Twilight of the Gods (The Harbingers of Light Book 7) Page 8

  At a motion from her ruined hand, the abominations started their assault anew. Several pummels later, Abagail’s wyrd came to an end. She sagged to the ground, a gasp of defeat on her lips. The abominations halted, allowing Hilda into the now unprotected area.

  The All Father either didn’t see her, or he was ignoring her.

  Abagail tensed. One slice with the God Slayer, no matter how slight, would end his existence. If Abagail had been cut with it when she was in Agaranth, she would have died while the All Father lived on in Eget Row. But now they were in Eget Row. What would happen to Abagail if the All Father died? What would happen to any of them? He was their only chance to get through to the darkling gods. He was the only chance, now, to purify Elivigar.

  Abagail raised her hand toward Hilda. The Waking Eye was still open on her palm, and her hand glowed with a plaintive light, but it wasn’t enough to conjure any wyrd. She was mentally exhausted, knowing if it came to a fight between them, that she would only be able to use her weapons.

  “You don’t want to do this,” Abagail said.

  Around them, the elves fought back the nightmares that still attacked from the back of the island.

  “Actually,” Hilda said, rounding behind the All Father. “I do.”

  Abagail put all of her strength into the Waking Eye, hoping for any amount of wyrd that would come. With any luck, it would be enough to knock Hilda aside. It wasn’t enough, the wyrd fizzled between her fingers as Hilda brought down the God Slayer on the All Father.

  As the All Father fell dead, the spear lodged between his shoulders, the light of the Waking Eye on Abagail’s palm closed for the final time.

  Muninn insisted they wait for the harbingers to join them before setting off into the frost giant’s lands. If it had been up to Leona, she would have charged in head-first and let the giants take her. She knew that Gorjugan wanted to face her, and it was unlikely that his minions would harm her. In all likelihood, they would speed her across the ice and to the coils of their master.

  Then she could kill him.

  Nothing is ever that easy, Leona thought, but she could hope.

  When the harbingers of light appeared, they were far less than she’d expected. A ragtag group of grandmothers, youth Leona’s age, and a smattering of ages between. They weren’t nearly enough to face the frost giants, and Leona knew what Abagail had intended.

  They are just a ruse to get me to Gorjugan. She refused to believe that Abagail had intended for them to sacrifice themselves, but what other option was there? Certainly no more than twenty harbingers could hold back that many frost giants, no matter how powerful they might be.

  In a ripple of feathers, Muninn joined with her raven form, and took to the skies, wheeling through the air with her sister, Huginn. Everyone was looking to Leona for direction. What was she supposed to say? She’d never faced anything like this before. The biggest decisions she’d ever had to make were about her own life, and she felt she was too young to have already made the decisions she had. Now she was supposed to lead a group of people to their death?

  She felt another consciousness stir within her. It stirred with strength and the pride of a warrior god. She knew that it was finally Hafaress come to help her, but was she ready for that? She’d seen the All Father blurred with the shape of Abagail before, and she was certain that Abagail had seen the shape of Hafaress with her as well. But Abagail had fought long and hard to distinguish herself from that of the All Father.

  Leona had no such restrictions. If Hafaress wanted to do this, she was more than happy to let him take the lead. She was unprepared for anything of this magnitude. She wasn’t ready for her orders to bring down Eget Row.

  Yet, at the same time, wasn’t it the gods that had done this? Certainly not Hafaress, he was used as surely as was his human lover. By Olik.

  Anger fueled Leona then. Her father was behind all of this. He’d never loved them—he’d never cared a single bit for them. He’d only saw a means to his end when he looked at his daughters.

  If you want to take lead, Leona thought to that strong consciousness within her head, I won’t stop you.

  Like a blanket slipping over her mind, Hafaress joined with her. She felt his strength in her arms, the force of his presence in her legs. She felt his will, his power, in the hand that gripped the hammer.

  “Harbingers!” Leona called, raising the hammer high above her head. Lightning arched across the sky. “To me! Kill anything that moves.”

  A shout went through the harbingers, fire kindling upon their upturned hands. They felt the power in her voice, the need for unbridled destruction of the frost lands called to the rage of the fire that lived within their core. They were unified in the need to sunder the icy plains and put to rest the scourge of the frost giants once and for all.

  When the frost giants reached them, they were met with a wall of flame; a wall of fire that sizzled the ice away to nothing but blackened grass.

  The frost giants gave pause, and Leona took advantage of their pause.

  “Fulgur!” she shouted. Lightning lanced out of the sky, swarming over the surface of the God Slayer like bees around a flower. She struck out with the hammer, and the lightning flew true. Giants shuddered as the force of the lightning hit them, but they weren’t gods, and they were mightier than humans. Lightning wounded them, dazed them, but didn’t kill them.

  That was for the harbingers to do. It took several more shouts of fulgur, and several more strikes of lightning before the harbingers noticed their chance of winning. Fire wreathed giants stunned by the lightning, and their armor melted away, the power of the frost burned from their skin. The icy storm that sustained them, kept them living, quenched once and forevermore.

  Rowan knew there was no concept of time within Eget Row. There was no sun to measure time’s passage, no need to sleep—and no desire to do so in the frosty trails in the Pass of Sages. Still, if she could tell by the screaming in her legs and the tiredness she felt, she would guess Vilda and she had been traveling for several hours.

  The goddess showed no signs of tiring, and she showed no signs of the overwhelming boredom that Rowan felt. She imagined she should be grateful for the boredom because it meant that the war was far behind them, and she would live a bit longer than everyone else in Eget Row.

  She didn’t think Abagail and Leona would be able to pull off beating prophecy. It had been too much for the gods to combat, what chance did teenage girls have?

  From time to time Rowan had called a stop to rest. As much as she hated doing it, in those times she turned back to Eget Row to watch the streamers of light flashing down from the Ever After—ballicrie calling weary warriors to rest in the Ever After.

  Eget Row raged with fire from the south, though she could no longer see fighting there. Frost poured in from the north—both fire and ice were closing in on the Well of Wyrding, and the great tree that had now lost more than half of its leaves and flowers.

  More than anything, the death of the tree was what startled Rowan. The tree wasn’t supposed to die and to her it signaled that the Void was collapsing—that life was drawing to a close. Whatever would survive after Ragnarok wouldn’t require life to thrive.

  While she imagined fighting would have happened all along Eget Row, the only true fighting she could see was along Elivigar, though she couldn’t make out the figures that warred there, she was aware of a glimpse of golden light at an island in the center. That had to be where Abagail was cleansing Elivigar.

  No wonder there’s fighting there, Rowan thought.

  But that had been a while ago. She had refused to turn back since then to see if her daughter was winning because she feared that she’d see the golden light had gone out and that the forces of light had lost their battle.

  She couldn’t concern herself with what happened there, because she had her own part to play. Olik was somewhere along this path.

  But it was Olik who found them, not the other way around.

  “Ma
ttelyn,” his familiar voice called from behind them. “You’ve come.” He didn’t sound as she expected, cocky, arrogant, and full of pride. He sounded hurt as if he’d fought a great battle himself, and had barely survived. She turned to look upon the man she once loved, the man who’d fathered her children, and then stole them away, claiming that he’d done it to keep them safe from her.

  She was startled to find that, looking into his blue eyes, seeing his graying blond beard, and the tousles of his golden hair had the same effect on her heart as it had so many years before. She remembered nights in his arms, sheltered from the cold of winter nights. She remembered dancing naked with him under the light of the full moon on warm summer nights, before the long winter had descended on Agaranth. She remembered falling into his arms in a grove of lilac trees, laughing at some inside joke that eluded her now.

  All of that swept through her, raising a heat that she’d hadn’t felt in so many years, sheltered against the darkling winter her home had been plunged into. The warmth of memories, the warmth of love that she’d felt for him.

  “Why did you do it?” Rowan asked him, reminding herself that it had all been a lie, that he’d taken their daughters because he knew the truth of them. Olik had known the true identities of Abagail and Leona. “Why did you plague her?”

  “What are you talking about?” Olik asked. The uncertainty in his eyes was so honest that Rowan almost believed him. She found that she wanted to believe him. She wanted to believe that Baba Yaga was wrong, that he couldn’t truly be so bad to do that, right? Sure, he was a birth-golem, but that didn’t mean that he was evil, right? If she believed that someone could be evil from the moment of their birth . . .

  “The shadow plague. You’re the reason Abagail was afflicted with it,” Rowan pressed.

  Vilda gripped her arm. “Step aside, if you’re unable to do this, then I will.”

  “Do what?” Olik asked, looking from Rowan to the goddess.

  Rowan shook off Vilda’s hand. “I want to know why, first.”

  “We know why,” Vilda pressed. “He’s been working all these long years to bring about the Twilight of the Gods. He’s the reason for this war now.”

  “That makes no sense!” Olik said, realizing what they were accusing him of. “Why would I harm my own daughter to bring about the end of everything? Are you listening to yourselves? You think I could be such a monster that—”

  “Yes,” Vilda cut in. “I do.”

  “But you don’t,” Olik said, his gaze slipping to Rowan. “You don’t believe that, do you?” He stepped closer to her and Rowan didn’t retreat. “You know me like no one has. The gods hate all of the birth-golems, why would they want to believe that one of us had turned out good?”

  Rowan shook her head. She couldn’t deny that he was right. The gods did hate the birth-golems. That was the true reason they’d been cast out for one trespass. True, it had been a great trespass, but it was still harsh punishment for one moment of error by children.

  “My own daughters,” Olik said. “Mattelyn, you know I loved you. I still do. What makes you think that anything short of total adoration for my daughters would have taken me from you, just to keep them safe from Fortarian and the path he was headed down?”

  Rowan shivered, tears blurring her eyes. She shook her head, unable to speak. A slight wind stirred her white hair around her head.

  “I’ve always loved you,” Olik said, slipping a strong hand into her hair coming to rest at the back of her neck. “You’d truly kill me over something someone told you? They don’t know me like you do.”

  She could see the wound on his side now, a stab wound, but he didn’t seem to be favoring it like he had when he came into sight. Her gaze drifted back up to his eyes. “I don’t know what I believe,” she said. She felt every bit like the scared girl she was ages ago when he pleaded with her, for the safety of their children, to not take Fortarian down the path that she intended. He had pleaded with her, and if it wasn’t for the safety of his children, then why? Hadn’t he even taken the God Slayer from their home so that Fortarian wouldn’t get it if Gorjugan took him over, as he did?

  Was Baba Yaga wrong?

  Could she be wrong?

  “I believe you,” Rowan said. “I love you too. I forgive you.”

  Relief flooded through Olik’s eyes. “That’s such a relief,” he said, and bent low to kiss her.

  Rowan only had a moment to hear Vilda scream out in rage before she felt the blade slip up under her ribs. She gasped in pain and tried to back away from the blade, but Olik held her firm.

  “That’s all I needed,” he whispered against her mouth. “Your forgiveness.”

  The blade jerked up into her heart, and Rowan fell into the Void of death.

  “No!” Vilda screamed out as Rowan slumped from Olik’s arms and fell to the ground, her eyes no longer seeing. Vilda leapt forward, a fist aimed at Olik’s jaw, but he ducked away from her, and snaked around behind her. “Does your evil know no bounds?”

  Olik laughed. “She was a fool! Who trusts a trickster?”

  “A woman who loves,” Vilda said, rounding on him. She held her hands before her, and great pools of moonlight and frost coalesced into her palms. “But that matters not. I will chase you to the edge of Eget Row and plunge you into the Void. There’s no way you can defeat me, there’s only two weapons that can do such, and you have neither.”

  She let loose the power of her wyrd. The wind tore at him, the frost bit into his flesh. Olik was driven back, his hands shielding his face, his feet unable to hold him. He tumbled to the ground, and the force of Vilda’s wyrd rolled him backwards, up the hill. She followed, her violet gown swirling around her body in the might of her power.

  “You cannot kill a goddess with your hands!” Vilda roared.

  Olik was trying to speak, but he couldn’t form words over the might of her power. She let it fall still. “What was that?”

  “I think you forgot something,” Olik said. “I’m every bit a birth-golem as the others.” He pushed to his feet. “Are we to fight for all eternity then?” he wondered.

  Vilda looked confused for a moment before Olik spoke again.

  “I cannot be killed by any godling who doesn’t also carry a God Slayer,” Olik said with a twisted smile. “So what is it, goddess? Fight for all eternity, or a truce. What did you owe this human?”

  “Playing on my dislike for humans will earn you nothing,” Vilda told him. “You’ve done more damage to Eget Row and the Ever After than you can ever be pardoned for. If not for you, this would never have happened.”

  “And yet,” Olik said, pointing the bloody knife at her, “The gods knew the prophecy, knew what I would do, and thought themselves immune. I assume Baba Yaga told you all about me? She was the very same prophet that spoke of Ragnarok. Why wouldn’t you believe her? You know that her words are never wrong.”

  Vilda didn’t speak.

  “You’re choice,” Olik said with a shrug, as if it didn’t matter, and to him it didn’t. The end was already upon them, his part had been played, and he would be victorious no matter what.

  Vilda growled, snow and moonlight swirled around her in a maelstrom of power. Her eyes glowed with wyrd. “To the end,” she rumbled.

  “Shouldn’t be a long fight,” Olik sneered.

  Abagail knelt in the blood of the All Father. Time seemed to still. What did this mean for her? How could she be alive when the All Father was dead? Wasn’t she the All Father? Wasn’t his spirit what made her? How could he be dead, gone forever, and she was still here? Still alive?

  She remembered that the All Father had come to her as another presence in her mind, another consciousness that slipped through her head to whisper to her. Had she been right all along? Was she really just Abagail?

  But her wyrd. She looked to her hand to see the plague still there, still shining an iridescent light. She had no strength to summon it, and she wasn’t sure it would answer even if she could call it. Had h
e been her wyrd? Had he been the plague all along?

  No, that wasn’t right. She remembered what Baba Yaga had told her, and it had rung true in her mind. She’d been poisoned by her father. But she’d also been channeling the All Father. He was gone now and so was the source of her wyrd.

  Was there any way to tether her wyrd to something else? She glanced up at the tree and wondered if she could use its wyrd. But the tree was dying also. Already most of its leaves and flowers had withered and fallen from its branches.

  She glanced back to the God Slayer, lodged between his shoulders. There were fresh scrapes on it, ones she’d never noticed before. Why were there fresh scrapes on it?

  She reached out her hand to grasp the God Slayer. Hilda was cheering, moving in slow, shuffling circles, cheering on her nightmares, not caring that the God Slayer was out of her grasp. She likely thought an end to the All Father meant an end to Abagail also.

  Time seemed to resume, and she heard Celeste scream out at the loss of the All Father. The elf turned her focus on Hilda, her scepter opening in a blaze of golden light. It struck the rotten darkling in the side of the head, knocking her into a stumble that took her to the edge of the small island.

  Hilda laughed it off. “Without the All Father, your weapons hold little power over me. Without his Waking Eye, your scepters are little more than flashy toys.”

  “Hafaress still lives,” Mari said, her voice carrying an edge that Abagail had never heard in it before.

  “For now,” Hilda said. She seemed sure of herself.

  Abagail’s hand touched the God Slayer, and it was then Hilda took notice of her. The darkling goddess seethed an inhuman noise and lunged at Abagail.

  Abagail was weak, but she was quicker than the half-dead darkling. She yanked with all of her strength, and the God Slayer pulled free. The All Father slumped to the ground, into the pool of his own blood that was just now reaching the edge of the little island.