Lady Astridia Eremont did not run, or show any outward signs that anything was untoward. She stood very still, very silent, head high like always, hands behind her back. Even soaked through, she was pristine. When she finally began to walk, it was purposeful and steady.
“A pleasure to see you at last,” said Layton, like he was welcoming an old friend. “As beautiful as the day I first saw you.”
She reached Idris’s side and reached out a hand.
“Get up,” she said, in her usual brisk tone. “It is unbecoming for an Eremont to kneel shivering on the ground.”
“So she claimed you at last,” said Layton, watching Idris rise with his mother’s assistance. “I wonder, does that mean the Queen will revoke the wardship? You can go back to Temple Hill like you always wanted, a necromancer controlling the kingdom’s best healers.”
“Rather an Eremont in the Eremont house than a Vonner,” she said, her voice laced with threat. “And he is an Eremont. That is what you wanted, after all.”
Even here, she was radiant and bright, strong-shouldered and proud, facing the Dead-Walker with nothing in her hands but her son’s hand.
“I wanted an heir,” Layton said. “It mattered little who the carrier was. And you produced a fine boy to carry on my line. It is a shame his head is filled with dust.”
Idris felt, in his mother’s palm, something unfamiliar. Then he saw that the vial around her neck was gone. She squeezed his fingers, and he slipped the vial out of her hand and clenched it in his own fist.
“His head is filled with everything he was given,” she said. “His own destiny. A path he has carved alone. Kindness and duty and purpose. Responsibility and patience. Love. All things you could never have given him – would never have given him. You would have moulded him into another bitter hermit in that awful tower, someone to hate what you hate and plot and scheme to achieve your desires. He is not a tool for a blood feud, Layton. He is a man. He is our son. Not another empty puppet for you to control and abuse. And if you do not like that truth, you should have had enough self-control to stop yourself from procreating.”
“You were compliant -”
“I was no older than a child,” Lady Eremont said, and finally she sounded angry. “And had I had any idea who you were, I would have thrown you out of my home without any treatment at all. If I had known what you were going to do to our child I would have stabbed you in the throat and not batted an eye.”
Layton laughed, then. The skull of Johannes Vonner pulsed darkly, the crystal in its mouth glittering.
“It hardly matters,” said Layton. “I found the Eremont child lacking. He does not have the spine to be a true Vonner. He is weak and soft. To be a necromancer is to control life and death and all he wants to do is raise farmers to till fields, like that is the power I gave to him. Well, I do not need an heir anymore. With the armour, with this - “ He gestured to the skull in his hands - “I can do the work of three generations of Vonners. I will not die. My family will not die.”
Lichdom. Idris understood. The skull held necrotic energy from his family line – a perfect receptacle for Layton’s consciousness, for his soul. They fed back to each other. If the Dead-Walker breastplate was eventually going to kill him, it made sense that he would simply embrace that. The crystal, then, was part of the process. The skull held everything Layton wished to keep.
And Idris was now expendable.
“I am not going to stand by and allow you to kill my boy,” said Lady Eremont, her voice shaking. “You will go through me, first.”
“Mother, no,” Idris finally said, holding out a hand, but she stepped out of his grip and settled into her casting stance, her eyes fixed on Layton’s.
“One healer against the Dead-Walker armour?” Layton said, looking amused.
“If I cleanse the armour, can you get close enough to hit it?” she whispered to Idris. He took a deep breath.
“I think so, yes.”
“We get one chance at this, Rissy.”
“I know.”
“I love you.”
“Mother -”
The healer aria chorused around her – Idris did not know how he had ever ignored the sheer power in that sound when it came from her, but it washed through him like a spring gust, calming his nerves, surrounding him with warmth.
“You are going to have to watch your mother die, I am afraid, Idris,” said Layton, and he gripped the skull tighter.
Idris felt the vial in his fist, and he knew immediately what it was.
Every head of the Eremont household was given a draught of this – pure morning root elixir. Pristinely distilled, it had the strength to cure blindness in the correct hands; Idris had seen his grandfather use two drops to close up a farmer’s stomach after he had been gored by a bull, even though the old man’s intestines had been hanging out. That farmer lived until he was ninety-three. It was the stuff of miracles that only an Eremont could use to heal, and Uncle Haylan had cursed it the day he picked Idris up off the forest floor with his foot half-dangling off. Had he been Lord Eremont, he would have been able to save the whole leg. It could have saved King Gael, too. And Uncle Haylan.
In this form, though, and in inexperienced hands, it could sear the skin off an initiate.
Idris did not know what his mother intended for him to do, but he assumed it was nothing benevolent, not if she had given him the entire vial. If two drops could save a man, then the contents of the little glass bottle could likely burn a hole through Layton’s arm.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
What might it do to the Spirit Glass?
But then he looked at the skull, and he knew.
“In times past,” Lady Astridia said, “the kingdom’s first defence against a necromancer was an Eremont.”
And the healer aria sprang from her mouth in a glorious, tuneful siren song, and something bright white and all-encompassing rushed towards Layton. When it hit him, it flickered like a roaring flame against the Spirit Glass and dislodged Layton by a good foot, but he remained standing and shifted into a battle stance. A column of grey smoke surged through the centre of the light; Lady Eremont swirled her hands in a protective motion and the smoke clashed against a wall of white.
Idris shielded his eyes against the heat, the steam rising from the two opposing forces colliding, and he turned his head so he could see his father. Layton’s gaze was fixed on Lady Eremont, his free hand making shapes that Idris had only seen drawn in textbooks, crafting necrotic energy until his arms looked black.
With Black Star in hand, Idris walked.
His spine hurt. The back of his head felt sticky. His nose and eyes were thick and puffy. His stump stung. He was certain he had broken at least two ribs and had internal bleeding. He was tired and hungry and shivering and he wished, so dearly, that Layton would just give up. He would rejoice and sing and embrace his father if such a thing were possible for him to do – but Layton had gone so far, there was no way back from what he had done.
Kurellan had known. He had been willing to save Idris the indignity of killing his own father and he had given up his life for it. Idris was not going to waste that, now. Enough had been lost.
He stood aside and reached into his coat, and he held tight to the trinket Willard had given him, the tattered ribbon he had worn in the spring when his life had been simpler, and he thought hard.
Willard, he thought, I need to move into a different room.
And he felt the tingle of fae magic, and moss sprouted under his feet – and there was a falling sensation that swooped through his stomach and up out of his scalp – and then Willard was there, breathing hard, holding Idris’s arm, in the yellow fae light.
“Where to?” he said.
“About ten feet,” said Idris. “Towards the castle keep.”
“Um...” Willard screwed up his face, as if trying to peer out of the fae realm and back into the mortal realm. “... behind your pa?”
“That sounds good, yes.”
“One moment.”
Willard closed his eyes. Within moments, the swooping feeling went in the opposite direction, and Idris felt pressure on the top of his head, and he fell upwards, somehow, and there was Layton, hot and dark in front of him.
Idris hardly even thought about it. He lifted his right hand and slammed it down, glass vial and all, onto the skull of Johannes Vonner.
There was a terrible screeching that pierced right through Idris’s brain, a mixture of the death aria and a high-pitched howl. Layton, stunned, shouted and let go of the skull, which was melting beneath the morning thistle tincture like candle wax. At the same time, whatever latent power had been living in the skull suddenly exploded.
Idris heard Lady Eremont gasp, and Layton slammed down on top of him like he had been hit by lightning. A swirl of black swarmed through the healer light towards Idris’s mother. She threw up another light wall but the force barrelled right over her, hurling her to the ground some feet away. Idris could feel the residue from the vial eating into his own skin, through the glass cuts, but he did not care.
Layton screamed and clawed himself back up, leaving Idris lying on the ground. His father tried to wipe the white liquid off his hands, onto his trousers, but all that did was spread the burn through the fabric. He gazed wildly for the skull, the crystal, and found the former turning to liquid and the latter in a thousand pieces on the ground.
“What did you do?” he screamed at Idris.
At once, he looked demonic. Whatever element of his humanity he had been holding onto was gone. His own face, once indeterminably aged, was sunken and sallow, almost like a skull itself. The breastplate clung to him like a second skin, and Idris saw how thin Layton’s neck seemed, how grey his lips. If the skull had been protecting Layton, that protection was gone.
Idris got back up and swung his hammer as hard as he could.
This time, instead of bouncing clean off the aria, the head of Black Star sank through it like a stone through quicksand. The force required to push it inwards, however, made Idris’s arms shake so hard that he thought the joints in his shoulders would shatter. Layton reached out, grabbed the shaft of Black Star and tried to push it away, but Idris screamed from his stomach and forced the head on. The aria rang in his ears like a million guttural screams. The very air around them fizzed and steamed.
Then, like a flower bud opening, the hammerhead began to peel.
Idris managed to gulp in enough breath to keep screaming, but that was all he could think to do. If he stopped pressing, it was over. If he kept pressing, he was going to fall into the white-hot terror of the disintegrating Spirit Glass. Layton was desperately trying to keep the hammer from searing into him, but it was no use. The glass ribcage opened.
Everything was noise. The wail of fractured Spirit Glass drilled deep into Idris’s chest until he was certain that he would never be able to hear anything else. He could smell the flesh on his hands burning, see it turning red around his fingers, then purple. He wondered how many layers of skin he could lose before there was nothing left but muscle.
Layton fell backwards. Idris knelt on top of him, driving the hammer down, tears streaming from his eyes. There was half of the head left. The breastplate was open like an autopsy incision. Layton gazed up, right at Idris, oddly silent while Idris continued to roar through the pain and the fury and the sheer exertion of what he was doing. It looked, for a while, like his father might say something – an apology, or a curse, or even a laugh.
The death aria that Idris knew to be Layton’s surged and swelled.
Then, at once, there was a burst like a firework, and the Spirit Glass erupted into sand.
Black Star’s shaft, devoid of its head, clattered uselessly to the ground. Beneath Idris lay Layton’s scorched, emaciated chest. It was grey-green with rot and ruin; each rib was visible. Necrosis surged through his veins like blood.
Exhausted, Idris flopped down onto his father’s shoulder. Everything hurt. The only thing he wanted was sleep.
*
It was silent, for a while. The ringing in his ears ceased, and the world became yellow and dewy, and Idris lay in the fae realm, quite content, warm and whole.
He tilted his head. The Fairy Queen sat on a gigantic toadstool, watching him.
She was a strange creature, indefinable in appearance. At some points, Idris was sure that her hair was blonde, then red, then darkest black. Her eyes were like kaleidoscopes. In her hands she held the poppet of Idris.
“Hello, Dead-Talker Eremont, Idris Yanis of Gleedsale,” she said, sounding amused.
Idris was too tired to answer. He sat up, looked down at himself. His clothes had been replaced by rough-spun cotton garments, like Willard had given him when he had visited the nest, and his stump leg had a golden foot on the end. He wiggled his toes and was pleased to see them move.
“Well, this has been quite exciting,” said the Fairy Queen. “I do believe you have fulfilled the terms of our bargain. All of the Spirit Glass is gone, and you wielded it with pure intent. A better servant I could not have chosen myself. A Vonner to destroy what a Vonner helped to make. Yes, a fine circle you have made.”
She placed the poppet at Idris’s feet.
“This belongs to you.”
Curious, he leant forwards and picked it up. It was a fine little doll, quite simple in its likeness to him, its hair made out of his own. He saw that the Fairy Queen had resewn the foot on. He held it to his heart and sighed, and he felt a great weight lift out of his heart that he had not noticed he was carrying.
“You are going to sleep for some time,” she said. He nodded. “Would you like to know what is happening?”
Idris shook his head. If he was going to be there for a while, he wanted to forget.
“Then I will send you into the deep, if that is what you want.”
He closed his eyes and nodded.
He felt light, then, and made of dust.
