The Myths of Ophelia (The Curse of Ophelia #4)

Chapter 32

Chapter Thirty-Two

Ophelia

“Looks like it isn’t broken and it set well,” Rina said, gentle fingers assessing my wounded ankle. She fluttered hastily about the dining room of the inn, barely taking time to stop before any of us.

She’d gotten Lancaster seated atop a table in the back corner, Mora laying on two pushed together beside him. The male, his shirt off and wound ghastly in his side, tracked his sister’s every breath as she tried to hide the pain lancing through her shoulder.

Knee bouncing impatiently, Cypherion sat before the dining room’s lone window, my sister, Erista, and Lyria attempting to distract him as he nervously awaited Malakai’s party’s return—with Vale, hopefully.

Thanks to Tolek tossing me on his horse with him, I was able to use my Angellight to heal my injured ankle almost all the way as we rode back to the inn, despite the rapid pace we kept to get the others back quickly.

I wasn’t quite sure how the magic worked, but I tucked away the knowledge that it could both heal an injury—which I’d learned before—and singe the dead. That one sent a chill down to my bones not even Angellight could warm.

I grabbed Rina’s hand as she flitted by, and her gaze snapped to me. “Thank you,” I said. “How can I help?”

She pursed her lips, evaluating her two patients. “I need to get the splinters out of Lancaster’s wound.” She dropped her voice, frustration burning in her narrowed stare. “Mora’s is worse, though. It’s…it’s nothing I’ve ever seen.”

“Show me,” I said.

With Tolek bracing me, I limped over my sore ankle, stopping before the fae.

Rina spoke with calm authority. “The blood isn’t clotting. But it’s running more…congealed than it should.” She dropped her voice. “It’s almost like poison was in that bite.”

The fae female tried to suppress a shiver. “It’s fine.” A sheen of sweat gleamed on her forehead, her skin gray.

“Mora,” Rina said softly, nervously, “I’m going to try to put together a tonic for you, but I may need to get more supplies.”

Through slitted eyes, Mora tossed a glance her brother’s way. “Fix him first.”

“No,” he argued. “You’re much worse.”

“Fix him”—she inhaled sharply—“then he can use his magic to keep me stable while you figure out a remedy.”

Rina sighed, looking to Lancaster. “She has a point.”

“Fine,” Lancaster grumbled. “Be quick.”

“I’ll be as quick as I can,” Santorina assured with as little bite as possible as she gathered supplies.

I evaluated the ebbing veins through Mora’s shoulder, how they pressed against her skin with a sentience rarely seen.

“Those corpses seemed as if they were enchanted by something,” I muttered to Tolek, not bothering to drop my voice since Mora would hear regardless. Damn fae senses.

“Valyrie must have charmed them to guard the power she left behind,” Tol said. “Until the chosen arrived and fought through that twisted version of the races. The physical duels. The metaphorical poison if you grabbed the emblem yourself. The defense of the Angel.”

I blew out a breath. It had all been right there, every stage, but not in a way we could have expected. “How did Annellius do all of this?”

“Perhaps he wasn’t alone,” he offered.

But Vale had seen him in one of her readings, on his knees and begging. Very much isolated. Which meant those who had helped him hadn’t survived.

The wound on Mora’s shoulder beat.

I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t trust it . But the fate of what might happen if I remained complacent flashed before my eyes. This horrid bite of the dead could infect Mora, her queen’s bargain tethering her to life until it tore her apart, her spirit remaining restless in our land.

Though I still did not want to hand the emblems over to the fae, I couldn’t allow Mora to suffer.

“Can I try something?” I asked.

Her eyes were closed, but without even asking what, she nodded. Whether it was implicit trust or the verge of unconsciousness, I wasn’t sure.

Carefully, slowly, I called up Damien’s strand of Angellight—the one I was the most connected to. It pooled in the air before me as I watched the shimmering layer of gold with a steady focus. Tolek and Lancaster did, too, the latter guarded.

This magic had healed me—but the untamed side of it had also destroyed. As I directed golden light toward Mora, I prayed to the Angel it stemmed from that it would behave.

It hesitated at first—as if something more than a lingering Angel charm infected the fae’s skin—and sniffed around the wound like an unsure pup. Then, it soared into her.

Mora gasped.

“I’m sorry!” I rushed out.

“Knock it off, Mystique!” Lancaster roared as Rina scolded him for moving.

But Mora gritted out one word: “ No .”

The gold trickled around her wound, wrapping it like a sheer bandage. But through that sheen, tendrils were visible. Little offshoots winding through her veins, targeting whatever taint festered there.

I didn’t understand how it was working—it was only my will controlling it—but I asked, “It’s helping?”

Mora’s brow relaxed. “A bit.”

I didn’t know how long we stood there. Cypherion paced the room, checking on us every so often and demanding we recount our tale. Jezebel, Erista, and Lyria pressed for details. Rina worked on Lancaster, claiming there were hundreds of impossibly small shards of cypher in his wound, and I worked on Mora.

Until the door to the dining room flew open, and we all braced ourselves. In my mind, the shrieks of the dead echoed.

But it was Dax’s broad shouldered-form that filled the frame. And in his arms?—

“Cypherion?” the Engrossian General shouted, Vale curled against his chest and Celissia walked at his side.

Cyph, striding swiftly around the tables hosting the fae, was in front of Dax in a moment. “Vale?” His eyes snapped up to Dax and Celissia. “What happened to her?”

Behind them, Mila and Barrett pushed through the door before the Engrossians could answer.

“By the fucking Spirits,” Tolek cursed, and we both raced forward—Mora assuring us she was okay to rest now—to where Malakai’s arms draped around their shoulders. The reek of blood stung the air, and Malakai could barely stand.

Tol reached to help support him but Barrett snapped, “Don’t touch his back.”

“His back?” I asked, scampering around Mila. And I gasped. Tolek swore viciously.

“It’s not that bad, Tol,” Malakai slurred, attempting to lift his head, but it only bobbed back down. His entire body winced. “Not like before.”

Before .

Rage roared through me as I took in the torn, ragged flesh. That’s what Malakai’s back had become. The scars from his imprisonment were shredded, and three large lashes ripped the surface, turning his back into a cross work of bloody, gleaming skin.

I never saw Malakai’s wounds this fresh—when I’d found him in the cave nearly a year ago, everything had been healed. I’d witnessed plenty of ghastly injuries in my life, but nothing like this.

Nothing that gave a new life to the wrath beneath my skin.

But with it, nausea swept through me. How had tonight gone so wrong? How had so much blood been spilled? And all for these emblems we didn’t even understand—one we didn’t even find. For the Angels who seemed to think us their puppets.

“What the fuck happened?” I growled.

“Titus happened,” Mila ground out.

Santorina was already preparing a table for Malakai, laying down towels. “Put him here.”

But Mila swept the scene. “I can take him,” she offered. At Rina’s nervous look she added, “I dealt with worse during the first war.”

Santorina wrung her hands. “Okay. Take whatever you need.” She nodded to the bar, strewn with her supplies.

“Thank you,” Mila said, a sigh of relief floating through her words. “Barrett? Tolek?”

Together, they helped a barely conscious Malakai through the dining room and up the stairs. I wasn’t sure how they managed to get him all this way, but I was grateful they had.

“Cypherion?” Vale stirred, voice timid. We whirled to face her—now in Cyph’s arms—as her eyes blinked open slowly. “It hurts.”

“What hurts, Stargirl?”

“My soul,” she whimpered. My heart squeezed in my chest. “Like a piece was cleaved off.”

Cypherion’s brows pulled together. His gaze drifted across Vale, down the powder blue chiffon gown draped gracefully around her, and that was when I saw them, too. The crimson stains.

Rage darkened Cyph’s voice. “What happened?”

“It’s not her blood,” Celissia answered. “It’s Titus’s.”

My breath left me in a whoosh . “Titus?” I asked. Cyph looked between Vale and the Engrossians as if reluctant to take his eyes off her.

Dax’s lips pressed into a line, and he mouthed, “She killed him.”

The whole room fell silent.

Vale had murdered a chancellor— her chancellor. Another gone. I looked up at Tolek as he reentered the room, eyes hard. Worried. Jezebel, Erista, and Santorina—even the fae—were all still, as if the heaviness of this new threat weighed on everyone.

With Titus dead, who would come for us? What punishment waited?

But Vale shuddered into Cyph’s arms, whispering again in a voice so broken, “It hurts.”

Her soul , she’d said. Her soul hurt. And Titus had died.

It wasn’t a physical injury, nor was it sadness. It was something deep within Vale that ached, that felt like a piece had been sliced off, because the chancellor had bound them on a soul level through the tattoo on her shoulder.

And to kill him was the only way to sever that oath. The result…something irreparable torn within her.

Reluctantly, my eyes dropped to my own tattoo, the ink beating an ominous tune on my arm. And then my gaze lifted to the ceiling, as if I could see Malakai’s matching North Star resting in that bed above.

A warm hand rubbed my shoulder, and I swallowed thickly at Tolek’s comfort, shoving down the fear writhing within me. The fear this entire night planted.

“Vale,” I said softly, limping toward her and Cypherion, “do you need a healer for anything?”

Her head rolled to the side. The tear tracks on her cheeks glistened in the mystlight. “Ophelia,” she muttered. “I have something for you.”

“For me?”

With tremendous effort, she lifted the hand clutched to her chest. I stepped closer, palm outstretched.

And she tipped her hand toward mine, an abstract gemstone tumbling between us. It glinted an array of deep sapphires with iridescent rainbows in the light.

Instantly, my skinned burned in welcome. A slice of something both familiar and foreign slid into place in the gaps within my spirit.

Based on the jagged bit of gold on the bottom, it might have been ripped from a setting in a necklace, or maybe a statue. And though I had no clue how Vale had found it, I knew exactly what it was.

“Valyrie’s heart,” I muttered, awe coating my words. Blistering heat spread through my palm, up my arm, soaking away a bit of the fearful chill that had claimed me.

“The Fated Lovers,” Vale exhaled.

As she said it, I looked closer. The crystal wasn’t an abstract form. It did appear to be taken from something, and it was worn with age, but it almost looked like two individuals wrapped around one another.

Turning back toward Cypherion and letting her eyes fall closed again, Vale breathed, “I hope you didn’t go to the catacombs. I tried to write to tell you I had it, but Titus found out. Spied on me and Harlen. Think that’s how he put together what he was planning. I’m sorry.”

Her words were thick with sleep, so I didn’t bother to tell her we had gone to the catacombs. That it had been an utter disaster and a pointless mission. Based on the warning in her slurred words, it seemed she knew what waited down there.

I didn’t ask her now, though.

Instead, I said, “Don’t be sorry about anything, Vale. Thank you.” I curled my fingers around the emblem. “Thank you for getting this for us. Perhaps later, you can tell me how you managed it.”

She nodded, those silent tears still slipping down her cheeks.

“We’re so happy you’re back. Why don’t you take her upstairs, Cyph?” I offered.

Vale didn’t need a healer. No one but time and perhaps the man who held her could mend the wound to her soul.

Cypherion nodded. “Let’s go, Stargirl.”

As they left, Barrett came back downstairs with a list of things Mila requested. Malakai’s blood was smeared across his clothes, dampening the dark fabric. Lyria helped him, disappearing upstairs, arms laden with shredded stretches of linen, a bowl of water, and whatever ointments Rina recommended for later.

Celissia turned to Santorina, her eggplant-colored gown torn around the hem. “Can I help with anything?”

“What do you know of healing?” Rina asked, not unkindly.

The Engrossian queen-to-be fidgeted with the hatchet at her waist. “My family has a rich healing practice. I’ve inherited much and studied at our citadel.”

It wasn’t the magic of the Bodymelders or the fae, but it was expertise. Santorina visibly sagged at the offer. “I’d love help monitoring Mora.” Celissia nodded, following Rina’s muttered directions in the corner of the room.

My head swam, but I clenched my eyes for a moment and fought to hold it all together. Mora, Lancaster, Malakai. Vale—Titus.

Another dead chancellor. Another possibly fractured alliance. Wounded warriors and fae in my own team, new scars on our souls to recover from. And a mounting burst of power within my own veins that I didn’t know how to trust.

After a deep breath, I turned to Dax. “What happened?”

He recounted how the Engrossian dinner with Titus had been interrupted when the chancellor learned Malakai and Mila had infiltrated his manor. That they were escorted by Starsearcher guards to a seeing chamber. That they didn’t know exactly what had happened to Vale before, but she’d been seemingly unconscious upon the floor, and Celissia had woken her while everyone else was distracted.

“He did what?” I asked, voice barely more than a whisper, when Dax got to the part where Malakai had volunteered to take the punishment for the others. The air in my lungs compressed, so much pressure squeezing and trying to pop them.

He’d been tortured for two years. He’d been whipped and burned and taunted. And yet, when the people he loved were shoved to the end of that leather strap, he kneeled before it. Bile stung the back of my throat at the thought.

There had been so much blood on him. So much lost.

“We need to set up a guard tonight,” I forced through a thick throat. “In case someone comes looking for us after Titus.”

At the hoarseness in my voice, Dax asked, “Ophelia?”

The shrieks of the dead warriors pressed down on me, the ghostly drafts of their spirits burning to ash warring in the air.

“And we have to get out of this territory as quickly as possible. Once everyone is healed, we can’t waste any time.”

I was tired of us losing. Of innocent people being tormented for this sick game among the Angels.

“Alabath,” Tolek said softly.

“I need a minute,” I said, striding from the inn with as sure a step as I could muster before anyone could follow—though I knew one person would.

I wound down the path leading toward the vineyard, leaving behind the room I’d been grateful to see earlier but that now reeked of blood. Leaving behind the memories of tattered and torn flesh, of mangled screams from withered corpses frozen in the last, desperate moments of life.

Or at least, I tried.

With each blink, they followed. With each inhale, the stains clouded the air. With each step, a dozen charged after me, chains chiming around their bones. The ones that had locked them in that prison beneath the earth and the ones figuratively capturing their souls.

I walked all the way down the path surrounding this edge of Valyn until I reached the line of willowing branches that opened onto bare grapevines.

“Alabath,” Tolek finally said when I showed no sign of stopping.

“Need air,” I clipped.

His hand—so warm and steady and full of life—gripped my arm, gently tugging me to a stop in the shadows of a cypher. “We can get air right here.”

He spun me toward him, and I tried my hardest to drop my gaze to the speckled gray stone, but in the night those spots looked like dark blood frozen on the surface. My eyes instantly snapped up, locking with Tolek’s.

A wild wind whipped through the trees, and over Tolek’s shoulder, a waving branch became a hunched, decayed figure.

I flinched, clenching my eyes shut.

“Don’t run away.” Tolek stepped close enough that his heat warmed my chilled body. “Was it Malakai? Or the emblem?”

“No,” I muttered. My breath was tight in my chest. The air prickled with misty rain, curling the ends of my hair and sticking to my skin.

“Talk to me.”

“ This is all my fault ,” I snarled. In the distance, thunder rumbled.

“It isn’t?—”

“Don’t tell me it isn’t because it is, Tolek! Everyone—my father, the council, countless soldiers and allies—have died because of this curse, and tonight, I watched more people nearly die for it, too! I watched—and?—”

Malakai’s back flashed before my eyes. Mora’s ruined shoulder. The bloodied staff from Lancaster’s side.

And Jezebel, with those tendrils of Angellight choking her. Squeezing tighter, tighter.

“This is bigger than you, Alabath. This is bigger than all of us.”

“And we’re all losing.” The words were rough. “How long until one of us loses everything?”

“We aren’t going to lose everything.”

“We are puppets for the Angels, Tolek. We are their toys and their weapons.” I sucked in a breath, pressing my hand to my mouth to hold in an angry sob. “They’re loading their bows with warriors as sharpened arrows and aiming us at their targets. And each time, it is a solid, inarguable strike of the bullseye. All because of this agent in my blood that activated the Angelcurse and whatever prophecies were spun in the stars eons ago! And why? Why is that fair?”

“It’s not fair!” He threw his arms out, stepping back as if to capture the whole mess—to contain it so I wouldn’t feel its wrath. “None of this is fair. None of the hands we’ve been dealt, none of the shit we’ve survived, is fair.”

He rushed to me, taking my face between his hands, and only then did I realize tears streamed down my cheeks, hot and angry and unquenchable. “Every damn emblem you go after, every battle you walk into, I am terrified of the most unfair outcome of all. I fear life will deal the worst hand yet, and the long string of unjust patterns will continue.”

My lips trembled as something inside of me cracked, and my throat grew too thick to speak. More and more with each word he said. But Tolek’s thumbs stroked my cheekbones with the steady confidence he always radiated.

“But do you know what I do when I’m dealt a bad hand, Alabath?”

My voice was so small as I said, “What?”

A smirk quirked one side of his lips. “I play smarter, not harder.”

“We can’t outsmart the Angels, Tolek.” I shook my head slightly in his hands.

Another stroke of his thumb across my cheek. “Where’s that confidence I love?”

“They took it. Siphoned it away with each of the dead they chased us with tonight. With each of their spirits I had to burn, they took it.”

“Alabath,” he tutted, “are you saying you doubt I can outplay the Angels? That together, we can’t tackle the eternal bastards?”

A lump formed in my throat, the battle of my heart warring to say yes—yes, I knew that together, he and I were invincible, that this love between us could forge the stars—and my head beating it down to say no.

No, we were nothing against the Angels.

No, there was more at play here.

No.

He read each of those fears in my silence. Then, one hand dropped to the small of my back, the other remaining sure against my cheek, and he pulled me a step closer. Forced me to come to him, to feel his beating heart and the certainty spilling from him.

“Don’t you dare disagree with me, Alabath,” he growled, voice spiraling into the night, crackling with fury. “The Angels—all of this—none of it matters when we’re here. None of it can touch us as long as we’re together. You and I, we’re the constant.” His thumb brushed across my lips. “There is nothing any Angel, god, or Fate can do to change that, no matter how many curses plague us or trials unfold at our feet. Because as long as they do, we are infinite.”

As he said it, the sky above cracked, the clouds finally giving way to the milling storm.

Under the downpour, I cracked, too.

“I’m tired, Tolek,” I admitted, sinking into him as the weight of the words left my shoulders. “I’m tired of fighting enemies we can’t even see. The ones I can raise a blade to are one thing, but I don’t even know who we’re after anymore. Or who’s after us. I’m confused, and I feel so used, and…I’m tired.”

Warm rain drops pelted the stone, each one loosening a piece of the rock cemented in my chest.

“I know. I’m tired, too, Alabath.” He pressed his lips to my forehead. “I’m so damn tired of seeing you weighed down with this pressure. Do you know another reason I liked being in the outposts so much?”

I sniffed. “Because the archery stations are always open?”

Tolek laughed. The rain picked up speed, nearly drowning his next words so they were only held between us. “Because despite the restlessness the queen’s orders instilled in us, we were allowed to breathe. To indulge in something we have too little of.”

“Peace?”

“Time.”

A roll of thunder echoed his words, my skin icy and hair plastered to my cheeks.

“I’m scared we’re running out of time.”

Tolek’s eyes darkened. “Never.” He walked me backward until my spine hit a cypher, the two of us cocooned in the tree’s willowing branches. One hand tilted my chin up so I could look nowhere but at the pure, molten fire of his eyes. “With you and me, there is always going to be time. As much time as there are stars in the skies. The cosmos doesn’t run out of time, apeagna , and neither will we.”

“What if?—”

“No.” Nothing but pure demand radiated in that voice. The rain lashed down harder. “I don’t give a damn about the Angels. I don’t care what threats they wield or what power they employ. I’m starting to think they are nothing without you—and I know I am. You are the thing holding this all together, and there is so much power in that, Ophelia. You can command it as you wish. Have us all on our knees at your mercy because that is your right.”

His words snapped through me, emboldening me. “And if I want this entire task to end?”

Tol rested his forehead against mine. “Then we put a fucking end to it.”

The rain-soaked air stung my skin, but the iciness didn’t reach me. All I knew was the utter power in Tolek’s voice. It burned, igniting the Angellight woven through my very soul, into the hollows my spirit failed to fill.

“So be tired if you must,” he said, gripping my jaw tighter. “You deserve it. Tell the damn Angels they bend to your will, Alabath, not the other way around. And if you need a break, I’ll carry you.” He paused, searching my gaze. “We’ve all questioned our purpose here. Questioned how we’re tethered to the prophetic fates of Bounties and cyphers. Of stars and spirits and Angels. Perhaps I’m not tied to any of those things but you. When you’re tired, I’m here to help you surmount the Angels.”

Tolek’s waterlogged hair drooped into his eyes, but even that couldn’t mask what burned there—something as potent as my Angellight and as venomous as the beings it was birthed from.

It soared through me, searing the dark voids of doubt. And in answer, without even a conscious thought, Angellight shone through my skin, tendrils wrapping around my waist and Tolek’s, banding us together.

“It would be my honor to conquer the everlasting with you,” I said as thunder rumbled overhead.

His words were sharp against my lips. “Let’s make the Angels fucking scorch.”