Cast Out, Crowned

Chapter Fifteen: What It Costs

The woman walked into my gold like it was warm sunlight.

That was the thing that frightened me. Everything else on that ground, the hunters, the whole pale flood, had recoiled from the light pouring off me. She stepped into it, bronze burning under her own skin, and it didn't so much as slow her. She stopped a few feet inside the ruined doorway and looked at me with her head tipped, the way Renna had, the way Selene had, the way every northern thing looked at me, like I was a sum being worked out.

"You can put that away, dear," she said, nodding at the gold. "It won't take with me. My blood's older than yours in all the ways that matter. Not brighter." A small smile. "Just better fed."

And that was when I felt it start to go.

I'd let it all out at once. Every swallowed year, up and out in one wave, and it had felt like the truest thing I'd ever done, and now the well of it was running low and dropping fast. The gold along my arms flickered. The wall of light in the doorway thinned. My knees went strange under me, and the edges of the room started to blur, ink bleeding into wet paper.

Fenric felt it too. I saw him feel it, the light between us guttering as mine failed, and he shifted without a word to put himself more fully in the gap, taking the weight of holding the doorway onto his gold alone.

"There it is," the woman said, watching me sway. Pleased, unhurried. "You don't know how to spend it yet. You emptied the whole purse in one go, like a child with her first coin." She took a step closer, and Fenric's gold flared to bar her, and she stopped, but only because she chose to. "It's all right. It's the most common mistake the young ones make. The last of your line did the same, you know. Right before the end."

"Don't," Fenric said. Low. His arms were shaking now with the effort of holding what both of us had held together a minute ago. "Don't listen to her, Zaveria. She wants you spent and scared. That's the whole plan. Stay on your feet."

I tried. I locked my knees the way I'd locked them on the marking stone, and I made them hold, and I dragged what was left of the gold back up my arms, and it came thin and slow and not enough. Seven hours ago I hadn't known I had this in me at all. Now I knew exactly how much I had, and I'd just spent almost all of it in a single breath, and the woman in grey had watched me do it and smiled because she'd been waiting for it.

"My name is Varla," she said, conversational, like we had all night. "I've kept the hunters for a long time. Longer than you'd believe. And I've stood where I'm standing now more times than I can count, in front of the last bright thing some old bloodline had left, watching it burn itself out." Her bronze eyes moved to Fenric, and her smile changed. "Usually there's a Lycan. There nearly always is. The old blood does love to find each other at the end." She looked back at me. "You want to know how it goes, dear, every time? I'll tell you, so you're not surprised."

"Zaveria, don't, "

"We put the Lycan down first," Varla said, over him, gentle as anything. "In front of the bright one. Because a girl who's just watched the only creature that came for her die is a girl who stops holding her power up. Grief opens the hand. And then we take what's left of her, breathing, back to the keepers, and we make certain her line ends with her." She smiled at me, warm, almost kind. "It's quick. And it works. It's worked for a hundred years."

I looked at Fenric.

He was between me and all of them, gold pouring off him alone now, holding a doorway that the two of us together had barely held, and he was shaking with it, and I understood with a cold drop that Varla wasn't bluffing. She'd told me the plan because the plan didn't need to be secret. It was going to work whether I knew it or not. Spend the girl. Kill the Lycan in front of her. Let grief do the rest.

Kill Fenric in front of me.

The man who'd told me the truth when everyone else lied. Who'd crossed a gathering ground toward me when everyone else fled. Who'd put a choice in my hands and left it there. Who'd sworn to never keep me small, and had just taken the whole weight of this doorway onto himself so I could stay standing.

Something moved in me that wasn't the gold running low.

It was the thing under the gold. The thing that had pressed against my hand in the cell. The sealed thing they'd buried when I was a child, and it wasn't empty now, and it wasn't spent. The gold on my skin was almost gone, yes. But the well it came from went deeper than one night's worth, deeper than Varla knew, deeper maybe than I knew, and watching her stand there calmly describing how she was going to kill the one person who'd ever chosen me, I stopped trying to drag the last thin thread of gold back up my arms.

I reached past it instead. Down, into the deep cold place the seal had been.

"You've done this a hundred times," I said. My voice didn't shake. Varla's smile flickered, just slightly, at the sound of it. "In front of a hundred bright things burning themselves out. You've got a whole speech for it."

"Zaveria." Fenric's voice, ragged, and something in it now that might have been hope or might have been fear. "What are you doing."

"You watched me spend the purse," I said to Varla, and I felt the deep cold place answer me, slow, vast, waking. "You're right. I emptied it in one go. I didn't know any better." The air in the ruined hut began to change, and the flickering gold on my skin steadied, and then it didn't flicker at all. "But you made one mistake, keeper. You watched me spend what was on the surface. And you thought that was all there was."

The floor of the deep place gave way under me, the way the door in the dark had given way in the cell, and what was behind it wasn't a purse.

It was a flood.

Varla's smile was gone now. For the first time since she'd walked into my light unafraid, the keeper of the hunters took a step back.

"They sealed you as a child," she said, and her easy voice had gone tight. "That much power in a child. They sealed it because it was too much to leave loose. I read the accounts. It was always going to be too much." Her bronze eyes went wide. "They should have killed you. The fools. They should have just killed you."

"Probably," I said.

And I opened the deep place all the way.