr,” she whispered. It was not a fragment of thought, but a simple command.
Tylar’s brow pinched at the strange word. Rivenscryr? He faced her, a question on his lips. “What-?”
Then he saw the impossible before him. It took all breath from him.
Meeryn lay as she had a moment before, but now all light faded from her-not just the glow of her Graces, but all that separated the living from the dead. Her eyes, still open, went empty and blind. Her lips remained parted with her last word, but no breath escaped them.
Both as a Shadowknight and as a slave, he had come to know death.
