Crown of Cinders (Imdalind Series Book 7) (33 page)

“What do you mean?” Frain asked, pulling my attention back to her.

With a hiss of pain, I pulled myself into a fully sitting position, my hands pressing against the rough stone floor of what I now recognized as a cave. “My sight showed me this. It wanted me to be here,” I gasped, each word tightening my chest painfully. “It wanted me dead.”

“No, child.” Ilyan’s grandmother smiled, her hair shimmering as though it were made from light. “It wanted you home.”

Home.

Something about the word pulled at me, tugged at my heart and pulled me right into sight. My pained chest gasped for air as the same cave reemerged before me, only brighter. Everything was clear and crisp, as all sights of the past were. The clarity in the sight was as alarming as what was in it.

Myself, the same self I had seen in that haunting white sight. The same who had prompted me to the underground river, standing on the edge of the massive pool.

Gasping in shock, I watched myself, my heart plunging to the ground, terror gripping me as I stared at the water’s edge, the two of us breathing in deep synchronization. The water below her began to bubble, swirling around her calves as she waded in. Her own gasp of shock rippled across the silence as the surface broke with a torrent of bubbles, four small bodies appearing just below the dark water: two boys and two girls, one of the boys blue and wrinkled.

“The four,” I gasped to myself in recognition, my mind still reeling as I tried to understand what I was looking at and why I was there.

My heart tensing, I watched myself rush deeper into the waters, pulling the blue boy out in desperation.

“No, no,” her frightened voice echoed around the cave as she worked to revive him. “You can’t die on me, boy. We need you.”

The other four, just children, made their way to the banks and circled around her as the older me worked in a panic.

She compressed his chest once more before she turned her head, placing her ear against his chest as she listened for a heartbeat, her eyes looking straight at me.

Straight into me.

She could see me.

“Do you understand now?” she asked as she lifted her head to look at me, everything freezing around her as she stepped toward me. My own feet moved back with terrified confusion. “Do you understand what you are?”

I stepped back again, my breath caught in my chest as I was backed into a wall.

“I am Drak,” I was finally able to answer, forcing the words out through my panic. “That is what you said before.”

“It’s true. You are. You are the first of the Drak. The first of the Skȓítek. The first of the Vilỳ. The first of the Trpaslík. You are the first and the last of magic. I am. We are all.” She smiled, the grin a wide span across her face in an odd wickedness.

“Why are you here?” I asked.

“Why are we here, you mean,” she corrected, her smile widening. “You see yourself in this life that you assume is not yours, but it is yours. It is your life, a life before this one, a life that was taken from you.”

“Wh-what are you talking about?” I stuttered, my heart beating faster as my magic ignited, pulsing and pulling at me, trying to show me something. But I couldn’t let it. I was stuck looking at this other me who merely smiled.

“You will see,” she answered, her voice dark and frightening as my sight vanished, leaving me staring at black. Black faded back into the cave and the two woman who sat before me in awe, the adult counterparts to the sight I had just had.

They stared in amazement, obviously having not missed the black sheen of my eyes. I, on the other hand, could only look back at them in horror, my heart beating too fast and my muscles too tight.

“What did you see?” Chyline asked, the hunger in her voice further igniting the panic and confusion I already felt.

“I saw myself,” I spat, barely able to control my emotions. “I saw myself … in the water. I saw you coming out … out of Imdalind. But … But you were children.” My panic had increased far too much.

I jerked away from them just as I had in sight, my gaze flickering in desperation to find some kind of escape from whatever hell I had wandered into.

“So you know, then,” Frain said, her calm smile out of place.

“Know what!” I yelled, my resolve snapping as I jerked toward them.

The two woman hardly flinched, and Frain’s smile still remained firmly in place.

“You know what you are.” The voice was different, but the words were the same, Chyline echoing exactly what I had said to myself.

“Don’t give me that. That’s what she … what I …” I stuttered to a stop, my frustration continuing to boil over. “I don’t know. I don’t even know what I saw!”

“You saw the beginning of magic,” Chyline finished for me, her smile so wide any hope of falsehood in the sight was forgotten. “You saw your true self begin it.”

“You saw yourself as you brought us from the mud,” Frain finished for her, the few simple words twisting inside my gut.

“I don’t …” I gasped, desperate to refute it yet knowing I could not. “But that is not me. It can’t be. Don’t you see?”

“I do,” Chyline interrupted. “I see the same woman who raised me. I feel your magic. I know it is a jumble to you. But that life is your life, just as this life is your life. They are one in the same.”

“Does anyone speak English around here?” I mumbled under my breath, hardly able to control another outburst.

“Calm down, Silnỳ,” Frain said, her hand soft against my arm. I still flinched.

I knew what I had seen. I knew what it meant.

I knew it was true.

I didn’t want to admit it.

“You said I wasn’t dead.”

“Not in this life,” Chyline answered. “You are the same as us. No, even above us. The magic of the earth is tied to you. Even when Sain thought he had killed you after Edmund’s ascension, you came back. And, I must say, coming back as Sain’s daughter was quite the trick. I would expect nothing less from you.”

If I was confused before, it was nothing compared to now. The cave around us moaned, shaking the floor I still sat on, sending the pool splashing over the bank. But I didn’t even turn. I scarcely registered it.

“Sain killed me?” I asked, my voice quivering as I watched Chyline. Her Cheshire smile was all that was visible as she moved into the depths of the cave we sat in.

“In a past life,” she answered.

“It’s not possible.”

“It is,” she said from the dark.

“You are the Silnỳ,” Frain added, the words I heard so many times before causing a fresh wave of panic to cascade against my soul.

“Powerful.” I tried not to sound frustrated, but it sneaked out, anyway.

“It means so much more than
powerful
, so much more than what was shown in sight. It means you are the first—
the very first
,” she continued, her voice echoing hauntingly as sight pulled at me, a single flash of myself reviving the blue-tinted boy breaking through.

“It is me, then,” I said as my magic roared a bit, flashes of sight still fueling my confusion.

“She is not stupid, this one,” Frain said with a wide smile, her eyes shining just as Ilyan’s did.

“She never was.” Chyline smiled as Rinax came back, landing beside her, a smile still devoid from his face.

The two woman continued smiling at me while Rinax stared at me in expectation as my magic swelled, the pain that had been slowly deserting my head returning with a roar.

I yelled in pain as I slapped my hand against my head, hoping desperately that the pressure would disperse the pain. However, it grew as my vision left again, plunging me into the golden glow of sight.

I saw myself with the same children I had pulled from the dark water of Imdalind. The blue child transformed into the Vilỳ who had been fluttering before us. I watched the five of us laugh as I taught them how to use their magic, as Chyline transformed a rock into liquid gold, a young Sain screaming in terror.

That image faded and another replaced it, the same cave surrounding me as Sain approached, his eyes sad with each step forward.

“I’m tired of waiting, Silnỳ,” he said as he fell down at my feet. “All of my siblings have found their love, and I am alone.”

I looked at him before turning toward the pool, my eyes sad as I led him toward it, as I showed him how to drop a single droplet of blood below the surface, to let it blend with my magic and create a new life.

Dramin.

The sight shifted to the four as they ruled, to cities as they were built, to the large pools of sight that Sain and Dramin built.

Sight after sight came of a life I didn’t know before it stopped on the cave surrounding me as I lay in the pool of dark water, floating there before Sain entered. He was the same Sain I had seen in premonition moments ago when I had been flushed down the river and into the center of the earth.

With a gasp, I pulled myself from the sight, the other three coming back into focus as my heart thundered heavily in my chest. The vision I had seen became a nightmare.

“This is not your first life, child,” Frain continued as Chyline patted my knee sympathetically, both women oblivious to the real reason for my panic.

I wished her touch could bring relief. I only had confusion.

My eyes were wide as I looked between one and the other.

“What did you see?” Rinax asked, his irritation finally fading. He folded his arms, pursing his lips as he waited for an answer. “I can see it on your face. You saw something.”

“She saw our birth, Rinax,” Chyline whispered, her voice sounding far away as my sight pulled at me once again, a single flash of Sain’s face as he laughed from below the dark water.

No, not below.

I was below.

It was the same sight I had seen as the water pulled me under, and now I knew why.

“I saw more than that,” I said as I pushed the sight away, looking at the three again, the fear of the admission pulling at my heart. “I saw Sain.”

My shoulders pulled in as the sight came again, shifting and moving to that same version of me I had seen before. This time, I was held under the water as Sain wrapped his hands around my neck.

“He drowned me, didn’t he?” I couldn’t even look at them as I said it. “Before … when he killed—” I still couldn’t make myself say it. “He drowned me.”

The three stared at me, their eyes becoming very sad as Frain nodded. My heart fell to my toes in a devastated confusion.

“In Imdalind. He drowned you in the well,” Frain said, her calm voice seeming very far away. “Your body was lost. It’s why you didn’t linger like we do. It’s why you had to come back and why you don’t remember anything.”

“But why would he do that?” I asked. “If I really did create everything—”

“He did it for the same reason he has tried to destroy your life.” Chyline’s voice was soft as she shifted closer to me, as though she was suddenly worried someone else would overhear. “The same obsession has haunted him for centuries. After Edmund was kissed and the Chosen Children were discovered, you decreed that the four of us were no longer to rule. Ruling is all he desires.”

“That retribution has consumed him,” Frain continued, the timbre of her voice continuing the haunting quality of the story. “The emotion, the need, was so strong that, even after his passing, after his death, he thought of nothing else. His focus was so singular even your existence was lost to him.”

Whatever beating my tense heart was able to muster was forced to a stop, the ironclad evil pressing against my chest in a painful weight. “Sain …? What do you mean by
after his passing
?”

I really didn’t want to know, but I had no choice.

“He has passed from this earth, just as we have, child.”

“But he’s my father. He walks around and performs magic and …” I gasped, staring between them, desperate for an answer, desperate for some explanation of what they were talking about, for some calm.

All I got, however, was the overly calm blue-eyed stare from Frain, the look so sympathetic it almost made it worse. My stomach sunk to my toes as I tried to swallow the panic away, but it only mounted, drowning me.

“As we could have if we had chosen to,” Frain explained, the words seeming hollow. “But that was not to be, not after what Sain has done.”

“What has he done?” This time, I wanted to know.

My blood boiled in anger at the possibility of what else he could have done, at what secrets these three could hold. The anger seemed to be reciprocated for the first time, however. Rinax’s skin sprouted into tiny spikes in his irritation.

“He was the last of us to pass from this life,” Chyline suddenly interrupted. “He killed the three of us first.”

I hadn’t expected that.

Muscles tense, I looked between the three of them, not knowing what to say, so I just waited, knowing more was coming.

“He stabbed me through the heart when I challenged him,” Frain said, her eyes sad. “We were in the forest, and I would have escaped, lived on as he has, if he hadn’t taken me back to the castle and claimed one of the mortals had attacked us. From that point on, everyone thought me dead and my life as they knew it was over. It was imperative I remain hidden. It was safer anyway, what with what my death began.”

“It started a civil war,” Rinax whispered, the irritation that had lined his voice up until that moment gone, “one that I am sure still graces your textbooks. Thousands died, and magic was pushed into secrecy.”

“I was the last death in the war,” Chyline interrupted, my brain buzzing with the information I was being inundated by. “The last of the magic, or so the mortals were told by Sain. They tortured me in the bellows of a castle, beheaded me before a crowd of thousands. Sain had convinced them that the war was my fault, my bid for control.” She shook her head, her eyes narrowing as my sight flashed.

Eyes black, I saw that moment, saw the beautiful woman before me folded over a blood-soaked pedestal, the large ax glistening in the sun above her. The ax cut the air, hitting against her skin as the sight vanished, leaving me gasping in the dark as I stared at the woman before me, her head very much attached to her shoulders.

“But why would he kill you if you can’t die?” I asked, still trying to put the pieces of this fantasy together.