“I’m fine,” her words were a little breathless. “Do they have Le Majest?”
“Yes,” I called back. Her loyalty was unshaken – as always. I would have thought that his snake manifestations would change that.
My captor tugged me roughly. “No talking. I would not like to stretch your pretty neck, but I will if I must, bird girl.”
I opened my mouth and pain blossomed across my cheek. He’d hit me. I clenched my jaw tightly and tried to focus on what I could feel, blinking past the pain. We’d all been captured. That meant no one was coming to save us. I’d have to think of a way to get away from these people – whoever they were – on my own.
I felt for my bees. They hummed in Juste Montpetit’s chest. He was ahead somewhere. I could feel that. I could hear grunts and a cry of pain that sounded like Ivo. I twisted my hands against my bonds. Pain blossomed as I was cuffed across the cheek again.
I sucked in a long breath. Maybe I’d wait before testing my bonds again.
It felt like we’d been traveling for a long time when the air around us grew cooler. It felt damp against my skin. I tried to think about what that could mean. Were we near a hidden pool?
Something sounded louder ahead – something that sounded like the murmur of voices in a language I didn’t understand. My captor said something in a harsh language with short, sharp syllables.
And then I felt something on my ear. A bug? No – too large. I tried to reach for it, but my hands were tied. Tried to rub it away with my shoulder, but a hand hit my shoulder hard enough to bruise and then the thing – whatever it was – was sliding into my ear. I screamed and heard other screams echoing my own. The same sensation bloomed in my other ear and then it was gone, and I was left trembling.
“Screaming over the gift of our snakes? How did you think that would win our pleasure?” my captor asked, his harsh voice seemed to suit his words now. “I refuse to continue to speak your filthy language and translation will only make this more difficult. Better to give you new ears immediately.”
He ripped off my blindfold and I saw him swaying slightly as if exhausted. A long rope of snake slid back into his hand.
“Why did you blindfold me?” I asked boldly. He kept pulling me after him despite his loss of energy.
“I hate it when captives squirm,” he said. “It makes the whole thing take forever. And there are places that you should not see.”
“Did your snake ... did it go inside my ear?”
His answering laugh held a nasty note that set my teeth on edge. The constant buzz in my chest rose, growing more and more irritated. So, he liked letting his gross snakes slither through people, did he? Well, maybe I’d show him what bees could do.
My captor took a sudden turn and threw me to the ground as if he’d sensed the violence welling up in me.
I hit hard on my wounded shoulder and moaned, struggling to get up again with my hands still tied behind my back. I pushed up to a sitting position and found Zayana sitting beside me, her eyes wide with terror.
“Are you hurt, Aella?” she asked.
“Only a little,” I said through gritted teeth. My shoulder screamed with pain. I’d probably pulled the stitches. But there were no new injuries. I blinked back tears at the sharp pains radiating from my shoulder and tried to look around us. “Do you see any of the others?”
Our captors had disappeared back into the tangled landscape. Were they planning to leave us here? But then why do the snake thing to my head?
“Just Le Majest. They had him on a litter made of spirit snakes.”
“Ugh. Did they put a snake through your ears?” I whispered.
Zayana shivered but she nodded, her Imperial face carefully cold and distant. “Who are these people? I wasn’t told about invaders here.”
“I wonder if they are invaders,” I said, working at the bindings behind my back. They felt like a rough jute twine. If only I could get at my belt knife. “They seem to know their way around.”
There was a crash in the distance and a long scream. Something slashed through the trees above us. Another scream. Then stillness.
Zayana shuffled toward me and I leaned into her, trying to look in every direction at once. “Is Flame hurt?”
“No. I have him hidden. And your bees?”
“I can’t tell,” I admitted. “I’m not very good with them yet. I could call them ...”
“...but that would leave Le Majest in danger,” Zayana finished. She nodded as if agreeing with me that he should not be disturbed. “I knew there would be trouble. I should have said something. There were four turtles on a rock in the river. Four! An even number. Nothing could be more inauspicious.”
Something rustled through the tangled Forbidding ahead of us. I focused on the sound, trying to keep my breathing even. Trying to keep from panicking. We shouldn’t be able to sit so safely in the middle of a tangle of Forbidding. I should have realized it would come for me soon.
I swallowed down fear. I was House Shrike. I was relentless. I would not let fear take hold of me.
There was a crashing in the dark Forbidding ahead of us and then a swarm of men and women in masks dragged an unconscious Ivo to where we were, tossing him on the ground like a sack of bones. I gasped as one of them kneeled on his back, lashing hands and feet together with brutal efficiency. There was no sign of his eagle.
“What are you going to do with him?” I asked, my voice trembling more than I would like.
The snake-masked attacker closest to me backhanded me, splitting my lip. I spat blood, blinking as pain shot through my head.
“Silence.”
If they thought beating me would make me docile, they were wrong. The pain was awful. But I was House Shrike and we didn’t cower or bend.
They left again, and this time, when they returned, they had Osprey, still tangled in the net, but unconscious, head lolling to the side, his familiar toothpick nowhere to be seen. The net had been strung to a pole and four heavily muscled men lifted the pole to their shoulders.
I swallowed, thinking of a bird I’d seen once, caught in a net. The poor thing hadn’t stood a chance.
They marched into the Forbidding, Osprey’s limp form swinging between them, as a second group grabbed Ivo and threw him into a similar net. I flinched as his limp body fell heavily onto the ground as they moved him. That was going to leave bruises. In moments, his net was attached to another pole and four more bearers carried him into the Forbidding, their masked expressions blank and unyielding.
A pair of them grabbed my upper arms, wrenching me to my feet at the same time that they pulled Zayana up.
“Where is Le Majest?” she asked, her voice shaking. I expected them to hit her, but surprisingly they did not.
“You ask after the Adder? Your concern is admirable. His snake has given him a fever and so has that poorly patched wound. We take him to the temple of the Cobra for healing and harmony.”
I stared at the one speaking to her, wishing I could see behind the mask. Temple of the Cobra? Adder?
A grim realization was starting to flood over me. We were the Winged Empire – as much as I both feared and hated that – and we were people of the skies and of the birds. My belt had shrike feathers sewn to it. My knife had a shrike etched on the handle. Birds or feathers, wings or claws decorated every bit of clothing we wore or owned.
These people – in contrast – were masked as snakes, wore the skin of snakes, and manifested snakes that snatched us from our boat. Was it possible that the underground cathedral we’d been in – the one that Juste Montpetit Hatched in – was one of their temples? Was it possible that they had been here in the Far Stones all this time, living deep in the earth or far into the Forbidding where we did not know to look? Perhaps, they were the ones who built the bridges covered in snakes, the ones who decorated old monuments with them. Maybe they were even the ones who made the Forbidding in the first place.
I shuddered at the thought, but my suspicions only solidified as
we were marched through the gnarled forest. Those who led us thought nothing of walking between waving tangles of Forbidding. They walked up the sides of waves of land that curled over and around. They ducked and hunched as they walked under spirals of grass growing overhead instead of under their feet. But the twisted land didn’t harm them. It even seemed to move away from them, curling away rather than toward them as they moved.
I watched with rapt attention. What made it respond to them differently, and could I find a way to make it respond to me like that?
Imagine how far you could go in the Far Stones – how much you could do! – if you didn’t have to constantly battle the land!
We hiked for hours through the tangled mess. The path – if there even was a path – wove in and out and up and down through such thick, swirling landscape that I was lost within the first hour. Even the sun didn’t seem to behave as I expected. It should be midmorning by now, and yet it hadn’t moved at all.
I was starting to grow more concerned, when my captors stilled for a moment, looking up and I followed their gazes to something rising out of the tangle of Forbidding before us.
Four stone snakes rose, tangling together in a spiral tower as they reached an apex where their carved heads split out in four open-mouthed images, each looking in a different direction.
We began to move again, and the twisted ground parted, revealing steps upward to what must be the Cobra Temple. Snakes formed the steps in coils. They lay one on top of the other so that the stairs wound around the building, sometimes forming strange S curves rather than a straight flight of steps.
All these snakes left a creepy feeling under my skin. Snakes would think differently than birds. Where a bird would choose a direct path, a snake would choose a twisted oblique approach.
It was long moments before I realized that some of the carved snakes decorating the steps leading up to the open-sided temple were not snakes at all, but more masked people wearing light scale armor and belts of snakeskin banded across their chests.
I tried not to stare as we were led up the steps, but the sense of being squeezed was becoming more and more powerful as I ascended. It was all I could do not to panic.
Just like with the underground cathedral, the snakes across the steps were carved in such sharp relief that they seemed to almost be alive. Shadows rippled deep and dark between the carved snakes so that it seemed as if we were walking up steps of snakes instead of stones.
Zayana stumbled beside me and we shared a brief worried glance. Whatever came next couldn’t be good. Ice flowed down my spine, settling into my belly.
When I fought the Forbidding all those years, had there been people like this hiding within it? Did they watch as I lit fires in their tangled mess? The Forbidding was more my enemy than anything else – more than Juste Montpetit and the Winged Empire even. It had been fighting me since before my first steps. I’d always thought it was a mindless entity, like thorns or wildfires. What if it wasn’t? What if it had something to do with these people?
When we reached the last few steep steps and could see the top of the platform, I froze. Osprey and Ivo – still unconscious – had been lashed to two of the snake-pillars, encased from neck to feet in wrapping spirit snakes which were longer and thicker than any snake I’d ever imagined. They glowed a light green and the one resting his head almost lovingly on Osprey’s chest seemed to wink at me.
Not good. Of all of us, Osprey and Ivo were the most powerful. And there was no way they could escape from that kind of confinement even if they were conscious.
Which meant I needed a plan. A plan to use my bees to get us all out of here.
And I needed it quickly. They set Zayana up against a pillar and the warrior closest to her went slack suddenly, his eyes rolling back in his head and then a spirit snake rolled out of his mouth and down to the ground where it began to wind around Zayana’s feet, moving slowly upward as it bound her to the pole.
Did all of them have snakes? That would make each of them equivalent to our Wings. I’d have to fight or evade all of them to escape.
Sweat slicked Zayana’s forehead. She stared straight ahead, trying not to flinch but she couldn’t stop a small moan of terror from rippling from her lips.
“If you think I’m going to let you do that to me, you can think again,” I said, scrambling backward. I hit a hard wall and spun. One of the guards was right behind me.
I could call my bees – and risk losing Juste Montpetit’s life – and then Osprey would kill me when he came to – if he came to. Or I could try to run and risk being beaten into unconsciousness. Or I could submit and hope that if I did that, they would spare me.
Too many ifs.
“Come,” I called to my bees and the buzz in my chest rose powerfully. I felt them gathering and moving. It left a sensation of satisfaction rippling along my skin. I held my breath, anticipating their return to me.
There was a cry from the other side of the temple and a woman in a high-collared scale armor suit leapt up to the temple level waving her hands.
“Which one pulled the bees away? The Adder is bleeding out!”
“I did,” I said calmly, as my bees buzzed toward me, encircling me in a friendly cloud.
“Send them back,” she ordered.
“I won’t be tied up,” I said grimly.
She looked down the steps on her side and then back at us.
“Untie her. She won’t go anywhere. Release the bees to heal the Adder, girl, or you will be slaughtered over a long seven days. We shall start by showing you how we can twist your very flesh from your bones like the twisting of the land.”
I clenched my jaw and whispered, “Return to him. Heal his wound.”
Loss flooded over me as my bees obeyed, streaking out from me and back toward my enemy. No bees, then. But at least I wasn’t tied up. Perhaps I could steal a weapon.
Hands clamped down on my arms.
“Don’t even think about defying them, property,” a cultured voice drifted to me.
Shocked, I looked to see Juste Montpetit stepping up over the edge of the steps to the temple platform. Sweat slicked his forehead and fresh blood stained his coat around his middle, though my bees buzzed in his belly. He walked slightly hunched, both hands clamped around his middle. His eyes glittered with hate when they met mine.
Chapter Seven
“THE ADDER,” REVERENT gasps echoed around me as the rest of the snake-masked people climbed the steps and circled the platform. They formed rings around the platform on the top two steps and on the very edge of the platform, leaving the center of it open.
A long moment passed as if they were waiting for something. Juste Montpetit looked around at them, swallowing as he held his belly together with both hands. His snake materialized, poking its head out from his eye and slithering down to ring his shoulders like a scarf that had slipped.
There was a hiss, and then the crowd parted slightly and a figure in high-collared gold scale armor stepped through. He towered above the rest and his snake mask had a hood around it – like the hood of a cobra. Snakeskin belts crossed and re-crossed his chest and hips. His polearm ended in a long, serrated blade that curved in a way that made me think of snakes. Its handle, similarly, was a long ripple like a snake in motion.
He ripped his mask off.
It must have been a signal. The moment the mask was gone those around me ripped their own masks off, dropping so suddenly to one knee that their armored knees made a clatter against the stone steps and platform.
A chill shot through me. These people were so organized. They’d materialized out of nowhere. They wore snakes as their sign. This could not be good.
The snake man nearest me tried to pull me down with him, but I kept my feet, fighting his grip. I would not bow to them. Just like I would not bow to Juste Montpetit.
“Brothers,” the tall figure said, and a ripple of pride bloomed on the faces of those around him. They were shockingly pale – almost grey-tinged. “We stand
today in the sun for the first time in fifty years.” Well, that explained the pallor. They should get out more. No, scratch that. They should stay underground. “We stand according to the words of prophecy and visions of our seers.”
“We stand!” The crowd boomed. Which was ironic since they were kneeling.
“In the words of the great prophet, Ica’ar, The Great Day Descends. Long did we wait for the son of Wings and War to come to us. From his mouth pours wisdom and his eyes behold greatness. He shall come from afar and light the path for the ascendancy of the snake, the great day of the Adder. He shall rip down their wings and snatch them from the sky. He shall shatter the sun and bring back the darkness. All will bow before him in his shadowed glory.
“And Ha’vat likewise spoke in prophecy, Out of the adder, something to eat, out of the snake, something sweet.
“Today, in our midst, we see the Adder rise – a child of the Winged ones by body, but a child of ours in spirit, he comes to us!”
“He comes to us!” the voices around me thundered.
I tried to be subtle as I turned to look over my shoulder. The steps were full of those kneeling and more bodies climbed from the Forbidding to join them, seeming to emerge out of nowhere. There were probably two hundred people here with the crowd growing by the minute. An army of people.
I couldn’t fight so many people. Tension rippled through me like a blade. I needed a different plan.
“Our seers,” the tall man cried out, “Foresaw this would come today. At this time. In this place. On this river.”
I frowned. Really? Or did they simply have very good spies? Anyone could have told them where Le Majest was and what he was doing. But these people could not blend in enough to spy and even Juste Montpetite could not have known he would manifest snakes a few days ago. I risked a glance at him and saw him staring at me balefully, triumph and vengeance warring in his eyes as he battled the pain in his belly. One of his arms was braced against a pillar, stiff as a tree, propping him up straight. It left a smear of blood where it had slipped slightly.
I swallowed, my mouth suddenly dry. This would only make him more powerful – more able to crush me. And I’d given him even more reason to want to with that slip.
Hive Magic (Empire of War & Wings Book 2) Page 4