With my other hand over my chest, I willed any power in me to transfer to him. Instantly, I felt a gathering of energy toward my hand, a swelling of something deeper than the beat of my heart or the blood in my veins. It was whatever force kept me alive, and I sent it to him through my hand.
Emptying out so much of myself immediately took its toll. A wave of dizziness washed over me, but I kept my hand in place, holding on to him with only tendrils of hope to connect us.
A piece of my own soul must have transferred too, because suddenly I was part of him. Whatever of Simon remained.
How very empty he was, little more than a shell of who he had been. Hoping for anything I could latch on to, I dug deeper and through our connection, found remnants of his soul, scattered like leaves in the wind. His worries still remained, stronger now with no reason or thought to control them. No wonder he had been shaking. I felt those same emotions too, and they filled me with ice. I understood now why he didn’t want to take the throne, how he feared he’d be less than he should. Then I saw myself through his eyes. Not as I was now, but as he feared I might become with magic. Corrupted, vengeful, rotted from within. With gray scarred lines on my face, one for each death I had caused.
Just like Endrick.
I recoiled from that with so much force, so much terror, that I returned to myself beside the river. Nothing had changed. I leaned in closer, hoping he could sense that I was here with him, very much alive, and that I needed him to stay alive too.
“Simon, you come back to me!” I shouted. “I can’t fight alone!”
“His finger twitched!” Trina cried. “Kestra, keep going!”
I wanted to, but there wasn’t much of me left either. Simon was borrowing more than half of my soul; he was feeding on my emotions, my physical strength. He was emptying me out just to keep a thread of himself connected to reality.
But with that thread, he must have been aware of my presence inside him, for I felt his soul wrap around mine as if it were an object of curiosity. He needed to do this, but every piece of him that was being pulled away took more of me too.
That piece of me entered the world of Endrick’s eternal punishment and it was worse than anything I could have imagined. Nothing was here
but a dark empty field, where hundreds of others who had been given similar fates wandered, forever restless. They were in a dense maze of trees, burned to nothing but blackened sticks in sterilized soil. Seeking to cure a hunger that could not be filled, searching for relief from pain that could not be healed. These were the souls who wandered All Spirits Forest. It was more than a prison for those who had tried to take shelter there during the War of Devastation, many of them Loelle’s people. It was also the worst sort of prison Lord Endrick could have created. Simon would go here too.
“Kestra?” In this vision, I saw a man staring at me, familiar but part of a distant memory. He was clothed as I last remembered him, but entirely without color and with gray wisps fluttering from his body, each loss a slow deterioration of what it was to be him.
“Darrow?” I blinked hard. “Father?”
“This is no place for you,” he said. “Get out while you can!” And he interlocked his fingers, shoving a rush of energy toward me that thrust me back into my own reality, even as I clutched for one last glimpse of him and watched him vanish before my eyes.
I was here again by the side of the river, kneeling over Simon and now fully aware of his destination if I could not pull him back.
I shook Simon’s body, then put both hands on his chest again, willing to sacrifice my whole life if it saved him from that place, from that doomed forest. “Come back,” I ordered him. “Now!”
And with a final burst of magic, something rushed into him with so much force that it knocked my hands from his chest and rolled me backward. When I opened my eyes, Simon was staring at me, confused, but slowly becoming aware of his surroundings. It was him.
I sat up again and touched his face. He whispered my name, but I wasn’t finished. I couldn’t be finished because the wound in his chest was open again. I hadn’t pulled him back together only to lose him to physical injury now.
My hand was shaking when I placed it near the wound. I tried to pull the injury to myself, but it wouldn’t come. I put one hand over the other, ignoring his whispers for me to stop, ignoring the warnings in my own head that I’d gone too far.
“Enough!” From behind, Trina pulled me away from him. “Kestra, you’ve done enough.”
I shook my head and tried to get back to his side, but I had no strength for it. When I looked at her, I realized we were no longer alone. It wasn’t only Huge and Trina here. A man on horseback in a brown uniform with a blue sash was here along with another dozen Halderians.
I spoke to the man on horseback, assuming he was in charge. “You can bind his wound now—you can save him.”
Trina addressed the same man. “Commander Mindall, he needs your help.”
“I respect his courage, but fixing this injury would require too many of our supplies. We’ll use them on our own men.”
Somehow, I found it in me to look up at the commander and say, “He is the most important of all your men.”
“Kes, no,” Simon mumbled, though he was weaker than I was and could not stop me.
Simon’s satchel was still around his shoulder. Trina dug through it to find his ring, then held it up as I said, “King Gareth chose this boy as his successor. Simon has the king’s ring and if you look closely, you will recognize the sword he wears. He is your king, and you will do everything in your power to save his life now.”
All eyes turned to Mindall, who took a few deliberate breaths before saying, “Give this boy everything he needs to stay alive.”
Simon’s eyes fluttered as he was carried away. I didn’t care if he was angry with me. He was alive.