The attacker used his head as a battering ram and charged into Mathuin, knocking him to the floor. Mathuin was an artist, after all. Not a fighter. He was woefully outmatched.
I crouched near the spot where the first man fell. His eyes were darting around in terror, and he scratched helplessly at the knife as life leaked slowly away from him. I had no magic of my own here, but I could still feel the magic in his blood, calling me. Tempting me.
I had to at least try, I told myself, and I put my subtle hand into the pool. I couldn’t feel the blood, but I could feel the magic.
“Torquent,” I whispered. Twist.
Shrieks. Thumps to the floor.
“Dirumpo.” Break.
Bones snapping, shattering.
“Scissura.” Rend.
There were no sounds from the soldiers anymore besides the gurgling of the blood in their lungs.
Mathuin stared at them. He’d won, and he had no idea how.
Aurelia. Aurelia. Come back, Aurelia.
No, I replied. Not yet.
Mathuin lifted Rosetta into his arms. “I’ve got you, Little Fox,” he said, kissing her hair.
He took her to the clearing where he’d entered the Gray, laying the semiconscious girl out in the exact same position as her dead body, next to an anxious Galantha, who was holding the portal open from the other side.
“Come on, now, Rosetta,” he said, curling up next to her. I could see the two realities in parallel, sliding closer and closer together, as if about to realign.
But there was a rustle from within the perimeter trees, and one of the Renaltan soldiers shambled into the clearing, his muscles twisted and his bones crooked. His eyes shone bright and malevolent from within his blood-caked face, his rage giving him the fuel to move when he should have died already three times over.
“Witches,” he mumbled through a mouthful of shattered teeth.
Galantha became a storm of white fire and feathers, diving through the portal on her side only to appear on ours as a great snowy owl. She let out a terrible, earsplitting screech and plunged toward the soldier, talons open, sharp and gleaming. She made several swoops, screeching and slashing.
“Galantha!” Mathuin called. “The portal is closing behind you!”
Galantha made one final swipe across the soldier’s neck, then shifted back to her human shape to push him from the perimeter of the Cradle into the arms of the waiting Ebonwilde. When he fell, his severed head rolled onto the edge of the mirrored plane and came to rest staring sightlessly at his own body.
On the portal plane, Galantha had crawled up alongside her sister, embracing her lifeless body on one side while Mathuin held her still-breathing body on the other.
“She can’t cross over,” Mathuin said. “She’s going to die—again.”
Above, the only piece of the comet remaining in the sky was its long, silvery tail.
Rosetta’s second self took her last breaths suspended between her sister and the boy they both loved, between the material plane and the spectral plane, between the Now and the After. They’d managed to change the location of her death, but not the outcome. Her soul had already begun its separation from her cooling body—I could see it, just as I used to when ghosts haunted me. But now I saw it in striking detail, from both sides at once. From the spectral side, a hundred thousand silvery strings that had once been tethering the soul to the body suddenly released their hold. Free of their encumbrance, the strings flowed together into an amorphous shape that slowly molded itself into the form of a fox. Saffron, from the way Rosetta’s spirit was looking at it, with surprise and sweet affection. The fox pranced around Rosetta’s feet and then stepped away, waiting, as if to ask, Are you coming?
Rosetta’s ghost was about to follow the creature when Galantha gave a wrenching cry. “No!”
From her side, she reached toward the spectral fox, her fingers tracing patterns so quickly, it was impossible to follow them, and the amorphous silver animal reformed itself as a sphere in Galantha’s grasp.
Orb in hand, Galantha dragged Rosetta’s spirit back to her physical body, pinning it there by etching a feral spell onto her skin with her nail. “As long as we have her blood, we can keep her soul and her subtle body together. Only her physical body has to die.”
“Galantha—” Mathuin started.
“Give me her blood and the bell,” she demanded. “I have to pass the wardenship on.”
“You can’t do this, Galantha. The blood will weaken you. You won’t be able to hold the portal open—”