She thought of her magical light. She hadn’t the strength to call more and the chamber was too dark. The moon had been full that night but the storm blotted it out. The Shining face. Not shining upon her now. In her mind’s eye, she cupped a tiny flickering flame; all that remained to her. Soon it would go out and she would die. Bacchus had won.
Accora will be disappointed, she thought absently. Before she had closed her eyes, she had seen the old woman’s chest rise and fall. She still lived. I failed her. I failed her and Skye and myself.
Something ugly tried to awaken at the thought of Skye now, like some monster twitching in its sleep.
A groan. A terrible grinding of bone and a muffled cry. Ilior. But it was too late.
I’m sorry, my friend, but I take the smallest measure of comfort in knowing that I will die with you.
She opened her eyes to see him a final time, and saw that dawn had come. Faint light suffused the room. But she couldn’t speak the sacred word. Her voice was gone and her jaw clenched shut.
From the recesses of her mind, Accora’s words from her training on Isle Saliz came back to her.
You are not drawing it in. You are calling it from within. Summon it to keep it at the ready. It is already yours.
Selena looked at Bacchus, his hand plunged inside her chest. It’s already mine.
Mine.
She summoned light.
She spoke no sacred word, her hand did not seek the moon in the sky. She merely called what already belonged to her. A fiery light, culled from the dawn’s endless illumination began to grow. Selena closed her eyes and imagined the light emanating, not from the sun but from the hearth of her heart. She watched it grow, watched it brighten until the cold that encased her began to melt away.
Bacchus swung his head from its throes of ecstasy, and peered at her, confused. “What…”
“Mine,” Selena croaked. “Mine.”
She culled more light and the inferno in her heart grew. As it did, the ring of light she’d created over her wound grew brighter. Bacchus screamed in pain and jerked away from her.
All that remained of his hand was a charred stump.
Selena stood straight as Bacchus stared at the smoking, blackened ruin. Her light grew larger. With every inhalation, it grew bigger, brighter, and the paralyzing cold began to ebb away. Bones ground together in her wounded shoulder as she raised her arms, but she pushed past the pain. Twin streams of light erupted from her palms, striking Bacchus in the midsection. The huge priest doubled over and cried out. He stumbled backward…into Ilior.
Ilior swayed on his legs. His skin was a ghastly, ashen color. Pus and blood leaked from numerous rents and bites, and his remaining wing hung broken like a splintered mast. But he held a sword in one hand—the sword Selena had taken from some Bazira—and he staggered to Bacchus. The dragonman found Bacchus’s exposed midsection, and he thrust the blade into his side. A shallow thrust; enough to slow him but not kill him.
“Yes,” came a whimper from behind that grew in strength like a gale wind. “Yes!” Accora’s voice gritty with pain. “Yes! Gods, yes! The time has come!”
“You’re already dead,” Bacchus said, lunging at Ilior, swinging drunkenly at him with his charred stump.
Accora, lying prone on the floor, screeched again. “It has to be you, girl! It has to be you!”
Selena understood and so did Ilior. The Vai’Ensai sliced at Bacchus’s burnt limb and then stepped away. The temple shook with the Bazira’s agonized roar. Selena stepped in front of Bacchus and raised her arms again. Two more lances of light struck his chest. He staggered backwards and fell to the ground amid flakes of his own charred skin that fluttered around him like ash from a bonfire.
This is it, Selena thought. The end of my wound. Skye, promised me. She promised!
The ugly thought birthed in the visions Bacchus had shown her writhed again but she would not let it waken.
“Yes! Do it, girl!” Accora was sobbing now, tears of joy and pain. “Do it, ah, you poor thing…”
Selena stood over Bacchus and the exhaustion of all the magic she had wielded was calling to take its due.
“Do it,” Ilior said and pressed his bone dagger into her hands. “You have suffered enough.”
She nodded mutely and fell to her knees beside Bacchus’s enormous head. His remaining eye glared at her, wide with awe.
“I saw them,” he whispered. The charred stump of his hand batted at her chest. “I saw them…So magnificent…”
Tears burned Selena’s eyes. The wound in her chest breathed its breath, perhaps for the last time. Bacchus’s remaining hand shot up and gripped her jaw in a sudden, wrenching fury.
“You have no idea…what is on the other side of your…wound,” he breathed. “Weak, stupid girl. It should have been me…It should have been—”
Selena slipped her dagger under his chin; it was visible in his gaping mouth. His body went rigid, his eye fixed. His hand fell away from her; she heard the thud as it fell to the ground, heavy and dead. The ice that encased the temple melted away and it was is if it had begun to rain inside.
She waited. Ilior knelt beside her, held her. She clung to him, neither daring to breathe. But the wound did. Her tunic was open where Bacchus had torn it and she felt the icy draft in chest just as she had every day since that awful morning ten years before.
“No,” she whispered. “Please, he’s dead. He’s dead.”
She stared at the Bacchus’s body, taking in every detail of his lifelessness: his still chest, staring eye, the blood that pooled about him, as if she could convince her wound that it must now do as promised and close.
Nothing happened.
Selena squeezed her eyes shut. The temple was shaking beneath her, shuddering to pieces now that the beast that had inhabited it was gone. It would bury them all if they tarried.
Ilior tried to make her stand. “Accora,” he whispered, reminding her that Skye’s promise was not yet broken.
Accora! she thought, with terrible relief, and rose to her feet with Ilior’s help. The temple roof rained down thatch and the beams and bones rattled. The horror of what she had yet to do.
Selena quickly laid her hands on Ilior’s arm and channeled healing into him. She spoke no word nor needed to.
I can’t think on that now. We must leave here.
“Help her, please.”
Ilior lifted Accora to standing and half-carried her out of the temple and into the night where rain was falling steadily and the moon was hidden. They hurried as fast as they were able, staggering like drunks helping one another out of a tavern at closing, and watched as the temple caved in on itself. When the rumbling stopped, there was only the sound of rainfall and their own labored breathing.
“You know what you have to do,” Accora said after a moment, her voice wracked with pain.
Selena shook her head. “To the beach,” she said. “Away from this dying place.”
Ilior helped Accora through the forest, Selena following behind.
When they emerged onto the beach, Accora’s protests grew loud and Selena called a stop. Ilior laid the old woman in the sand.
“You have to kill me,” Accora pleaded, her lips flecked with blood. “It’s the only way…
Selena looked up at Ilior. “Please. Leave us…for a moment.”