The Bitter Kingdom

Should I dare the whitewater? I’ve always been a decent swimmer. But I could just as easily be pounded to death as drown in the current. And if I survived, there’s no telling where the river would take me.

I crane my neck to view the wall above me. Except for a lump of moss here and there, the way is too smooth to have any decent handholds. And near the top, the balcony hangs over the edge. I would have to climb underneath it, hanging like a spider.

The only possible route lies sideways along the foundation. Small, dark openings are set at regular intervals. Trash chutes? Gutters? Maybe I could climb up one of them.

I groan. It seems I am destined to spend a lot of time in sewers.

There’s no knowing when the Inviernos will return for me. Surely they have sensed my use of magic. I should go now. But after the last firebolt, I’m too weak. I would fall to my death.

I will rest just long enough to get some strength back. I close my eyes and pray. Please, God, I just need a little blessing from you. Send me strength. Or if you’d rather not, could you please hold my captors at bay while I rest?

I keep my eyes closed, waiting, hoping. But of course nothing happens. It’s not that I expected strength and energy to suddenly fill my limbs, but it would have been nice.

I scoot back into the pit and lean against the wall, wondering whether or not God will do as I ask. If he does, I’ll never know whether it’s him or dumb luck. Which makes me wonder, somewhat guiltily, why God never answers the obvious prayers, prayers that I can see being answered.

Having my body suddenly awash in strength—now that would be something.

I don’t realize I’ve drifted off to sleep until something crashes to the ground beside me. Black shapes roughly the size of my foot pour from a shattered wooden crate. I see eyes, hundreds of them, as round and shiny as marbles, as oily black as a Deciregus’s. Tiny claws skitter across the bedrock as they swarm toward me.

Rats.

I scurry backward toward the hole, pulling food from my pouch as I go, scattering it before me. The rats pile on top of one another to get at it, and I almost sob with relief. I’ve bought myself precious seconds.

Wind whips at my loosening hair as I swing out over the hole. I grasp the bottom edges and let myself hang, seeking toeholds. I can do this. I’ve climbed before.

But how long until the rats pour out of the hole looking for more food? Whoever threw the crate into my pit had to have noticed how bright it had become, maybe even saw the hole itself. I’ll be lucky if I am only pursued by rats.

I creep to the side, limbs splayed like a spider’s. The wall is not quite sheer, and as my grasping fingers slip and my arm swings wildly into the air, I realize the slight slope is the only thing keeping me from falling to my death.

My shoulders burn. My knuckles are already scraped, and each time the breeze picks up, I feel like a tiny grass blade, barely rooted, swaying in the wind. The dark sewer entrance is so far off.

Despair almost takes me. I can’t go back. But I’m too weak to dare a plunge into the rushing river.

Something skitters above me, and I look up to find noses twitching in the morning sunshine. One bold rat takes a step over the edge. He slips, and his high squeal echoes like a raptor’s as his round black body bounces along the wall. The churning river does not even acknowledge his entrance with a splash.

To my left is a stone block that juts out from the others. It might jut out far enough that I can straddle it. I climb toward it, one careful handhold at a time. If I do it in strategic increments, pausing to rest when I can, maybe I’ll have a chance.

Sounds carry out through the hole. Footsteps. Yelling. A ringing sword.

I’ve been discovered. Tears fill my eyes, because I don’t know what to do. I can’t climb any faster. Maybe I should let them take me, look for another opportunity to escape.

But there won’t be another opportunity. Next time they take me, it will be for keeps.

The river. Rapids aside, I won’t last long in alpine snowmelt water. And I have no idea where it leads. But it’s my only option.

Hard to believe that after everything, after so much worry and dread about my destiny, that my death will be so simple. So without fanfare.

I take a deep breath, steeling myself to let go.

“Elisa?”

I’m so startled by Hector’s voice that my feet slip and I swing from my arms, banging into the side of the wall. My shoulders burn like they’re pulling out of their sockets, and skin sloughs from my fingers as my hands slip from their holds.

22

“HOLD on! I’m coming,” Hector calls.

My right foot finds a toehold. It’s not much, but it takes some pressure off my burning shoulders. I just need to be still, to hold on.

Hurry, Hector.

Pebbles clatter around me as Hector descends. I look up to see if he’s close and get an eyeful of grit. I blink hard as tears stream down my face.

He exclaims in surprise, and several furry black bodies tumble past me. My fingers are going numb. I might be slipping again, but I’m not sure.

“Hector?” My voice shakes.

“Almost there!”

Suddenly my left hand is grasping at air, and my weight is too much. I’m sliding, sliding down the wall. . . .

Hector swings into place behind me; his arm wraps my waist. “Got you,” he whispers in my ear. He’s hanging by one hand, holding us both. How is such a thing even possible?

His feet find purchase, and he is rock steady at my back. The relief breaks something inside me. “I’m sorry!” I blurt. “I couldn’t stay. I was too weak to fight them off if they came back.” I can’t seem to stanch the flow of words. “I tried to get to the sewer, but blowing a hole through the wall made me even weaker, and I have no food left, and the rats came, and—”

“Stop.” His arm around me tightens. That’s when I realize that his arms tremble slightly, that his breath comes too fast. He is as exhausted as I am.

He begins to push us both upward. Between breaths, he says, “You know, it’s all right for me to rescue you every now and then.”

“You haven’t rescued me yet,” I point out.

He grunts, trying to pull us over a lip of stone. His forearms are corded with effort. “Elisa, if you could help, even a little . . .”

I reach up with bloody fingers and find a handhold, then another. Slowly, together, we crawl back up the wall and pull ourselves into the hole I made.

My knees are buckling, but he pulls me to my feet and wraps me in a hug. I hug back, my face smashed against his chest. “Thank you,” I murmur.

He pulls away and grabs at a rope dangling from the trapdoor’s opening. Worried, familiar, dear faces peer down at us.

“I’ll make a loop for you to stand in,” Hector says. “The others will pull you up. We have to hurry.”

He loops the rope and ties an elaborate sailor’s knot, then helps me step into it. He fails to hide his grin as he lifts me by the waist and says, “Hold tight. Stand straight and stiff. You’ll be easier to pull up.”

“You’re very pleased with yourself, aren’t you?”

“Oh, yes.”

Now that I’ve stepped into his loop, we are eye level. He cups the back of my neck and plants a quick kiss on my lips. “See you at the top.” Then he looks up and calls, “Now!”

The rope jerks, and I swing wildly, but I make myself as stiff as a plank of wood.

As I near the top, hands reach for me, and I’m pulled over the edge. I roll onto my back, gasping with relief.

“Are you hurt?” says Mara. She seizes my hands, turns them over to reveal the scraped mess and says, “We’ll need to clean and bandage your fingers.” She grabs my chin and turns my face to the side, then the other.

“Mara, stop. I’m fine.” I sit up and climb slowly to my feet. Then I fling my arms around my lady-in-waiting and hug her tight. Smaller arms wrap us both, and I reach down to tousle Mula’s hair.

I extricate myself from them and look around at my companions. Everyone is breathless and wide-eyed from the effort of pulling me out of the pit. Off to the side lies an Invierno acolyte, blood staining his robes. The bringer of the rats, I presume. “Thank you,” I say.

“Lucero told us how to open the trapdoor,” Storm points out.

I look to the altar and find Lucero’s lashless eyes fixed on me. He is smiling. “You promised,” he whispers.

My heart thuds into my belly. “I did,” I whisper back.

“We must go,” Belén says, as Hector pulls himself over the edge and gains his feet. “Our escape has certainly been noticed.”

Hector says, “Be alert.”

I grab his hand. “Wait. I promised Lucero I would . . . kill him. If he healed me.”

No one speaks for a moment. Then Storm says, “You did come to destroy the power source.”

I stare at Lucero. “I didn’t know it was going to be a person.”

“I can do it for you,” Hector says.

“Or me,” Belén says.

“I can put an arrow in his heart,” Mara says. “It would be very fast. Almost painless.”

“I hate blood,” Storm says. “It stains.” But he pulls his dagger.

It’s tempting to let one of them take this burden from me, but it wouldn’t feel right. “Thank you. But I will do it.”

I’m sorry, God. I know the murder of innocents is against your will, but so is breaking an oath. And surely this living death is worse in your eyes?

I call on the zafira. It comes slowly, for I am both exhausted and reluctant.

Lucero never fulfilled his destiny as God’s chosen. The Blasphemy was not intended to be his final act of service, for his stone still lives inside him. And now I will take the possibility away from him forever.

I’m startled to hear his quiet voice in my head: But maybe you will fulfill yours. And I will have helped.

“Please,” he whispers aloud.

He showed me the way, when my body was broken and he healed me. I know exactly what to do. I reach inside his still form to stop his heart.

But something changes. A subtle shift. With growing horror, I realize the power of the zafira is no longer being channeled by me. It’s being channeled through me. “Lucero, what are you doing?”

The power becomes a torrent. My belly turns to fire.

They must die. All of them.

Our essences collide, Lucero’s and mine. He weaves them together until they are a single entity, a power so massive that we could crack open the world. Which is exactly what he plans to do. Now that we are one, I see his vision: the Eyes of God, exploding in fiery fury, burying Umbra de Deus in lava and ash.

“No!” I shriek.

I fight, but it’s no use. Lucero forces the scalding power through my veins, and I am helpless against it, laid bare and burning. I open my mouth to sob from pain and rage, but even that release is denied me. This is what it means to be an unwilling sacrifice.

Lucero drags me into the depths of the earth, where lava pulses like lifeblood. He reaches as if with giant, invisible fingers into cracks and fissures, prying them open, relentless. The world groans.

Please, Lucero. Don’t do this.

They deserve it!

The ground heaves, and I drop to my knees.

“Elisa, what’s happening?” Mara’s voice, as if from far away. I see her in blurred relief against the distant mountain. Her bow is drawn.

“He’s done something to her!” Hector yells. “Shoot him.”

A massive boom rocks the balcony, and I snap back to myself, gasping with relief. For a moment I imagine I am light as air and soaring, for I am free, and my power is my own.

I glance around, not quite taking everything in because all I can think is: How did I not understand, all these years, how precious and glorious it is to belong to myself?

Then I notice the arrow protruding from Lucero’s chest. Blood snakes from the corner of his mouth. His chest rises and falls with short, shallow breaths.

Beyond him are the twin mountains. One has exploded, its top blown clean off. A pillar of bilious gray the diameter of a city rises into the sky. The glowing fingers of lava clutching the mountainside have thickened. Steam sizzles from the river below, and I choke on air tinged with ash and a scent like that of rotten eggs.

Even so, it seems as though wind has carried most of the blast away, and I dare to hope that we might be safe. But the ground beneath my feet quakes again, and I realize the other mountain, the nearer one, is about to follow its brother.

Hector swears. Belén mutters a prayer.

“There is no escaping that,” Storm says softly, gazing at the mountain about to devour us all. Mula steps up beside him, and he drapes an arm across her slight shoulders. “I guess it ends here, after all,” he says.

No. I plunge my awareness back into the guts of the earth, and I drag the remaining spark of Lucero’s life with me.

This time, I’m the one in control. I brutally yank the zafira through both my stone and his, weaving our power together, until it feels just as thick and unremitting as the pillar of ash spewing into the sky. Such power, with two living conduits working in tandem. Too much. I could do anything with it.

I feel twisted and dark and wrong as I shove it down, down, down the gullet of the mountain, bringing rock and debris with it, choking it dead.

The earth stills to a gentle rumble. I wipe ash from my eyes even as I release Lucero back to himself.

The farthest mountain still sends clouds billowing into the sky. It is bald of forest and snow. The horizon beyond darkens with ash. Night will come early today.

But the nearest mountain has caved in on itself and is now half its former height. Boulders tumble down the side as it continues to settle.