by the light stretching above him. When the palm descended, he didn’t try to move, only sat gazing up, waiting for the end, and Elisabeth had to admit she wouldn’t mind it, watching Ashcroft get swatted like a fly.
Instead the hand came crashing down on emptiness; she had seized him by the arm and dragged him away. As though he were a bundle of rubbish, she tossed him aside.
“Why?” he asked, rolling over, looking at her standing over him much as he had the Archon an instant before. “Why did you—?”
“I wanted to see your face when you realized you were wrong,” she said. “That everything you’ve done, all the people you’ve hurt and killed, was for nothing.”
Behind him, the Archon’s claws raked through the marble. Its light stretched higher, almost touching the dome, blotting out half the atrium as it spread its wings. Dwarfed by its immensity, Ashcroft looked impossibly small. Sweat had broken across his brow; his throat worked. “Are you satisfied, Miss Scrivener?”
Elisabeth had desired this moment so greatly: his confidence shattered, his power stripped away. But now that she had it, she realized it was worth nothing to her at all.
“No,” she said, and turned.
His face contorted. He scrabbled after her, collapsing to a crawl, his eyes blank and unseeing. “You must believe me. I need you to understand. Everything that I did, I did for the good of the kingdom. Please—”
She kicked him, and he went sprawling with an anguished cry.
Not caring what happened to him next, she went to Nathaniel. His eyelashes fluttered at her approach, but he didn’t wake. She crouched, taking his hand, and saw that Silas still held the other, clasped between his own as though it were spun from glass.
Light spilled over Nathaniel, reflecting brighter and brighter from the floor around him. She supposed the Archon would kill them at any moment, but all she could think was that his hand felt terribly cold. “Is he in any pain?”
Silas spoke without looking away from Nathaniel’s face. “No. The end, when it comes, will be swift for you both. I imagined it would be better this way—for you to fight together, and to fall quickly, rather than enduring the death of your world without hope.” He paused to smooth the lapel of Nathaniel’s coat, then to carefully straighten his collar. As though it were an ordinary evening, Elisabeth thought, making him presentable to step outside. “I apologize for taking such a liberty.”
Tears flooded her eyes, and her throat tightened. “What will happen to you?”
He betrayed himself with the slightest hesitation. Finally he said, “It matters not, miss.”
“It does.” She reached out to cup Silas’s cheek. The evening’s trials had left her hand filthy, hideous against his remote perfection. But he held very still, and allowed her to touch him, and she was surprised to discover that he felt human, not like a statue carved from alabaster.
A strange serenity came over her. There was one thing left that she could do. This was the end of the world, and they had nothing left to lose. “Thank you. I just wanted to say that, before . . .”
His eyes flicked to her beneath his lashes. She saw the moment that he understood. She had thought him still before, but now he turned to stone. Though his expression didn’t seem to change, there welled up in his eyes both wretchedness and hope, and a hunger so bottomless she could feel it yawning beneath his skin, like the devouring dark of a night without stars. The light had grown blinding; the Archon was almost upon them now.
“Silariathas.” The Enochian name poured up her throat and rolled over her tongue like fire. “Silariathas,” she said, her voice raw with power, “I free you from your bonds of servitude.”
His pupils swelled, black swallowing up the gold. That was all she had a chance to see before the light grew so bright that she had to avert her eyes. A pulse traveled through the library, stirring her hair, as though a stone had been dropped onto the surface of reality, its ripples flowing outward. She gripped Nathaniel’s hand, waiting to die. But a second passed, and then another—and she felt nothing.
Nathaniel’s eyelids cracked open. The silver had bled from his hair. Groggily, he tried to focus. “Silas?” he managed.
Slowly, Elisabeth looked up. For a heartbeat she thought she had died after all, and was dreaming. Silas stood over them, one arm raised, blocking the Archon’s light. Not Silas.