I assumed it would be done then – no one would survive that, except maybe Skalla – but my mate didn’t seem to be done yet. With Joleb limp and hovering in front of me, I couldn’t see Skalla, but I could hear him, his breath tearing from his throat, his steps like the thunder that still boomed outside. More bones snapped, ribs, I was pretty sure, and I wondered if Skalla would break every single one. If he’d keep going even when there was nothing left in Joleb’s limbs but dust. Even when I begged him to stop.

But then Joleb was flung aside. His corpse crashed through yet another wall, and all I could see now was Skalla.

“You came,” I whispered. “I told them that you would.”

I laid my hand against his chest. I could barely see the green or the glow of him now, so slick was he with blood – blackish from the warriors and the silver of his own. But I felt his heart surge beneath my hand, and it was the heart I knew.

Blood-soaked and berserk, with a single burning eye and only one working wing, dragging the deaths of more than fifty men behind him, he was still my Skalla.

I wrapped my arms around the man who’d become my home, closed my eyes, and wept.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

Suvi

Skalla didn’t hug me back. Not at first. His breath stuttered hoarsely in and out of him, and he trembled, as if restraining himself because he couldn’t quite trust himself not to crush me. It reminded me with bittersweet nostalgia of when he’d gone into heat before me. He’d been scared to touch me then, too.

“Hold me, Skalla. Please,” I sobbed.

And then, with a great groan of release, he did, his arms closing around me like iron. But even so, I could still tell he was being careful. His hands roamed my back gingerly but frantically, his snout burrowing against my throat, sliding down to my shoulder. I flinched when his scales touched the wound there. He froze, then withdrew, and it made me sad to see that he now had red blood on him too.

His eye looked a little clearer, now. His scales pulsed in shimmering waves down his body, like he was trying to get them to lie smooth again. But when his gaze registered the swelling on one side of my face, the cracked lip, the bruised eye socket, his gaze smoked over and his scales puffed right back out.

“Who,” he rasped, sounding vengeful and haunted all at once, “did this to you?”

“Joleb,” I whispered. “But you’ve already killed him.”

He snarled low in his throat, then tugged at the torn, blood-soaked sleeve of my tunic.

“And this?”

“Koltar. But you’ve already killed him, too.”

We both looked at Koltar’s body. Skalla was still for a long moment. Then, with a furious shout, he sliced his hand through the air. He hurled Koltar’s corpse into the hoard room, where it crashed into heaps of fallen metal. Skalla was enraged all over again, and for a second I thought he was actually going to go drag Koltar’s body out of the hoard room simply so he could start pummeling it. I grabbed his bloody wrist with both of mine.

“Please, Skalla. I need you with me. It’s done. Just... Just stay with me. Please.”

His scales flattened instantly. When he turned his eye to look at me, his gaze was sombre.

“Suvi,” he said, voice raw with pain, “it breaks my heart to even hear you ask me that.” His arms went around me once more, the bottom of his snout settling against the top of my head. “I am here now, little star. I am here, and here I plan to stay.”

And stay with me, he did. Not at the house, though. As soon as the storm subsided, I was desperate to be out of here, away from the calamity and death. Though he assured me that he would heal quickly, Skalla didn’t trust himself to carry me in flight with his torn wing, so we took the boat from Callabarra and steered it back towards the city. As we moved over the water, Skalla filled me in on what had happened while he’d been gone. Apparently, the council he’d visited to ask for help had not opened their gates, and he hadn’t been able to locate the human ship. The disappointment of that stung, but after the trauma of tonight and the gratitude I had that Skalla and I were both alright, I pushed it aside for now. We were alive and we were together. We would figure everything else out in time.

I didn’t see the city, but Skalla knew where to stop the boat. This was the first time I’d been conscious on the approach to Callabarra, and I marvelled at how completely the city was made invisible. From here, standing on the banks of the river, there was nothing ahead but gentle slopes of rain-bejewelled grass and plant life.

But Skalla knew where to go. He cut a straight, confident line towards nothing, carrying me when I began to shiver from the moisture on the plants soaking my clothes. Heat poured off of him, comforting me, warming me to my core, like I was in a sauna back home. I sagged against his chest, too tired to care about how much blood was getting on me now.

“Falreth,” Skalla intoned into empty air. I recognized that the word was not a Bohnebregg one, but all the same understood the meaning with the webbing in my ear. It meant cotton.

The landscape got kind of wiggly, like it was a projection and something had gone wrong with the slide. Then, Callabarra was there, the front wall and gate of the city so close I could reach out and touch the wood and stone.

“That’s incredible. Can all stone sky gods do that? Hide things like that?”

“Aeshyr is a warlord of Riverdark,” Skalla explained. “He comes from a world of mages with powers outside the scope of a typical stone sky god. They are one of the few other races who can travel between worlds.”

“Few other? You mean there are more alien species that have achieved space travel?”

He grunted in confirmation. I didn’t know why I was so surprised. Us humans had figured it out and there was no way we were the smartest ones out there.

I turned my attention back to the gate as Skalla lifted one of his arms from me and pounded on it. I winced when I saw the parts that had obviously been newly rebuilt after Skalla had damaged the structure last time. Luckily, a Mother’s Claw opened the gate instantly, though she almost looked like she wished she hadn’t when she saw the state of us.

Twisting in Skalla’s arms, I looked down at him, and then myself.

Skalla’s scales were almost entirely black with blood, apart from the silver dripping from his own wing and the places on his lower legs wiped somewhat clean by the wet reeds and grass. His face and hands in particular looked like they’d been dipped in tar. His hair was unbraided, tangled, and caked with fluids, and at some point in the battle, or maybe when he’d swelled up in his berserker rage, he’d lost his trousers. He was a magnificent, terrifying, naked god of gore carrying his injured mate into the midst of Callabarra.

There was no one in the streets, and when we got to the temple I understood why. Because it seemed as if everyone in the entire city was awake and standing there. The courtyard was packed with Bohnebregg bodies all crushed together, and many more citizens had spilled out into the main road outside. Loud, confused-sounding chatter spiked and rolled through the crowd like radio static, but it fell silent, incrementally at first, then all at once, when people began to turn and see us.

In a solemn hush, the crowd parted before us, creating a path through the courtyard. At the end of that path, in front of the main entrance into the temple, I could see Zev and Jolakaia with the other Mother’s Hands. I allowed myself a few sloppy tears of relief seeing them, then gave a great big sniffle and sucked it up because we had important shit to sort out now, and nobody needed human tears getting in the way.