This was the part of the plan Idris had not shared with the Gleesdale Court.

  Head ringing, he hurried to the centre pentagon. The artificial heat of the death aria, within him and without, made him woozy and nauseous, but he knew he needed it all in order to be successful.

  “Lila,” he called, turning around, “stay outside of the pentagon.”

  “But what are you going to do?” she shouted back.

  He was going to attempt the impossible, but it was only going to work if the cleansing worked, too.

  If his mathematics were correct (and they often were), Idris could reach the other side of the pass without having to be there with the pentagons he had crafted. Hurriedly, he realigned his objects of power on the points of the central pentagon and turned to face the pass.

  “Protect me!” he shouted to Lila.

  “Yes, sir!”

  He knelt.

  A Nexus of Belonging was going to be the only way to make his idea work. The cleansing was going to strip the death aria out of the plain, so he had to make sure that he had everything he was going to need before that happened. He had to be the aria.

  He had managed Belonging once, and only once, when he needed it. With time, he was sure he could do it again. Training with Layton had shown him how to embody the aria, to control it, rather than let it control him. Practice, patience and trust were all it took.

  And bravery, of course.

  Idris closed his eyes and took the deep, stomach-filling breaths that he had been taught to take as a child. The aria rolled into him like perfumed air. Already, he was sweating, so he shrugged off his armoured coat, but he made sure to hold Black Star parallel to the floor, perfectly balanced on his palms. The aria, amplified by the pentagons, was so strong that even outstretching his arms was a strain, as if a blanket of weights lay on every muscle. If he were a pebble in a stream, he would be downriver by now, far from the bed he had tried to anchor himself to.

  And it was loud. As if his eardrums might burst. Vibrating his vocal cords.

  Gently, he shifted his stance, made calculations. His eyes were watering. He was aware of great movement and change in the air that he could not see but he could feel, inherently. Was that the sound of the death arias in every person in the pass? Not yet his?

  The thought was giddying on its own.

  He concentrated.

  He felt it all. The heat-death of a dehydrated stalk of grass. The bones of an animal below the clay. The pulsing of Layton’s control.

  I am with you, Idris thought.

  Gently, knowing how dangerous it was, he let go.

  ‘Letting go’ was not truly relinquishing his grip on the aria. It was harder than that. He had to maintain his sense of who he was, where he was, what was outside. He had to belong without succumbing or surrendering – that was a sure way to burn up from the inside out. The correct thought to have was that he was a conduit, a vessel that the aria could flow through, like the pentagonal tower of Raven’s Roost, except flesh and blood.

  It was a difficult thought to keep hold of, though. As his whole being streamlined into the aria, the concept of thoughts and identity rushed right out of him. For a while, he was music, low and slow, never the same, twisting and turning and existing forever.

  It was so beautiful.

  And yet somewhere, outside of the notes that he was, he could feel the wrenching hand of Layton’s spells, catching the melody, scraping it together into lumps of his own will like ice floes on a rushing rapid. Beneath that, the wrongness of the fae aria that lived in Black Star, preventing the natural flow of the river.

  And it was hot.

  That, mainly, was what anchored Idris. The heat was intense. His lips were dry and cracking; his eyes felt like sand.

  He started, slowly, to gather.

  He imagined himself as a magnet, and he willed the aria to pull inwards, towards himself. At first, it felt strange, like he was overstuffing himself with food or water, but at the moment he thought he was going to burst, there was a sensation of... singularity. It was what he imagined being a bottle neck might feel like.

  So he kept pulling. The heat tingled. There was exhaustion but it did not matter. What were bodies, anyway? Meat for the crows. The rush was amazing, pure fire through his core, like his bones were lightning rods and his eyes were cinders.

  This is what real power is, he thought suddenly.

  Idris opened his eyes.

  It was hard to see past the streaming curtain of grey fire that now surrounded him, fire that burned but did not harm. The rustling sound of leaves was everywhere, mingling with the tumult of the aria’s natural rhythm.

  But he could see, and that was important.

  The ability to use his eyes was secondary, somehow. He could feel... everything.

  He knew the difference between the undead wolf that had a soldier by the neck and the undead wolf that was being salted as if they were two separate fingers. He could see them. He felt them. He knew each individual soldier in Kurellan’s party, in the rock path, waiting for orders, sweat on their brows. He knew the healers and their arias as they worked the cleansing. He saw his mother, conducting. He saw Riette, perfect and shining, her death aria faint and forgotten. All like shadows, close by, that he could swipe through and grip onto.

  He saw – he felt – Layton.

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  Intrinsically, Idris knew Layton was far away, but he felt close, like a pressed-on bruise. He almost believed he could reach out and touch his father’s face, pull the breastplate off his chest.

  His chest. The sound coming from it was fresh and raw and terrible. A scream of agony.

  No. The bodies. You only want the bodies.

  The newly dead. The remains of Layton’s reanimations. The old, beneath the clay. Beetles. Birds. Bones.

  Bells, this is so much.

  At Braemar, he had risen three-hundred. Here... there were more. So many more. More than he could fathom.

  He could not panic. If he panicked, he was lost.

  Idris breathed deliberately, calmly, despite the enormity of energy inside him.

  Wait. What is that?

  There was... something else. Something huge.

  The form was unfamiliar, made up of parts that did not quite fit, but even without seeing it Idris could feel its bulk, its gigantic head, its teeth.

  It struck him with terror that made his jaw hurt.

  The aria was so strong now and he was so consumed by it that he felt faint. If the tower of hot air was not holding him up, he was sure he would fall.

  The shapes of the soldiers -

  No.

  They were running.

  Back through the pass. Towards him.

  The shadow that was Kurellan surged forwards, with his group.

  No, this is not the plan, what -?

  There was another, crippling roar.

  It was too late to pull out of the Nexus, not without time. Idris gasped for air that he knew he was not getting, and he saw, through the grey fire wash in front of him, Lila.

  She was sprinting, a single figure holding a bow, towards him, not looking back.

  Behind her, in the air, was the thing that made the noise.

  It was so large that at first, Idris thought he was hallucinating it. Nothing that big could possibly be real. Nothing that grotesque could be real.

  “Idris!” came Lila’s long, urgent shout. “Idris!”

  There was no time. He had to do something.

  The creature was at least as large as the assembly hall at the palace, and made entirely from bone and grey fire – save the wings. From where he knelt, Idris could not see the composition of the wings, but in the aria he knew what they were. Human skin. Sewn together. The aria from the skin was keeping the beast in the air, its wings outstretched and glowing with the light of the autumn sun, shadowing the ground. Each vertebra was at least the size of a carriage, each tooth as wide as three swords and twice as sharp. Its jaws, wide and emitting the scream, filled all at once with grey and aimed downwards, towards Lila.

  Idris abandoned his previous plan. The undead, skeletal dragon was now his number one priority.

  The collected aria around him was going to have to be enough.

  “Idris!” Lila bellowed. “Do something!”

  He gripped the shaft of Black Star tight, took one last, long, deep breath, and he said, focusing all of his will on the dragon,

  “Push.”

  The burn that came up his throat was as if he had vomited lava. It lurched through him, upwards and out, and the grey fire tower he had created exploded from him in an arrow-straight line, right towards the chest of the dragon. His spine ached. His skin felt like it was blistering.

  The dragon had time only to let forth a short burst of its own fire before Idris’s column slammed into its ribcage. It roared again, wheeled around; Lila skidded to a halt and turned, staring at the creature as it circled back.

  “Idris, I... I’m going to try and draw it back through the pass,” she said.

  He could not respond – he was too deep within the Nexus to speak anything but commands to the death aria. He wanted to tell her that something in the plan had failed, that Kurellan was assaulting the fortress alone, that she needed to get word to Cressida that there was a problem, but none of these things would come through. He was a prisoner to the power that flowed through him.

  Lila began running again. The dragon turned and began flapping its skin-clad wings to approach her again, bearing down impossibly upon the small servant girl.

  Idris gathered the aria again, sucked it in like a fire drawing air. It quickly overwhelmed him until he could hardly see, such was the whirling energy before him, but the dragon pushed forwards, mouth wide, grey fire burning in its eyes and the back of its open maw.

  Lila’s feet pounded the clay.

  There has to be a way, Idris thought frantically. I have to stop this thing, I have to bring it down.

  If he could hit it with enough force, could he shatter the jaw?

  It was a tiny chance, but he was willing to take it. Shattering the jaw could take off the head. Blasting through the rib cage could also work. There was not enough time to be picky.

  But the aim...

  Lila was still sprinting, bow raised, towards the creature, and it was still driving its huge, human-skin wings against the air. In the state Idris was in, he could see the black-and-green awfulness of the aria around it, glittering whimsically in the faint light. It left the taste of blood in his mouth.

  Human-skin wings.

  He changed his mind.

  He focused all of his energy into the aria, connecting so deeply with the threads of it and the notes that he lost his ability to see, for a moment. All there was in his head was the image of the wings, bearing down, catching the wind, holding the dragon’s skeleton aloft.

  He spoke his will.

  “Burn.”

  There was a screech that he was sure rent his eardrums apart. His throat tasted like hot iron. His eyes watered.

  Then, the smell. His vision returned almost as soon as the scent of burning flesh slammed into him. The dragon flailed its wings but the skin was being eaten up by grey fire at a rapid, horrifying pace. Lila skidded to a halt, aghast, as the dragon careened over the top of her, straight towards Idris, on a collision course with his column of death magic. It swung its head, screeched and screamed, and then -

  It slammed to the ground, skidding with the momentum, its wings useless. Idris watched it slide towards him, bringing up giant dust clouds, thrashing its feet and tail.

  And it stopped, mere feet from him, and everything was still.

  Spent, tingling, Idris breathed the aria out in an exhausted sigh, and flopped onto his face in a dead faint.

  It was mercifully silent, in the darkness.

  Something wet slapped his upturned cheek.

  “Sir Idris?”

  There was the cry of, “Salt!”, and more screaming that shook the earth.

  He jolted awake, dragging in air. Lila was beside him, breathless. The rain was falling.

  “Black bells,” she whispered, “how did you do that?”

  He could not reply – his throat was too scorched to form words, and the faint sizzle that came from his clothes as the deluge finally opened up told him that he was probably hot all over. Everything was spinning.

  “The archers had salt bombs left,” said Lila, pulling him up. “They piled them into that thing... Idris, your shirt...”

  He blinked down at himself. There were large, scorched holes in it, like moths had chewed the whole thing up, but the leather armour was intact.

  “The plan... it...” Lila chewed her lip. “There were too many animals. I don’t think the cleansing worked. What do we do now?”

  In reply, Idris kicked off his prosthetic and fumbled for his hare’s foot.

  “You want to go in there?” she said, eyes wide. He nodded. “For what?”

  “Kurellan,” he mouthed.

  “Judge Kurellan can hold his own -”

  He shook his head firmly, feeling the way the world wheeled about him in an uncomfortable spiral. It was pointless to change his mind.

  Lila helped him click the hare’s foot into place and brought him upright. From there, he could see the monstrous dragon skeleton, still and oddly beige in the rainfall, without the grey fire burning in its eyes or the glitter around its bones. The remaining soldiers from the pass were standing around it, faces drawn, watching Idris for some indication of what they should do.

  He picked up Black Star and nodded to Lila.

  “Back into the pass,” she said to her counterparts. “We finish this.”

  “Yes, ma’am!” came the call back.

  “Protect Sir Idris! He gets through unscathed!”

  She began organising teams, separating the soldiers – Idris supposed her work as his attendant had given her the eye for detail she needed. Once they were done, they passed the body of the dragon, back towards the blackening slit of the pass in the mountains.