The Forbidden Library (32 page)

Turesobei caught his breath and cast the
spell of winter healing
on Kurine. He sagged at the end, but Iniru caught him. 

Kurine’s eyelids fluttered and opened. “Sobei,” she whispered, grabbing his hand weakly.

“I’m here.”

“You’re … okay?”

“I’m fine. We’re all safe. We got away. The kagi poisoned you, but I’ll get you cured.”

“I know … you will … I know … because … you’re amazing and … you love …” 

Kurine drifted off into sleep.

Chapter 40

A sumptuous feast of berries, goat cheese, and honeyed rice cakes lay spread out on a table beneath a cedar gazebo. Tea steamed in two bowls on opposite sides of the table, and in the center sat an iron kettle and a bowl of loose tealeaves. Sunlight sparkled on the stream that splashed over a rockfall and into the pond surrounding the tiny island on which the gazebo stood. A warm breeze carried the scents of jasmine and mimosa.

Dressed in his finest emerald robes, his hair tied neatly into a braid, his skin clean, his body rested and injury-free, Turesobei knelt at the table. He bit into a fresh strawberry, and as the sweet juice flowed over his tongue, he sighed contentedly. He’d never been so happy before … so relaxed. He didn’t have a single worry in his life.

Footsteps crunched delicately along a gravel path. Awasa, carrying an umbrella, her face lost in the shadows beneath it, stepped onto the bridge that led across the pond to the island. She wore robes of lilac, matching her deep plum eyes, over inner robes of palest pink. Ivory pins held her blue-black hair in a bun, save for two strands that framed her heart-shaped face. She stepped into the gazebo, folded up her umbrella, and set it to the side. She was taller than he had remembered. Her hips had widened. Her breasts had grown larger. Funny, how on earth could he have forgotten those details? He had seen her yesterday.

Turesobei stood and bowed. Awasa turned her pale face up toward him. Enticing, extraordinarily crimson lips peeled into a smile revealing sharp, bright teeth. She met his eyes and suppressed a giggle. 

“May I?” she said, gesturing toward the table.

“Please.”

She knelt across from him and bit, daintily, into a strawberry. The juice dribbled down her chin. She wiped it away with a laugh.

“Wasa, you are the most beautiful thing in all the world,” he said.

“Silly,” she replied, delightfully. “I am so happy Sobei. Just think. This time tomorrow, we shall be married. And tomorrow night …” Blushing, she took up her tea bowl and glanced coyly away.

“Tomorrow …” he said, sipping a strong, almost bitter, black tea. “Married?”

“Tell me you haven’t forgotten, Sobei? How could you?”

“I — I don’t know. Probably …”

“You’ve been working too hard?”

“Probably.”

“Remember, you promised me you wouldn’t work as hard once we were married. Not the first year or two at least. Kahenan is still strong. He can manage without you there all the time.”

Turesobei nodded and bit into a honeyed rice cake. It was almost heaven. “Oh, I’ve missed good food
so
much.”

“Missed it? How could you miss it? What do you two eat in the tower?”

“Well … I guess … I guess if I’ve been eating poorly then I have been busy. Though I can’t remember what we’re working on.” He was starting to feel disoriented. Why was he so forgetful? Had he overdone a spell and dazed himself?

“You know what I think?” Awasa said. “I think you have wedding jitters.”

“Really?” He wasn’t about to tell her, but that didn’t make sense. He couldn’t even recall having set a date for their wedding.

“Shoma told me so when we had tea this morning.”

“You two are getting along?” he said with surprise.

“Of course we are. We’re going to be sisters soon. Sobei, you know, I love you, even if you are spacey sometimes.”

Awasa finished her tea. She leaned forward to scoop fresh tealeaves into her bowl. Her robes fell open far enough to reveal a mark on her chest — a raised tattoo of an eight-pointed star the color of a dark bruise, a shade that matched her lilac robes and her deep plum eyes.

But since when had her eyes been that shade of purple? Why did she have a tattoo? That was hardly acceptable. How could she have gotten one?

Awasa sat back and gave him a curious stare. “Turesobei, are you all right?”

Now that he focused on her harder, he felt, like a whisper across his skin, a pulse of magic … violent, chaotic. Awasa’s skin was not the creamy pale he had first thought but the pale of one lost forever in night, or one returned from the dead. And on her forehead, faint but growing more noticeable, was a tattoo that matched the one on her chest. Thick veins rose along her temples and forehead. Her features sharpened. Was that — was that specks of blood in her hair?

He opened his kenja-sight.

“Sobei!” she exclaimed as his eyes turned milky-white. “Don’t! Please, don’t.”

Awasa blazed with sinister magic — magic that he knew, that he had fought — the magic of Barakaros the Warlock, leader of the Deadly Twelve. He chanted the
spell of dream breaking
and Ninefold Awasa, the blood-smeared, terrifying witch that used to be his betrothed appeared across the table from him.

Turesobei staggered back as the full truth rushed back. Though how he’d come here and where this was, he had no idea. Smeared with blood and wearing torn clothes, Awasa snarled and leapt over the table. She tackled him and pinned him to the ground, squeezing her legs over his hips. He struggled to break free, but she was stronger than him. She licked her lips and fangs and ran claw-like fingertips along his cheek.

“Oh Sobei, I didn’t want to have to do it this way, but if this how you’d like it …”

“Like what?” he muttered.

“Why, being my thrall, of course. You are mine. You were mine first, long before that k’chasan slut. And now you will
always
be mine.”

The gazebo within the elaborate garden faded away, leaving only crumbling ruins tucked into a vast wasteland beneath an empty twilit sky. All was dust and shadow with not a single sign of life except for himself and Awasa. The Shadowland … a realm between Death and Life, Torment and Paradise, Oblivion and Existence. Many-layered, infinite, inscrutable. The abode of nightmares and demons and stranger things still. This was the layer nearest the real world, draped over it like a burial shroud, accessible by ritual or dream. If he was in the Shadowland, he was trapped in a nightmare, though how he had been brought here, he had no idea.

Turesobei cast the simple
spell of waking
. Nothing happened.

“You cannot leave here until I let you,” Awasa said, sneering. “And I won’t let you until I’ve broken you.” 

“How did you do this?”

She pulled back her shirt to reveal a fresh cut over her heart. She drew her finger along it and bit her lip. “Our bond was never broken. I used it against you.”

How utterly simple and devious. She had exploited their betrothal as a connection and then strengthened it with — “Blood magic.”

“You cannot break free,” she said. “I know because Barakaros tells me it is so.”

“The Warlock? He’s possessing you?”

She slapped him hard across the face and busted his lip. “Don’t insult me like that! I am my own self. The Warlock’s ghost merely resides within me, whispering secrets, teaching me all the foul sorceries he knew.”

If she had stolen into his dreams with blood magic, exploiting the bond between them, how could he break free? Banishing her wouldn’t work, and waking himself had failed. Dream-breaking had already done all it could by destroying the illusion. Maybe if he hadn’t shared tea with her in the dream. That had given her more power here. He tried again to throw her off again, but it was no use. He could only think of one thing that might work, although it could just take him from the frying pan to the fire.

“I am Chonda Turesobei!” he cried out at the top of his lungs. He didn’t know what had summoned
her
before, so he continued on. “The heir of Chonda Lu! I bear the power of the Storm Dragon! I’m trapped in the Shadowland! Please, by Kaiwen Earth-Mother, I beg of you to help me.”

“No one can help you here, no matter the name you use or who you call on.” Awasa put a finger to his lips, lowered herself down, and bit his earlobe. “Anything you attract here will be as bad, or worse, than me.”

“I know,” he muttered.

And then
she
arrived, rolling in from the horizon like a night-black cloud punctuated by eyes of searing flame, slowly filling the sky, darkening even the Shadowland. The shadow spoke, as it had before, with a voice both feminine and primal. 

“You will let the Storm Dragon go, foolish girl.”

“Never!” Awasa screamed at the flaming eyes above them. “He’s mine alone!”

“You cannot have Naruwakiru. His fate lies with me. I have waited centuries … millennia … for our day of reckoning, here at last at the end of the world.”

So this — whatever
she
was — was after the Storm Dragon? It had nothing to do with him or Chonda Lu. It thought he was Naruwakiru returned.

The flaming eyes plunged toward them. Awasa recoiled and reached toward her scabbard. But there was nothing there. A white-steel blade couldn’t enter the Shadowland. Awasa grabbed Turesobei by the collar and pulled him close. “I have touched your soul. You can
never
hide from me again.”

Then, a moment before the eyes fell upon them, Awasa released him and disappeared.

Turesobei shot up, wide awake within the snowhouse. Everyone was kneeling around him with concern etched on their faces.

“Master, you’ve been screaming,” Lu Bei said. “We couldn’t wake you. I thought perhaps you were —”

“Everyone pack your things.” Turesobei stood, shaking. “We have to go. Now!”

“But it’s not dawn yet,” Kemsu said. “And the sonoke —”

“Now!” Turesobei shouted.

Everyone looked at him, amazed, no doubt wondering if he’d lost it. But Motekeru set off in motion and Lu Bei said, “Everyone do as Master says. Quickly.”

Under light from the
spell of the moon mirrors
, they gathered their things and ran out to the sonoke. Motekeru wrapped Kurine in a blanket and held her in his arms as he climbed into the saddle. They rode with abandon along the coast, trusting that the sonoke would spot any dangers in the terrain and adjust in time. The sun rose. A strange feeling tweaked Turesobei’s senses. He whipped around. On an inland rise loomed eighty-nine terrible shadows. The smallest one in the center bellowed a screeching war cry and charged. Light glinted off the white blade in her hand. The rest of the shadows followed her.

Chapter 41

Ninefold Awasa and her eighty-eight yomon fell out of sight as the sonoke outpaced them, but the yomon were tireless. They
would
catch up.

“What do we do?” Zaiporo asked. “We can’t outrun them. They’ll catch us by nightfall.”

Narbenu stroked the back of his sonoke’s neck. “Sooner. The mounts will be dead by noon if we keep this pace. We’ve ridden them hard for two days with little rest between.”

“Maybe we can find a cave and hide,” Iniru said.

“Awasa touched my soul in the dream,” Turesobei told her. “She found something to exploit … a nice moment we once shared. An afternoon tea, the last one we had together before I left Ekaran, only this time without Shoma and our mothers there. Awasa used that and our bond of betrothal, and blood magic, to get to me in my dreams, pulling me into the Shadowland. Fortunately, she won’t try that again. Unfortunately, she can now track me wherever I go. There’s no escaping her. We’re going to have to face them. So just … just keep an eye out for any terrain that might give us an advantage.”

But all the terrain was the same, barren coastline and low rolling hills inland. One by one the sonoke tired out, slowing to a leisurely pace. Forcing another hour of sprinting would kill them. Turesobei closed his eyes and meditated, preparing himself to change into the Storm Dragon. Because maybe if he had his mind ready, he’d have more control and a chance at turning back into himself … maybe … eventually.

“Master!” Lu Bei shouted from where he soared above them. “A ship on the horizon!”

“Can we reach it?” Turesobei asked.

“Its sails are furled.” Lu Bei looked behind them. “Oh demon droppings! I can see the yomon now, too. But I think we can reach the ship before them.”

Two masts, taller than any Turesobei had ever seen on such a small vessel, towered over the flat-bottomed ship. Three skates, each made of a single piece of bone or ivory, stretched the length of the ship and were held in place with wood beams and rope. The skate-booms lifted the ship up off the ice high enough that it could easily pass over a sonoke.