She fixes her gaze on the cauldron and steps forward again.
The hook doesn’t help. The binding on her drives her to complete the task whether she wants to or not, but it can’t protect her from failing. If her own mistakes had killed her out on the island, that would have been the end of this life, and the Cruais would never get what he summoned her for. She can’t decide to say “to hell with the blood” and accept the Lhian’s temptation . . . but if her own weakness or stupidity breaks her, then she will be lost, and never mind what the Cruais wants.
She must do this on her own strength, or not at all.
She takes the fifth step.
It only gets stronger. They’re crowding around her now, all the memories she dares not even look at. She walks through a storm of her own self, vision narrowing to a pinpoint, afraid to even blink for fear that when she opens her eyes, she will see something she should not, and the Lhian will interpret that as theft. Her arms are rigid at her sides, hands packed tight into fists, so that no trailing finger can touch a stray wisp. Only two steps more.
Another—and now she hears a voice, whispering seductively in her ear. It can take an archon years, even a century or more, to reach their full strength, because they do not know who they are. They do not remember enough. But with a true understanding of yourself . . . how powerful would you be? You have a blade at your side. Could you not challenge the Lhian, and win?
She cannot tell whether that voice is the Lhian’s, or her own.
Every muscle in her body cramps with tension. All she has to do is reach out, and all of this can be hers. She can be whole again—perhaps more whole than she has been for lifetimes, her existence too often cut short by death. She tries to tell herself that the Lhian is lying, that these memories are false, there’s no way that treacherous bitch can know her more profoundly than she knows herself. But she can’t be sure it’s true. What lies within the other archon’s power, and what does not? Maybe the visions all around her are real.
They aren’t what she came here for. Aching inside with the emptiness she cannot—must not—will not fill, she takes the final step.
It’s like breaking through the surface of water to open air. She gasps in what feels like her first breath in a century, body shaking from head to toe. There is nothing around her now, only the cold, brilliant light of the cauldron, which stands on a low pedestal before her.
The binding, or perhaps the Cruais, has this much mercy: she’s allowed to gather her strength, instead of immediately being compelled forward. She wonders if he knew what temptation the Lhian would put in her path, and how hard it would be to refuse.
Not the latter. No human can truly understand it, because their souls are not the same. They choose who to be: an archon cannot.
When she is sure her knees will hold her, she mounts the pedestal and looks down into the cauldron.
Lightning spiderwebs through her body once more, following the path of her blood. She felt it before, when she saw the dead bull the Cruais used to summon her, when she touched the stain of her own blood on the moss and it rose up in her fingers as red cloth.
This is why he got her, when he sounded his horn through the apeiron and summoned an archon to help him. It’s hard for such a ritual to be precise, unless the summoner is very skilled; he might have gotten any one of a hundred archai, all variants on the theme of his need. But he used blood to call her, and blood is at the core of her nature, in ways she doesn’t understand. For one fleeting moment, she finds herself strangely glad that she isn’t here to ask for inspiration. As much as she dreads what the Lhian will do with a piece of her soul, her blood might not be any better. Might even be worse.
She can’t stay here. She has to collect what she came for, and then return it to the Cruais. Only then will her task be done—and her path will end in the freedom he promised, or the death she expects.
Reaching into the neck of her shirt, she pulls out the bone vial he gave her. It’s the work of a moment to unloop its cord and tug the stopper free. When she dips it into the cauldron, the blood rises before she even nears its surface: a thin red stream that flows obediently against gravity, in through the tiny neck of the vial, until it is full. She holds her breath, watching it move, and exhales only when the flow stops. Then she closes the vial, puts it back around her neck, and turns to go back the way she came.
She can’t see anything past the glow; everything beyond is shadow. But assuming the cave hasn’t changed, it’s seven steps back to the inner ring of stalactites.
She takes the first step—and realizes the Lhian is not yet done.
The visions are back, even stronger than before. They call up every ache within her: the hollowness of ignorance and absence of choice, the helplessness of being bound by someone who doesn’t care who or what she is, so long as she can be a useful tool. She burns to be herself again, not this sad, pathetic little echo, scarcely more than human.
And she can be. All she has to do is accept what the Lhian offers.
It isn’t the binding that stops her. It isn’t a fear that the visions are nothing more than empty promises and lies. It isn’t even the awareness that if she gives in, she will have lost, no matter how much she gains in return. Maybe she could defeat the Lhian, maybe she couldn’t—but she doesn’t really care.
What stops her is a pure, searing refusal to accept her own soul from someone else’s hands.
Fuck her, and fuck her “gifts.” I don’t need her help, or anybody else’s. If she offered this to me for free, I’d throw it back in her face. I will know myself again; I will remember everything I have lost, and return to my true self. But I will do it on my own.
She holds that thought around her like armor, putting it between herself and the world, repeating it like a mantra with every step she takes. It doesn’t break the storm that fills the air; the visions are still there, still every bit as entrancing as before. Worse. She would weep, but her fury burns the tears away before they can fall. Seven steps to the cauldron, and seven steps back; and the return journey makes those first seven feel like nothing. But there’s a fire raging inside her now, an inferno that drowns out any other voice except the one that says she will do this, and to hell with the Lhian, to hell with everything—all that matters is that she will . . . get . . . through.
And then the glow fades, and she is standing beneath the stalactites once more, with a single syllable echoing through her mind:
Ree.
She goes blind from the resonance, swaying on her feet. That brief sound is like a bell, echoing into the deepest reaches of her spirit. It is a piece of her true name—a fragment only. The rest is still out of her reach. But for the first time since the Cruais called her into being atop that ritual stone, Ree knows who she is.
A wanderer—that’s what he wanted from the apeiron. Someone whose nature was to make an impossible journey, and return. A warrior, too, capable of defending himself or herself, because that would be necessary; but it was the journey he was thinking of, more than the danger, and so he got her. Because she will never make a domain for herself, as the Lhian has done here. There is no home for her, now or ever. She will always move on, and overcome whatever is in her path . . . or die trying.
He called for someone like her, and he called with blood. And so he got Ree.
Fear spikes through her like ice. I shouldn’t know these things. I can’t take anything she offered—
But this isn’t from the Lhian. She knows these things about herself because she found them within, because they came with that fragment of her name. What she just did—those seven steps to the cauldron and seven steps back, driving herself beyond her limits because she refused to fail—was a moment of perfect harmony, an echo of her truest self. Among all those distant memories of failure and death, there are moments where she succeeded.
A familiar sight, like a sabre or a gun, can make her remember trivial things; this can do more. And she won her name from the apeiron, not from the Lhian.
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That realization brings with it another one: she is no longer bound.
Ree is too breathless to laugh at the terrible irony of it. The Cruais trapped her spirit with his summoning ritual . . . but by reclaiming a piece of her own name, she’s broken free of that net. She has the blood in a vial around her neck, and she can do anything she wants with it: drink it. Pour it out. Give it to Aadet. Turn and hurl the vial back into the cauldron and tell the Lhian she changed her mind—she doesn’t want the blood after all, and their deal is null and void.
She doesn’t have to pay.
When she looks up, she finds Aadet staring at her. What the hell her struggle looked like from the outside, she doesn’t know—did he see the visions swarming around her? Or just Ree, body tensed as if against a gale-force headwind in a perfectly still cave? Maybe she vanished from his sight entirely. But judging by the way he’s staring, probably not.
Ree’s looking at him because she doesn’t want to look at the Lhian.
She has to decide, right now. Not what to do with the blood if she keeps it—she can think about that later. But she has to make up her mind whether she will keep it or not. Whether she will pay the price. A single fragment of her true name doesn’t make her anywhere near strong enough to fight the Lhian and win.
A little while ago she might have done it anyway, just out of a sheer, self-annihilating impulse to escape this trap. The binding stopped her then. Now . . . now she thinks that maybe she isn’t ready to die after all.
Is she ready to lose a piece of herself?
The mere prospect nauseates her. Ree knows herself now, at least a little. She isn’t just an archon, and therefore a story that repeats throughout the ages; she is a teller of stories, someone whose voice has its own power. She felt the faintest echo of it when she talked with Aadet over the fire, turning him away from his foolish request and toward a better one. When she comes fully into her strength, maybe he won’t need someone like the Lhian. Ree won’t hand him what he’s looking for, but she’ll lead him toward it, awakening the fire in his spirit so he can awaken others in turn. What part of her nature will she lose, if she keeps the vial of blood?
The more she thinks about it, the more reasons she has to throw the vial back. Every reason, in fact, except for one.
If she does that, then she will have made that journey, seven steps there and seven steps back, for nothing.
Yes, she got her name out of it, and the first, tentative understanding of herself. But she didn’t do it for those things. She did it for the blood. For the Cruais and his people—who may or may not be worth what she’s gone through. But it was their summoning that brought her here, that gave her life once more. And if she throws the blood back, she’ll never find out why.
Therdiad at least had thanked her. And he did what he could to protect her against the Lhian.
Too bad it didn’t work.
Ree curls one hand around the vial and turns to face the Lhian.
The other archon’s expression is unreadable. She says, “Do you have what you seek?”
When Ree answers, she is preternaturally aware of her own voice. How will it sound, after this moment? Her gut twists, but she says the words anyway. “I do. So get on with it.”
The Lhian gestures. Ree approaches, kneels, braces herself for agony.
Cool fingertips touch her brow—and the world changes.
They are still in the cave, with that cold, silver light . . . but it is as if the sun has emerged from behind a cloud.
Color comes flooding in, and life, and warmth. Things she didn’t know were missing until they came back. Ever since the Cruais summoned her, she’s known with a cold, unrelenting fatalism that no matter what happens, she’s fucked. Now it lifts, as if burned away by the fire she called on when she refused the Lhian’s temptation. One hand goes instinctively to the ember tucked into the sash at her waist. If the sabre is the icy certainty of death, the ember is the fire that burns on regardless. It is a piece of herself, one that had dwindled down to almost nothing. Now that fire comes roaring back, bringing with it the possibility that she might just survive this—even come out of it stronger.
Ree staggers to her feet, backing away from the Lhian. “What the hell did you just take from me?”
She should sound horrified, but she doesn’t. Horror is impossible, in the face of the lightness that now suffuses her. And in a way, that’s more frightening: it’s like she’s drunk, and too far gone to realize the danger she’s in.
The Lhian’s smile suggests she knows all of this. “Nothing, I think, that you will miss.”
“The hell I won’t,” Ree says wildly, not even sure how angry she should be. “Do you expect me to believe you just did—whatever you did—for my own benefit? Because you’re so kind and generous?”
“Not at all,” the Lhian replies, unperturbed. “But there is such a thing as a mutually beneficial deal. Is it so impossible to believe that is what I have given you?”
Impossible, no . . . but unlikely, yes. Ree hasn’t lost all suspicion and self-preservation instinct. But when she looks inside herself, comparing what she feels now against the impressions she had before, she can’t tell what might be missing. Rather—
When Aadet spoke of “aspects” before, on their way up the mountain, it meant nothing—because she didn’t realize the word applied to her. But she feels it within herself, the duality of an archon’s nature: the force of creation, and the force of destruction. Which aspect currently rules the Lhian, she can’t begin to guess . . . but Ree herself has been in the latter, ever since the Cruais summoned her.
Until now. Somehow, whatever the Lhian took, it has changed her over to the other side. From ice to fire, from the conviction of death to the hope of survival.
“I did not take that from you,” the Lhian says, before Ree can ask. It has to be true. If she’d taken half of Ree’s soul, the destructive aspect that awaits a knife in the back, then Ree wouldn’t be frantically analyzing this deal now, searching for the hidden flaw. But that side has retreated, and she isn’t nearly as afraid as she should be.
She still wants to know what she’s lost. But it’s hard to fight the joy bubbling up within her, the feeling that an enormous burden has been taken from her shoulders, leaving her as light as a feather. Will she truly miss whatever is gone?
I’m sure that someday I will.
But for now . . .
Ree touches the vial of blood around her neck. Although she doesn’t need the Cruais to free her anymore, she’s curious to see what he will do when she brings this back. Once she and Aadet find a way off the island, of course.
“We aren’t done,” she warns the Lhian. “I’ll be back someday.”
The Lhian’s smile reminds her of a hunting cat. “Come prepared to pay for what you take.”
Blood, to get back whatever she’s lost. It isn’t a good deal; she’ll have to find some other way. But at least now she believes another way might exist. “Are we free to go?”
One bone-white hand gestures toward the exit, and the Lhian sinks into a mocking bow. Ree doesn’t bother returning it as she walks, with Aadet, out into the night.
It wouldn’t have surprised Ree if the Lhian made them fight for every hundred paces they take toward the shore, but she doesn’t. The trip is still less than easy—they’re both bruised anew before they get down off the mountain—but it goes ten times more quickly than it did on the way in, and no strange creatures trouble them as they pass.
Aadet even manages to find the boat he rowed over from the mainland. It’s a round, flat-bottomed thing, barely large enough to hold the two of them. When Aadet casts a speculative eye toward Ree, she snorts. “Sorry. If I’ve paddled a boat in some other lifetime, I don’t remember it yet.” But she takes the job of pushing them out into the water, getting wet up to the hips before she jumps in and Aadet sets to work with his oar.
The water is still preternaturally calm and dark; the sun has only risen in Ree’s soul. The
island vanishes quickly into the mist as Aadet paddles them away. When it’s gone, he makes a sound of rueful frustration and says, “I should have known you were an archon.”
“I should have known,” she says dryly. “But the people who summoned me did their damnedest to keep me as ignorant as they could. They thought it would help.” And maybe it did. She scrapes dried blood off her palms, careful of the scabs. Then she adds, “My name is Ree. I know that now. And I’m sorry for not telling you anything before.”
He waves that away, in between strokes of the oar. “You saved my life—and my purpose. That more than makes up for it. Can I at least let you off wherever you need to go?” He pauses and cranes his neck around the waters of the bay, which have started to rise into ordinary waves. “Assuming you know where that is, because I sure as hell don’t.”
Neither does Ree. But as the sky begins to brighten—dawn, at last—they hear a voice ringing out over the waters: “Hey! Over here!”
It’s Therdiad in his rowboat, looking tired but cautiously happy. He rows toward them, and Aadet paddles to meet him, until the two vessels come alongside and Ree grabs their edges to keep them from drifting. Incredulous, she says, “Have you been sitting out here this entire time? However long it’s been.”
“Five nights,” Therdiad says. “And no, not the whole time. The island only appears at night. During the day, I go back to shore.”
So he wasn’t just planning to abandon her on the island, leaving her to find her own way back. Ree wishes she had thought to ask earlier—but she probably wouldn’t have believed him anyway. “Mind taking on some passengers?” she asks, and Therdiad waves them both in.
He rows the rest of the way back to shore, with the round little boat bobbing on a line behind. She can see other craft on the water as the sun begins to rise; Therdiad casts a worried glance in their direction and rows harder. “I feel like I should return my boat,” Aadet says, biting his lip.