While the two men worked, Tylar stripped open his cloak and parted the shirt beneath to expose the mark on his chest.
“Let’s be quick about this,” he said.
Dart held out her hand. “I’ll need the stone.”
He nodded. He already had the sword pulled. Grabbing the hilt in one hand and the diamond in the other, he twisted them in opposite directions, popping the stone from the pommel. He felt the snap deep within him. Pain lanced out from his core and shocked through to the tips of his limbs. His sword hand spasmed, tightening again into a knobbed grip.
Dart looked on with concern.
Tylar passed her the stone, gone dull again. The sword’s blade had also blown itself out. She nicked a finger and daubed the stone. It flared again from rock to gem.
She motioned with her other hand. “Lie across the bottom of the skiff.”
Feeling slightly foolish, Tylar obeyed.
Off to the side, blocked by the solid bench, Dart leaned down, reached out, and whispered. Tylar saw a ruddy glow flare up beyond the bench, bright in the darkness.
Pupp.
Over the bench’s edge, the creature rose into view, all molten armor and fire. He clambered to the top and stared down, the gem brilliant in his jaws, lit by inner fire.
“Lie still,” Dart told him. “He’s not very comfortable about this.”
Tylar remembered the burned stump of the squire’s arm-Pupp needn’t be the one worried here.
Pupp lowered from the bench to Tylar’s shoulder. The nails of his paw sliced through cloak to skin, steaming hot. Tylar winced. Pupp crawled, belly low, toward the black handprint on his chest.
Beyond Pupp, the others all gathered around.
“You all might want to step back farther,” Tylar warned. He felt it inside him. A stirring down deep.
Pupp lowered his fiery muzzle toward his mark. Somehow Tylar knew before the nose reached him. He tensed. He felt the naethryn writhe inside him, rising as Pupp lowered.
Then the molten muzzle sank through his mark as if through shadow.
Dart gasped behind him, echoed by the others.
Then Pupp vanished from his chest, weight and burn gone.
Everyone glanced at Dart.
She pointed down to her legs. “Something spooked Pupp. Probably the naethryn. He’s hiding behind my cloak.”
“But where’s the stone?” Brant asked.
“He dropped it.” She pointed to Tylar’s mark. “Down there.”
Tylar reached to his chest, to his mark, but found only skin and breastbone. He lay his palm atop it. The stone was inside him.
Falling…
He sensed the rock tumbling into a deep well.
Then something rumbled even deeper inside him, a rushing up, a monstrous pressure building behind his rib cage. “Everyone! Get flat!”
When the rising pressure struck the falling rock, the impact shattered through him. Tylar’s body leaped full off the boards, back arched, balanced on head and heels, arms out.
Pain and pleasure trapped him in a clenched breath.
He filled, swelling up, leaving no room for himself.
Too large…
Vision dimmed.
Then finally, like a popped cork, the pressure broke through into this world. From his chest, smoke flumed with the force of a gale out of his body. Bones broke with the passage, unmoored, torn loose.
He collapsed to the planks.
Beyond pain.
From his chest, more smoke sailed high. A storm of black and white, churning, mixing, coiling one to the other. Tylar noted wing and snaking neck, one black, one white, like two wyrms mating or fighting in midair.
Aethryn and naethryn.
Between them, a flickering lick of green flame danced and lashed, as if this were the fire that smoked them into existence. But Tylar knew it to be the burn of poison, Chrism’s hatred given form. The two wyrms writhed around this core of flame.
At the very top of the column, a star glittered, reflecting the flame from a thousand facets.
The black diamond.
Slowly, as the two wyrms writhed, they smothered the fire between them, squeezed and strangled. The flame lost its brightness, the fierce flickering slowed, and in another few moments, it expired with a final waft of putrefaction.
With the fire gone, the smoke swirled with less violence, and the two creatures, both lost parts of the same whole, coiled and churned, trying to become one again-and failing-forever missing the third.
Tylar heard two voices in his head, two expressions of grief, more thought than word.
LOVE LOST HELP HOPE
LOST LOSS PAIN FURY
FREE FAITH LIFE WEEP
FIGHT BITTER WEEP LOSS
The litany flowed through his head, but was felt more with the heart, two views of the same pain and loss, neither able to get the other to understand, to comprehend, too foreign to the other, yet so alike.
He recognized the first voice, one tinged with regret and hope. It had spoken to him before, revealing itself as naethryn. But the other voice was more embittered, laced with fury and cold inflexibility. He knew who the newcomer was, summoned by the stone, the smoky wyrm in white.
Meeryn’s aethryn.
Another voice reached him through his pain, one of urgency and plain word.
“Bloody yourself, Tylar!” Rogger said. “Call back your dog!”
As the thief placed a dagger in Tylar’s gnarled grip, he stared up. The whirl of two wyrms had become more heated as each tried to get the other to understand that which the other could not comprehend, so close but still sundered, the frustration building toward fury.
Tylar dragged the heel of his hand across the dagger’s fine edge. He felt the bite of steel. Blood ran down his arm as he lifted it. He snatched at the smoky tether, feeling the fleshy substance, igniting fire under his palm. Then as usual, the brilliance shot outward and back, consuming the tangle and pulling it back. It fell back to him with the weight of water, crushing him to the planks, knocking the air from him.
Then it was all gone.
A hand reached out and snatched a rock falling from the sky. Brant had captured back his stone as it fell back into this world.
Tylar sat up, inhaling a deep breath, his strength returned.
No pain in his side. He used Rogger’s dagger to cut the wraps from his hand. The soiled scraps fell away, revealing straight and strong fingers. He flexed his fist and rolled to his feet. His knee-both knees-lifted him smoothly.
The others stared at him.
Cured.
Off across the dark forest, a scream echoed.
Rogger glanced back. “Looks like we’ve waked another beast.”
Tylar bent down, retrieved the bladeless gold hilt, and held out a hand toward Brant. The boy passed him the stone. Dart had already freshened it back to a diamond with her blood.
Tylar stared at Brant, the echoes of the aethryn and naethryn still stirring through him. He remembered Brant’s words when he held Keorn’s skull. With the stone at his throat, he’d spoken in two different voices, as if in argument.
HELP THEM…
LET THEM ALL BURN…
FREE THEM…
LET THEM ALL BURN…
But they weren’t his own words. He knew that now.
Through skull and stone, Brant had spoken with the voice of Keorn’s naethryn and aethryn. Two sundered parts just as conflicted. One seeking salvation, the other ruination. Naethryn and aethryn. Two parts of a whole.
Tylar lifted sword and stone.
He felt no such conflict within himself.
He slammed pommel to diamond. The blade shimmered into substance. He heard the daemon’s cry echo away.
He answered silently- I’m coming -and turned to the group.
Though hale, Tylar was only one man against a host of ravening rogues and a wraithed daemon, leashed together for a common purpose-all set against him.