Snow Like Ashes(61)

Someone calls my name, voice ragged with fear. I grab Sir’s face, my dirty fingers digging into his hair. He stares into the sky, his eyes absent and empty, an expression that branded its horrible meaning into my mind long, long ago. A candle without a spark, a sky without a sun, the look people get when they cease to be people, start being bodies. But he is too strong for this expression, his face too hard, too wise, to support the sheer nothingness cascading over him. I refuse to let him go, not like this, not while I will always, always need him.

“William,” I sob, and shake him, his blood squishing between my fingers. “Look at me! Please, I’m begging you, look at me . . .”

All I ever wanted was for you to look at me.

“Meira!” Mather slides to the ground beside me, throws his arms around my shoulders.

“No!” I claw at him, pushing him away, but he fights me to my feet. “No!”

We stumble back, trip on another dead body. Like Sir, staring up at pockets of blue sky through holes in the wafting debris, just another casualty in Angra’s war.

I shove Mather away, rage coursing fresh at Angra’s name. This is his fault. All of this, his greed and his conduit and Winter being weak, so weak . . .

Mather’s arms leave me long enough that I turn back to Sir and reach out in one final grasp for him.

Please, you can’t die too.

Coldness streams down my arm, flies from my fingertips. I can feel it crawling across the battlefield and over Sir’s body, spreading like frost over the ground. It touches every blood vessel, every nerve, turning everything around me into a field of ice. Is this what shock feels like? Is this how it feels to have a piece of who you are ripped from your life—cold and desolate?

Mather pulls me away like nothing happened. “Meira, we have to run! It’s not safe!”

I stare at him. Doesn’t he feel cold too? How can he not feel it? But his panic, the way he drags me through the battle, tells me he didn’t feel anything.

Cannon fire pierces the air, spinning and whistling in the dust, and I react without thought—I shove my shoulder into Mather, throwing him sprawling to the ground as the earth next to me explodes. The weightlessness returns, heaving me up and up, slamming me back into the blood-soaked ground. Something else pops in my chest, and pain flares.

I try to pull myself up, to see where I landed, but only manage to get to my elbows before blackness swarms over me in the form of twisting agony. As it descends I see Mather too far away, screaming, getting dragged toward Bithai by a few of Noam’s men.

“Meira.”

A shadow drops over me. At first it looks like Sir, but it can’t be Sir, it can never again be Sir, and I whimper in the terrible truth of it all.

The shadow crouches down. He sneers at me, a sickening movement that clashes with the men wailing for their lives behind him, against Mather getting sucked away to safety. Against my great rush of terror when I recognize that face.

Herod.

“You stole something from me,” he hisses. “It’s about time I take it back.”

As he bends down, pain, and fear, and exhaustion sweep over me, throwing everything into darkness.





CHAPTER 19

SNOWFLAKES DRIFT AROUND me, turning the air over the ivory field white and cold.

I’m in Winter.

“I thought I’d have more time.” Hannah stands beside me in a white silk gown, the locket gleaming from her neck. Her eyes are glazed, whether from tears or the cold I can’t tell.

“What?” I feel a flicker of alarm. I shouldn’t be in Winter. Last I remember, I was . . . somewhere else. Where?

“I thought I’d have more time,” Hannah repeats. “The connection to conduit magic never breaks, but it was too soon earlier. I’ve been trying to give you time, but time has run out.” She faces me, and I know now that those are tears in her eyes, tears that crest over her lids and tumble down her cheeks. She steps forward, reaching one hand out to me.

“Wait.” I pull away. I can’t remember . . . anything. Why I’m here, in a dream again, why my stomach hangs with a painful weight. Why . . .

Sir’s dead. And I’ve been captured by Herod.

I fall to my knees, gasping on snowflakes. “No . . .”

Hannah steps closer. “Once you arrive in Spring, Angra will use his dark magic to watch you like he’s been watching Mather since Winter fell.” Her face softens. “I’m sorry I can’t explain what I’m about to show you, but I don’t have time for more than this now.”

She puts her hand on my forehead. I moan in protest, but the moment her skin touches mine, scenes fill my head, images and pictures of . . . the past. Hannah is showing me the past. I don’t know how I know that, but the truth zings through me as certainly as the images, and I draw in ragged breaths to keep myself from descending into panic.

Dozens of people stand on a dark lane, holding stones and pendants and sticks in unrelenting fists. The objects glow faintly, gentle pulses of light under the deep black sky. The people turn as a different group approaches, also holding glowing objects. The two groups don’t hesitate—with a scream and a bellow they attack. Fists split bones as if they’re no more than brittle pieces of wood; bodies fly through the air, thrown like fistfuls of straw.

Normal people shouldn’t be able to fight like this. But these aren’t just normal people—those objects are conduits. People once had their own conduits? But only the Royal Conduits were created before the chasm disappeared. . . .