She opened her eyes, groggy but conscious. "Silverdun, love," she whispered. "You came for me. You didn't leave me again."
Silverdun looked at Faella. "Never again, love," he said. "Never again."
Sela's feelings were contorted into an unrecognizable shape that dug inside her like a many-pointed knife.
"Ein," said Faella. "He's loose."
"We need to go," said Silverdun.
"No," said Ironfoot. "Look."
Ein had finished with Hy Pezho, and now turned to regard his bound siblings.
"Althoin!" he cried. "The wise! I must know your counsel!"
Ein stepped toward the platform next to his own. He grabbed the iron bonds on his brother Althoin and pulled at them. They creaked but did not break.
"Althoin!" he shrieked. The bonds began to give way.
"Get us out of here!" said Silverdun.
"Yes," said Faella. "Let me think of how to reverse the fold. Give me a moment."
Sela looked at Fin and felt his pain. He was alone, bound for so long, a bird with clipped wings.
"Here we go," said Faella. "We'll work it out, won't we?"
"Let's just get clear," said Silverdun. "One thing at a time."
The air began to shimmer.
Sela leaned over, off the edge of the disc, and kissed Silverdun lightly on the lips. "Good-bye," she said.
She leapt.
"Sela!" shouted Silverdun. But his voice was faint, distant. Silverdun, Faella, and Ironfoot vanished into the fold.
Sela was on the floor. The pain of the fall mingled with the fire of iron on her skin. She stumbled, staggered toward a chunk of cobalt, one of the few remaining. She pulled herself up on it and stood.
"Ein!" she called.
Ein continued to tug at his brother's bindings.
"EM!" she shrieked. "Look at me!"
She grabbed the Accursed Object and tore at it. For a horrible instant it clung to her, but it slipped on the sweat that covered her and fell away for the last time.
Ein turned.
He looked.
A thread formed.
She knew a god.
He flowed into her and she flowed into him. She showed him all that she was and all that she could have been. He let out his grief in waves that nearly consumed her. She showed him her childhood, her sweetest memories of devotion in the Chthonic temple of her youth, showed him Lord Tanen's cruelty and Milla's dead body. She showed Ein what he was. The full extent of her power, without the Accursed Object. To show what truly was. What was beyond what was.
She let it all flow out of her, into her, though her. Without the Accursed Object to restrain her, she drew in all of the re around her, channeled it into Empathy, hurled it all at Ein. All of her love and her loss and what remained of her purity.
All of her.
The thing that had risen up in her, that had destroyed Lord Tanen, the doctor, the Bel Zheret. It wasn't inside her. It was her.
Her last thoughts were of love.
Mauritane's company reached the gate and dispatched the terrified guardsthose who remained, anyway. Many of them fled back into the city.
Outside, the Unseelie troops, now cut off from their escape route into Elenth, began to retreat to the east, away from the city and away from the reinforcements that were hurrying to join them from the southwest. The battle had turned, and with it, the war. It all depended on the Einswrath now. It all hung on that.
An odd silence came over the battlefield. One of the odd lulls that sometimes occurred, when every combatant was silent: falling, or gathering breath, or swinging.
Something small and dark flew up into the sky. Mauritane watched it arc and begin to fall. It was headed straight for him.
He closed his eyes and said a prayer to Aba. Why not?
A horse whinnied in the distance. Mauritane opened his eyes. A black blob the size of an orange had landed on the ground twenty feet away from him.
The fighting had ceased. Everyone knew what it was; they had all heard the stories. Einswrath. They all waited to die.
But the thing just lay there. After a moment it began to sizzle, then shudder, then it melted into a black puddle and soaked into the ground.
Mauritane offered the remaining Unseelie soldiers the opportunity to surrender and they happily obliged.
An hour later, the Seelie flag hung over Elenth.
Just before sunset, while the dead were being cleared away, Mauritane walked through the field, deep in thought, looking.
It took him almost an hour to find Baron Glennet. He would have found the body sooner, but a horse had fallen on top of it. Mauritane's sword was on the ground next to him, bloody but unbroken.
Mauritane called out to a nearby private. "Have someone send a message sprite to the City Emerald." Mauritane wiped the blood from his sword in the grass. He wondered whose life Glennet had managed to take, and whether the Unseelie soldier he'd killed knew how lucky he'd been.
"Tell them that Baron Glennet led the charge at the battle of Elenth, and that he died a hero of the Seelie Kingdom."
Immortality is a predicate only in the abstract.
-Prae Benesile, Thaumatical History of the Chthonic Religion
Silverdun learned all this en route to Elenth, with Ironfoot and Faella. The knowledge that the Einswrath had failed, that Sela had succeeded at whatever she'd done, was heartening, but none of them felt much like celebrating. They were exhausted and in pain, both physically and emotionally. The act of folding them back to the Chthonic temple had shattered the cynosure, meaning that they now had no way to return for Sela. Not that any of them were physically up to the task, or that any of them truly believed that Sela had survived.
Still, Silverdun had no intention of giving up on her. It was fortunate for many reasons that the war had gone as it did. To their immediate purpose, it was critical; the nearest Metropolitan Chthonic temple was located in Elenth. According to Prae Benesile, each Metropolitan maintained its own cynosure.
When they arrived in Elenth, they went directly to Mauritane's temporary headquarters in the Elenth City Building. Mauritane must have been surprised to see Faella, whom he knew only as the ingenue daughter of a mestine he'd met two years earlier, but he was as impossible to read as ever, and greeted her without comment. When their brief congratulations had ended, and they told him what had happened at Prythme, however, he did in fact raise an eyebrow. And when they explained why they were in Elenth, he grew visibly chagrined.
"That won't be easy," he said. "The Chthonics have been extremely accommodating to us since our arrival, and have done much to smooth relations between us and the Unseelie populace. I'm loath to ask them to allow you to go mucking around in their temple."
"Understandable," said Silverdun. "Consider, however, that we have no idea what happened after we folded away. For all we know, these bound gods are dusting off their lightning bolts and preparing to annihilate all of Faerie."
"No course in the academy on how to handle a situation like this, is there, General?" said Ironfoot.
"I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt," said Mauritane. "In fact, it would be best if the cynosure were destroyed entirely, if it does what you say it does."
"We won't make any friends doing that," said Ironfoot.