by Sara Raasch
His body turned back to face the Mother Goddess. Smiled.
You’re enjoying this, he wanted to respond. But she either didn’t hear him or didn’t care.
And after a moment, he didn’t care either.
Eighteen
ASH
IN IGNA, ASH was near the harbor. She faced the bulk of the city, its sprawling obsidian structures speckled with windows in a rainbow of hues. The sky was gray with low-slung clouds and the air had a twist of humidity, thick like a storm had come or was about to come.
She was relieved—only for a breath.
Then grief hit her, a piercing feeling of absence: Ash hadn’t been to Igna since her mother died.
She had the sensation of being underwater again, her senses muted as though she was submerged, noises muffled to a dull roar, her breath a grating rumble alongside the thudding of her heart. Each blink was languid and painful, flashing with memories she had been able to ignore for several weeks.
Char taking her to Igna’s markets. Idly shopping with her, whiling away time and money on trinkets and smiles to combat the horror of Char’s life as Ignitus’s champion.
Char and Tor arm in arm as they walked along the waterfront. Her mother, smiling, her teeth a blinding white and her face soft.
Char trying a dish at a tavern, then spitting it out and laughing through tears at how spicy it was.
Everywhere, Ash saw her mother. Everywhere, Ash heard her voice, her all-too-rare laughter.
She hadn’t felt Char’s absence so strongly since she’d watched her mother die.
Wheezing, Ash stumbled around and faced the sea.
Everywhere, Kulans were running. Innocent citizens were fleeing in terror; warriors, their bodies awash in flame, were positioned strategically around the bay.
And out in the water, charging through the surf, were half a dozen Deiman ships.
The breath went out of Ash’s lungs.
Around her, screaming voices pushed through her fog.
“Ignitus!” They had seen her fire. They had watched her appear in a flare of blue and gold. “Ignitus! Our god has risen!”
But they turned, and they saw her, not Ignitus, and the cheers became confused cries, and Ash couldn’t deal with an explanation right now.
“I haven’t been to Kula in decades.”
Ash glanced over her shoulder to see Hydra behind her, shifting out of her water form.
“I’m not leaving Kula with you,” Ash told her.
Hydra locked eyes with her. “I know.”
That was it. Just acceptance, and Ash realized with a jolt that Hydra had come to help her. Or at least to make sure Ash didn’t get herself irreparably hurt.
Ash nodded, surveying her surroundings. She and Hydra were on the path in front of a naval building on the largest military dock. As she turned to leap up the steps, a man shot out of the doors and drew up short at the sight of her.
“Ash?” Brand’s face contorted. Ignitus’s former champion looked behind her, to Hydra, and his frown deepened. “How did you—”
“What is happening?” Ash demanded.
He took the steps two at a time to stand in front of her. The last she had seen the cocky champion, he had been gaunt and stricken by Ignitus’s death. That, and his short time in Kula explaining Ignitus’s fate, had seemed to mature him. The flighty confidence Ash had hated in him was gone. A rough line of stubble made him look unkempt and tired. He was wearing Kulan reed armor, but it was dented and well-used, not ceremonial in the slightest.
“Deimos sent a message ahead of their ships,” Brand told her. “They’ve come to take the Fire Divine to fight in Crixion’s arenas. It’s a privilege”—he spat the word—“and the winners will become part of the Mother Goddess’s circle. Whatever that means.”
“She sent centurions to capture Kulans,” Ash said, half to herself. Just as Anathrasa had sent Biotus to take Florus.
“Not just centurions,” Brand said.
Ash frowned.
He pointed at the ships. “If you look through a spyglass you’ll find rows of armed gladiators on those ships. If she’s taking Kulans to fight in her arenas, and using the victors—”
“She’s building an army of gladiators.” Hydra was the one who finished the thought. Brand gave her an odd look, like he recognized her but couldn’t place her, and nodded grimly.
“An army made of the fiercest fighters in the world,” Ash said. She felt ill. “Such a force would quell any unrest.”
Hydra blew out a breath. “Anathrasa would have complete control of the world.”
Ash faced the sea, the coming ships. Anathrasa may have gotten Deimans, Laks, and Cenhelmians to obey her, but no Kulans would join her army.
Brand echoed her unspoken sentiment. “The Mother Goddess seems to think she can make Kulans bow to her, but after what Geoxus did to our god, any supporter of Anathrasa will find only bloodshed here!”
He shouted the last words and punched a fist into the air. All around him, frantic warriors and cowering citizens alike responded with a cheer.
But Ash watched Brand’s face. His eyes showed none of the conviction in his voice.
He sobered and bent closer to her. “Many of our warriors deserted when they learned of Ignitus’s death,” he whispered to her. He kept his focus on the passing soldiers, the ones who were scrambling to set up a defense as the Deiman ships drew ever closer. “They fled the city, seeking shelter in the wilderness outside Igna. They think the world is ending.”
He paused, eyes sliding to her in an unspoken question. Is it?
“We know how to defeat Anathrasa,” Ash told him.
Some of the tension in Brand’s face subsided. He cast his eyes to Hydra, this time with purpose. “Did you bring help from the Apuit Islands? Or Itza?” He looked down at her again, confused. “How did you know we were in trouble?”
“I heard you,” Ash said. “And I did bring help. This is Hydra.”
Brand’s mouth fell open. For a moment, his body twitched as though he might drop to his knees in reverence.
But Hydra waved him off. “Ash is more powerful than I am.”
Brand’s jaw went slack. “What?”
Ash didn’t respond. She was still watching the ships and could barely make out moving shapes, rocks shifting and lowering as centurions—gladiators—prepared their attack.
Such an army would destroy this city at Anathrasa’s command and drag Kulans into her war, to be drained of their igneia if they refused to fight for her.
Ash would die before she let Anathrasa touch any of her Kulans. Because they were just that—her Kulans, her compatriots.
Anathrasa would not take anything else from her.
“Hydra,” Ash said, taking slow steps toward the water. “With me.”
Brand followed them. “Where is the army? Who did you bring? We have soldiers stationed around the—”
“Call them back,” Ash told him.
“What? Are you insane? We can’t leave the bay undefended.”
“Call them back,” she said again. She cut her eyes to him, and the strike of her glare rendered him silent. “Clear the bay. Now.”
Brand faltered a step, but he nodded and started shouting the order. It caught, tentatively, and Ash watched the small specks of Kulans peel back from the water. Or maybe she just sensed it through her connection to them, the thrumming of her igneia beating stronger now that she was in Kula, surrounded by Kulans.
“You’ll need to get closer,” Hydra told her. “You’ll have more control of your energeias if you can see what you’re attacking and where.”
Ash continued walking, closing the distance to the shore. When she reached the lapping water, she paused, whipping a look to Hydra. “I’ll have control? You’re not going to help?”
Hydra had matched her pace and was next to her. “You wanted to save your country? You’re a god now. So get out there and act like the god of Kula.”
Ash’s hands shook. Blame was heavy in Hydra’s tone. I
f something happened to Ash or Hydra—if Anathrasa captured them or injured them somehow—it would be Ash’s fault, because she hadn’t waited, because she was impetuous.
She was also a goddess, and Kula was hers, and she would defend it.
Ash started walking again. Small pillars of water lifted to meet each footstep as she headed out into the bay.
The lead Deiman ship had just reached their waters.
Ash stopped a few paces back from its bow. Hydra was beside her, hovering on a similar pillar.
A man onboard saw them.
“Turn around and sail back to Crixion,” Ash told him.
The centurion laughed. “Not likely.”
He noted their position, standing on the water. He noted Ash, especially, smoke like steam gathering around her and flames licking her face.
Fear broke his confidence with a flinch.
“Leave Kula,” she said. “Now.”
“We have our orders. Kula’s god is dead. The Mother Goddess wishes to bring his lost children into the fold of her guidance—”
“I will kill the Mother Goddess,” Ash promised. “Just as I killed your god of earth.”
That made the centurion’s unease shift into anger. “God Killer! We will not leave until all able-bodied Kulan warriors have surrendered to the superior might of Deimos. We will not leave until we have taken from you what you took from us tenfold!”
“Are you going to let him keep talking?” Hydra whispered. “Attack.”
Ash felt the flames on her arms waver.
“High ground,” Hydra prodded. “Rise up.”
Attack. High ground. These were all things Ash knew from her arena training. How to fight. How to win.
She lifted her arms and a thrashing wave carried her into the air. The commotion on the Deiman ships paused as everyone watched her.
She saw the rows of immobile gladiators now. Their heads lifted as one, their eyes on her empty and unseeing.
Ash realized with a jolt of horror what Anathrasa had done. She was building an army of warriors wholly given over to her control. This was what she wanted from the world—utter, explicit obedience.
“The circle is unending,” the gladiators began to chant. “The circle is unending. The circle—”
Panic swelled in Ash.
“She did this before.” Hydra’s voice came from the droplets of water on Ash’s ears, the raging waves thrashing beneath her feet. “Forced people to obey her. It’s disgusting.”
“She’s stronger than we thought.” Ash felt sick.
“Steady. You can do this. They know you can control hydreia now. Attack where they won’t expect it.”
Yes. Ash could do that. The unexpected.
She called all manner of ocean plants up from the depths, and they squirmed and writhed around the thick hulls and up the wooden rails. The igneia was still alive within her, even as she used floreia. Fire sparked off the tips of her hair and the ends of her fingers and glowed from every muscle on her body. Water spewed foam and froth around her as it held her aloft, and the plants that scurried to do her bidding grew in great, powerful surges of green life.
“There are rocks on the ships,” Ash said to Hydra, and she laughed. Didn’t these stupid mortals know who they had come to fight?
“Get to them,” Hydra told her, “before the Earth Divine can use them. Call on plants and fire also—I’ll handle the water.”
“I thought you weren’t going to help?”
Hydra gave Ash a sardonic look. “Don’t make me change my mind.”
Ash laughed again. “Kula already has a god, Anathrasa,” she told the Mother Goddess. She knew Anathrasa wasn’t there, but she was listening through these people, and Ash’s voice resounded out of the rocks onboard every ship. “And I am Deimos’s god too.”
Ash clapped her hands together.
The plants slammed into the wooden planks of the ships, snapping them like twigs. Hydra sent water gushing over the rails and pouring into the cracks. Ash called on flames to lick at rope and barrels, bright bursts of light and heat that singed hands and served as warnings. And when the centurions cried out and dived for their precious rocks, Ash used those, too; she lifted every stone into the air and crushed them to shards that she then showered down on the Deimans.
It wasn’t enough. Ash pushed the shards of rocks outward, flinging them like projectiles. They met skin, dug deep; she pushed, the shards burying at her command as screams rose—
“Ash!” Hydra’s voice pitched high. “Ash, stop! You don’t need to kill them!”
“They’d kill my people!”
“Stop,” Hydra pleaded. “Stop the bloodshed. Let them live.”
Ash could so easily sink these ships to the depths of the bay.
But she felt Hydra, felt her intention tug gently on Ash’s control of hydreia. The goddess would always control water, even while Ash manipulated it.
With a snarl, she relented.
The ships were damaged, not destroyed. The crews sprinted for order, but there was no order.
There was only Ash.
She had spared the crews’ lives. She had given them a second chance. That was more than Geoxus had let his gladiator give to Char. More than Ignitus had given to Rook after his son had died. More than Anathrasa had given to Madoc. That was more than any god ever gave to any mortal, and for that, Ash would be known not only as God Killer, but Merciful.
“This world does not belong to you, Anathrasa,” Ash said. “Ready your armies. I am coming for you.”
She lifted her arms higher, pulling the wave she stood on up, up, up, before she dropped all her weight and plummeted into the water. The force of her surge propelled the Deiman ships hard and fast for the open, stormy waters of the Hontori Sea.
The bay churned and rocked. Ash hovered in it, watching the ships to make sure they wouldn’t try to charge back. But their crews scrambled to turn sail, fighting the cracks Ash had left in their vessels.
Only the gladiators were not panicked. Ash thought she saw them smile.
Ash turned to Hydra, expecting to see the water goddess looking as triumphant as Ash felt.
But the water goddess scowled at the horizon.
“You look like you think we lost the battle,” Ash said, gasping as her body trembled with the aftershocks of the fight. “Look what we did! We—”
Hydra lifted her hands. “We protected Igna, but at what cost? You were a threat to Anathrasa before, but you are deadly to her now. And with your Madoc currently in Crixion . . .”
Ash recoiled. Her body still hummed with the power she had unleashed, a ripe, resilient flurry that made her feel . . . everything. Every particle of sand on the shore. Every thudding heartbeat in the crowds watching her. Every sparking flame in the hands of the Kulan warriors. Every splash of water.
Everything but the fear she should feel, knowing she had endangered Madoc even more.
It should have consumed her, that fear. She should have been frantic to talk with Tor and find some way to salvage it.
But all she could think of was whether or not Madoc had gotten aereia and bioseia yet. Had he given them to Anathrasa, or was he fighting her off to save them for Ash? She wanted those missing pieces. How much swifter would her defense of Kula have been if she had been complete?
“He’ll be fine.” Ash looked up at Hydra. “He’ll get the other energeias for me—”
Hydra’s eyes narrowed. “That’s it? You just made your lover even more of a target, and you don’t have any reaction? Any guilt?”
“I defended what’s mine!” Ash whirled, a wave cutting up around her. Fire streamed along each arm, holding there in threatening flickers.
From the shore, a chant started. Ash thought she heard Brand’s voice kick it up first.
“Goddess! Goddess!”
“Do you hear them?” Hydra snapped. “Do you hear what they’re calling you?”
“Goddess!” the Kulans cheered. “Goddess!”
“How do
es that not terrify you?” Hydra’s eyes teared. “Look at the gods of this world. Look at what has happened to them. All of them, all of us, are murderous and cruel. This is what you want to become?”
“Maybe it’s what I already was,” Ash said. “Cruel. Selfish. Untethered. Maybe this power just set me free to stop cowering and embrace that I’ve had this strength in me all along.”
Hydra shook her head, tears clouding her eyes. “This isn’t strength, Ash. There can be power in unbridled selfishness to a degree, but you need to learn those limits.”
The water goddess sank into the bay, a ripple of sea-foam on the surface. Ash stared down at it, her shoulders heaving and her muscles aching while the crowd chanted goddess all around her and the sky raged a stormy gray above.
She screamed, and fire shot out from her hands into the roiling sky, and she fell into the flames.
Nineteen
MADOC
MADOC’S CONSCIOUSNESS REVIVED in stages.
A breath of cool air on the balcony in his room.
A bite of sour yogurt with breakfast, Aera giggling with Biotus, all at a table together. Panic seized his mind when he realized he’d lost time—how long had it been since the fight? Where was Elias? Had he been injured?
The last he recalled, Aera had made a wager about whose people would win—a Lak or a Deiman—and whose room she and Madoc would later meet in. He prayed he hadn’t followed through on that bet. That Anathrasa hadn’t let him be used in that way.
Before he could find out more, he grew foggy and slipped away.
Days passed—he could feel them ticking down in his mind like notches in a wall, though he could never grab hold of any one moment long enough. He was so tired, drawn so thin.
He rested. He didn’t know what his body was doing.
And then—the low light of a sheltered corridor, leading toward a stairway. He had to duck as he walked down the steps so he didn’t hit his head on the ceiling. He felt as though he was waking from a long sleep and couldn’t quite get his bearings.
He was following Anathrasa.
He became alert in a rush.
He was conscious. He would stay conscious—
Yes, stay awake, my son, Anathrasa told him. I want you to watch this.