The starbloom hit the back of her tongue with the same impossible brightness it had the first time – sweet, then sharp, then bitter as ginger root. She let it split through her like a hot blade.
Her knees buckled. The world strobed with light, white, blue, scarlet. The chain-lights above the pool spasmed, anchors shuddering in their housings. The Underserpent thrashed, water slamming against the lip of the bowl and over the walkway. Seli shrieked something, the sound lost in the roar of blood in Lain’s ears.
Her heart lurched sideways.
And she thought – absurdly, achingly – of raspberries.
Hellen’s trembling smile as she’d smuggled the cake like contraband rubies. Sena’s mouth meeting hers by firelight, raspberry bursting between them like something too ripe to hold. The bowl given to Kelthi pairs in the festival’s twilight in Vaelun, a heap of berries so dark they gleamed blue.
The taste came to her again – the bright sting of it – and for a breath she tried to anchor herself to that small, human sweetness.
Then the starbloom surged through her veins like floodwater breaking a dam.
Her breath vanished. Her limbs spasmed violently. The Tuning flared open; she felt every rock in the Spire like teeth in her own mouth.
“Lain – Lain –”
Morgan’s voice, rasping with awe-struck terror. He caught her as she pitched, caught her with the desperation of a man seizing lightning before it could dissipate. The bond roared open, not a thread but a river. His pulse flooded into hers.
Through the blur of pain she felt his hunger. His fear. His triumph. His need. He was incandescent with power, Veinwright magic seething under his skin, cracking along bone-edges, blackening everything to tar.
She tried to breathe, but the inhale scraped like glass.
“Stay with me,” he murmured, mouth to her temple. “You cannot do this alone.”
She would have laughed if she’d had breath. She had done it alone once, had died alone, drowned alone, woken alone. But she could not speak. The starbloom burned up her throat and out across the floor in waves of heat.
The Underserpent’s agony hit her again, so vast and unbearable. Its mind was split across centuries of commanded sleep, silence, and pain.
Her vision flickered.
Brother Tanel’s hand on her back, the quiet mercy of it. The copper basin before her. The cold stone. The name she’d once whispered in the dark. I don’t want to die.
Fillan’s bell throbbed at her hip. Bells bind, whispered the wind. And bells free.
A second voice crashed through her skull. Morgan. With me.
He wrapped himself around her as if to take the starbloom into his own body, one arm banded tight around her ribs, the other braced over her shoulders, his palm spread over her heart as though he could cup the fire and shape it. He seized her Tuning like a lever, dragging its pitch toward his own.
And here, the first hidden engine revealed: the day-bloom burned through her blood the way the mixed-brew had frozen it, one driving her inward toward death, the other driving her outward toward waking.
The bond pushed them together, mind to mind and will to will.
Her heat flared – but not the blind, frantic fever she’d once feared. It rose as her true power: instinct, mercy, rage, love. The Kelthi inheritance the Dagorlind had tried to bury under prayer and collars.
The Tuning sang.
Morgan gasped in shock. He hadn’t expected her to push back with this, with all of herself, with every thread of her body’s wild nature.
“Lain – stop.”
His hands slid to either side of her throat, steering her like a man turning a blade to precisely the angle needed for cutting. His grip tightened on her jaw.
“Listen to me – you will burn –”
He was right. The starbloom was killing her. She felt it.
He tried to ease some of it out of her hands – to take it into himself. His pain and triumph took turns within him. Lightning flared up his spine. His shoulders arched unnaturally, something tearing through the skin, through his clothing.
A sickening crack split the skin between his shoulderblades. Black smoke poured out, thick and roiling. Wings burst from the wounds, huge and skeletal, before filling with light and smoke the way the wyrms did, feathers forming in frantic curls edged red like slag.
They emerged in a spray of blood. Their span filled the space above the walkway, brushing the chains of light as they opened, beating once, twice, flinging droplets of red across the ground. Priests screamed and Lain fell shockingly back to the room. Brighthand broke and scattered. Hellen could only stare from the floor. Rhalir shoved the Dagorlind back; Mallow staggered toward the stair mouth.
But Morgan saw only Lain.
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He dragged her closer, foreheads pressed together, the wings curving around them both like the nave of a dark cathedral.
“Through me,” he whispered, lips brushing hers as if the starbloom heat were his to taste. “Through me, Lain – channel it – let me bear it –”
He pulled her open the way he had with the bloodwyrms, using her Tuning like a vein he could pour himself through. He bent her Tuning toward him, the way his mouth had found her bleeding arm.
Her Tuning unfurled so wide it swallowed the chamber, the stone, the bowl’s lip glistening with water, the trembling priests, the screams, the heartbeat of every creature present.
Empathy crashed over her like the collapse of a frozen waterwall.
She felt everything – every heartbeat, every terror, every flicker of hope. The Underserpent’s agony and yearning, Morgan’s frantic love, Mallow’s breaking grief.
It should have shattered her.
But she had already lived in the space between martyrdoms.
Morgan screamed as she pulled him into the empathy. He couldn’t hold it. No Veinwright ever could.
But Lain could.
She knew the wyrm’s suffering. She had worn its drowning like her own skin. The wyrm knew her, wanted her, and wanted no master.
Morgan sagged, drowning in the bond, nearly toppling them both.
“Lain, please.” It was no command; it was a plea, raw and child-like.
A memory emerged: dawn on the Cliffs of Noverrel, a woman soaring with the wings of a swallow, and two small ones beside her. The sea below. The hills alight with dawnrise. And somewhere far below them was a creature that felt the hills vibrate with the building of their aeries. It held them aloft to catch the breeze like a child with cupped hands full of cattail down.
“Don’t go,” Morgan whispered.
She didn’t. She took his wrist and pulled it gently from her throat. The Kelthi and the Veinwright stood like that – bonded, battling for freedom neither could grant the other.
She lifted her own bell from her bandolier. She rang it, once, and summoned all the mothers of the Cloudspine, where the Starbloom grew wild and fragrant in the snow. She summoned Fillan, who hummed as the wheat bowed and parted, the trickster bell-song that had tamed the wolf with a counter melody curled under the original sacrifice, waiting.
Bellborn Lain opened her mouth, and sang.
Starbloom open, root and rise,
Wake the fire behind the eyes.
Unbind the chains that held the deep,
Rouse the wyrm from poisoned sleep.
Let no heart be lost alone
Share the breath in blood and bone.
Sing the truth the world forbade
Life restored, and fear unmade.
Morgan rallied, flinging his will into her note. He rode the bell’s note like a man seizing a horse’s reins. He forced the starbloom toward the chains like a river driven into a gorge too narrow to hold it. Outside, bloodwyrms screamed as their minds flared; Lain felt them wink out like sparks as he drew on their power.
He meant to bind the wyrm, to lace his Veinwright power through the Kelthi song and make of it a leash.
His lips brushed her ear. “Yes,” he gasped. “That’s it. Give it all –”
She bared her teeth and bit his hand.
His pain snapped through the bond. His blood filled her mouth, copper-black. The starbloom potion roared to meet it.
Kelthi, she thought wildly, remembering Fillan’s hand on the wolf’s jaw. Veinwright. Wyrm. All three tangled.
The starbloom leapt.
It rejected Morgan’s narrow channel. Instead it burst outward, seizing every thread – the Tuning, the bell-song, the braid of daylight trapped in the brew. It lunged toward the Underserpent, hungry to complete the circuit it had been made for.
Morgan tightened his grip. Lain saw the line of power as Morgan envisioned it: the Underserpent chained to him. A god on a leash.
The Underserpent lifted its head, and met her eyes.
The chamber vanished, leaving only that gaze as the walkway trembled under her.
In it she saw the mountains young and uncarved, the first songstones pressed into cooling rock by small and careful hands. She saw Kelthi children splashing in an unbound river while a spelldancer serpent glided past them, lazy and pleased. Then the chains. The bells. The sleep. The centuries.
And beneath it all, the plea rose: no more.
The starbloom completed the circuit from Lain’s burning veins to the wyrm’s heart.
Morgan tried to follow.
But the power reversed. It struck him full in the chest.
He staggered, losing his footing on the slick path. He had been ready for resistance, ready for rage. Ready for the savage joy of domination.
He had not been ready for grief.
Centuries of grief tore through him. The sorrow of a creature buried alive. Every Bellborn drowned in starbloom, every Kelthi voice whose songs had gone unanswered. He felt Lain’s own terror, and the way she’d thought of raspberries even as she died, clinging to one small sweetness as she fell away from the light.
He felt all of it.
Lain felt him feel it.
His hunger buckled. The bloodbinding that had always run outward cracked inward, toward Lain, toward everything she felt.
Kelthi Heat had always been a feral generosity, a call to share, to open, to bind in love. The starbloom seized the bond, seized the Underserpent’s ancient ache, and twisted Morgan’s power into something new.
It was empathy.
His knees hit the stone. The walkway shuddered beneath him.
The bloodwyrms collapsed, whining like frightened pups.
Lain sagged with him, only his arms keeping her upright. Her antlers burned white. Her scales glowed blue-white and violet like starbloom petals.
“Lain,” Morgan rasped, and for the first time since he had carried her from the snow she heard him say her name without certainty. “What are you –”
She cupped his face.
“Let go,” she whispered.
He couldn’t. He dragged them both backward on their knees, away from the Underserpent’s eye. He snarled something wordless, and the bloodwyrms obeyed instinctively, surging to form a barrier between the walkway and the rest of the chamber.
Mallow cut in, holding them off, the confusion of his place with Morgan leaving them to snap at him but not bite. One of them got hold of his blade and flung it across the chamber.
“Enough,” Morgan said, his fingers digging into Lain’s shoulders. “Enough. I will not – I cannot –”
She saw the decision form. If he could not control the conduit, he would end it.
His right hand opened. Blood welled in his palm, then spun in the air, shaping itself into a blade. A long, narrow spear of darkened iron, veined red.
He raised it toward her heart.
“Mallow!” she cried as Mallow slammed into her. His shoulder struck her side, shoving her clear, the blade carving a path across her chest and arm.
The spear drove through Mallow’s chest just below his collar. It glanced off bone, sinking deep. His breath left him in a soft, stunned sound. He hung skewered between them, Morgan’s fist locked on the haft.
The Underserpent’s massive tail struck the walkway. Granite shattered as the ledge gave way to the chamber below it. Lain fell, rolled, reached for Mallow.
“Mallow! Why?!”
Mallow’s eyes met hers. He smiled.
“Easy choice, really,” he whispered, and fell from the ledge and into darkness.