Hive Magic (Empire of War & Wings Book 2)

by Sarah K. L. Wilson

  I didn’t know how long we sat there, but eventually my bees settled into the hard work of knitting him together, and I fell back on the reeds beside him, head swimming, gasping for breath. It had taken all my energy.

  By the time evening fell, there was still no sign of Juste Montpetit.

  We’d passed the day quietly, each absorbed in pain of our own. The experiences of the temple replayed themselves again and again in my mind. I relived watching settlers come to Far Stones, I remembered every detail of the moment the Forbidding first arrived. I thought hard about the generations of Snake manifestors and what it was they wanted from Juste Montpetit. But more than anything, my mind wandered to the Wing with the two ravens who was imprisoned in the tower. Who was he, and why did he look so familiar?

  Ivo awoke while we were lighting the evening fire. Osprey had caught five fish in the river. He didn’t tell us how and I hadn’t seen him go off to fish, but we cleaned them in pained silence and wrapped them in leaves and mud to bake. We set Ivo up on a fallen log beside the fire. He gasped whenever he moved, but the bees had already made a difference for his face – I could only hope that they’d heal the ribs in time as well.

  He waited until Zayana went to the river to draw water before he spoke. “And now we are in a jam, my fellow revolutionaries. We planned to fight a battle on one front to be rid of our oppressors only to find that we might have one on two fronts.”

  “Is it still worth it to fight?” I asked. How could we defeat both enemies? We were unarmed, with none of their resources.

  “You made a vow,” Osprey said soberly. I almost rolled my eyes.

  “I’m just asking,” I protested. “Maybe there is a better place to find freedom than on a stretch of rock already claimed by two other powerful groups.”

  “How do you know that the snake warriors are powerful?” Osprey challenged.

  “Are you saying they are weak?” I shot back. “After how they bound you without a thought and kept you from your bird.”

  His cheeks grew dark and I knew I’d struck a hit with that.

  “Enough,” Ivo warned, glancing over his shoulder. “This complicates things, but it doesn’t change our hopes or goals. We will fight and we will carve out a place for ourselves and our brethren. But we don’t have much time. We need to talk.” He turned to Osprey first. “I think you’d be sad to kill our Aella now that we’ve gotten to know her.”

  Osprey grunted his agreement as if he didn’t even want to bend enough to speak. I shot him a spiteful glance. He could at least pretend to care.

  “And we both know she is the figurehead we’ve been waiting for,” Ivo said.

  “Even now that there are snakes manifested?” I challenged.

  “Especially now,” Ivo’s face was grim. “Which means we need a plan. The crown prince will order her death the moment he doesn’t need her anymore and you will be bound to carry it out, Osprey.”

  Osprey looked away, the bitter twist of his mouth only disguised by the toothpick he was fiddling with.

  “We need to get them apart as quickly as possible. The moment we get to Karkatua, I want to split up.”

  “Why not now?” I asked. “Why not leave while he’s with the snake people?”

  “They watch us,” Osprey said, eyeing the trees around the riverbank. “At least twenty of them. If you so much as move, they’ll be on you.”

  Ivo nodded. “We’ll wait for Karkatua. It’s better if Le Majest finds a healer first, anyway. We don’t want him to die. She can leave her bees with Le Majest for as far as they’ll stretch and I will claim I need her on an errand out in the wild lands. You’ll have to keep an eye on Le Majest, Osprey. Keep him busy while I steal her away.”

  “And if he won’t be kept busy?” Osprey asked.

  “Then we’ll lose her, and with her, everything else.”

  Chapter Eleven

  WE SPENT A SECOND NIGHT tending to our manifestations. Osprey walked down the riverbank first, his bird flaring to life in a burst of bright purplish-white. A moment later a song drifted upon the wind, rolling and bittersweet. And as he sang, the bird grew and preened. Os stretched his wings, running his beak down them as the song ruffled his feathers, bringing out their gleams and sparkles.

  “That,” Ivo said, “is one good way to restore your bird, Zayana. Have you been taught it yet?”

  He sat gingerly, his side still paining him. I tended the fire as Zayana drew her tattered bird from the neckline of her dress. Ivo clicked his tongue sadly.

  “Poor thing. It took a beating.”

  “How could it be harmed?” I asked him. “I thought it would just diminish if it was attacked. But it’s actually hurt like a real bird.”

  “He not it,” Ivo corrected. “He can be diminished if Zayana wears herself out, or if she forbids him or does not invoke him correctly. He can also be injured because our manifestations are more than pure magic. We put a little of ourselves in them. There is some of Zayana in this bird already, newly hatched though he is. And we will help her restore him tonight. I heard you singing harmony back in that snake temple, Zayana.”

  “You did?” she asked, her almond brown eyes going wide.

  “You think I was so busy fighting that I didn’t hear? You made a contribution. You joined Osprey’s song of restoration.”

  “What’s a song of restoration?” I asked.

  Ivo pointed down the riverbank. “It’s what he’s doing right now. He’s restoring Os. And when you, Zayana, joined him in restoring Aella,” he pointed at each of us in turn, “you were using that same skill. Which should make it easy to use to restore your bird.”

  “I thought only words could invoke a manifestation,” she said timidly.

  “What is a song but words that dance?” He winked. “Try it.”

  She cleared her throat. Paused. Shook her head.

  “We are making you nervous,” he said with an encouraging smile. “Why don’t you walk upriver a bit? Stay out of trouble but get a little distance and let yourself go. Be free. Sing to the bird and see what happens.”

  She nodded eagerly and stood, hurrying through the waving rushes.

  “And now that leaves you, Aella,” Ivo said.

  “I’m no singer,” I said warily.

  He laughed and then moaned, his hand moving to clutch his ribs. His words choked out. “Then let’s try something else. Something selfish.”

  “Selfish?” I pressed.

  “For me, at least,” his eyes glittered.

  “Your bees have healing properties that I didn’t guess were there. I should have. Bees have been healing people for centuries. And your manifestation of them is very strong. Do you know why that is?”

  I shook my head. “I’m not much of a healer. My sister Raquella did that.”

  “It’s because you know right from wrong. It’s hard to correct what is wrong if you don’t even know it when you see it. It’s hard to heal anything if you can’t tell what broke it.”

  “What should I do?” I asked, scooting nearer. “I don’t even know how they started healing in the first place.”

  “Work on your invocations. Speak to your bees of things that heal – of warm summer days and blooming flowers, of the way we will rebuild the Far Stones when it is ours free and clear.”

  I looked around nervously. “Can we really make the Far Stones free, Ivo? It was hard enough to imagine when it was just the Winged Empire we would have to fight for this piece of rock. It seems even harder now that we know there is another enemy beneath the surface – an enemy that sees this land as theirs.”

  “Don’t lose your fight girl. Osprey says you have family out in the Far Reaches.”

  I nodded.

  “We’re doing this for them and for all the people who long to be free. It’s in us – this sky-given desire to chart our own courses to be our own people to make our own mistakes. It’s in every pulsing, thundering beat of our hearts, in every gasp of our breath. It’s the air we breathe and the song we
sing and nothing’s ever going to stop us. They can come at us. They can carve us up and spit us out and we’ll still be singing our freedom song.”

  The melodies of Zayana upstream and Osprey downstream tangled in and out of his speech and for the first time in a while, I felt a thrill of hope.

  “How do you and Osprey stay hidden?” I asked. “How do you work so closely to High’uns and Le Majest without being discovered?”

  “A gift,” he said, eyes twinkling. They were less swollen than yesterday. “The skies see all, and they have granted us a tiny piece of that seeing. We know who to trust. We know who is reliable. How do you think that Osprey knew to trust you? To bring you in on the most important, most life-threatening, most freedom-inducing project of our lifetimes?”

  “I have no idea how,” I said, somewhat bemused. I still didn’t know what to make of Ivo and his grand speeches half the time.

  “The Single Wing,” Ivo said. He pushed his sleeve up and tapped his wrist where a single wing was tattooed there. “It acts as a guide. Gives you a little pressure to draw you in the right direction. We’re all marked with it – all of us who long for freedom and the lifting of the yoke.”

  “Can I have one?” I asked, thinking of my father and how he told me to trust that mark. I missed him so much that it ripped through me at the strangest times with almost crippling echoes of emptiness. I felt a pang of it now as I asked for the sign.

  Ivo chuckled. “You should have the mark! All free people should! But we’ll have to wait until we can give it to you. Not here. Not now.”

  “Will you really get me away from Le Majest?” I asked, my voice sinking to a whisper.

  “If any man can, I will.”

  “And then what will we do? We’ll need an army to take Far Stones for our own.”

  He nodded. “An army of citizens ready to seize their freedom.”

  “But that won’t be enough,” I said decidedly.

  He lifted an eyebrow. “Why not?”

  “For the same reason that my bees are not enough to heal you just by buzzing around. They need direction. They need a leader. And we need a war leader. A general.”

  “Yes,” Ivo said, gazing off into the distance. “We’ve been thinking of that. But enough about the revolution. You need to work on those bees. Go find your own place by the river and whisper to them until you feel their hum in your very bones.”

  I nodded.

  “And Aella?” he added.

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve never lost an apprentice. Never had one die on me or fail to meet their potential. I won’t let you down either.”

  “Thank you,” I said, oddly touched by his words. We shared a smile and then I turned back to the river and made my way to a sunny spot in the rushes to whisper to bees. Which felt utterly ridiculous. Out there along the trail, my father lay under a cairn of rocks. Farther into the Far Reaches, my mother’s bones lay under a similar cairn. Beyond her, my family battled the Forbidding, fighting their way out of the vice of evil called the Empire of War and Wings. And here I was, whispering to bees.

  I could hear their hum in my mind and as I closed my eyes and concentrated on it, I could feel them out there, some binding Ivo’s ribs together, others deep in the belly of Juste Montpetit, weaving honeycomb to patch his organs and veins. I shivered and they shivered with me. I whispered to them, and they seemed to whisper back.

  But the darkness was almost too much for me. Little memories of what I had experienced in the agony of the Cobra Temple kept bursting back and threaded through them were emotions and memories of things I didn’t even remember from the experience. Things people had seen or done. I trembled as I remembered plunging a knife into my own belly.

  My eyes shot open. A buzzing filled them, and I grasped for the single bee floating around me, reaching for it. It landed on my palm as my tears flowed fast and hard.

  “Hold onto me,” I whispered. “This is all too much.”

  Like breaking open a beaver’s dam, emotions flooded over me – the crushing weight of my father’s death and fear for my siblings and over it all a deep, heavy sense of responsibility, as if by choosing to fight for this land and the people on it, I had chosen to bear the grief of it, but also the responsibility of it. Because if we took this land for ourselves, we would be taking it not just from the Empire but also from the people who had owned it before the Empire arrived.

  I’d been born here in Far Stones. I’d lived my sixteen years here. I knew no other home. But the memories I had now showed me a time when my kind was not here. And I was having trouble sorting out how I felt about that.

  I didn’t realize I was shaking until someone whistled a two-note tune. I spun around to see Osprey standing behind me, leaning against a willow and chewing his toothpick thoughtfully. There was sweat on his brow as he clung to the willow. Was the belly wound getting worse?

  “What happened with that snake? They hurt you somehow, but there are no marks.”

  “They gave me memories.”

  “Of what?”

  I shook my head. “Of everything. They come back slowly ...”

  He swallowed. “Maybe you can use them to help the Single Wing. If you think of something that can help – anything – tell it to Ivo.” He cleared his throat. “Not me, okay? Don’t tell me.” I tilted my head to the side and his smile was rueful. “I can only be trusted with so much.”

  He stepped forward, flexing a fist and then opening it – as if he wanted to do something and was holding himself back. “I know everything is murky now, but I need you to know that I would never willingly harm you. I’m doing everything I can to protect you.”

  “Because I’m the figurehead you need for the revolution,” I said, nodding.

  He made a sound in his throat and looked away, flushing, as if there was more he wanted to say. I opened my mouth to goad him into saying it, but a sharp sound cracked in the forest behind us and a horn blew.

  Our eyes met and then we were scrambling through the reeds and willows to get back to the riverbank.

  Chapter Twelve

  WE REACHED THE FIRE, breathless and flushed, joining Ivo and a nervous-looking Zayana just before the reeds parted and a pair of masked figures slipped into the clear circle around the fire. They moved with surprising stealth and grace and I couldn’t help how my mind saw them and immediately thought, ‘snake.’

  The two warriors parted, fanning out as a stream of them moved to surround us. Was it my imagination, or were they looking at me a little more than the others? It was hard to tell with the masks, but the back of my neck prickled from the attention. What, exactly, did they expect to see? Had they thought I would be more damaged by the ceremony in the temple?

  “Make way for the Adder, the glorious one, he who comes from the belly of the earth.”

  As if Juste Montpetit needed more titles.

  He was being carried on a litter with Ixtap between six masked bearers. The litter was carved in whitewood – every bit of it made to look like snakes woven into a round platform or curling out in long poles to stretch over the shoulders of the bearers.

  They set the litter down with care. Juste Montpetit’s face was wan and slick with sweat. He kept an arm wrapped around his belly even as he clasped arms with Ixtap in a friendly gesture. Ixtap leaned forward.

  “Like this,” he said, as his snake manifested, pouring from his mouth and wrapped around Juste’s neck. Our crown prince imitated him and my stomach flipped, nausea rising in my throat. Everything about the snakes made me ill. And the strange customs surrounding them did not help with that feeling.

  “I shall return when I am ready to ascend,” Juste Montpetit said as if making a proclamation. He held his head high, his lovely curls gleaming in the bright sunlight and his large eyes sparkling innocently with them. “We shall forge a great peace between our peoples, made of mutual respect and admiration.”

  I didn’t quite snort, but by the way Ixtap’s face twisted, I felt like he was about
to. Whatever Juste Montpetit said, he bore no love for the Winged Empire. A burst of memory flooded my mind – thoughts of warning children against birds, looking on the sky as a curse, the tumultuous change of it a threat. Only under the ground was life safe.

  I shook my head against someone else’s memory and shoved it aside. It was as if my enemy had slid into my mind, changing up to down in a moment. It made my skin crawl. And this was what was supposed to happen to Juste Montpetit. It would have tied him to them even tighter. It could have made him their creature.

  “You are our prophesied heir, the one who will lead us to victory and return us to the ways of the ancestors,” Ixtap said. “We will wait for you. We bind your people now to silence. They may not speak of us.”

  I felt a clenching around my throat. Panic bubbled up as I clawed at my neck, but it was gone as quickly as it came. My eyes met Zayana’s at the same moment that a snake manifestation fell from her neck and she drew in a gasping breath. Had they really used magic to silence us? I despised these people more every moment.

  “There is strength in silencing lies,” Ixtap said.

  Juste Montpetit nodded. “We are committed to speaking the truth about peace and justice. My people will not deviate from that.”

  What did that mean to him? His tone sounded like he was agreeing with Ixtap but if he was really committed to truth, he wouldn’t silence us from speaking about what we saw. I was growing frustrated by how his words never matched his meaning.

  “Keep the sacrifice within your grasp,” Ixtap said, nodding to me. “You may find you need more from her.”

  Juste Montpetit grunted, hunching slightly over his belly. “Have no fear, Ixtap. I have great respect for those I own.”