Page 31

Chapter Thirty-one

We run.

Penn first, me in the middle, Soren on my heels. Down the passage, past the portal—still glowing faintly from Soren’s journey—to the lift. None of us speaks as Penn activates the glyph and we shoot downward into the earth. The only sound in the jarring quiet is that of my breaths, thready and terror laced, pumping in and out of my lungs.

The lift ride lasts a lifetime. Each second drags into a day, a month, a year wasted. Time ticks away uselessly while those in the streets party on, completely unaware of the looming danger. I think of all the families I passed on my way here, necks craned backward to catch a glimpse of the fireworks show, grins splitting their faces in glee. Defenseless. Innocent. Unprepared. I nearly chew through my bottom lip trying to hold in my hyperventilation.

We hit ground level and charge, full tilt, for the mouth of the mine shaft. Another blast hits the wards just as we exit into open air. The sky flashes faintly red, a weak pulse. A cry goes up from the crowd, a medley of amusement and concern. Most, still caught up in the intoxicating festivity of Fyremas, assume it is just another facet of the celebrations.

“Sound the alarms!” Penn roars at two bewildered-looking soldiers stationed on a street corner as we hurtle past them. “We are under attack!”

We do not pause to see if they comply. We run faster. Impossibly fast. An unyielding sprint. At my sides, Soren and Penn seem tireless, their long legs eating up the ground without ever breaking stride. Somehow, I keep pace with them, my feet flying over the cobblestones as though I’ve grown true wings, the golden train of my gown whipping out behind me like a battle flag. I feel the cold burn of power coiled in my chest and realize I am unconsciously using the wind to propel myself forward, the air currents extending each bound farther, higher, longer than my petite legs could accomplish of their own accord.

Under normal circumstances, this might shock or even delight me. Tonight, there is no room in my mind for anything but dread. It poisons my veins, a toxic elixir, as we carve a jagged path toward the heart of Caeldera. When we reach King’s Avenue, the main thoroughfare from the tunnel to the lakeside, we find it packed with people still dancing and drinking.

“Get inside!” Penn roars, over and over. “Take cover!”

Faces stream by in a flood—at first merely concerned, then increasingly terrified as yet another blast of maegic shakes the sky.

“Prepare for attack!”

A cacophony of confusion and terror rises in place of music and laughter. Just as we reach the main square, that terror reaches a fever pitch when alarms begin to sound—a shrill ringing that splits the night, warning of an imminent attack. Even the drunkest revelers know what it means.

People bolt for cover. Stalls overturn in the crush. Vendors desert their wares. The stage is abandoned, fire-eaters long gone. The contortionist hoops hang empty. We push against the tide, fighting our way upstream as folks flood from the lakeshore through the marketplace, onto King’s Avenue. Their fear is palpable, infusing the air, mingling with the persistent scent of gunpowder from the fireworks.

The moment we reach the bridge, I know there will be no getting across. It is packed with people pouring from the palace, desperate to reach their homes and reunite with their loved ones.

“ Oi! ” Someone whistles sharply over the din. “Pendefyre!”

The three of us slam to a halt. In unison, we turn to see Jac, Cadogan, and Farley shoving their way toward us through the melee by the foot of the bridge. On their heels, about two dozen other members of the Ember Guild are forming orderly rows around us, buffering the panicked crowd. The sheer amount of weaponry strapped to their persons is mildly reassuring.

“Oh, thank the gods. She’s with you.” Jac is staring at me like he wants to sweep me into a hug and throttle me simultaneously. “Damn it, Ace, we’ve been looking for you for almost an hour! If the sky wasn’t falling, woman, I swear…”

“Sorry.” I grimace. “If we live through the night, I’ll make it up to you.”

“Not sure what’s going on,” Cadogan cuts in, stepping forward to face Penn, “but we figured you might need these.”

Penn nods in gratitude as he accepts his boots, broadsword, and bandolier of throwing knives. On all sides, people continue to jostle by, an unending stream. How quickly this night of warmth and light has darkened into shadows of despair. How fast these flames of joy have turned to ash. The sky flashes red again as another barrage of maegic hits the wards.

“Anyone care to explain what the hell is happening?” Farley shouts over the resounding rumbles.

“We’re under attack,” Jac says. “Obviously.”

Farley rolls his eyes. “Bloody half-wit, you think I don’t know we’re—”

“ Enough! ” Penn barks as he straps on his bandolier with one hand. In the other, the naked blade of his broadsword gleams. “The Reaver clans have found a new ally in our old enemy—Efnysien. He’s trying to bring down the wards. If he succeeds, they’ll breach the tunnel and sack the city.”

“Gods.” Jac pales. “Can he do it?”

“Let us hope not.” Penn glances past the flood of panicked civilians to the palace looming behind. “Where the hell is Yale?”

“Took it upon himself to protect the queen.” Cadogan’s face is a mask of contempt. “Our brave commanding general, barricaded in the throne room while his soldiers do battle.”

Beside me, Soren snorts. The other men look at him, seeming to finally take note of his presence. Their thunderstruck expressions are very nearly comical.

“What the skies is he doing here?” Farley splutters.

“Helping,” Soren fires back. “Which is more than I can say for you, tripod. Do you plan to swing that walking stick at every Reaver who comes your way?”

Farley’s oath is overshadowed by another onslaught from outside the crater. The wards shudder weakly, strobing the diluted shade of inexpensive wine—as though their strength wanes with each strike. I am not the only one to realize this, for any verbal sparring is quickly brushed aside in lieu of rapid-fire battle orders.

“Cadogan, take your unit to the tunnel,” Penn commands, jerking his chin toward King’s Avenue. “Mabon should already be there with the rest of the guild and a contingent of foot soldiers. Grab as many able-bodied men as you can find on the way. If they’re sober enough to stand, they’re sober enough to fight.” He pauses. “We have to assume anyone stationed outside the ward perimeter is already dead.”

Cadogan nods, expression grim.

“Jac, go to the aviary,” Penn continues. “Tell the master of scrolls to send ravens to every guard post and battle station across the plateau. We need reinforcements here as soon as possible.”

“And afterward?” Jac asks.

“Meet us at the tunnel. We may yet have need of your axe.”

Jac takes off like a shot, headed west along the lakeshore to the rickety stone tower that houses a flock of well-trained avian messengers. Cadogan, more somber than I’ve ever seen him, has already turned to the dual lines of battle-ready Ember Guild and rattled off their marching orders. Lump in my throat, I watch them go until I lose sight of their maroon uniforms halfway down King’s Avenue.

“Where is Uther?” Penn asks, calling my attention back.

Farley shrugs. “Home with Carys and the baby, last I heard.”

“No. I’m here,” comes a breathless voice from just behind us as Uther jogs to a stop and joins our circle. His steady gray eyes sweep over me and Soren before coming to rest on Penn’s face. “Where do you need me?”

“Uther, your family…” Penn hesitates. “Are you certain—”

“I said, where do you need me? ”

Penn clasps his hand on Uther’s shoulder. “Go to the barracks. Make sure any stragglers are out of bed, armed, and ready to fight. Bring whoever you can find to the front gates.”

Uther nods. His eyes meet mine for a brief instant, shining with undisguised warmth, before he, too, races away into the night.

“Farley.” Penn’s attention shifts to the redhead. He looks grave, leaning heavily on his cane, bow and arrow strapped across his back, short sword hanging from his hip. “You’ll be at the keep. The guards there already know the lockdown protocols, but I want to ensure people have a place to fall back, if necessary.”

“The keep? You’re joking.”

“Farley. It’s the safest place—”

“Fuck safe !” Farley’s expression mottles with anger. “I want to fight!”

“Your leg is not recovered.”

“I don’t need my leg to swing a bloody sword!”

“I need you with Rhya.”

Farley quiets.

I tense.

At my side, so does Soren.

“I’m with Farley on this,” I interrupt, nearly shaking in my attempt to keep from screaming. “You aren’t sidelining me. I’m not running or hiding. Not this time. Not while you all risk your lives to keep the city safe—”

Penn glowers. “Rhya—”

“She’s right, Pendefyre,” Soren says, surprising me. “We need her. Your powers are not at full strength—”

“I don’t need you to tell me about my own bloody limitations, Soren. And I definitely don’t need you putting ideas in her head. She has no training for battle.”

“What have you spent these past weeks teaching her, then?” Soren asks, incredulous. “From what I witnessed up on that parapet, perhaps your lessons have been more focused on the bedroom than the battlefield.”

Penn’s expression darkens with wrath. “Be very careful what you say next, nymph.”

“Why?” Soren’s brows arch sardonically. “Is the truth too hard to swallow?”

“Stop it! Both of you.” I step between the two men, cutting off Penn’s sight line to Soren before things escalate to bloodshed. “Penn, please. Now is not the time to be overprotective—”

“We’re under attack,” he counters. “It’s precisely the time to be overprotective.”

“You can’t protect me from this !”

“I can bloody well try!” His words are a roar, right in my face. But beneath his rage, I see his fear. I feel it, too, a surge of pure emotion through our bond. “Gods, Rhya, for once, would you just listen to me without fighting every step of the—”

I never hear the rest of what he says. The sky rattles as another blast of dark maegic collides with the wards. They give one final, faded pulse of resistance, flickering the faintest shade of red, then dissipating in a cloud of useless vapor.

The wards are down.

For a moment, there is only stillness. The entire city holds its breath, waiting to see what will happen. Penn and I stare into each other’s eyes. No longer fighting, no longer saying anything at all. His free hand lifts to my neck and he jerks me close. Our foreheads collide with a jarring thunk.

“Stay safe,” he whispers fervently. “For me.”

Then his mouth is on mine in a hard, brutal kiss. It lasts no longer than a heartbeat. It tastes like goodbye. Before I can even think of returning it, he is gone—racing toward the front gates without a word.

Soren shoots me a brief, unreadable look and then he takes off, running after Penn so fast he is no more than a smear of dark navy fabric to my eyes, though the tears glossing over their surfaces may have something to do with my blurred vision.

“Ace,” Farley says. He sounds as shaky as I feel. When I drag my watering eyes to him, I see he looks even worse. “We should get inside.”

Despite his words, neither of us moves. All around, people are running for shelter; soldiers are scrambling for weapons. Everyone seems to have a purpose, a destination, a plan. Except us. We are a point of stillness in the chaos, unmoored and uncertain.

We both glance briefly toward the keep. Toward the promise of shelter. Then, in unspoken unison, our gazes swing around in the opposite direction, down the straight stretch of roadway that separates us from the fortified tunnel on the far side of the crater, where, even now, our friends are readying themselves for whatever evils might burst through those heavy stone doors.

I know Farley is no more enthused than I am at the prospect of hiding out while others fight and bleed and die. But I have no skills in battle and no weapons to speak of—besides the dagger strapped to my thigh. Thank the gods Carys agreed to add the slit so I can access it easily.

Carys.

Realization blazes through me. “Farley. Carys is all alone.”

His light green eyes flood with purpose. He immediately begins hobbling in the direction of High Street, his cane moving at a steady clip.

“What the hell are we waiting around for, Ace? Let’s go!”

Since my arrival in the Northlands, I have heard many stories of the Reavers’ brutality. I have seen the hatred that fuels their quest to wipe my kind from the face of the earth with my own eyes, in that bloody clearing atop the Cimmerians where a whole unit of soldiers lay butchered in the snow. But whatever tales I have heard, whatever horrors I have seen cannot compare to the things I witness the night of Fyremas.

Farley and I are halfway down High Street when the tunnel falls. There’s a telltale explosion—much like the ones that rained down upon the wards, only closer, louder, and infinitely more terrifying.

It would take a troll to breach them , Penn had said of the stone doors that seal the tunnel. You are safe.

But I am not.

No one is.

We are nowhere near the explosion, yet the impact still shakes the ground beneath our feet. The resulting boom has me covering my ears and ducking for cover, certain I am about to be blown to bits. A cloud of dust and ash fills the air, spreading outward in a fog.

From here, we cannot see whatever is blasting its way into the city. A maze of streets separates us from King’s Avenue and the gates beyond. But when my senses stop ringing, my ears pick up the unmistakable roar of battle on the wind. And I know, without a doubt, the stronghold of Caeldera has been shattered.

“Fuck,” Farley curses, hobbling faster. He nearly loses his footing on an uneven sidewalk in his haste.

“Careful,” I mutter. “We’re nearly there.”

We pass the apothecary, who is frantically pounding wooden boards over his shop windows. I want to tell him not to waste his energy, to get to safety, but merely nod in greeting as we rush past. The chocolatier is long gone, his door ajar. He left in a hurry. The cobbler and her wife peer out at us from behind their half-closed shutters, fear etched plainly across their features.

Carys’s whole building is dark, but the door swings inward the moment we come to a stop on the street outside, as though she’s been waiting for us. She urges us into the dim shop without a word. Baby Nevin is swaddled tightly against her chest. As soon as we clear the threshold, she bolts the door once more.

“What’s happening?” she whispers, staring from me to Farley. “We heard the alarms. Uther took off to see what was going on. He said not to leave until he came back, but I just heard an explosion…”

“Reavers,” we say in unison. “They’ve breached the tunnel.”

“But the wards!”

“The wards are down. We have to go, Carys.”

Carys grips her baby tighter. Her face is ghostly pale. “We will be safe enough here.”

“Not as safe as the inner keep—”

“I’m not going to the keep. My husband told me to stay here until he returns. That’s what I plan to do.”

I swallow a gulp of frustration as she collapses stubbornly onto a straight-backed chair she’s turned to face the door. I notice a slender, lethally sharp saber sitting on the end table beside it. When she sees me looking, Carys shrugs. Her lips curl up at one side and a ghost of humor drifts through her eyes.

“I’m no Ember Guild member, but Uther taught me well enough to stop anything that comes through that door.”

“I’m relieved I have you two fearsome ladies to protect me,” Farley says with only the slightest edge of mockery in his tone. Grinning, he slips the bow and quiver off his back and passes them to me. “Take this, Ace. You’re a better shot than I am.”

“But—”

“I’m covered.” He gestures down to the short sword at his hip. “Just take it, would you? We both know I can’t aim worth a damn when I’m leaning on a cane for support.”

“Thanks,” I murmur, fingers closing around the quiver. I feel instantly safer with a weapon in my hands.

Discussion stalls as we sit in the dark shop, flinching each time an explosion sounds in the distance. None of us has the heart to keep up the charade of normal conversation. Physically, we are in the room, and yet our hearts and minds are far beyond the confines of these four walls, caught up in the battle that rages on in the streets, coming closer and closer as the minutes tick by.

Certainly, there is horror in the fight; however, there is a different sort of horror in the wait for that fight to end. In sitting idly by, counting minutes, counting heartbeats, praying that the news, when at last it comes, will be good.

I have never before felt so useless. A pathetic girl in a pretty dress, sitting in the shadows, hiding out instead of helping.

What have you spent these past weeks teaching her?

I am a failure. I have no aptitude for maegic, no ability to keep anyone safe. Would that this gift had passed to someone else. Someone worthy of it. Someone who could actually be of some consequence in a war zone, instead of hiding out like the worst sort of coward.

One haunting thought chases another across my mind, a dark circle that snakes through me and coils at the center of my chest. My Remnant burns, a constant reminder of my own stagnation.

“ Carys… ” I try again when a blast hits so close, the chandelier rattles over our heads and several bolts of fabric tumble to the floor. “We should really—”

“I’m not leaving,” she repeats for the umpteenth time, digging in her heels. “Uther said—”

“Uther did not know the severity of this situation!” I cast a desperate look at Farley, but he merely grimaces, at a loss for what to do. We can’t exactly drag her, kicking and screaming, into a battlefield with a baby in her arms. No sooner can we leave her here alone.

We are stuck.

“At least take the baby and get out of sight,” I plead with my pigheaded friend. “If the fighting reaches us…”

Carys heaves an annoyed sigh but ultimately does as I bid, moving toward the rear sitting area. She drags her saber with her.

Farley blows out a tense breath. “Stubborn as an ox, that one.”

“She’s scared. She doesn’t want to leave her home.”

“She may not have a choice, Ace.”

The sounds of battle edge closer, increasing in decibels as the bloodshed spills outward from the breached tunnel down King’s Avenue, into surrounding neighborhood squares and side alleyways, and, eventually, onto the quaint cobblestones of High Street. I listen to its approach, a melody unique to wartime—the heartrending peal of screams, the piercing clash of blades, harmonizing into an anguishing din that grates at both the ears and the heart.

All too soon, the fight rages right outside our door. I tuck a high-backed chair beneath the knob, but I know the barricade is flimsy at best. Scurrying up into the window display, I squeeze between two mannequins and press my face against the glass pane to get a look outside.

“Rhya—”

I silence Farley with a terse hand gesture. People are running down the street, their faces streaked with dust and grime and blood. Not soldiers but civilians, many of them still clad in their fanciest Fyremas attire. My heart lurches when I see a mother dragging two children in her wake, desperation contorting her face as their tiny feet stumble.

“To the keep!” a Dyvedi soldier is shouting as he runs in the opposite direction, pointing wildly over his shoulder. “Take shelter in the keep!”

The door of the shop directly across the lane cracks open. I watch two cloaked female figures dart out, not even pausing long enough to turn the locks. The cobbler and her wife join the fray of fleeing Caelderans and disappear. One shop down, the apothecary’s hammer and planks lie abandoned in front of his half-boarded windows.

The fleeing crowd thins, then tapers off until only a handful of stragglers streak past the window, heading in the direction of the marketplace and the palace beyond. When a shadow lurches to a stop at the front door, my heart seizes in panic. I realize it is not an enemy as desperate fists pound and a familiar voice calls out.

“Carys! Gods, Carys, are you in there?”

Hopping down from the window display, I tear away my makeshift barricade, pull back the bolt, and yank open the door as quickly as my shaking hands allow.

“ Keda? ”

“Rhya!” She gapes at me, eyes wild. Her slim face is coated in grime except for twin trails down each cheek, where tears stream in a steady torrent. Her dress hem is in tatters. Her arms reach out for me, like I might pull her physically to safety. “Thank the gods! Please, let me in! I tried to make it to the palace, but they’re coming, they’re here , and I—”

She never finishes her sentence.

Her hands are still reaching out for me when the tip of a blade plunges through her heart.