Ellis only hoped the road didn’t collapse beneath the Wardens and cadets, all lined up behind it to defend their shores.
“Zophia!” Ellis stretched his neck so he could see her, crouching ten people down the line and blinking back at him, wide-eyed. Terrified. “Can you sink them?”
“I try.” Her chin wobbled. “I try.”
She looked awful. Exhausted. It hadn’t merely been a matter of waving her hand and shooing away the fog the past two nights; she’d spent a lot of power and concentrated energy doing it. And then they’d gone and added the chore of spending more power and energy on ensuring the ammunition was more accurate. Ellis hadn’t been watching out for her properly, conserving what she had for when they needed it most, and she was clearly paying for it now.
“It’s all right.” Ellis tried to make it reassuring. “Just do what you can. And if you can’t, just shoot.”
There’d been no magical assault yet, or at least none Ellis could detect. From the fog those first two nights, he knew there had to be at least one witch or sorcerer out there somewhere. Maybe they were as played out as Zophia was. If not… well. It was probably a bit craven of Ellis to hope they were too busy with the main battle past the sound to throw anything toward shore, but he was doing it anyway.
“Infantry!” Yelton’s voice was drowned out by another barrage that boomed through Ellis’s chest and roared through his head enough he thought he might get concussion without being touched. “Platoon, advance!”
Ellis watched, a bit awed, as Yelton’s people popped from behind the berm like gophers from their holes and teemed down the rise toward the beach.
“Wellech!” Ellis’s own people were lying on their stomachs as Ellis and Tilli were, a swath of them stretching farther than Ellis could actually see along the road, all of them with rifles propped and ready. “Cover!” he yelled, then settled every nerve into cool lines and, for the first time in his life, targeted actual people.
The Home Guard had the weapons built for war—machineguns and bayonets and hand grenades. The Wardens had the weapons built for peacekeeping—rifles and batons and a fierce determination that no enemy invaders would make it past their line to threaten the people they’d kissed goodbye just this morning. But they also had an inordinate number of men and women who’d been hunting for their tables and competing in sharpshooting competitions since they were old enough to hold a gun. Which, in war, meant they had snipers.
The first person Ellis shot was a mere blur in his sights. Man or woman, he couldn’t tell. Wounded or killed, he couldn’t tell that either. The only thing he could tell was young, too young, younger than Ellis, hardly more than a child. Still, they went down in the water, and he didn’t see them come back up. Strangely, he didn’t pause or even entertain the notion of being horrified by himself; he merely adjusted his position, sighted down again, and took out another.
Alton’s forewarning had alerted the Royal Navy. The sound the enemy were trying to take was not undefended. But the Navy was stretched thin these days. The North Blackson Fleet was continuously engaged in the Gulf of White Sands. Destroyers and fast cruisers patrolled the Goshor to minimize the air raids on Preidyn that had ramped up in both number and aggression. A good portion of Preidyn’s Southern Fleet had been called north to replace Western Unified ships lost or damaged. Consequently, the battle at the edge of the sound, aiming for the mouth of the strait, was well matched and louder and more violent than what Ellis imagined the end of the world might be.
Or maybe this was the end of the world.
“Zophia!” Ellis saw the dread in her fatigued gaze when she looked at him, and said, “Never mind. Tomos!” Ellis spat sand. “Curl your unit in and get that clump coming in on Yelton’s flank!”
Missiles shrieked in, landing with explosions of sand and pebbles and the screams of any man or woman within thirty feet of the craters they plowed. The clatter of the machineguns themselves was less substantial than the strangely dense ffwt sound of the bullets they spat whizzing by. The clotted, flat smack of impact was no more impressive than a fist punching a divot in a feather pillow. And yet the damage they were doing…
One of Yelton’s people went down; all Ellis saw of it was a spray of red mist before a nerveless roll of abruptly lifeless limbs in the sand. More of the enemy than Ellis could count were strafed from the picket Yelton’s cadets had formed behind the craggy rock and scrub along the beach; one moment there were dozens of soldiers, guns held over heads bobbing above the waves, and the next they were just bodies, limp in the swells gone red all around them.
Planes came buzzing in, and for a too-long moment, Ellis didn’t know whose they were. Until the bombs started dropping in the water between the soldiers trying to gain the shore and the Home Guard defending it, and Tilli whooped a joyful cry of “Every goddess bless the Air Brigade!”
Ellis leaned up and looked behind him. “Go, Andras, go, that’s you!”
Grim-faced, Andras got his people up and moving, leading them across the road and down the bank to take a better covering position behind the Home Guard.
It was hard to keep track after that. Air support was only one squadron, but the planes were bloody everywhere. One of them dipped so low Ellis could actually see the man in the gun turret as the plane swept in to strafe the soldiers still in the water. Bombs dropped from their bellies. Gunfire punched hole after hole in the small flotilla of enemy boats. The big guns on the decks of the naval ships never stopped.
Cordite burned in Ellis’s nose. Sand and smoke wedged beneath his eyelids. Blood was everywhere, spraying at the end of his sights. Living people a second before he pulled the trigger, slabs of meat a second after; it washed the sand red as the tide pitched the dead to shore on its rolling breakers.
The small ships abruptly turned to flee. They were cut off by the superior naval vessels they clearly hadn’t been expecting. The soldiers still alive in the water saw their little fleet attempt to turn tail; some of them reversed direction and started back toward the boats, while the rest kept trying to gain the beach. The big guns had mostly taken over, pounding the enemy ships so steadily they couldn’t have dropped more soldiers in the water even if they had them. The planes took up what slack was left, dropping bombs like a child sowing seeds into the wind, only these reaped fire and ruin in thunderous bursts that Ellis would swear were making his ears bleed. Three enemy ships were on fire just at the blurred stretch where sound turned to open sea.
It left the soldiers in the water to Wellech’s frontline. Yelton kept shouting to “Hold your positions! Hold your bloody positions!” so Ellis relayed the order to his own line and kept shooting.
IT DIDN’T hit him until later, much later, after the Home Guard took over dealing with the captured soldiers and left the dead to Ellis. Ellis felt a little bad about handing the duty to Petra. He did it anyway.
The residents had been evacuated days ago, the moment the first hint of fog had been spotted. Now Petra—still scowling at Ellis because he’d refused to allow her to enlist with either the Wardens or the Home Guard, since “If anything happens to me, Wellech still needs a Pennaeth, Petra, be reasonable!”—called the people back to help with the grim work of collecting identification from dead bodies. Salvaging guns and ammunition washed to shore. Digging a too-long trench in which to lay the bodies for as proper a burial as they could manage.
Still, there was nothing in Ellis but awe at the fact that all of it had actually happened. Gratitude that he and most of those on his side had lived through it. Fury that there’d been an attempt to invade his home. Pride that he’d been part of repelling it.
And it was odd, because he kept expecting to feel what he’d seen when he’d Dreamed of Milo flinging magic at a woman with a gun and turning her into a mangled mess of broken parts, and then standing there, staring.
Shock. Horror. Fear. Self-loathing.
Ellis wasn’t feeling any of it.
Not until he caught a ride in the back of a Home
Guard lorry from Hollywell to Reescartref, and watched, bewildered, the surreal illusion of “life as usual” going on around him. People collecting wash from lines; children clumping on the side of the road to yell and cheer at them as they passed. When he arrived at the Reescartref Bridge to see his mam standing there, waiting for him, it crashed over him so fast and so hard he couldn’t parse any of it. Only that it was awful and it hurt and it churned his guts into a roiling mess. He only just kept himself from stumbling from the bed of the lorry to kneel at Lilibet’s feet on the boards of the bridge and howl.
Because then he felt it. Then he remembered every moment of it. Every magnified view through his sights of every eye he’d closed forever with the sweet pressure and deadly tug of his trigger. Every man and woman in the uniform of the Home Guard that had gone down because he’d been aiming elsewhere. Every cry of one of his Wardens when their cover proved just that much too sparse. Every gentle surge of pink foam over wet sand. Every order he’d given to target that group of living, breathing people—that specific man creeping too close, that particular woman who’d almost got her legs beneath her and was about to gain the beach—and the satisfaction he’d felt when his orders were followed.
Ellis managed not to let any of it out, only stood there and let his mam look at him, grateful she wasn’t trying to touch him, because he didn’t think he’d be able to keep it together if she did.
He only said, “We didn’t lose any Wardens,” thick and clotted in a throat gone full and tight. Because there was something in him that mourned the nine cadets Yelton had lost but was glad it had been them and not Ellis’s own people.
Lilibet crimped a sad smile at him, like she knew. “Let’s go home.”
“Mam.” Ellis stopped her. “I need you to call the Coven.”
He needed more than that. He needed them to permit him to attend. He needed to be allowed to speak to them, plead with them, convince them. He needed Lilibet to Dream for him so he could find a way to make them listen to him.
Lilibet looked away, mouth tight. “You know what you ask.”
No one who didn’t have the kind of power or skill or credentials to call themselves a witch or sorcerer or mage was permitted to attend a formal Coven. No one who hadn’t done their time as Newyddian and then sat the rites to become Arbenigwr was permitted to speak at one.
But that wasn’t what Lilibet meant.
A good percentage of the Kymbrygh Coven were veterans. A bigger percentage of them had taken the places of those killed in the last war a generation before. All of them knew how few they were, how many just like them had died in the same way Ellis was prepared to ask them to do now.
He merely sucked in a tight breath, and said, “I’m sorry.”
“Yes. I know.” Lilibet shoved out a sharp, bitter noise that was nothing like the laugh she’d clearly intended. “I’ll do what I can.”
“I NEED more magic folk.” Ellis paused, waiting for Dilys to say something, but when she didn’t, when he didn’t even hear the gap in static that signaled she’d toggled down to speak, he set his jaw, frustrated. “Dillie.” He scrubbed at his eyes then his face, and thought blight it all. They were on a coded channel for a change. He could speak plainly. And he needed to. He set his teeth. “I can’t keep overusing Zophia. Exhausting her two nights in a row made her near useless when they actually landed. She’s strong, but she’s not as strong as Milo, and not nearly so well trained. Mam’s doing what she can with the folk who’ve volunteered, but they weren’t that powerful to begin with and they’re not prepared for actual war.”
“None of us are,” Dilys said, firm. “And it isn’t as though we’re hoarding all our folk. They can come and go as they like. We don’t keep Tirryderch citizens prisoner.”
The most annoying part about communicating via radio was that the person doing the talking had to stop and let go of the toggle before the other person could respond. Which meant Ellis couldn’t interrupt.
“We can’t be blamed,” Dilys went on, “because we opened our doors when Wellech shut theirs. They’re our citizens now, and you can’t expect us not to protect them.”
“That’s a far cry from what you said last year.” Ellis couldn’t help how it snapped out of him. “They’re not only Tirryderch citizens, Dillie, they’re citizens of the United Preidynīg Isles. United. If Wellech falls, all of Kymbrygh follows, and if the Confederation have Kymbrygh, they have Preidyn. Why d’you think the Royal Forces are suddenly throwing everything they can around us? They know what the Confederation are after—are you going to tell me you don’t? Because I know you’re smarter than that. And I know Mastermind hasn’t kept it to himself.”
There was a huff from Dilys’s end. “The Confederation don’t know what they’d walk into in Whitpool. Half of Whitpool don’t know what’s waiting in Whitpool. They’re never getting past the parish line.”
“How lovely for Whitpool. But what will they have to mow down to get there?”
Silence. For quite a long time.
Then: “I can’t make them help you, Ellis.”
Ellis blew out a heavy breath. “I’m not asking you to. I’m only asking you to let them know they’re needed. And that they can.”
“They know that.”
“Do they? And who’s told them? Tirryderch’s Pennaeth? Or its most influential witch? Because last I heard, Nia and Terrwyn were making it very clear that Tirryderch magic ought to stay in Tirryderch, and Steffan was very loudly backing them up.”
“Let’s not pretend that protecting our own is the same as dictating what they can and can’t do.”
“Wellech is your own, or is Tirryderch not a part of Kymbrygh?” There was only empty static for an answer. Ellis snorted, shook his head. “Right. Fine. You do what you think you have to, Wildfire. We’ll just be here, putting ourselves between the wolves at our door and the rest of Kymbrygh. Maybe there’ll be enough of us left by Sowing to make good sport when the dragons start coming for us.”
There was a pause, a long one, before Dilys’s voice came back, subdued and pained. “I’m trying, Ellis. I swear it, I am. I have been. They… I mean, they’re a united front, the three of them, always have been, but it makes them…” A growl, a burst of static, then: “I’m not the one in charge.”
“You’re the one Nia will listen to.”
“Bloody—” Dilys laughed. “Have you met my mam?”
“Oh, pull the other one, Dillie. You’ve had Terrwyn and Steffan eating out of your hand since the day you were born, and it’s been plain for years that Nia’s been grooming you for Pennaeth. So show her what kind of Pennaeth you’ll be. Make her listen. Make all three of them understand that Pennaeth might not be waiting for you later if Tirryderch doesn’t help us now.”
A huff. “How much power d’you think I have against the three of them when every one of them still sees me as a three-year-old with scabbed knees and a ready tantrum?”
“Then you have to show them. Show them who you are now, and make them listen. Because if you can’t, we’re all done. And we can’t be done, Dillie, d’you understand?” He paused, waiting, but when Dilys didn’t answer, he pressed, “Wildfire. Do—you—under—stand?”
“Of course I understand, you great pillock.” There was a bang from Dilys’s end, muffled, then a sharp curse. “It’s not… it’s only… oh, blight it.” A high-pitched oscillating whine nearly pricked holes in Ellis’s eardrums. For a second Ellis thought Dilys had thrown her radio across the room like he’d been sort of wanting to do, but she came back, snapped, “If I pull this off, you will owe me so big I won’t have to buy drinks in Wellech for the rest of my bloody life!”
This time, she had channeled off, Ellis could tell by the quality of the static. Didn’t matter. Dilys might be a lot less serious than most people would prefer she was most of the time, but she was solid, she was smart, and she had very clear ideas of just and fair and right, and no qualms whatsoever about picking a fight and, more importantly, winning it.<
br />
Ellis couldn’t remember, in all their lives, even when they were wee and wobbly, ever winning anything against Dilys—from archery tournaments to arguments to wrestling matches. And she was almost two years younger and probably half his size.
He also couldn’t remember laughing so hard, being so relieved, in… well, probably ever.
THE DREAMS were getting… odd. Ellis had got used to clear pictures, actual scenes, which was unusual for Dreams in general, yes, but had become normal for those he had of Milo. Ellis had decided almost right away it must have something to do with the dragonstone, but the fact that everything was even more vivid and detailed when he Dreamed of Milo in the company of dragons had solidified the notion.
He didn’t know what to think now.
Everything was murkier. Darker. Snatches of Milo playing in a smoky pub would segue without sense into Milo hitchhiking along a busy road then skulking in shadows somewhere dim and empty, red possibility striating out in confused webs in every direction. A bright, clear look at Milo casually strolling past an apparent checkpoint at dusk would abruptly become Milo ducking into an alley at midday, gaze wary and everywhere at once.
The things Ellis did see clearly only served to increase his unease. Because, though he didn’t know the language, he was fairly certain the writing he was picking up on street signs and propaganda placards around Milo was Ostlich. Knowing Milo was in Colorat had been bad enough, but there’d been dragons freed from Taraverde, and now it looked like he was in Ostlich-Sztym. And Ellis had to think that going from a country that had been unwillingly occupied, then on to the one that occupied it, and then to one that had volunteered for occupation had to be an escalation in risk.
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