Crown of Cinders (Imdalind #7)(82)

Normally, this close to the barrier, everything would be hot and stifling, the air so thick and muggy you could feel it press against your skin like mayonnaise. Right now, with the way the wind rushed around us and the snow beat against the barrier feet from us, it was cold. The air was a brittle chill as the outside world found a way in, as the earth itself felt the bitter agony of losing someone so great.

The earth knew why we were here, she knew why we were gathered on a little hill, surrounded by miles of farmland with enough of a rise in the earth that it lifted us above the hell the city had become, looking over it like the rulers we were.

It was the city Dramin had called his home, the city we would bury him in. Up here, I could see why he loved it so much. I could see his home. I could see my home.

“I’m sure it was beautiful,” I sighed out, my voice broken as the sobs tried to quiet briefly. “When it was first built … before all of this …” I waved my hand over the city, displaying the ruins before us, as though Ilyan hadn’t seen them before, as if he didn’t know how it had been.

Ilyan pulled me into him as he pulled the thoughts from my mind, his own comforting words drifting to me through our magic. The warmth of his power settled into my bones.

It was. It was his home.

Sobs stuck in my throat, I turned into him, my cold cheek pressing against the warmth of his arm as he held me, tangled awkwardly in the cold. He was the only comforting thing this hilltop had for us, so I held on to him, watching our ribbons dance and tangle in the angry wind.

Ryland stayed back, the wind attempting to devour him as he stood between two fresh dirt mounds, his hands and knees covered with the dark earth. His sobs swept into the wind like the howl of a demon, his mourning knell hitting me in the chest.

Watching him there, watching his heartbreak, knowing what was still to come, ripped open my heart again, and the sobs came. Deeper and louder this time, the pain stifled by Ilyan’s arms as he wrapped me up in him.

His sobs increased as Wyn and Thom began to drag Ryland away from the two people he had considered family and toward the last one, following the few of Ilyan’s people who had come up here with us.

“I’m not sure I can do this,” I said between sobs.

Ilyan’s hand was soft as it ran down my spine, the blanket shielding the touch from view. “Do what, mi lasko?” he asked, his tall frame bending over me as he whispered in my ear.

“Step over there. Say good-bye.”

Ilyan stiffened with the shake in the words, the reality hitting him as it did me. As wrapped up in him as I was, I could feel him shudder. His magic pressed against my heart as I felt his lips press against my hair. His breath was warm as it flowed with the wind that still tried to move into me, warm breath and cold wind tugging and pulling at my hair.

Good-byes are never easy, he whispered in my mind. Nor are they final. His magic is all around us, my Joclyn. You saw it as it left him, and you will see it again … whether it be in this life or the next.

“Or the next,” I echoed, my voice muffled as I pressed my face into the crook of his arm, burrowing into the blanket that was wrapped around us.

I didn’t want to watch Ryland as he walked closer to us, all broken again. I didn’t want to think of the next life, the life that might be too close thanks to the premonitions and fathers who lie and mess everything up.

At first, it was me, and then it was Ilyan. Now it might be any one of us.

It was already Dramin.

And Risha.

And Jaromir.

“I have told you of how we release our kind, the Sk?íteks, into the earth, yes?” Ilyan’s voice was an accented rumble as he whispered against me, pulling my mind from the flashes of sights.

“Into the underwater river that flows throughout Imdalind,” I answered, the imagery clear in my head, just as it had been when we had buried Risha a few moments ago: The large cavern; the quick flow of icy water; the way the body, all wrapped up in white, was placed in the flow, swallowed beneath the surface to return the physical body back into the earth that gave it life and allowing the soul and magic to find their final resting place amidst the rock and sky and air of the world that had created us all.

“Do you think they will get lost?” I asked, knowing Ilyan was tuned in to me. “That they will get stuck in the barrier and never find their way home?”

I knew it was a silly question. I didn’t even know where home was after this. I didn’t know if there was a heaven or a hell or some combination of the two. I hoped Dramin’s soul would find what he was looking for, find his way back to whatever blissful eternity he wanted.

Barrier or no.

“He will,” Ilyan whispered as Ryland’s loud cries passed by us.

I listened to his sobs before the wind drowned them.

“Sk?íteks are released into the earth.” His voice was calm as he pulled me from him, the blanket falling from one of my shoulders with the slow, mournful steps we took toward the final mound where Ryland and all the others were. “Drak’s are released into sight. We release them from their past so they are free to find their futures.”

My heart fell to my toes, my gut twisting painfully as Ilyan pulled me back to the horrors of what we were moving toward.

The small group was already making a circle around his body.

The icy air sucked the oxygen from my lungs, my heart twisting and cracking. I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t want to see this. Nevertheless, I couldn’t stop moving forward. I couldn’t stop everything from dying inside of me.