Page 223 of Keldori By Daybreak

“If you decide to blow the volcanoes, you’ll kill the armies on the shore,” Ferrin simpered. “I don’t think you have the spine, Wren. I’m sorry, but I don’t.”

“You trapped me in here because you know I can’t use Skal without killing everyone?” I sat up on my knees. “Coward.”

“Or maybe I just wanted to catch up?” He gave me an animated shrug. “Not everything is a plot to get you, you know.”

“Not everything, but definitely this,” I sneered.

Ferrin rolled his neck and rubbed at the back of his head. “Fair enough. It’s absolutely a trap, but you’ve already sprung it, so why not have a little chat first?”

“I’m not going to have a ‘little chat’ with the man who just shot my grandmother!” I snarled.

“I wouldn’t have had to shoot her if you’d just cooperated like you were supposed to. Just look at the mess you’ve made.” Ferrin shook his head. “If you had played your part weeks ago, this could’ve all been over by now. But no. You had to be difficult. You had to delay the inevitable. And for nothing! We’re right back where we were at the Rift, but how many had to die because you decided to try to take matters into your own hands? Galahad, Tiernan, Caitria—all dead. Because you fought back. And by the end of the night, your friends, your mother, and your grandmother will all be dead too.”

Anger rose in my gut, then my throat, and I was on my feet bracing for a fight I had no way to arm myself in. “You won’t touch my friends, and you will never set foot in my home.”

“Keldori is already mine,” Ferrin hissed. “I can go there as I please. I can control whom I please. All that remains to take is its magick, and nothing, not even you, Wren Warrender, will stand between me and my Skal.”

“They’re resealing my grandmother right now. You can’t stop them.”

“No. Probably not,” Ferrin admitted through a smile. “But that’s okay, because I’ve got you to help me.”

Ever since I’d let him into my mind in the canyon outside the Keep of Realta Fiel, there had been a door in my head that I kept closed. It was easy to ignore with both mine and Ciarán’s thoughts already crammed inside my head. It was not easy to forget about, however, because I knew what monster lurked on the other side.

I’d wondered if Ferrin knew it was there, but had decided he must not, because he never attempted to come back through it.

That had been a terrible miscalculation, because now the door in my head slammed open, reigniting the tether between Ferrin and me.

Skal surged and burned through every synapse in my head. The pain of the sudden magick coursing through me brought me to my knees.

It was intoxicating. Every fiber of my body electrified, and that familiar hunger reared.

Skal.

Searing, metallic Skal.

I needed more, and Ferrin had plenty to give. It was the canyon all over again. Ice pressed against my face as magick surged through me, bringing fire, electricity, and that horrible hunger.

More Skal. Only more Skal could fix this.

I dug my fingers into the ice.

Ciarán screamed my name in my head, and I reached to him in the flood of power.

Last time Ferrin had tried to turn me into a rotsbane, he’d severed Ciarán’s connection to me, but after everything—Willow’s Grave, Ergoth, fighting rotsbane on the Baron’s train—that connection had been tempered in a forge of blood and mutual faith. It could no longer be broken.

I clung to it. It was a lifeline in the flood.

“You can’t resist me forever.” Ferrin’s voice sounded directly in my head. “You will give in. You will turn rotsbane and rip apart your friends and family and if they don’t have the gall to put you down, then you can watch me take Keldori and be the beast that heralds my arrival.”

No…

No.

No amount of Skal, no level of hunger was worth the death of my friends. Mom, Gams, Orla, Iseult, Fana.

Ciarán.

We were so close to the end. I was so close to a quiet life in Keel Watch Harbor with Ciarán at my side.