Before he could respond, she crossed to him, took his hand in her own, then squeezed it gently.
Kaden met her eyes, held them, then nodded.
“Are we high enough?” Valyn asked roughly. “You said the top of the Spear.”
“I don’t know,” Kaden replied quietly. “But we’re as high as we’re likely to get.”
“I hear them now,” the Flea said. The Kettral commander turned to Sigrid. His voice was soft, but Kaden could hear it clearly enough. “What do you need from me?”
The woman met his eyes, then reached out to take both of his shoulders in her hands. She made no effort to speak.
“Do it,” the Flea said.
She didn’t move.
“Do it,” he said again. “I’m ready.”
She didn’t move.
“I’ve been ready since he died, Sig.” His voice was quiet, gentle. “Do it.”
Then, the movement so fast that Kaden almost couldn’t follow it, the woman slid a knife from her belt and slammed it into the man’s side. He stiffened with the blow, almost fell, then steadied himself.
“What…,” Triste said, lunging forward despite herself.
Kaden held her back, his arm wrapped tight around her shoulders. He could feel her heart slamming in her chest.
“Her well,” Valyn said grimly. “It’s pain. He’s giving her the strength to fight il Tornja’s leach.” He exhaled slowly. “And I’ll do the same.”
“No,” the Flea ground out, his voice on the verge of snapping. “You need to fight … shield her while … she works.”
Valyn gritted his teeth, but even Kaden could hear the footsteps now, dozens of boots pounding down the stairs from above.
Sigrid drew another knife from her belt, more slowly this time, then drove this one, too, into the Flea’s flesh. He dropped to his knees. Dead, Kaden thought, then paused, made himself really look at the wounds, at the angle of the steel where it entered the skin. They were savage, cruel, almost too painful to contemplate, but they weren’t fatal. And slowly the Flea rose, met the leach’s eyes, and made an animal noise. No, Kaden thought. Not a noise. It was a word: Another.
And so a third time the blond woman buried a blade in her commander’s flesh, a third time he dropped, and a third time he rose slowly to his feet.
“Is it enough?” he whispered.
Sigrid watched him a moment, then took him by the shoulders, leaning over to kiss his blood-smeared forehead with those perfect lips. She nodded, and they both turned toward the stairs, to hold at bay whatever was descending from above.
“We have to do it, Kaden,” Triste said finally, roughly, breaking him free of what felt like an awful dream. “We have to do it now.”
Kaden nodded. It seemed impossible that after all the running, all the fighting and climbing, all the fire and dying, it should come down to this. A whole life, whittled to a few final instants. Slowly, his legs trembling with the strain, he knelt on the narrow landing. Triste knelt beside him.
“How do we…?” she asked.
“Close your eyes,” he replied. Men were shouting above them, pounding down the stairs. Kaden ignored the sound.
“Wait!” Triste said, clutching his face in her hands.
Kaden shook his head. “There’s no time, Triste. If we had a year or ten years, there wouldn’t be time.” He reached out to touch her cheek. “It doesn’t matter. You don’t need to say it.”
Tears poured down her face. All over again, he saw her as he’d seen her that first night in Ashk’lan, the same violet eyes, the same perfect face, the same fear.…
No, he thought, gazing at her. Not the same at all. Her face was scarred now, and her eyes … there was fear in her eyes, but this time, it wasn’t a fear of him. This time, when she reached out to touch him, there was none of the frenzied desperation he remembered from that night in his tent, none of the mad, animal haste.
All my life, Kaden thought. I’ll remember her all my life. It was an inane thought, given they were both about to die, but somehow that didn’t matter. Everyone was always about to die, always a breath away, a dozen breaths, ten thousand-that was the lesson of the Skullsworn, the surprisingly gentle tutelage of Ananshael.
“I’ll remember you all my life,” Kaden said. For some reason, he wanted to speak the words aloud.
The Shin had been wrong about so many things, but the old aphorism came back to him all the same, spoken, for some reason, in Tan’s gravelly voice: Live now. The future is a dream.
Triste smiled at him, smiled through her tears, leaned forward, kissed him once, then settled back and closed her eyes.
In the stairwell above, steel smashed against steel. There was a savage, animal howl, half defiance, half hunger. Valyn, Kaden realized. Valyn, standing alone against il Tornja and his army while Sigrid drew from the Flea’s agony to hold back the leach. Kaden listened for a moment to the discordant music of his brother-the screaming, the ringing of blades-all of it, too, beautiful in its own way. There was a time when he might have wished something for his brother-luck, maybe, or strength-but they were, all of them, well beyond wishing. Kaden closed his mind to the carnage, focused only on what was inside of him.
“When the goddess entered you,” he said, repeating what Meshkent had told him, “she built a doorway. All you need to do is open it.”
He could hear Triste panting just a few inches away. “A doorway? What kind of doorway?”
“Like the kenta,” Kaden said. “But in your mind.”
“How do I find it? How do I open it?”
“The phrase isn’t in our language,” Kaden replied. “Not anymore.” He closed his own eyes. “Ac lanza, ta diamen. Tel allaen ta vanian sa sia pella.”
He felt something shudder inside his mind, as though the language were a pry bar, as though some deep-buried stone foundational to his very being had shifted.
“I am a gateway for the god,” Triste translated, voice terrified, awed. “I will unmake my mind so that she might pass.”
Kaden nodded, and then, this time together, they spoke the awful words.
Above them, men were bellowing, screaming, falling from the staircase. The air shuddered with fire. None of it mattered. Only the words mattered, words growing, spreading, until they were huge as the world itself.
“I am a gateway for the god. I will unmake my mind so that she might pass.”
The staircase trembled, as though it were about to plunge into the abyss.
“I am a gateway for the god. I will unmake my mind so that she might pass.”
Il Tornja was shouting something, voice hard, confident.
“I am a gateway for the god. I will unmake my mind so that she might pass.”
Triste was sobbing through the words, her hands clenched around Kaden’s own. He held them, as though through that holding he could keep her from some unfathomable abyss, as though she, in her turn, might bear him up even as the world itself collapsed.
“I am a gateway for the god. I will unmake my mind so that she might pass.”
Each time they said the phrase, Kaden could feel the gateway opening inside him. At first it was uncomfortable. Then the pain came, a bright, invisible knife carving a hole out of his mind. He shuddered. It was bright beyond any human light. Too bright.
“I am a gateway for the god. I will unmake my mind so that she might pass.”
Inside his mind, Meshkent was bellowing. No. NO! Not here! THIS IS NOT THE PLACE!
Too late, Kaden thought, the doorway opening on its own now, prying him apart, destroying him. He held tight to Triste’s hands. They were the only thing left. It’s too late.