SanClare Black (The Prince of Sorrows) (6 page)

“
Why?” he breathed. His body shook with weariness. His hunger had become so much a part of him he—almost—was beyond feeling it. This place thrummed in his ears, in his brain, invading all his senses until he felt nothing, saw nothing, knew nothing but the Breach.

“
You know why, child,” the woman said, her voice almost gentle. “You’re a threat. Sorrows are always threats, and...” She didn’t finish whatever it was she’d been going to say, and Nylan turned to look at her, frowning in confusion.

She reached out and caught his face between her hands, and,
with no more warning, she was inside his mind. He tried to resist her but lacked the strength to do more than be afraid. Her presence burned white hot and left him sobbing when she finally released him.

“
What did you do?” He dropped back to the sand, clutching his head in his hands. Blood dripped from his nose, and he coughed out choking sobs, trying not to vomit.

“
A simple spell, child,” she said, dismissive. “You aren’t to come back, but you aren’t to be killed. This makes things complicated.”

“
What
did
you do, senna?” one of the men asked. They both looked frightened. “I thought you said we wouldn’t hurt him.”

“
If he knew, he would consider this a kindness,” she said. “Memory can be a terrible burden, especially a memory such as his, filled with death and betrayal and pain. He won’t have those nightmares to fear anymore.”

“
My memory?” Nylan gasped. The pain was slowly subsiding, but he felt so very strange. It was as if someone were slowly wrapping cotton gauze around the edges of his life. He tried to remember the color of his favorite shirt and couldn’t. He tried to remember what Flannery Llorka looked like. And couldn’t.

“
Don’t do this to me.” He stared up at the woman, helpless. “Please.”

“
It’s for the best, believe me,” she assured him. “I wish someone had done the same for me at your age.”

She lifted him from the ground once more and turned him to face the Breach.
“Now, go, before the sun disappears. Walk into the Breach, and don’t look back.”

Nylan stiffened, but he felt no shock at the
woman’s words. For some time, he had expected this ax to fall. He lifted his chin in a final defiance.

I don
’t care. It doesn’t matter. I remember this much, at least. I am a prince of the blood of SanClare and Voyavel. I am a Sensitive, gifted by Vail. I have survived so far in spite of them. I will survive this.

“
I will.” This only made sense after everything else. Someone wanted him out of the way. Maybe he even knew who this person was, but his memories were fragmenting, and he couldn’t be sure of anything anymore.

But the Breach he remembered.
Jary—
don’t let me forget him, dear Vail, don’t let me forget
—had told him stories about it and about how it had been used as a punishment for important criminals, highborn traitors, and rebels.
A long time ago.

Jarlyth had said that n
o one knew for sure what happened to people sent through, but maybe they didn’t die. Nylan supposed that somewhere his murderer was consoling himself with that possibility.

“
Don’t turn back.” The woman’s flat voice interrupted his confused, dazed reverie. “Or we’ll have to kill you.”

Of course.
Nylan nodded again, once, collected himself, and started off. He climbed down the steep slope to the crater’s bottom, even more covered in dirt and grime by the time he reached it. He paused for a moment and dusted himself off, then turned to face the Breach once again. Its thrumming had grown much louder, screaming in his head now, and he clenched his teeth against its noise.

Tears stung his eyes, but the bitter, frightening glee he
’d felt so briefly at the prospect of his own death was gone. Death walked beside him. His life was almost over. It seemed to be unavoidable now.

He took a deep breath and straightened his shoulders.
At least he would go out like a prince. And at least when it was over, he’d be with Jarlyth again.

He expected it to hurt and had almost asked the woman if she thought it would.
He’d thought better of that just before the words escaped his mouth, but he was still afraid.

The glints of light were sharp
-edged, it was said. He didn’t know if this was tale or truth. The pirates had navigated around them in their little boats and seemed to fear making contact. Would stepping into the Breach cut him to pieces?

“
Maybe it’ll be quick.” Nylan needed to hear a voice, even if it was just his own, thin, frightened one.

The roar in his head blotted out everything, and he barely heard himself.
The Breach loomed before him, just a couple of lengths away. A few more steps, and he’d be in it. Stabbed to death on its shards or punctured as by a thousand arrows.

He inhaled deeply and took a long, last look at the world.
More and more of his memories faded with each passing moment, too, and he wanted to fight the spell, but he was too tired.

“
Let’s get this over with,” he breathed, and he stepped from shattered land to shattered air.

Nylan had been caught in a current once, long ago.
He and a few other Sensitive children had been playing in a seemingly gentle stream that ran through Tanara Priory and poured out into the Gulf of Souls, and he’d taken only a few steps past the safe boundary in order to catch a straying, floating toy. He’d been sucked under so fast, he hadn’t had time to scream or inhale. As always, Jarlyth had saved him.

The Breach had a current, too, and it pulled him in with a vicious determination, moving Nylan through its magic as if through all places and times at once.
He saw light-bleached, broken bits of the world beyond the Breach in shards of reality all around him and understood he was looking out through the glints.

At first, o
nly the light hurt him and then the current ran him into the rim of one of the shards, bruising his arm and leg. He tried to pull himself out of the current, reaching out to catch the next of the quickly-passing scenes, and sliced open the palm of his hand on the edge of its reality.

The current slowed and turned in a great, sick
-making whirl, and Nylan saw two figures almost invisible in the blinding brightness. It took him a moment to realize they were inside the Breach with him and not in a shard somewhere out in the world.

Their outlines blurred into light as if Nylan stared
at an eclipse to see them. If they were male or female, old or young, or even people and not trees, he couldn’t tell.

Until one of them spoke.

“Poor, pretty thing.” A hand reached out, pointing at him. “He’s one of yours, isn’t he?” The voice was as indeterminate as the figure.

“
Help me!” Nylan’s voice squeaked out as a rasping breath. “Please, help!”

They can
’t have heard me.

“
I’m sorry, my dear child,” the second figure said. “You must be brave until—”

But t
he current’s whiplash sent Nylan speeding past too quickly for him to hear the rest of whatever the figure was trying to tell him. Or was reality moving past him at this insane speed? He couldn’t tell, but each time the current threw him into some immovable piece of reality, it hurt worse.

He struggled toward another shard and was thrown
back, deeper into the light, his other hand torn and arms scratched badly.

The pressure had grown, roaring more and more painfully as time passed.
The light burned into him, hurting his eyes, his head, everything.

Maybe I
’ll burn up. Maybe this is how you die in the Breach.

He closed his eyes against the inescapable brightness
and realized what was happening to his memory within mirrored the chaos he tumbled through.

Perfect and whole until the
witch-woman’s spell, his memory had melted and shattered. Too late, he knew, Nylan clutched at the remaining pieces, trying to hold onto them and keep them from being drawn from his mind.

The spell gained speed with each passing moment
—or perhaps it was trying to match the current’s speed—and memories were vanishing into nothing far too quickly. Chunks of memory like tiles from a storm-ravaged rooftop tore free of his grasp and blew away. He held onto small pieces and odd fragments which, along with the parts of his memory the witch woman had seen fit to leave him, made for nothing but confusion.

The pressure in his head grew unbearable
, and he moaned and curled up into a helpless, flung-about ball. He bumped more often into the shards of reality, the current narrowing as he went, and with each unavoidable collision, a new cut or scrape or bruise.

The roar grew even louder, the current
’s speed terrifying, the light truly blinding, and then, as if a door had closed, shutting it all out, everything stopped.

Nylan felt himself falling through the sudden dark silence, but he couldn
’t see anything with his Breach-blinded eyes. He felt cut to pieces and boneless and broken, and he couldn’t force his body to move though he knew he might be hurtling to his death.

His shoulder made a terrible sound as it struck the ground with the rest of him right behind it.
Nylan rolled automatically, glad of his training, and came to rest against something hard and wet and cold.

A very long time passed while he simply lay still where he was, trying to regain his breath and figure out if he could even move.
His body continued to ignore his brain, and he thought he may have been unconscious for awhile.

Eventually, Nylan
struggled to sit up, hampered by countless cries of pain from his nerves and by his left arm—numb and useless—weighing him down. He managed to pull himself up at last and rubbed the back of his good hand across his face to try and clear his eyes. He did this quickly, wobbling precariously, but managed to brace himself once more with his good arm before he’d collapsed back onto the ground.

It hadn
’t helped. His eyes still saw only echoes of the blinding, burning light the Breach had branded into them, and every time he blinked, the light seemed to flare up brighter again.

The world smelled wrong, somehow, though he recognized the sharp scent of the ocean underlying the worse smells of rotting fish and
manure. He recognized only one other of the myriad scents surrounding him: blood. He felt it on his hand, too, warm and sticky.

“
Holy Vail, help me,” he whispered. But she had not helped him so far...

Helped me do what?
He knew that she’d abandoned him, but to what, he didn’t know. And he knew he had been taken, but away from what?

The Breach, he remembered, but aside from a few, seemingly useless fragments and glimpses, he had no idea of anything else.
A wave of panic rose up then quickly died away.

It doesn
’t matter
, he thought, suddenly calm.

Some part of him knew this wasn
’t true, but he couldn’t push his way past this magnificent unconcern.

Like a spel
l.
And then another thought occurred to him:
Spells are bad. Don’t talk about spells. Don’t think of them.

“
All right.” And his curiosity about himself dwindled away to nothing.

His eyes stung but a
fter a few minutes, he began to be able to make out his surroundings through the fading light patterns. It was nighttime wherever he was, but the darkness was incomplete.

The pools of light flickered and changed.
He frowned up at the nearest pole and saw the flame burning inside a small glass box. This use of fire seemed strange and almost reckless to Nylan. Magic would be safer.

Stop!
Stop thinking about it.

The wind blew stronger,
and he finally felt it. It was cold here in this strange place, but he’d been cold for so long he almost hadn’t noticed.

He could
just about see again, but nothing looked familiar. He seemed to be in the middle of some sort of open area—a village square or something. As he looked around, he made out something larger than anything around it. A great stone arch rose out of a massive, stone platform which occupied the center of the square.

It
’s a Crossing,
he thought, but the minute he did, the meaning of that word slipped away from him, leaving in its wake a sense of fear and repulsion at the sight of the strange, out-of-place thing towering over him. He turned away from it and found the sights much less overwhelming.

It did seem to be some sort of village
or neighborhood, but the buildings were strange, all made out of rough brick or wooden shingles—which made the flame lights seem even more foolish. Strange compared to what, he didn’t know.