by Sara Raasch
“Yes, Ash Nikau,” Biotus purred. He laughed, the sound like a roar. Ash inadvertently tensed, her fire wavering. “Save us.”
He swung at her, a fist to the gut; she danced aside on instinct only. She dodged two more blows the same way before one connected—but it wasn’t a punch. Biotus grabbed her, wrapping his beefy arms around her, and hauled her bodily from the throne room.
“Biotus!” Hydra shouted. “STOP—”
Ash screamed, but wordlessly; she was horror embodied, every raw ache from the beating she’d taken at Florus’s hands coming back on her tenfold. Her whole body lit up like a sunset, but Biotus held tight, running, running, until he leaped into the air—and out a window.
Briefly, Ash was aware of the palace giving way to the sky and a small bay jutting out from the land. Where the palace ended and the shore began, she couldn’t tell; this entire island was moss and vines and growing things. But out in the water, the liquid-blue sky and bay created a bowl.
A bowl that looked very much like an arena.
Biotus laughed again, the sound grating against Ash’s flaming back, and released her.
She dropped, plummeting through the air. She hadn’t realized how high he’d taken her until she flipped upside down and saw Biotus, above her, now in the form of a massive golden eagle.
Then she flipped again, and the bay waters were coming up fast, too fast—
A spurt of water shot up from the bay and gulped Ash into it. She flailed, fighting for the surface as the water lowered her to the bay’s surface and solidified into an ice platform.
Ash doubled over, coughing on the ice, shivering, as Hydra materialized into her human self.
She dived at Ash, ripping her to her feet and throwing her arms around her. “I’m sorry—Florus had no right. I tried to find you as soon as I could, but he’s lost his mind, and now this—”
Ash almost came apart. She clung to Hydra, and she could have rested there too long—but they were floating in the middle of the bay, easy targets for the massive eagle above them, banking in the sky.
Other birds joined him. Falcons and hawks and wicked, hook-beaked things with sharp talons and hungry eyes.
Ash stiffened in Hydra’s arms, and Hydra looked up.
“Travel again,” Hydra told her. “Get back to my islands. I’ll handle him.”
Ash sucked in a shaking breath, and with it came a surge of will. She pushed onto her feet, but the ice rocked, and she squatted low.
“I’m here to fight,” Ash told Hydra.
Hydra appeared exhausted, suddenly, with rings of bruises around her eyes and hollow cheeks. She might not have been able to die, but she looked close.
“No—you’ve been through enough.”
“So have you!” Ash screamed. She was shaking so hard she could barely see Hydra before her. “So has everyone! This is why I am what I am, right? To fight. So let’s fight.”
Ash looked up at the birds. The giant eagle at their center hovered above Ash, beating his wings to stay steady.
She flared fire up both arms.
The birds, as one, swiveled to face her. Biotus as an eagle angled his body and speared through the air toward them.
Ash knotted the fire into a ball, ready to throw, but Hydra didn’t move, didn’t raise her arms or flinch. She stared at Biotus, letting him and his vicious birds come closer, closer—
The moment he was close enough to touch, Hydra thrust her arms up, and a wicked gush of water wrapped around them all—Biotus, his birds, Ash, and Hydra. It dragged them all into the frigid depths.
The water hit Ash like a rock to the chest, knocking the breath from her lungs. She twisted in a curtain of bubbles and foam, angling for the surface, but hydreia grabbed all of them and yanked down, keeping the fight in Hydra’s realm. Panic crested as Ash’s mouth popped open in an involuntary scream.
The noise should have been muted, but it rang clear in her ears, which jolted her enough that she inhaled before she could think not to.
Water gushed into her lungs. Her body seized, fighting the invasion—
But she wasn’t drowning.
Again, her lungs clawed for breath, and she relented, pulling water in, pushing bubbles out.
She could breathe underwater. And hear underwater.
All those times Hydra had thrown her into the sea during their awful training, Ash had never once inhaled. Now that she thought about it, it made perfect sense—being Fire Divine made her impervious to burning, so being Water Divine would make her impervious to drowning.
The wonder of this new discovery was short-lived.
Biotus was not as confident in the water—his large frame thrashed and, much less fluidly than he’d changed from falcon to man, his body elongated, darkened, writhed and rippled—
Until he was a shark.
He whipped around, tail flinging bubbles through the water.
The birds splashed feebly to the surface, useless here; Ash reveled in that for only a breath before she saw all manner of other sea creatures gathering behind him. Sharks and stingrays, grotesque-looking eels with electricity flicking off their skin—they rallied to his cry, pulled by bioseia, helpless not to obey the animal god.
Hydra was gone. Or maybe she was everywhere, the water personified—Ash couldn’t see the goddess, but she could feel her, a charged rage that sizzled on her skin with each brush of the tide.
Biotus in his shark form flipped and writhed, fighting something unseen. Hydra had to have been holding him trapped with hydreia.
But the rest of his sea creatures stayed focused on Ash. They were weapons at the ready.
Ash treaded water, her hair wild and free in the shifting current. Her head roared with a hundred past fights, the call of a ghost crowd demanding bloodshed and death.
The sea creatures, poor beasts at Biotus’s whims, charged her.
Ash flailed, trying to get away, but everything was liquid and she couldn’t get traction. Dread pushed her into action and she moved, either by hydreia or her own force, bubbles brushing her face like gentle, comforting fingers.
She needed to fight. But how?
She couldn’t control animals. She couldn’t fight off dozens at once.
The first of the sea creatures reached her, its rounded nose driving into her side. Pain flared as the force launched her back. She spun and spun and crashed into a jagged rock.
The long, angular fish that had thrown her fell back, swiping around to regroup. There was almost a formation with the creatures, organization roughly given from Biotus as he battled nearby.
Ash thought she saw a face in the water, a giant, liquid version of Hydra, but she blinked, and it was gone.
The sea creatures were heading for her again, all of them hissing and heaving, while Ash remained pinned against the rock. One of the creatures made a croaking bark, filled with frustration and anger, as though it was trying to resist attacking her but was helpless not to.
Ash felt that frustration to her toes.
This life had been brutal and unfair, but she would be damned if she let it defeat her.
She would fight because Char would have done so. Because Madoc needed her to. Because she wanted more than just one stolen night with him—she wanted a lifetime, and she would not let Anathrasa, or Biotus, or anyone take that from her.
She would show them just how godlike she could be. She was more than a god. She couldn’t be killed and she could command three of the six energeias—and Biotus and Florus both would rue the day they had stood against her.
Holding the image of Madoc in her head, Ash moved.
She flung her hands outward, trying to call fire, but of course it wouldn’t come. Not down here. All she got was boiling water, and she growled in frustration.
Even if she could use igneia, something about that sort of aggressive attack felt wrong. Time slowed as she looked back up at the creatures. They were alive, trapped as she was, but controlled by Biotus. Ash didn’t want to—couldn’t—kill them.
Hydreia. She’d have to use hydreia.
Ash widened her hands, kicking her legs to push off the rock.
Stop, she willed, fingers splayed, arms braced. She wasn’t sure whether she spoke to the water or the animals or the world at large. Stop.
The fastest creature, a barracuda, reared back as though it had struck a wall. It blinked at her, glassy eyes startled, and Ash almost laughed with feeling the same. Had she done it? Had she managed to harden the water around her enough to—
Hydra materialized next to her. With a shove of her arm, the sea creatures tumbled away, sucked into the abyss of the sea by a twisting water cyclone.
“Learn faster,” Hydra snapped, and shot away, her body zooming through the water, back for the main attack.
Ash glared after her. Biotus in his shark form was fighting twisting funnels of water, tearing at shards of ice with glinting, pearly teeth.
Purely by instinct, Ash lunged, and on a whisper of intention, she appeared on top of Biotus, her body a lit iron even underwater. The shark reared at the flames and Ash watched blisters pop across its gray skin. She clung to Biotus’s back, willing her igneia to flare, every piece of her scalding as the water around her boiled and fumed.
Through the chaos, Ash saw a surge of greenery, a knotted tangle of plants rising off the ocean floor—
Florus appeared, vines stretching from him toward the surface, holding his body buoyant under the water. His eyes met hers with vicious determination.
She couldn’t bring herself to read anything in that stare.
Beneath her, Ash felt a shift, a tug—and Biotus was himself again. The change stunned her enough that when he spun, she released him, and he landed a punch to her gut with such force, even underwater, that Ash saw stars. Agony ricocheted up her chest and had her coughing for breath—or water, here, whatever appeased her lungs—but Biotus didn’t attack her again.
He whirled for Florus.
Hydra formed, launching herself at Biotus, but his lower half shifted into that of a shark once more. His top half remained human, and as he charged through the water, he slammed into Florus, keeping hold of him as he angled for the surface.
“No!” Hydra appeared next to Ash, gasping, her long black hair like tentacles in the water.
“We have to get up there—” Ash started, but Hydra beat her to it, carrying her forward on a wash of hydreia.
The sea capped around Biotus and he hit the invisible wall of hydreia with a gruff roar.
“Hydra!” he shouted. “I will have him, and I will have the both of you! You cannot win this war!”
“Biotus will keep fighting,” Hydra said absently, to herself or to Ash.
He would. And Hydra would keep fighting just as hard, and Ash too, and maybe even Florus, and these four gods would be clashing until the world caved in on itself, for none of them would tire and none of them would die.
Ash touched Hydra’s arm. “I’m with you,” she said.
Hydra looked at her, exhaustion in her deep eyes. She gave a weak smile. “Then we—”
Biotus cut her off with a bellow.
Ash and Hydra whipped around.
He had his powerful arms knotted around Florus’s body, leaving only the plant god’s head free. But vines spewed from Florus’s open mouth, an endless stream of tendrils scurrying out into the water. Half of them pummeled Biotus, burrowing into his eye sockets, yanking at his limbs—
And half shot toward Ash.
She flailed away, but the vines grabbed her, and she screamed, everything in her panicking. Not again—
But then a vine traced her ear. “Ash Nikau.”
The voice came from the plant. Florus?
“Time is against us,” the voice said. “Ironic for immortals, isn’t it?”
Biotus yanked off the worst of the vines. He retightened his grip on Florus while Hydra sent funnel after funnel of churning water, but Biotus was calling the sea creatures to him, and more from beyond, a growing army of animals to attack them.
Ash gagged, unable to move in Florus’s vines.
“I may have misjudged you,” Florus told her. His voice was impossibly sad, worn with pressure. “We were wrong last time with Ciela. Don’t let us be wrong again.”
One of the thicker vines wound against Ash’s chest, and the world blossomed into spring.
There was no endless sea. There was only a forest, silent and sleepy, gleaming with dew and golden light. Thick brown trunks shot up to support a fluffy emerald canopy with leaves drifting down in lazy spirals. All was still, and peaceful, and it smelled of moss and decay but also of life.
It made the terror she had endured in Itza less shattering.
That haven retreated into Ash’s body. It was inside her now: floreia. A piece of the life that sprouted from earth, the life that bloomed in ashes, the life that fed on water.
The connections were forming. Ash could feel the tapestry weaving together in her chest, floreia sighing to be together with igneia, geoeia, hydreia. Two spaces remained, and their absence throbbed, echoing with loneliness.
Aereia. Bioseia. Her soul stretched to reach for them.
She was coming together. Shattered pieces reforming into a nearly complete whole.
Florus’s vines retreated. Across the water, she saw him in Biotus’s arms.
He nodded at her, and she knew what he intended to do. Why he had given her a piece of floreia now—because he knew Biotus would take him to Crixion. He had been wrong to think Ash could defeat Biotus, or maybe he’d just wanted them to fight as a distraction; whatever his intentions earlier, he was going to surrender now.
“Hydra!” Ash reached for the water goddess, who was still throwing water and calling shards of ice. “Hydra—Florus gave me floreia.”
Hydra spun, hair whipping in the water. Her face went slack with shock, then tensed with rage, and she spun back to glare at Biotus and Florus. “No, you idiot! We can stop him!”
Florus shook his head. He gave a helpless smile.
“We’ll save him, Hydra,” Ash told her. Part of her wanted the plant god to suffer a little, but he had given her floreia. Even after everything he’d put her through.
But only because Biotus had forced him to act.
Hydra screamed. It was a lifetime of pain and agony.
The only sign that she had lifted her hydreia’s grasp on Biotus was his triumphant laugh.
“Good girl, sister,” he barked at her. “I’ll be back for you.”
And he was gone, launching up toward the surface. The moment he broke out of the water with Florus, he transformed back into the eagle, his claws holding the plant god as he swept into the sky.
“This is war,” Hydra growled. Ash wasn’t sure whether the roiling water around them was from her anger or Ash’s own.
“It is,” Ash told her. She took Hydra’s hand. “We’re going to get Florus back, and we’re going to stop Anathrasa.”
Hydra blinked, a calculating glint in her eyes. “You can travel through igneia,” she stated. Gone was the lighthearted woman who had pestered Ash during training; this goddess was a general, readying for battle. “Go warn your lover that Anathrasa is accelerating her plan, if he doesn’t already know. Find out why Biotus took Florus. Be discreet. I have to deal with my people in Itza, and with Florus’s own mortals.”
“Yes,” Ash said. She had no idea how to fully control her igneia travels, but Madoc needed to know that Anathrasa had abducted Florus and would no doubt send Biotus back to get Hydra. “Tor’s still in the palace—”
“I’ll get him back to the islands,” Hydra said. “Meet us there.” Ash nodded. She would get to see Madoc now. If she could figure out how to appear in Crixion without revealing herself to Anathrasa.
Madoc, she willed herself, her heart fluttering.
Go to Madoc.
Thirteen
MADOC
MADOC CUT THROUGH the party in search of Aera, smiling and shaking hands with those who stopped to praise him. Over the
heads of the others, he watched Elias skirting the edge of the courtyard behind the musicians. It was impossible now not to feel the fear of those in attendance. Even the Air and Animal Divine who’d fought in the games watched him with barely veiled hostility.
By the time he arrived at the corridor, Elias was waiting. The Deiman guards who blocked their path were easy enough to distract—Madoc had only to suggest they weren’t there, and the guards looked straight through them, as if they were invisible.
Soon they reached the double doors of the library, which were cracked open to reveal flickering torchlight within. Low voices came from inside, and as Madoc leaned closer, a chill swept over his skin.
“She’s grown soft,” a deep, male voice growled, bringing the iron taste of bloody meat to Madoc’s tongue, and a rise in his anathreia. “Now that we have Florus, we need to move on Hydra. Take her before she has time to gather her army.”
Madoc glanced at Elias, both Biotus’s return and the mention of the god of plants taking him by surprise. Who had Florus? He was supposed to be with Hydra. If he’d betrayed the goddess of water, that was less protection for Ash.
Wariness chilled Madoc’s blood.
“And sacrifice our chosen battlefield?” Aera responded, her voice light. “You’ve been back two minutes and you’re already prepared to attack?”
“I don’t know about your soldiers, but mine can fight anywhere, anytime.”
Madoc’s breath quickened. He had to find a way to warn Ash. Was this the errand the Mother Goddess had ordered? If Florus had joined Biotus and Aera, and they were conspiring to attack the Apuit Islands, Hydra needed to be ready.
Aera giggled. “How very versatile of them . . .” Her words were cut off by a sharp gasp.
“I grow tired of your mocking tongue, baby sister.”
Madoc didn’t pretend to understand the dynamics at play between the two gods but couldn’t deny the toxic wave of power that pushed through the door. He glanced at Elias, whose eyes went wide as a crash sounded from inside. Aera’s cry cut through his resolve.
“Distract them,” Madoc whispered.
Elias pressed his hands to the outside wall of the library and closed his eyes. A moment later, the wall began to rumble, and from inside came the groan of wood, and the clattering of books tumbling to the marble floor.