The Griever's Mark (The Griever's Mark series Book 1) (34 page)

The earth rips and buckles before him. I watch in horror as the ground splits open between him and the city. The low tearing sound rises to a high snapping as a crack snakes up the wall.

I reenter the Drift and position myself to one side of the narrow cleft. I pass through my mooring again. He freezes when I appear. His face is bruised and coated in dust, his golden hair dulled to the color of the battlefield. Half his shirt is gone, exposing a stretch of bruised and bloody torso. A black stain makes his eyes horribly cruel, and they show me no recognition.

“Stop.”

He stares ahead to the city, his expression dead.

“Logan.”

A muscle bunches in his jaw. The black stain shifts like oil over water. Horror closes my throat.

“
Logan
.”

Green swirls through the black, flickering—there and gone, there and gone.

“Please.” I take a step toward him, agonized to be so close yet unable to reach him. He is deep, deep within himself, if he’s there at all. But I must believe he is. I must believe he can hear me. “
Fight
him.”

He makes a sound of pain and turns away. Cautiously, heart pounding, I approach. I touch his shaking back, closing my eyes at the mess of blood and flesh and torn fabric.

“Please, Logan.” My fingers tremble up to his shoulder. “Come back to me.”

He hunches, head bowing low. Hope teases me. I reach for his hair and stroke the dirt-caked ends of it. He falls to his knees, and I crouch beside him.

His voice shivers out from somewhere deep, breaking on each syllable of my name, “A-star-ti.”

I throw my arms around him. He is here. He is mine.

“Please,” he begs, shaking. “Please.” He twists his neck to look at me, and there, for a moment, is the gorgeous swirl of color that is his eyes. But the shape of those eyes is pain. And terror. “Please. Kill me.”

I recoil.

His fingers find mine and tighten painfully. “You must. Before it’s too late.
Please
.”

I shake my head. I can’t!

He says the horrible words again, whispering, “Kill me.”

When I don’t respond, he rises, shouting something inarticulate, and in that moment, I lose him again. Black floods back into his eyes. His face contorts as he tries to fight it. For the briefest moment, color returns, then it’s gone. His face deadens.

Cruel, horrible, mindless. Not Logan at all.

I take a step back, but it’s not enough. His punch to my gut lifts me from the ground.

I collapse around his fist. The moment seems to go on forever: the shock of pain, the dizzy spin of the battlefield, the black of Logan’s eyes.

He flings me away. I tumble and roll. I claw my way to my knees, choking for air.

Logan stalks near. He looms above me.

Fear squeezes my chest as I stare into the torn and trampled grass. He will kill me. I close my eyes, waiting.

Wind lifts the fines hairs that have escaped from my braid. The wind builds, tugging at me. I brace against its pull and look up.

Logan’s face has gone completely still, but his eyes boil blackly, and his whole body is primed. The wind whips around him, swirling dirt, stones, someone’s lost gauntlet.

Logan vanishes into the mad wind.

* * *

I watch numbly as the wind tears across the field, spraying dirt. Debris slams into the wall, some sweeping over the top to make the men there duck and yell. The crack widens, splitting from the top. He will break through. And it will be over for Tornelaine and everyone within it. All those men on the wall. Bran. Korinna. Aron. If he kills his brothers, it will be my fault, because I could not kill him.

No
.

This is not my doing. Or Logan’s.

This is Belos.

Always it comes back to him. What would this world be, without Belos? What would I be?

I lurch to my feet. Behind me, the battle rages, the living surging and stumbling over the heaped bodies of the dead. At one edge, the Seven drive their men toward the brutal attack of Heborian’s troops. I catch flashes of Drift-work among them and hope that means Heborian’s Drifters are still alive and fighting.

I turn away from the Seven. They don’t matter right now. There is one cause of all this. One man’s greed. One man’s will. And I will make him pay for what he’s done to Logan.

I surge along my mooring into the Drift. I find the black Leash and follow it. I streak over the surging mass of energies. On a hilltop, far behind the jagged line of men, stands a solitary figure, arms crossed. A dozen white Leashes flow from him, some into the distance, one to Martel, another, black and oozing, to Logan. Within Belos, energies rage against one another, fighting for control.

With a shriek of rage that echoes even in the Drift, I dive along my mooring, willing my spear into my hand.

Belos looks up in surprise as I dive toward him. I slash at his face, thrilling at the tear of soft flesh. Belos twists away with a yell.

I tumble, skidding to a stop. I scramble up as Belos stalks my way. A ragged flap of cheek spills blood down his face. I almost got his eye.

“I wondered when I would see you.”

I take a step back, spear pulsing in my hand. “Hiding behind the lines, are you? Coward.”

His mouth turns at the word, teasing another line of blood from the slash. “You know I always let little people do the grunt work. Don’t worry, the Seven know not to kill Heborian, or the prince, or Gaiana’s sons. Those pleasures will be mine.”

My blood chills. When Logan breaks through that wall, Belos will get his chance. All of them will die. I fall back on the word he hates, “Coward.”

He snarls. His sword flares to life in his hand, the blade’s silvery length almost white with power. He swings.

With a ring of metal, I catch the blow in one of my spearhead’s notches, but the notch breaks, and Belos’s sword slides down the length of my shaft.

I twist away to free my spear and make space to slash at his belly. He jumps back heavily. I press the advantage, whipping quick blows as he retreats. My world narrows to this one purpose: lunge, advance, sweep, advance.

My foot catches a stone.

The stumble drops my spear only a fraction, but it’s enough. Belos slashes at my right shoulder. White pain flares as he cuts through my shoulder guard, and my arm sags. I scuttle back, bracing for his attack.

He shrugs his shoulders, and a second blade flashes into his other hand.

Memories tumble. This is just like every other time I tried to defy him. He will punish me. He will break me. I am powerless. I cannot win.

Belos sees it in my face, and he sneers. His face seems to grow, to fill my whole world.

But curiosity overcomes him, and he asks, “How did you destroy the Leash?”

His question, the fact that I know of some power he does not, clears my mind. “You don’t know?”

His lip curls. He likes to think he is smarter than everyone. “You will tell me, once I have Leashed you again. And like your lover, you will serve me, you will
be
me.”

I say, as though my heart is not pounding in my throat, “I will never serve you again.”

He smiles cruelly. “But that is the very thing you were born to do, the very purpose of your existence.”

I scream, forcing rage into myself, as his words dig at the fears lodged so deep in my gut. I scream until the rage takes root, and then, for a moment, I forget pain, forget fear and weariness. I forget that I will lose.

I charge.

The power of my first two blows surprise Belos into hurried blocks, then he snaps one sword at me, almost slicing my face, and thrusts the other at my thigh. I duck and spin. Belos drives me aside with a flurry of blows, the two swords weaving and slashing. I block and evade. My injured arm is too slow, and each slash is closer, closer.

I cry out as pain slices my thigh.

Belos closes the distance and kicks my feet out from under me. I fall with a grunt.

Belos looms over me, his eyes dark with anger, his slashed cheek dripping blood. He holds both swords above my chest.

“You
are
mine, Astarti. In the deepest corners of your little heart, you know you always will be. I shaped you, I
made
you. You will remember that before the end. With your last breath, you will give yourself back to me.”

I grit my teeth. I cannot let it come to that. If I die, I will die free of him. With a speed born of desperation, I roll from under the pointed swords.

As Belos lunges, the blades a blur of metal and energy, I dive into my mooring, hovering at the edge of the Drift, not quite within it. I watch the blur of confused, turbulent energy that is Belos stumble to a halt.

I should escape. This is my chance.

But then I feel the angry rumble of earthmagic. I
feel
it, dark, dense. A deep and sleeping power. Elemental. Impossibly strong. So much stronger than I am. I slide into it.

* * *

I pulse through the veins of the earth, pass through the cold trickle of an underground stream. I ease through the hairline cracks between dense, crowded masses of stone.

I sense Belos’s roiling energy somewhere above. I wedge myself into one of the cracks below him. I wrench the crack wide, barreling upward to explode in a shower of earth.

Belos staggers back with a cry of surprise as I, half myself, half stone, lunge toward him with my spear, its glow dimmed in stone. I stab him through the chest. He screams, and warm blood splatters my face.

Belos falls back, his swords gone, clutching at the spurting wound.

I step from the earth, dragging myself free of stone. I feel suddenly light, weightless in my human form. My mind soars with victory.

“Your death,” I tell him, “is the only one I will permit myself to enjoy.”

Belos sags to his knees. His head jerks back. He gulps for air.

Then he laughs, a wet bubbling sound filled with blood.

He climbs to his feet, all black leather and flashing silver studs, all blond hair and gaunt beauty and blood.

He should be dead. His face is white and his eyes twitch with pain, but he laughs.

“Did you really think you could kill me? This?” He drops his hand from the wound. “Nothing.” It pulses blood, glistening wetly on his leather vest, but already the drain is slowing. “Do you understand yet the enemy you’ve made?”

“Better your enemy than your slave.”

His eyes turn unexpectedly gentle. “You loved me once.”

I recoil, stepping instinctively away from him.

“You did. I remember you, five years old, grabbing my hand and saying, ‘Look!’ You were so proud of that first glow of Drift-light, no bigger than a firefly. And it was
me
you wanted to show.”

“Do you think that means I loved you? You
stole
me from my mother!”

He shrugs, cold again, and I realize that the gentleness of a moment ago was just another lie. He says, “I paid for you. I didn’t steal you.”

“And that’s okay?”

“You have no one else. Who cares for you but me? The Earthmakers? Heborian? Don’t fool yourself.”

“Logan—” In my desperation, I am making myself weak—I know this. I am exposing myself, and Belos doesn’t miss the opportunity to exploit it.

He laughs. “The Warden? Broken, weak. And besides, he belongs to me now.
My
creature. He will never escape. I will torment him until he begs for death, but I will not let him die. And I will remind him always of how you betrayed him.” He smiles at my horror. “Yes, I know he begged you to kill him. And I know you refused. I will not let him forget that. In the brief spaces between madness and pain, I will remind him.”

I scream at Belos, all the rage and hate breaking my voice into a shriek. I wrench myself into the Drift.

* * *

I search the energies of the battlefield and feel the whirling pull of wind. Logan. So much power, it disturbs even the Drift. The oily black Leash trails from the vortex.

The Leash.

Within the Drift, I freeze.

A Leash, Heborian has shown me, can be cut.

I streak to the net, dashing through the hidden gap and over the city, unable to slow myself before I collide with Heborian’s twisting barrier. It snaps and sizzles, lashing at me as I tear away. I squeeze through my mooring, falling to the cobblestones of the bridge. I run for the gates.

The guards shout, but I don’t have time for them. I draw heavily through my mooring, shaping energy into a ram. I hurl this at the gate, which explodes in a booming shower of timbers.

Crossbow bolts whiz past me from the stone arch over the gaping, debris-littered gateway. I ignore them until one grazes my hip. I cry out, stumbling. More bolts fly at me, and I escape into the Drift.

There is a secondary barrier around the castle itself, but I drift to it, planning to drop onto a roof, as I did before.

I am still hovering dangerously high when the first lash takes me across the chest. My energy form sizzles with pain, and I dart back. The barrier crouches over the dark form of the castle, shifting with what looks like a will of its own. Another invention of Heborian’s?

When I snuck into the castle last time, I traveled within the wind, not through the Drift. I grope for currents of air to replicate this but find nothing. I approach again, but whips of lights snap at me from the barrier.

My scream of frustration rings into the dead silence of the Drift.

I shoot back to the city wall, marking Heborian by his blaze of energy. I flood through my mooring.

Guards shout in surprise when I appear, and I have to duck and dodge several swords before Heborian commands, “Stop!”

I scramble to my feet and dart toward him. Wulfstan strikes me in the throat and I fall, choking. Boots scuffle around me, voices shout, then everything quiets and Heborian crouches beside me.

“The knife,” I choke out. “I need it.”

“No.”

I grab the armhole of Heborian’s breastplate. “You don’t understand—”

“I see him. I know why you want it. The answer is no. It’s too dangerous.”

“Listen to me!”