Reign of the Fallen (Reign of the Fallen #1)(77)

For Meredy, it’ll probably be Firiel who appears to lure her into staying.

But no matter what we encounter, I’m going to keep Meredy alive. I can’t lose her, not after how much trouble I went through to save her the first time. Not after we’ve finally started talking about Evander, sharing memories to keep him with us. Not after . . . well, everything she’s become to me.

“Lysander’s found something.” Meredy squeezes my elbow, jarring me back to the present.

“Which way?” I demand, putting a hand on my sword.

The bear gazes straight ahead, at one of the Deadlands’ many gardens. I take a step toward it, but Meredy holds me back, her hand turning cold in mine.

“She’s nowhere near here,” she says in a dreamy, distant voice not quite like her own. Her face is completely blank. A shiver runs through me as I realize Lysander’s eyes are glowing a vivid green, identical to hers. Somehow, she’s searching his thoughts in a way I’ve never seen before.

“Then we’d better start running,” I murmur. Now that we’re in the Deadlands, there could be Shades nearby. Or the very man I’d like to catch by surprise.

“No.” To my relief, Meredy sounds more like herself. She meets my gaze, then nods to Lysander. “Riding will be much faster.”

Every necromancer should see the Deadlands on the back of a grizzly, I decide as I settle myself on Lysander’s warm bulk. The view is different somehow. Sharper, with every twisted tree and every moonflower seeming to jump out at me, vying for my attention.

Meredy sits in front of me, and at her urging, I wrap my arms around her waist.

My heart taps out its excitement against my ribs, and there’s nothing I can do—save for letting go of Meredy’s soft curves or tucking my nose into my shirt so I don’t have to breathe her subtle vanilla scent that makes my head spin—to slow it down.

I just hope she can’t feel the faint pounding against her back, or hear the slight quickening of my breath.

Lysander picks up speed, and I grip Meredy tighter. He seems to be following the meander of a dark and icy river. As the water rushes past in a blur, my thoughts turn to Master Cymbre.

The day she first came to see me at Death’s convent, her face was less lined and her fiery hair had no trace of gray.

She wanted to be a mentor, not a mother, but I was ten years old and I didn’t know the difference. We both learned a lot that first year, as she tried to pass on her knowledge of the Dead while I tried on her clothes and lip rouge and begged to sleep in her bed.

Wind chills the tips of my ears as Lysander carries us through a grove of trees that have dropped their silver leaves.

I asked Master Cymbre about the seasons in the Deadlands once. I think I was twelve. She couldn’t explain why there weren’t any, she said, any better than her mentor could when she’d asked the very same thing. But she still knew a lot more than I did, and I never stopped relying on her to answer my impossible questions.

Why the moon turns blood-red sometimes.

Why we can’t look upon the Dead without them turning into Shades.

Why Simeon doesn’t like kissing girls, only boys, but I like both.

Why love hurts when it’s the thing we live for. The thing some people search their entire lives for. The thing some people die for.

Why I don’t know where I belong.

“With me, chickadee,” Master Cymbre would singsong when I asked her that, in the years before I started going by Sparrow.

She’s never been my mother. She’s always held a little something of herself back from me, just enough to remain as mysterious as Vaia, the Five-Faced God who created our world and then vanished long ago.

But she’s all I have. All that’s left of our trio, which once felt invincible.

“You’re quiet back there,” Meredy murmurs, gazing at me over her shoulder. “Everything all right?”

I nod, still lost in memories. Like the day Master Cymbre first took Evander and me into the Deadlands and explained the price of our magic. That while we could come here and have the freedom to bring spirits back to their bodies, our spirits would never rest here when we died. We’d just . . . disappear.

It seemed so unfair to ten-year-old me, I’d flopped down under a silvery tree and cried so hard I gave myself hiccups. Nothing we got in return for raising the dead—invitations to all the palace parties, the fame, the heaps of gold for each person we brought back to life—seemed to be a good exchange for our spirits.

“All magic has a price,” Master Cymbre told me more than once. “If it didn’t, every blue-eyed person would raise all their loved ones and Karthia would be overrun with Dead. If gray-eyed people could change the path of a huge storm without giving themselves a stroke, we’d never have to fear another dark cloud.”

“Sounds like a perfect world,” I’d grumbled.

But Master Cymbre had merely smiled. “You wouldn’t think it was perfect. There would be other problems. Karthia would be crowded, restless, and miserable.”

“What are you trying to say?” I demanded.

“I’m saying we make our own problems. As long as people exist,” she’d said, her steely blue eyes focused intently on mine, “there will be trouble and discontent and rumblings of how things could be better. There is no ‘perfect.’”