All That Falls

35 A Daughter's Last Stand

Lark would be furious. I should make sure I tell him that this was all my idea and not hers at all. I heard it all from Gemini the next morning when I awoke in a warm inn somewhere I didn't recognize.

"It's not that I'm afraid of my nephew," she was clarifying while fussing over her unwieldy hair at a nearby vanity table, "but, well, maybe I am just a little."

She whirled around to face me.

"Are you even listening?" She snapped.

"Where are we?" I asked, rising slowly from the bed and padding over to the window to peer down on rich, fertile farmland as far as the eye could see.

It was early morning, if the workers in the field were any indication. All of them weathered from a life spent in manual labor, straw hats atop their heads and soft shirts beneath their long brown jumpers. Brown.

A lump settled itself in my throat and I turned, slowly, back to face Gemini.

"Where are we?" I repeated myself, my tone firmer than it had been before.

"You said you wanted to speak to your mother," Gemini answered with a shrug. "I couldn't tell if you were serious or delirious. So I brought you here. It's an inn right on the border of your mother's court. If you truly wish to see her, you can simply step outside and be on your way and how would I stop you? If you've changed your mind, we can have a nice breakfast and head back to that infernal apartment. The choice is yours."

She shrugged again, as if the matter truly were of no consequence to her. I stared at her for a moment, trying to sense the trick.

"That's it?" I asked. "But Lark—"

"Lark will rage for centuries if something happens to you and likely, it will start a war rather than prevent one, but, as we seem to be on the path to war already..."

She trailed off with another shrug that showed her belief that I truly couldn't possibly make things any worse than they already were.

"Out of curiosity," she spoke into the silence that fell when I lost myself in thought, "what happened back there?"

I blinked at her.

"One moment, a portal to the mortal realm rips open in the center of a busy market. The next, it's closed and you're muttering some nonsense about your mother before collapsing," she said.

"I-I closed it. I don't know how but—"

"That's powerful magic, girl. Two days ago, you couldn't craft a simple shield to defend yourself," she reminded me and I winced. "Tell me what you were feeling."

"What I was feeling?"

"When you closed it, what emotions?"

"Hate," I spat, remembering. "Rage, Fear."

"Powerful emotions, indeed. Did you feel him?"

My gaze shot up to hers.

"Your power is greater when he is around," she told me. "His is weaker when you're not."

"It is?"

"Infinitesimally. Lark is a very powerful Fae who chooses to use that power sparingly and cleverly so any reduction of his power isn't all that noticeable if you don't know where to look."

My lips parted and I turned away in thought.

"If you tell him I called him powerful, I'll call you a liar," she added.

"You said before that there was a chance that I could stop all this if I went to her," I reminded her, still thinking.

"I think it's possible that all this tearing into the mortal realm is an effort to find you," Gemini answered slowly. "They stopped entirely during the time you were being held at the Bone Court, a time in which she knew where you were. They resumed again when you disappeared and, most recently, she tore one right into the Court of Wanderers, right into the very marketplace where we were. You don't think it odd, girl, that these things always seem to pop up either to draw you out or right near where you are?"

"Hellscape," I murmured, eyes widening in realization as I put it all together. The rifts from before I met Lark were all over the mortal world but I went to them every time. I hadn't known they'd stopped while I was at the Bone Court but now that I did, it put the following ones into more perspective. The rift that tore into Hellscape while we were there, when I saw Wyn on the other side. The rift that tore into the marketplace of the Court of Wanderers. I closed my eyes, wondering how I hadn't seen it before. "She isn't going to stop."

Gemini didn't answer so I knew I was right.

"She's tearing the world apart to find me," I breathed in awe.

"She is," Gemini nodded her agreement this time. "But it's entirely possible Lark would tear it apart to get you back."

He wouldn't. I knew it and she did, too. He would want to and Gemini was right. He would rage for centuries if something happened to me. But Lark wouldn't break the world for anything. Not when everything he had ever done, not when every move he ever made, was to save it.

"I can stop this," I said, mind racing at the implications of all that I had learned. "All I have to do is go to her and it all stops. The rifts, the risks of exposure, the destruction of the Divide. It stops."

"Maybe. Maybe not."

"If I don't go, she keeps at this and then eventually this realm is exposed to the mortal realm once and for all. More beasts might get through, more people might die. A war might start."

"And if you go, you may never leave again."

One life, my life, for the lives of many, for the salvation of the Divide. She might try to control me, keep me under her spell like she did to my father, but I am better equipped to deal with that than he ever was. She was powerful, supremely so, but I had magic too, magic from her, and I could use it. I might be alright. I might survive, and someday, I might escape.

Maybe this was my fate. Maybe Lark only saved me all those years ago so that I could save him, save all of them, now. He had been exiled, he had been sentenced to death, to save me. He had given everything to do the right thing. So I could too.

"You said she fancied herself your friend," I said then, looking at Gemini with determination. "Could you take me to her?"

Gemini's lips slanted into a frown.

"The last time I saw her I was complicit in her newborn daughter's kidnapping," Gemini recalled. "I can't imagine she will be pleased to see me."

"Even if you're bringing me back to her?"

Gemini raised a brow, watching me closely.

"You're going to do this?" She asked.

"Tell him I'm sorry," I said, steeling myself because I had to. "Tell him I had to."

"I will."

She reached for my hand and I took a deep breath. I sent out a feeling, huge and raw and real. I'd never told Lark how I felt, not truly, but maybe an outpouring of the love I held in my heart could reach him wherever he was in this court. I felt that tug a moment later. A question. I pushed it aside and focused on my task. Reaching for Gemini, I felt his panic when I didn't respond, just before I grasped her hand and the world squeezed shut around us.