A scream like the scream Dalca made when his mother fell.
The salt-sweet raindrops on my lips are tears.
The Storm. The Queen found a vessel in a storm, but as she lent it her power and her fury, it became what it is. And it poisoned her, feeding her back what she gave it. It isn’t her wrath.
It’s her pain.
The Queen shrinks back inside me, but she shows me images of how the Storm grew large and strong and violent with the pain of all the children who lost their parents, the suffocation and self-loathing of high ringers in their gilded cage, the low ringers who grew up second-class, their burdens, their miseries, the pain in all of their hearts. The Storm took it all.
My pain lives in it, too. The Storm’s tears—some of them are mine.
Who knows where it began. Pa’s choices killed Dalca’s grandfather. Mine killed Dalca’s mother. Dalca’s killed Pa.
And now, I could kill him.
Dalca’s eyes open, boring into mine as he claws at my shadow’s hands wrapped around his neck. His summer-sky eyes shutter, his pupils dilating. His mouth opens, his lungs fighting for one last breath.
Who’ll come to kill me?
The Storm feeds on him, on his pain. On mine. On that of the people in the stands, of Cas and Ragno and their soldiers.
It will grow strong and endless with our pain. It will blanket the land to the horizon. It will bleed into the sky. It will spread until there’s nothing left but the Storm.
I know what I must do. My shadow’s hands release Dalca, and he staggers, stricken and uncomprehending.
The Storm must end. Without the Great Queen fueling it, it will. All its beasts and all its curses—all will end.
I turn my face up to the Storm.
Come, I tell her.I accept.
The ikonshield shatters. Ikons snap like strings drawn too taut, and the remnant wisps of blue light fall and fade into thin air. The pale burning rain singes my skin, but I hardly notice.
There is no sky above. Only dark clouds, streaked with lightning. A spiral grows, clouds rotating around a central point, claws and teeth and glittering eyes within them, spinning faster and faster, spooling into a funnel that shoots toward me.
I hold my breath, bracing myself. The Queen’s mark rises, burning through me, moving outward, rising through layers of bone and muscle and flesh to my skin, appearing on my body in shifting lines.
It hits like a whisper.
Hands of shadow and cloud caress my face, Ma’s hands, the Queen’s hands. She holds my face still.
The lines of her mark shimmer across my skin; the mark is a door, and she opens it, opens me.
Her power pours into me so fast and so full that I’m drowning with it; my mouth floods with the taste of midnight rain and copper, my lungs fill with ozone, my chest is squeezed with immense pressure—
I scream.
It’s too much—It’s been too long, she’s forgotten how to fold herself into a body—
I wrap my arms around myself and pull—
—the crushing flow stutters to a stop. I gasp for air, coming back to myself, coming out of myself. I am a ghost, half out of my skin—and yet my skin is newly raw, goose bumps as significant as mountains, the tingling in my fingers like earthquakes.
The Great Queen hovers over me in a shifting form of intertwined shadows; she has only poured a drop of herself into me, but her mark binds us close. Something has drawn her attention—her awareness is fixed up above, beyond the Storm blotting out the sky.
He has come.Her monstrous overlapping voice echoes in my ears and rattles my bones.From the time he was freed, he has waited, pooling his power. He thinks me diverted; he comes for war.
A blinding shard of light cuts through the clouds. It craters into the ground with an explosion of stone and crackling air that stings my teeth.