by Karen Chance
I felt tears flow down my cheeks, but they weren’t of grief. It was still too raw. I couldn’t deal with it; couldn’t touch it. Anymore than I could put my hand in a fire.
But there was something I could do.
I started forward, but Pritkin grabbed my arm. It was the burnt one, but it didn’t hurt anymore. Mircea’s gift had already healed me.
“What are you doing?” Pritkin demanded.
“What you think.”
“Cassie—”
“Don’t.” I told him tightly. “Don’t tell me my life is worth so much that I cannot risk it. Don’t tell me to hide in a corner and save my strength for another day. This—” I pointed savagely at our army. “This is that day! We either act now or—”
“Or what?” he demanded. “It’s the same argument we had in Jonas’s office, almost a week ago. About the fey assassin you tracked down and killed when you could have just gone back in time. We’re already back in time! We can go home; we can stop the army from ever leaving—”
“And then what?” I demanded. “Aeslinn knows. He’s ready. We won’t surprise him this time; the damage is done—”
“Then we find another way! We fight another day!”
“No, we kill them all. Now,” I said, and shifted.
The other side of the portal let out into a mountainous cave overlooking the battlefield. It was a dark, blueish gray like all this realm, and empty except for the massive portal thrumming away behind me. Which meant that I was probably visible.
And explained why I suddenly had company.
Pritkin slammed me into the wall, and I realized something. “You shifted us, didn’t you?” I said. “Back at HQ. Mircea was too out of it at the time; he couldn’t have done it. But you could. You put Lover’s Knot on us once before, to fight Jo, so you knew how.”
Pritkin stared at me. “You want to talk about that now?”
“No, I want to go kill something,” I said, and started forward.
He dragged me back.
“I put Lover’s Knot on us to get you out of danger! Not to get you into more of it!”
“He didn’t realize that you and I already had that bond,” Mircea said, shifting in. “And that his spell would unite all of us.”
“Something that would have been nice to know!” Pritkin snarled.
Mircea shrugged. “You have a temper. She knew how you’d react.”
“Mircea is dealing with a condition right now,” I added. “It was the only way to help him, and can we talk about this later?”
“We can talk about this all you like—back home!” And Pritkin actually tried to shift us out.
He failed. Partly due to his spell stuttering halfway through, because the Pythian power was tied to Earth and we were no longer on Earth, and partly due to me.
When I shut. It. Down.
“Gods fighting,” Mircea murmured, looking at us.
“What?” Pritkin glanced at him.
“Something one of my kitchen boys said. I didn’t understand it until now.”
“We are not gods!”
“No. We’re a god. And our fight is right out there.” He inclined his head toward the battle. “Will you walk away from it?”
“If it means saving Cassie’s life? Yes!”
“That’s not your call,” I said, furious.
“I’m making it mine!”
“It is his call,” Mircea said, surprising me. “At least partly. If one of us dies, all three of us do.”
“Not if we take off this goddamned spell!” Pritkin said and raised a hand.
I pushed it down.
“You’re not seriously doing this,” I hissed. “You’re not leaving them to be slaughtered!”
“They’re not going to be slaughtered. I told you, we’ll go back and warn the army—”
“And they’ll call it off. They’ll cancel the whole thing. They won’t have any other choice. Not against that!”
“We’ll find another way,” Pritkin said stubbornly.
“What other way?” Mircea asked. “We have been looking for a solution for months now, bending all our resources to it—”
“Another one!” It was savage.
I put a hand on Pritkin’s arm. “You were right when you said we were back there again, in Jonas’s office. Repeating the moment when you tried to warn me off to protect me. But that didn’t work and when we talked it out afterward, you said we were partners—”
“Not in that!”
“In what, then? When it’s easy? When it’s safe? This job isn’t safe—”
Pritkin roared. There was no other word for it. An animalistic sound of pain and fury that would have normally had me backing up against the wall, wondering about his sanity.
It didn’t now. This was all insane. And I knew how he felt. I didn’t want to risk them, either, neither of them. But there was no other choice.
“We can win the war right here,” I told him. “Right now. My power knew that; that’s why it didn’t warn me about Jonathan. It’s why you tried to shift us outside a room and ended up shifting us back in time and to another continent! It wanted us right here, right now.”
“You don’t know that,” Pritkin said stubbornly.
“No, although it fits the facts. But I do know this. If we go home and lick our wounds, the war could slog on for who knows how much longer. Months, years, decades? How many would die then?”
Mircea didn’t say anything. He wanted to, but he knew there was nothing he could add that would help. And he’d been right. This was Pritkin’s choice. We had to go in united, or not at all.
“You said we were partners,” I pressed. “Was it a lie?”
Green eyes met mine, and they were burning. “You know it damned well wasn’t.”
“Then come with me. Protect me.”
“And if I can’t? The Pythian power doesn’t work in Faerie.”
“It does next to a portal.”
“It does sometimes next to a portal.”
“But yours works all the time, and the power you need you already have.” I put out a hand. “Be my partner, one last time?”
Pritkin stared at me, a hundred emotions running across his face.
And then he snarled and slapped his hand into mine.
Mircea smiled, baring fangs. “Let us make them pay for it.”
Chapter Forty-Three
It wasn’t a battlefield; it was an abattoir. There were little pockets, here and there, of resistance: groups of mages who had linked shields and were somehow holding out; scattered vampires who were hiding behind fallen colossi one minute, and attacking a new target the next; random piles of wounded who were being guarded by clusters of the Corps’ medics, but who were still coming under attack. Because it didn’t look like Aeslinn wanted prisoners.
It didn’t look like that at all.
But most of it was a disaster, with our army—what was left of it—being systematically hunted down while Aeslinn and his forces stayed secure behind their walls, not even bothering to get their hands dirty.
“Start small,” Pritkin said, his voice harsh. “We don’t know how much we can do, or how effective we’ll be.”
“Fuck that,” Mircea said calmly. “Take down their shield.”
“Damn you!” Pritkin rounded on him. “We need to be careful—”
“No, we don’t.” Mircea sized up the man opposite him, who was kneeling behind a pile of leather coated corpses. And for once, there was no animosity in his eyes. Mircea had commanded men before. He knew what Pritkin was feeling right now, seeing literal heaps of his comrades, their faces slack in death, their bodies in some cases ripped to pieces. The stench was awful, the visuals worse.
I saw a coat valiantly trying to defend its wearer, who was missing a face. I saw swarms of levitating weapons buzzing around the piles of bodies like flies, using whatever residual energy they had left to fight off all comers. I saw what looked like an ocean of blood leeching into the ground, just so much that you’d think the sands
were red instead of gray, and wondered if I’d done the right thing.
Had Pritkin been right? Should we have gone back? I honestly didn’t know anymore.
But Mircea never wavered.
“If we go small, we lose,” he said tersely. “We don’t have unlimited power, we’re in enemy territory, and no back up is coming.”
“If we take down their shield, they’ll know a new power is on the field,” Pritkin said. “They’ll come looking for us!”
“Possibly. But they’ll have far fewer people to do it with their capital under attack.”
“And you know that your troops will attack how?”
“I trained them.”
They both looked at me.
“We go for the shield,” I said hoarsely, and shifted.
I landed behind the severed head of a manlikan. It was of the mountainous variety, and was still “living,” if you wanted to call it that. But its rider was dead beside it in the dirt, his silver hair mixing with the mud made from dirt and his own blood, his pale face staring skyward with eyes that reminded me of Jonathan’s: pewter gray and lifeless.
Without him, the creature was safe enough, although the dark, cavernous eyes turned toward me when I flashed in. Its mossy beard was serving as a nesting place for a family of small starlings, who paused to look at me, too. But that was as much of a reaction as I got, and the head was the size of a train car, giving me plenty of cover.
I needed it, because this wasn’t going to be easy.
Mircea and Pritkin shifted in while I examined the shield. Or tried to. The barrier was so thick that I couldn’t even see through it. It looked like solid ice, and felt like it, too, when I put my hands on it. Blueish white, hard and cold; it was like no other shield I’d ever seen.
But Pritkin had. “Elemental energy,” he told me. “It won’t break easy.”
“I thought Aeslinn’s element was earth,” I said.
“It is. But he has an alliance with some of the Alorestri—the water fey. He must have hundreds of them in there, to support something like this.”
“Then they need to be targeted first,” Mircea said, his eyes glowing.
I knew that look; he was talking mentally to his vampires, somewhere on the field. And they were listening. Across the wide expanse of burning corpses, ruined, smoking machinery and walking mountains, there was a sudden surge of darting figures, all headed in the same direction.
“They’re on their way,” he affirmed. “Shall we make a door for them?”
“Whatever we do, Aeslinn’s people will seal it up right after,” Pritkin warned. “You’ll have a minute, maybe less, to get your men through.”
“It will be enough,” Mircea said calmly. “And they’re not men.”
“Tell them to get ready,” I said, and put my hands on the shield. It hummed under my palms, resonating softly like a struck tuning fork or a song played just out of range. It was strangely beautiful, like the rest of Faerie, which was still the prettiest hell I’d ever seen. I closed my eyes and reached for power—
And had a rush of it hit me so hard that I went down.
I hadn’t expected that. Had assumed it would be the same as when I summoned the Pythian power. But this bond that the three of us had, this trine, was way more responsive.
Pritkin had caught me—I knew those arms—but he didn’t pull me away. This was our once chance and he knew it. I held on, power sizzling through me, just this side of pain, and felt the outermost layer of the great shield start to liquify under my hands.
There was so much power, raw and unformed, boiling around between me and the shield, that it felt like it might consume me at any second. It was waiting for a command, I could feel it, but I didn’t respond because I didn’t know how much I needed. The shield was huge and was being supported by a magic I didn’t understand. If I moved too soon, the spell might fail and alert Aeslinn to what was going on.
And jury-rigged god or not, we couldn’t fight everyone.
This had to work the first time, so I poured more power into my hands, and watched a golden wash of it start to creep over the ice.
“Almost here,” Mircea murmured. “And our enemies are noticing; they’re in pursuit.”
I ignored him and strained, channeling everything I could, watching the golden glow spill over an area the size of a small house. The power was melting more and more of the outermost layers of the shield, to the point that I was standing in a small flood as my hands and then arms sank into it. Ice-cold water splashed over my feet, soaked the bottom of the robe, made my toes go numb.
But still I called for more.
“It’s not working,” Pritkin said, his voice tight. “It’s not going to be enough.”
“I haven’t started the spell yet,” I told him.
“What?”
“This is spill over. From the massing of power. I haven’t cast anything yet.”
“Why the hell not? What are you waiting for?”
“That,” I said, as the wind of an approaching army fluttered my hair.
One chance I thought grimly. Make it count. For Billy—
“Astara,” I said, and a second later, I was flying.
The blow back from the casting felt like I’d taken a baseball bat to the chest, one swung by a silverback gorilla. I felt like I’d broken a rib; it felt like I’d broken all of them. And then I hit down, not on the ground, but on a mound of the dead.
It was bad, with stabbing pain lancing through me. But it would have been much worse, except that Pritkin had come with me. He’d gotten a shield up at the last second that took the brunt of the backlash, but he hadn’t had time to form a proper one. As a result, an amorphous mass of blue sloshed around us as we rolled down the slope, and were attacked by the weapons of the dead.
Clouds of levitating guns, knives and potion bombs threw themselves at us, including something that exploded underneath us and then boiled up on all sides, olive green and a thick as the smoke from a witch’s cauldron. It didn’t get through the shield, but it obscured our view. We hit the ground and rolled blindly for a moment, before Pritkin managed to put on the breaks. I just lay there, trying and failing to breathe, wondering if I ever would again. And then the smoke finally cleared and I found myself looking up—
At a huge golden pentagram opening up inside Aeslinn’s massive shield.
It was big, I thought blankly.
It was really big.
Bigger than I’d expected, and it was still growing. While I coughed and hacked and struggled to get a breath, it kept on expanding. It covered a third of the great shield before it stopped, and just hovered there for a moment, its power causing Aeslinn’s watery protection to melt and gush and stream down all around it. Freezing water gushed all around us, pouring off the shield, but not enough. The pentagram, while impressive, wasn’t doing its job.
Had I made it too big? I wondered. Had I spread the power too thin? Why didn’t I make it smaller? We needed a doorway, not a—
And then I heard it—the first mighty CRRRAAAAAACCCKKKKK, like the calving of every glacier on Earth.
The sound shivered through my flesh and into my bones. And then another, even greater crack exploded through the air, like a thousand shotguns all going off at once. This one shuddered my body, made me cry out in pain, and caused Pritkin to shore up his shields, thickening them to the point that the whole battlefield looked blue and wavering. Yet it still wasn’t enough.
What did I do, I thought, writhing in the mud and screaming mentally and maybe physically; I couldn’t tell anymore.
What did I do?
That, I thought, as the massive, mile high pentagram shuddered and shook—and started to turn.
The sound was horrible. The sound was indescribable. The sound was mind bending and earth shattering and the loudest thing I’d ever heard—
And then the great symbol broke free, turning, turning, turning, and then spinning like a top, while it ripped open time and dragged pieces of the great
shield away into other eras, where I didn’t know.
But they weren’t here anymore, and no matter how good those Alorestri bastards were, they couldn’t replace all of that. Not in time. I lay there, shivering and gasping and watching in disbelief as a third of Aeslinn’s protection just . . . disappeared.
Mircea’s army gave a great shout that I saw rather than heard, because right then, I couldn’t hear anything. And poured through the breech, hundreds of them instead of the thousands that there should have been. But maybe it would be enough.
Maybe, I thought, watching them dodge great pieces of the shield, which were falling off the ragged remains up above; watching them wade through waist high water from the ice melt, much of which was still contained by the remaining lip of the shield; watched them take a whole sky full of arrows from the fey defenders. They were fresh; our troops were not.
It was anyone’s game.
At least it was if the other side didn’t get some back up.
I spotted Mircea near the breech, up on a rock with his sword out, rallying the remains of our army. The were his troops, not those of whoever the Senate had dredged up to replace him, and they acted like it. But I also saw the mighty force on across the battlefield, headed straight for him. And he couldn’t fight on two fronts at once.
We didn’t have the men.
I looked at Pritkin; he looked at me; and we scrambled up together, shifting to position ourselves between Mircea’s forces and the oncoming horde.
“Dulceață . . .” It echoed in my head.
“Go,” I told him breathlessly. “We’ve got this.”
There was hesitation, but then the validation that I’d never before received from him. “As you wish. Be safe.”
I nodded.
“We have this?” Pritkin repeated, his eyes on the mountains headed our way. Some of them looked damaged, missing arms or ears or even half a head. But they were still viable, and they were still coming.
It was like an avalanche on flat ground.
Literally, I thought, as a hundred giant boulders came screaming our way, all at once.
And were caught by a gleaming, glimmering net that appeared in the sky in front of us, stretching, stretching, stretching, as it strained to contain them all. Stretching so much, in fact, that the nearest boulders stopped all of a foot from our faces. But they didn’t stay there for long. The next second, they were snapped back, the momentum of all those projectiles doubled by the power I’d poured into that spell, and went flying at the enemy like a rocky hurricane.