“I don’t wear it around you because I imagine it’s unnerving when you’re used to seeing everyone’s auras. I only wore it in town when I didn’t want to be spotted by the rest of your family. But my parents always wear them because my mother has a blessing from Asher.”
His intense, dark eyes bore into me.
“She’s a resurrectionist.”
The words take the breath out of me. Resurrection—the rarest of magics. While we had credible reason to believe that was the case, it’s another thing to hear it from Henry.
When I don’t say anything, he continues. “It’s a rare gift, but also a terribly draining one.”
He opens his mouth to say more, then closes it.
Finally, he turns on the ledge to face me head-on, and I can sense the weight of whatever he’s about to say.
“The day the wall fell, I wasn’t just wounded. I died. And my mother brought me back.”
22
HARLOW
Shock freezes me in place. Those two small words echo through my mind:Henry died.
I have so many questions, but my chest seizes with a shocking grief.
“How?” I rasp.
He pats the claw marks on his chest. “The blood loss from these almost killed me.” He closes his eyes for a moment. “It’s been almost ten years. It feels like both a lifetime ago and like it happened yesterday.”
“I’m sorry.” Though I actually mean it, I’m so shocked it sounds like a reflexive response.
“You’ve seen the way the fort is set up—it’s like the city. Fallback plans and safe zones. The Drained had never done more than climb the walls a few at a time. We’d never even had a breach beyond the wall before that day.” He shudders. “The first five levels of the fort fell that day. Holly and I—” His voice is hoarse, and he takes another slow breath. “You’ve seen how strength is the most prized currency here and you know how it is being a ruling family. If you don’t protect your people, you have no value. We had to be on the front lines. My parents stayed back, trying to keep our people calm and help as many as possible to safety and to hold a final line to help the wounded. Holly and I and the last of our hunters—Bryce, Carter, and one hundred others—held the level six wall.”
He shudders and rubs a hand over his face. “I grew up venturing into the woods. I know how the Drained act. You can’t hunt for game beyond the walls without a deep understanding of how the Drained operate. You learn what’s normal and how they sometimes work in groups. But this was like nothing I have ever seen. A horde of them.Thousands. You have to understand. Every man and woman who stands on that wall has faced down terror many times. We have plans and contingencies—things that are drilled into us from the time we are children so they run on reflexes when something goes wrong. But the front wall was overwhelmed in minutes. There was a blast and the wall broke and it was madness.”
I am torn between wanting to hear the rest and the desire to run from this. Kellan thinks our family was somehow responsible, and though I have no idea how that could possibly be true, I trust my brother. My stomach turns over. I feel guilty by association. As if I wouldn’t choose to be in any other family.
“We lost so many of our best fighters in the lowest level of the fort,” he continues. “We were on our heels and barely able to hold off the onslaught enough to evacuate our people. So Holly, Bryce, Carter, me, and one hundred of the best men fell all the way back. We knew if we didn’t shore up the level six wall, we wouldn’t be able to stop them. With every level, the Drained fed on the warriors who fell. You know how it is if they get blood in general, but the more vital the blood, the stronger the Drained become. They were faster and more terrifying. So we held the line and it brought all of us to the limits of our magic. I was healing people between fighting. Holly was laying down holy fire to cover the parts of the wall where we were thin. But it wasn’t enough.”
I think of the sheer size of the fort, of the levels that lead up to the manor, of the number of people I saw in the streets on my way into town.
Henry runs his hands over the crisscross of scars. “We were down to the last big surge of Drained, but all of us were flagging. Bryce took a bad hit from one of them, and I was distracted for a split second, and one of them got me. I went down and I knew right away it was bad. But I’d healed so many people, I had nothing left for myself. It was too slow and I couldn’t breathe, because one of the claws had punctured my lungs. I felt myself fading, and Holly lost it. She basically turned herself into a human fireball and jumped into the crowd of them and took out all of the remaining Drained at once. But it cost her. She channeled too muchmagic at once and she burned herself up from the inside out. There was nothing left of her but ash.”
Henry looks down at the clear blue water. “The last thing I remember was watching over the crumbled edge of the wall as my sister burned away to dust and took the rest of the beasts with her.” He swallows thickly. “Then I closed my eyes, and I don’t remember this part, but my mother got to me right after I died. She brought me back. I was lucky, I suppose. If a soul has strayed too far, she can’t draw them back.”
I’m speechless. The ethos of the fort has always been about strength, so I had assumed Henry’s scars were a way to show off his courage, but this is so much worse.
“She called back as many of us as she could—Bryce, Carter, Stefan, and about fifteen other hunters who stood on that wall with us—but Holly was gone. That day broke my mother. She had always been devout, but she couldn’t live with Holly’s loss. She prayed to Asher for days, and he answered her. He gifted her a way to ensure she would never lose another child.” His eyes meet mine, and I can’t look away from the agony in them. “Divine Asher gave her the method and the will to answer her plea. Whatever end I have met once, I cannot meet again.”
It takes a full minute for me to understand what he’s saying.
“You can’t be killed the same way twice,” I whisper. There’s no way to claw back my composure because this is much worse than him simply being immune to my magic. I might not be able to kill him at all. I point to the pale scar on his neck. “She did that?”
Henry chews his lip. “Technically, my father did that part. She just brought me back. He does the violence. Naima does the healing, and my mother calls my soul back.”
He points to the scar on his left ribs. “Blade to the heart.” He brushes the hair on his left temple aside so I can see the bare line where his head is scarred. “Cracked skull.”
He leans an arm against the lip of the well, looking alarmingly casual for a man describing his many painful deaths. I want to ask what was the worst. I want to ask what happened after he died, but I won’t.
“And then there are all the invisible ones: crushed to death, broken neck, drowned, fever, and hypothermia.” He says them all so casually, but his aura flares violently. “And, as you noticed the night we met?—”
