Page 68 of Keldori By Daybreak

“I heard Ferrin tell Wren all about it back when I was spying on your city through her eyes. I know how you lost your parents and your leg in a single night, only for the old man, your only family, to leave you the next day.”

“Stop it,” Iseult hissed, and I echoed her command to Ciarán through our bond.

“Why? It’s true, isn’t it? He left you.” Ciarán’s hand played with the jar of ashes on his belt. He sat just ahead of where we’d found his parents’ remains the day before, and the orange of his irises made the copper plate on the wall behind him seem all the brighter.

“He had a duty to uphold.”

“He did. An important one.” Ciarán nodded. “One he was willing to die for. My parents left me, just like Galahad left you, and they died for the same cause he did at the hand of the same man. And now you’re going to let that man win.”

“He won’t win,” Iseult asserted. “If we wait long enough, the volcanoes will seal the Rift. You said it yourself. There’s no need to go to Keldori.”

“Rocks and magma aren’t as permanent as a magick seal,” I said.

“Don’t act like you understand magick just because you found out you’re a Saergrim,” Iseult sniffed.

“It’s actually the rocks and magma she understands more than the magick,” Ciarán chuckled. “Regardless, she’s right. After the debris from the volcano settles, Ferrin will be able to drill through rock better than anyone. Look at this keep. His people are better than anyone at carving halls and corridors through stone.”

“It still takes time,” Iseult argued. “And in that time, we can stop him.”

“A magick seal is still—” I started, but Iseult cut me off.

“A magick seal is better only in that it spares your grandmother. Look around you, Lady Saergrim.” She sneered my title, and I tried to quell the anger rising in my throat. “Ferrin killed my grandfather. He killed your Grimguard’s parents and cousin. Orla’s parents. Fana’s entire family. Why should we risk entering Keldori so we can save yours? Everyone else has sacrificed. Why can’t you?”

I reeled away, struck and shamed by Iseult’s words.

“Iseult,” Orla said slowly. She’d been quiet the entire morning, letting Ciarán and me do most of the talking, and her voice was hoarse from lack of use. “No one here has sacrificed anyone. Those people, everyone who has died, they were taken from us, cruelly and violently. We didn’t choose that. That’s no sacrifice. We are just as cruel as Ferrin if we expect Wren to suffer loss for no reason other than we have all already suffered the same.”

Iseult narrowed her eyes at Orla, and a deep blush rose in Orla’s cheeks.

“I expect Wren to suffer because the alternative you brought before me is a death mission. One of you is a child, the men are both injured, and you,” Iseult turned her glittering eyes towards me, “may have been a powerful and resourceful Nightmare, but as a Magician, you are woefully untrained and volatile.”

“So you won’t help us?” I blanched. We’d risked so much to get her. We’d wasted so much time already.

“If you don’t, we’ll be forced to go back to Tulyr to find someone who will,” Ciarán threatened.

“Calm down.” Iseult stood and shifted her weight to her Skal leg. She stared down at me with a neat frown. “I’ll help, but only if the Lady Saergrim proves this mission isn’t as hopeless as it looks.”

“Of course.” I scrambled to my feet. “Whatever it takes.”

She smirked and flipped her long silver hair over her shoulder as she spun on her glowing heel and stalked out of the chamber, through the steam-filled antechamber and into the moss-laden canyon.

I chased after her, and the shuffling of feet against stone told me the others were close behind.

Iseult stopped in the mossy courtyard, then spun to face us where we gathered on the stone steps of the keep. She lifted her metal knight’s helmet and pulled it over her head, letting the visor fall into place and obscure her eyes.

A silver longsword that glowed the same color as her leg took shape in her hands, and she brandished it at me.

“Show me you’re worth fighting alongside, Saergrim. Make a weapon. Any weapon.” Her voice echoed from inside her helmet. “Any weapon that isn’t a flail.”

The others were silent behind me, but Ciarán swore softly in my head.

Whatever it takes, I’d told her. I would’ve fought a rotsbane or gone back to the Second Sentinel to prove it to her, had she asked.

No. Instead she had to choose the one thing she knew I couldn’t do.

“I don’t have any Skal.” It was a terrible attempt at delaying the inevitable. Not only could I feel magick buzzing beneath the skin of my palms, the Keep of Realta Fiel was so full of Skal that even the steam hummed with its magick.

Glass clinked behind me, and someone pressed a bottle into my hand. I turned to see it was Ciarán, unreadable in both his stern expression and the way he continued to keep his thoughts locked just out of my reach.