He Who Breaks the Earth (The Gods-Touched Duology)

Lia clung to a fragment of wood, river water gushing all around her. She wasn’t sure where the scrap had come from, only that it floated, and when she held on to it, she floated too. Apparently, Calsta could only lend her breath for so long—Lia coughed up half the lake as she drifted downstream. Her throat and chest burned, but Lia could only think of Aria. The way she’d lain there in the tunnel. How she hadn’t been real.

Mateo cracking the tunnel’s glass—ancient, Basist constructed, and supposedly unbreakable—so she could escape his father. He likely knew where Aria really was.

He’d probably show her. Maybe he would have if she’d waited. Tried talking to him instead of…

Lia’s eyes clenched shut, every breath a knife. She’d lost control again. She hadn’t thought things through. Her sword had been in her hand, and she’d felt that insatiable pull to jump as if Ewan were still coming after her. So she’d jumped.

It had been the wrong thing. Don’t lose yourself, Calsta had cried, but maybe Lia was already lost.

Maybe Aria was paying for it at that very moment.

Something slipped past Lia’s leg, wriggling up to her side, then darted away. Elsparn. The word sounded off in her mind, as if it were supposed to be important. Elsparn. Not biting. Because of…

Because of something Anwei did. Lia couldn’t remember and didn’t care. All she knew was that Anwei was supposed to have been the one to get Aria. Anwei was supposed to be there. She’d promised.

Something that was much larger than a fish bumped Lia’s driftwood, almost knocking her into the water. Lia swore, her hands shaking as she reached for the sword weighing heavy between her shoulder blades, barely noticing that someone else was swearing too. Hands grasped her shoulders and heaved her onto a canoe. Lia twisted away, managing to pull the sword free, but cried out and dropped it into the canoe when her leg hit the side, pain a fire in her ankle, the bones grinding against each other.

“Miss Lia!” The hands laid her gently onto a wet wooden bench, and Lia peered blearily up at Gilesh. “You’ve exchanged your auroshe for this… extremely sexy form of transport?” He inspected the water logged plank before laying it next to her with just a little too much reverence for it to be genuine. “It’s beautiful.”

“Oh, shove off. Get us back to the boat. We found her, like Abendiza said,” Noa’s voice interceded, and softer hands helped her to sit up. Lia breathed in tentatively, worried her lungs would leak after so long underwater. “Are you hurt?”

“Where in Calsta’s wind-cracked name are Anwei and Altahn?” Lia wheezed.

She didn’t understand the flurry of movement that happened as they drew near to the boat or the gray of Anwei’s face when she came into sight. There was something wrong with her aura, but Lia hardly saw that much before the healer was pushing her flat onto the deck, groping for a bag that wasn’t there. “Lie still. Don’t move,” Anwei rasped, her movements jerky and unsure somehow. “You’re hurt?”

“You didn’t come.” Lia’s whole body shook with cold as Anwei began pressing fingers along her collarbone, then down her ribs. “You sent me into that place alone and—” She gasped when Anwei got to her leg.

“Altahn set off the flare. You weren’t supposed to—”

“The flare came after I was already face-to-face with the Warlord!” Lia exploded, curling up from the deck. “Where were you? He drained the Warlord right before my eyes. She just… flopped over, like there was nothing left inside her. I saw my sister, and she… she—” A sob burned through the words, charring her tongue. Aria hadn’t been there. Tual had said she wouldn’t survive outside the keep—

Tual said all sorts of things. But Mateo would know the truth. Mateo would tell her.

“I… I am so sorry, Lia.” Anwei’s voice was wooden, a far cry from the manufactured tones Lia had come to expect from her, modified to exact specifications depending on who she was talking to and what she wanted. It was as if whatever she was made of had shriveled to dust, leaving nothing but herbs and two fingers mercilessly jabbing at her lower leg. “I think the bones here are broken.”

“Let me.”

A voice—an aura—Lia didn’t recognize bloomed into existence. She skittered back from the foreign presence looming toward her, the woman’s outline jagged as driftwood and broken swords. “Who are you—”

The woman knelt beside her and softly touched her knee. Calsta’s power flared bright inside Lia’s chest, the golden burn racing down to her ankle hot as molten metal.

Crying out, Lia jerked back from the woman’s touch, the hurt there and then gone, leaving a scorched path through her everywhere it had gone. The woman slunk back into the shadows, nothing but the glint of eyes in the darkness.

Anwei didn’t move, her hands limp at her sides. “Did you get anything of value? Could you draw me a map? Tell me where Patenga’s sword is being kept? Where Tual’s rooms are—”

“Who in Calsta’s name is that?” Lia stared down at her ankle, the feel of grinding bones gone.

“What did you see in there?” Anwei asked. “I’m sorry things went wrong, but if there’s anything you can tell me—”

“Anwei, who is—” But as she pushed toward the woman with her aurasight, Lia caught a glimpse of an awful, guttering aura from the belly of the ship.

Pushing Anwei off her, Lia wrenched herself up from the deck and ran down the ramp, her ankle hardly twinging as she zigzagged between crates to the back cabin where Anwei had taken Knox. Only now his aura was like the last breath before a candle went out. Slamming the door open, Lia fell hard to her knees next to the cot to find Knox’s eyes closed and his skin gray as old candlewax.

“What happened?” Lia demanded. “Is he—”

“Dead?” It wasn’t Anwei who had followed her down. The strange old woman’s teeth clacked against one another. “Just about. Your friend up there killed him.”

Lia grabbed his hands, but they were cold. She touched his face, but it was cold. She was crying, but her tears were cold, and she couldn’t feel anything because Knox was all she had. Knox. And Aria. “No.” It came out in a croak. “He still has an aura.”

“Just a thread. It’ll soon break.”

A scream boiled up inside Lia. “He’s not dead,” she wheezed. “Anwei’s aura is still white. She’s still bonded to him—”

“My aura is white, child.” The old woman chuckled. “Just like Tual Montanne.”

Just like Tual Montanne. Like a shapeshifter. Goose bumps prickled out from Lia’s arms. She pushed herself up from the cot, unable to process the old woman, only that Anwei’s aura was white. Anwei was still there, and Knox was—

Lia ran. Through the maze of crates, up the ramp, away from the crooked tilt to Knox’s neck, the slack line of his jaw. She ran to the deck, to the canoe, where the Warlord’s sword sat like a dark promise.

Anwei was still kneeling on the deck, her hands clasped about her ribs as if she’d lost more than her medicine bag. “It was an accident,” she whispered.

“The first thing you asked me when I came back here was what I found in that place.” Lia’s hands both gripped the sword. “You took Altahn’s father and Calsta only knows how many other people when you brought down the tomb. You almost took Noa, letting her run into danger. You almost let me get taken, but thanks to your shapeshifter brother, I’m still alive.” The words came louder and louder, liquid acid burning all the way up her throat. “Now you take Knox?”

Anwei’s shoulders slumped. “I’m trying to fix it, Lia.”

“How can you fix it?” Lia advanced on the healer, sword shivering in her hands. “You’ve smiled and petted us and told us each we were the prettiest one. Even Knox, the boy who loves you, could only be sure you’d come save us from drowning because you still needed him.”

Lia felt auras loom closer behind her as if they meant to stop her. Noa and Bane and Gilesh. Altahn was frozen, Galerey bursting from his collar and sparking like a bonfire. “What did you say about my father?” he hissed.

But Lia couldn’t care, not about Altahn, not about the other messes Anwei had made, the other people she’d lied to, then destroyed. “How could you do this?” she cried. “How could Calsta have chosen you to fix whatever went wrong with Devoted and Basists? All you are is a fake goddess. A thief. A liar. A murderer. You were supposed to love Knox, and now he’s dead.” The words kept spilling out, Lia’s hands shaking so hard her knuckles had begun to hurt, her muscles too tight to do anything but shout. “The girl who collects ants while people die around her! I should have seen what you were the first time I saw you lie to Altahn. The first time Mateo’s name crossed your lips. Your own brother—he’s next, isn’t he, Anwei? Use him, then dispose of him, like the rest of us?”

Anwei hadn’t moved, her voice fluttering like ash. “I’m going to fix it.”

“Did you kill Knox on purpose? Drink him in so you’d have enough power to finally face your snake-tooth man? You don’t fix things, Anwei! You break them!” Lia lunged forward, but a voice cried out and something slammed into her before she could swing the sword. Noa stumbled into view, dropping the paddle she’d used to deflect Lia’s sword to put her hands up, bracing herself for the next blow.

“You are worth more than this, Noa,” Lia snarled.

But then Lia caught sight of the sword in her hand, Anwei a blur beyond it.

The Warlord’s sword… No. She shivered as she looked down its length, nausea bubbling up inside her like poison. It was Ewan Hardcastle’s sword.

Don’t lose yourself, Calsta had whispered. Like the Warlord had. Like the Devoted had. So frightened they’d committed genocide rather than try to work through the horrors that shapeshifters had perpetrated. Like Ewan had, so obsessed with getting what he wanted that he forgot everything that mattered.

She froze, thinking of Aria, still trapped with a monster because Lia had been too busy trying to keep moving to notice Tual doing something to her brain. And Knox at the point of her sword in the Trib camp. Lia let the sword tip fall and backed away a step. Then another, her legs hitting the railing. Anwei stared up at her, tears rolling down her cheeks and her braids dripping, and that awful white aura flashing above her like a flag. My aura is white, too, just like Tual Montanne’s. The old woman’s eyes glinted from the darkness of the hold.

But in the cold moonlight, Lia didn’t know. Not what was right or wrong or who had done what, only that anger was a live thing inside her—and she didn’t want to be this person. She stared down at her hand on the sword. Ewan’s sword. The very sword he’d brandished at her when all she had was a shovel to fight him off.

Ewan held this sword the same way the Warlord did. Like a right. Like a threat. Like anger and a surety they were right, with no reason to hold back.

That wasn’t who Lia wanted to be. Fingers shaking, she dropped the sword, the blade splashing down into the river. She hated the way she still shook, as if she couldn’t trust her own hands. “Fix it,” she rasped.

Anwei’s head came up, her cheeks wet.

“You owe me. You owe him. You owe all of us. Fix it, or I’ll…” Lia swallowed, her voice broken glass. “I’ll be back when….” Grabbing hold of the rail, her fingers still wanted to tear, to wring, strangle, destroy. “You know what Devoted do to shapeshifters.”

Anwei’s eyes narrowed, but it was Noa’s look that cut Lia through, the fear Lia had seen the day she’d faced down Ewan Hardcastle like a memory across the girl’s face. Only now she was afraid of Lia.

Unable to stand it, Lia vaulted over the rail. When she hit the water, cold enveloped her, but that did nothing to douse the fire raging inside her. How could you let this happen, Calsta? she screamed inside her head. Knox was how we get Aria back! Knox was supposed to be a part of destroying Tual!

It wasn’t until she’d clawed her way onto the muddy shore that Lia felt the sear of the goddess’s reply. I can’t stop you humans from hurting one another. I give power to people I hope will do good, but in the end, the choices you make are yours.

The words stung like a slap. Lia wanted choices. But she hadn’t wanted this. Reconciling the two seemed impossible, a conundrum with no answer, only a deep dark hole down which she was falling alone.

She just had to get away before she did something terrible she couldn’t take back. Lia set out between the trees, the thin ground crackling with every step. She couldn’t lose herself because that would mean she’d also lose the only thing that mattered to her now.

Aria.

Without Anwei’s plans, her manipulations, her lies… Lia walked faster, her hands twitching toward her sword. Anwei who brought a shapeshifter onto the boat. Who sat on the deck while Knox lay beneath. His pale face sat in Lia’s mind like a chunk of coal waiting to ignite again, those last strings attaching him to Anwei—

Something skittered through the leaves behind Lia. She spun around, a scream already in her throat, the last of her control, her hope lost in the sea of nothing she had become. Running at the sound, Calsta was a force of gravity inside her, a force of wind, a force of power too big for her to hold, so when she launched into the air, sword raised to strike, Lia was the storm.

“Lia!” the voice had called a hundred times or maybe a thousand, familiar like poison and regret and the worst of all things in the world. And when Lia finally managed to focus on the shape ahead, all she could see was an auroshe of gristle and bone, worn away like the skeleton she was. A rider sat on her back with absolutely no aura hovering around him as if he were more skeleton than the auroshe, devoid of any soul: Mateo Montanne.

Lia strode toward the boy, following the sound of her name like a trap she couldn’t stop herself from walking into. The auroshe skittered back as she advanced on them, Mateo shrinking down in the saddle at the sight of her.

“You’d better run,” Lia choked out, groping for the sword only to find it gone. She started toward him, rage a monster unfolding inside her. She didn’t need a sword to hurt someone who had hurt so much. “Hide. Die before I catch you, because it’ll be better than the death you can expect from me.”

The auroshe reared, Mateo holding his seat as Rosie struck at her. “Lia, stop!”

“Is this the next stage to becoming a shapeshifter? You completely lose your aura when your humanity is gone?” Lia dodged Rosie’s hooves, spinning away to put a tree between herself and the auroshe. Thinking of Aria. Of cracking glass, and the feel of magic all around her, none of it hers. Of Mateo, who had managed to creep up on her because he had no aura.

None. Not even the thin mist that was all he had left of an aura in that tunnel. Lia didn’t have it in her to care. She pulled the sheath from her back and gripped the hardened leather and metal like a sword, waiting for the sound of cloven hooves that would tell her where Rosie was, the sound of his breathing, the beat of his heart—

“A fight between us wouldn’t be fair, you know.” Mateo’s voice cracked.

“Shut up, Mateo.” Lia spun out from behind the tree, running at Rosie’s flank. She was not sure if he meant that she would surely kill him or that he could squeeze her soul from her like oil from a rag. Rosie leapt over a fallen tree and swiveled to face Lia with a scream.

“Let me explain! I only need one second!” he cried. “Okay, maybe two seconds.”

Lia tripped, landing on her knees. She breathed in deep, trying to remember her training.

Don’t lose yourself.

There was one thing Anwei had right. Standing very slowly, Lia kept her sword point down, ready to move if Rosie charged. The auroshe gamboled around the edge of the trunk instead, as if she wasn’t sure if this was a game or a battle. When Lia didn’t move, Rosie skipped forward with a happy croon, butting into Lia’s shoulder with the soft part of her forehead. Lia’s chest was steel and bone and stone, nothing that breathed, or lived, or loved. But when Rosie began to nuzzle into her, Lia could feel her warmth.

Mateo, a bit too slowly, perhaps, swung his leg over her back in a fancy dismount, Rosie spoiling it when she danced to the side, making him trip on the way down. Once he’d recovered himself, he drew himself up. “I’m here.”

“Where is Aria?” Lia didn’t look away from the skeletal bridge to Rosie’s nose, the skin pulled tight over the scaly ridges that protected her eyes and pointed snout. She rubbed a finger along the sharp lines of Rosie’s powerful jaw, concentrating hard on not destroying the world. She raised the sword to point it at him. “If she’s not with you, then this is all I have for you.”

Mateo stayed well behind Rosie’s withers, keeping the auroshe’s cloven hooves and teeth firmly between them. “I don’t have her, so I guess you might as well stab me.”

“When you’re done hiding behind fifteen hundred pounds of auroshe?”

“I want to help,” he said quietly.

“With what?” she yelled. “All you ever do is sit very still and hope you don’t get hit by a stray blow while fights happen all around you. If you want to help, you’re going to have to actually do something. Helping means choosing between good and bad, not showing up here and hoping your father hasn’t noticed you missing from your morning bath.” Lia took a step toward him, and Rosie’s hackles bristled up from her back, the auroshe giving a dangerous squeal.

“How could I come before, Lia?” he yelled back over Rosie’s head. “We both know what my father wants with you. Calsta above, I wanted you, and you knew it. Anything I did before would have looked like I was going along with his plan—the one where you end up dead and I end up with an extra soul to patch up the hole in mine. You were there with me when I realized what being bonded to a……a shapeshifter means.”

The word tore out of him like a curse. Like a plea, a prayer, and a scream, all at once.

“I don’t want to die, Lia.” His voice broke. “And yes, I realize that coming here now without Aria makes it look like all I want is to die young, but that’s not so different from what’s going to happen to me if I stay on the island. So I thought I’d come do something good instead.”

Lia waited, Rosie’s low growl sending ripples of goose bumps down her neck. After a moment, the auroshe curved around to look at Mateo for assurance, as if she couldn’t quite believe Lia was the thing he was so scared of. Mateo gave her a soft scratch behind the ears, wilting like the little flower he was as he pulled off his ridiculous tomato-colored sun hat.

His hair had grown out into little curls all over his head. It made Lia suddenly remember another moment Mateo had looked away with such embarrassment, worry, and an undercurrent of despair. He’d been wearing a bathrobe and slippers, surrounded by books about dead herbs with a new hope that somehow he wouldn’t join them. I like you, he’d said. I hadn’t expected that.

Mateo’s voice shook. “I’m… I’m not here to help.”

The emptiness inside Lia yawned wide, and she braced herself, waiting for him to take from her, just like everyone else in this world. The Warlord. Ewan. Tual. Anwei. They’d all taken everything they could, but Mateo could do worse than all of them put together despite his thin frame, his fidgeting hands, the erratic beat of his heart.

“I’m here to beg for your help, Lia,” Mateo’s voice rasped. “You want to talk about choices between good and bad? My father loves me. He’s saved me from being murdered by my own family just because the wrong god touched me. I love him, even if… even if he made me into what I am now.” Mateo was shaking all over, hat in his hand, nothing between him and her makeshift weapon, but he didn’t look away from her eyes. “But he’s gone too far. He’s gone too far, and… I think it’s only going to get worse. I need your help to stop him, Lia.” He thrust a hand into his pocket and pulled something free from the soggy, dirty fabric, then held it out to her. A rock. “My aura is gone because of this. I think it would hide yours too, so I brought it for you.”