“Listen to me. If I can return to you, I will. I swear it. Nothing else—” He cut off, abruptly, and the arms tightened. “But I have to do this. There’s no time to explain, but there’s no one else who can. I have to go. You have to let me go.”
I just shook my head, my hands gripping his forearms, feeling like the world was shattering around me. I didn’t care. He was going to have to pry me off. He was going to have to—
“Listen.” It was gentler this time, and he somehow turned me around, made me look up at him. I was crying now, great ugly sobs that racked my body and tore at my mind, but I didn’t even try to hide them.
“I can’t,” I said brokenly. “Please don’t . . . I can’t. . . .”
A filthy hand pushed the muddy hair out of my face. “I don’t believe that. I don’t believe there’s anything you can’t do.” He finally did something other than fight me, and the kiss tasted of smoke and ash and spent magic. “I think you might be the strongest person I know.”
I shook my head. I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t, that he was wrong, that he’d always been wrong about me. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t seem to say anything, even when he pulled away. And I felt something inside break and shatter and splinter. I collapsed, falling to my knees, staring at the ground because I couldn’t watch him walk away.
And then stagger and fall, hitting the ground unconscious a few yards in front of me.
I looked up, shocked and horrified, expecting to see a Svarestri looming over us. But instead—
“Rosier,” I breathed.
“Damn boy.” The demon was holding his hand. “Jaw like a rock.”
And then he shoved something into my hand.
I looked down to see a scrap of parchment. It looked like it had been torn out of a book, with careful, cramped medieval writing in the center, and a manic scrawl along the edges. I stared at it, utterly confused. “What is this?”
“The spell.”
I looked up. “What?”
“The countercurse. I rewrote it in the common tongue. Emrys can put it on himself. When the soul arrives, have him read it.”
He actually started to stride away, before I got my shit together and grabbed his leg. “What? Why? Rosier—”
“I have the same abilities he does,” he told me testily. “I’m the one who passed them on to him! And whatever else they did to me, the demon council can’t block fey magic.”
“That doesn’t explain this.” I held up the paper. “What’s going on?”
Unlike his son, he didn’t try to lie to me. “I don’t have enough strength to come back.”
“What?”
“I came on this journey to benefit me,” he said abruptly as I stared at him. “I told myself it was for the good of my people, but that’s a lie. I wanted to prove everyone wrong, to show them I was my father’s son, after all. Not bothering to think that I was someone’s father, too.
“I never acted like it. I never had a father; I had a taskmaster who was never satisfied with anything I did or was. I hated him, but I’ve treated Emrys . . .” His jaw clenched. “Pritkin. I’ve treated Pritkin just the same. All his life. I can’t change that, but I can do this.”
“Rosier . . .”
“Immortal she named him. Let me be!”
He jerked away, and strode into the fire before I could stop him.
Chapter Fifty-nine
I just stayed there, on my knees, staring into the fire until it seared my retinas, I didn’t know why. And then a passing witch jostled me, and slowly, sluggishly, I came back to life. In the middle of a scene of carnage and chaos, unsure where to go or how to get there.
“Here!” A witch, a dishwater blonde all of three feet high, poked me. “Get him on here!”
I looked around to see that she was pulling a wonky contraption behind her, consisting of a broom on one side and a bunch of blackened sticks on the other, with a few bench seats in between. It formed a slightly lopsided, floating gurney already piled high with moaning bodies. It didn’t look likely to take another, but Pritkin was out cold, and I couldn’t carry him.
“Help me,” I said breathlessly, and together we somehow maneuvered a hundred and eighty pounds of muscle onto the pile. It left the crazy contraption barely a couple of inches off the ground, but it was still mobile. More than me.