“In time for what?” Mercy asks.
Pierce’s eyes slide to her. “It’s your father. I’m afraid he’s dying.”
“He’s . . .” Mercy goes still as a statue, the blood draining from her face. Without another word, she turns and bolts down the hall, snarling at anyone in her way.
Pierce grabs Tamriel’s arm before he can follow. “Your Highness, we must get you and your father to safety. Creator only knows what destruction that Cirisian girl can bring about with her powers, and we must plan for the worst.”
“How long until they arrive?”
“An hour, if we’re lucky. Mercy’s parents were in bad shape when the guards found them. They wouldn’t have managed to outrace the elven army if they had not had the Strykers’ help.” His grip on Tamriel’s arm tightens. “Master Adan prepared for this, Your Highness. There is a carriage waiting at the other end of the tunnel leading out of the castle. Adan and your father will meet you there to take you to safety in Ospia. Once the Cirisian army is within sight, we’ll send a decoy carriage with your family crest and a contingent of guards through the eastern gate and hope they give chase.”
Tamriel shakes his head. He nearly has to shout to be heard over the slaves’ cries and the clattering of the guards’ armor as they rush past. “Firesse and her people will come after us as soon as they realize we’ve tricked them, and I won’t put Ospia’s people in harm’s way just to secure my own safety. The city walls haven’t been breached in hundreds of years. Should Firesse find her way in, we’ll make our stand here. I’m not leaving the people of my city to fend for themselves.” He jerks out of Pierce’s grip and starts running down the hall toward the infirmary, toward Mercy. Slaves and guards jump out of his way as he passes. “See my father out of the castle, then get somewhere safe!”
“You’re being reckless!” Seren Pierce shouts. “You’re going to get yourself killed! Let the guards—”
The rest of his words are lost when Tamriel veers around the corner and plunges into the stairwell.
39
Mercy
Dayna lets out a strangled cry somewhere between a sob and a gasp when Mercy bursts into the infirmary, breathing hard. Since Atlas and the other guards had been deemed healthy enough to return to work, all of the beds are empty save for the one right next to the hearth. Adriel is huddled atop it, his back against the wall and arms wrapped around his knees, his face so pallid she can see the veins in his temples.
“Mercy,” her mother sighs. She’d been sitting on the edge of Adriel’s bed, clutching his hand, but she rises now and starts toward Mercy, her arms held open for an embrace. “I thought we’d never see you ag—”
“Sickness or poison?” Mercy sidesteps Dayna and moves to her father’s bedside, ignoring the hurt look on her mother’s face and the guilt which rises within her in response. There’s no time to play the grieving daughter. Mistress Sorin had taught her to be a healer, and that’s who her father needs her to be right now.
“Poison,” a male voice answers from the corner of the room. She starts—she’d been so preoccupied with her father, she hadn’t noticed the Strykers sitting on the far bed. “We don’t know what kind, though,” Nerran continues. “One of Firesse’s soldiers made it from a plant in the woods. I don’t know the name—it had bright purple flowers with white spots in the center.”
She leans down and peers into her father’s eyes. The pupils are huge, dilated so large she can hardly see the gold-brown of his irises. His breaths come out in ragged pants, and a sickly-sweet scent rises from his skin. “Does your tongue feel thick and heavy? Do you have a pounding headache at the base of your skull?”
Adriel nods weakly. The collar of his tunic is damp with sweat.
“It’s Widowsbane.” Dayna takes Mercy’s place at Adriel’s bedside as she moves to the shelves and begins searching for a vial of willowroot and blossoms of Claudia’s Song.
“How can you be sure?”
Mercy spares her mother the briefest glance. “Because that’s exactly how I felt when my tutors forced us to ingest poisons and identify their antidotes. Willowroot and Claudia’s Song blossoms will neutralize the poison.” Even if she lives to be a hundred, she’ll never forget that. They’d lost Amber, an apprentice of only nine years, the day Trytain taught them about poisoning because she had not been able to identify the proper antidote before the toxins reached her heart. Trytain had not let Sorin or any of the other apprentices treat Amber as the little girl fell to the ground, clutching her chest. If she is not smart enough to know how to save her own life, why should I do it for her? Trytain had sneered as Faye began to cry and beg her to help. The world has no mercy for orphans and runaways like you. The sooner you learn that lesson, the longer you’ll survive its cruelties.
Dayna makes a strangled noise at the reminder of the Guild and lets the subject drop. Mercy pours some of the willowroot oil into the mortar Niamh had left on the desk, and mashes the little white blossoms to form a liquid.
Tamriel bursts through the door. “Your father, is he—” His eyes land on Adriel lying on the bed, and he lets out a relieved sigh. “I had feared we’d be too late. Do you know what’s ailing him?”
“Widowsbane,” Dayna answers for her. “Firesse poisoned him during the attack in Xilor.”
Mercy pauses. “In Xilor? That was four days ago. He should’ve been dead in two hours. That’s how long—” she stops herself and focuses on mashing the blossoms. That’s how long Amber had lasted. The girl’s whimpers of pain had haunted Mercy’s sleep for months afterward.
“Firesse used her magic to keep the poison from killing him. He’s grown weaker ever since we left. I was so sure we weren’t going to make it.”
“I’m beyond grateful you did. Here.” Mercy perches on the bed beside her mother and lifts a spoonful of the concoction to Adriel’s lips. He slurps it down eagerly, one swallow after another, until only the dregs remain in the bottom of the bowl. His eyes flutter shut, the pain on his face finally abating.
“Why didn’t she let the poison take him?” Tamriel asks quietly, giving voice to the question they’d all been thinking. “Why keep him alive if he betrayed her?”
“She said—She said she had a use for us. She said if we were so desperate to get here, she’d make sure we had a chance to see our daughter one last time. I don’t know what she was planning, but if Calum hadn’t helped us escape . . .” She shudders. “I don’t want to think about it.”
All the air seems to leave the room at the mention of the traitor. Mercy’s hands clench into fists. “And will Calum be joining Firesse in the attack, or is the bastard going to shift loyalties again?”
“You don’t understand,” Oren pipes up from the corner, his voice thin and reedy. “He was different. Something was wrong. When we last saw him, he was acting insane. Said everything he did wasn’t really him.”
“He let the elves catch him to buy us time to escape,” Amir adds. Hewlin hasn’t yet said a word; he’s merely sitting there, his expression hollow and pained.
“It’s Drake,” Adriel croaks, the words nearly unintelligible. “That’s why he was different. Firesse let his father possess him again—for good, this time.”
“She . . . She did what, mate?” Nerran gawks at Adriel, then looks to Mercy. “Is the poison messing with his brain?”
“Calum broke through somehow. He fought back. That’s why he was able to free us, and why he had seemed so eager to help Firesse,” her father continues. “We’d suspected it for a while, but we didn’t know for sure until Calum tried to help Dayna run in Xilor.”
“So Calum didn’t help her willingly?” Tamriel asks. When Mercy looks up at him, she cannot decipher his expression. Relief? Anger? “He was her prisoner this whole time?”
Adriel nods.
Mercy frowns at the prince. “That doesn’t change what he has done. He’s still a traitor.”
He nods, slowly. “Of course not. But it does . . . complicate matters.” He tu
rns to the Strykers. “As for you, and the fact that you helped arm her troops—”
“We agreed to help her before we knew what she was capable of,” Hewlin finally interjects. “When I realized how far she was willing to go to hurt you and your people, I told her we were going to leave, but she threatened to unleash the plague on us if we fled.”
Every pair of eyes snap to him.
“What do you mean, unleash the plague?” Mercy asks, hardly breathing.
“It’s one of her . . . powers. She can control it.” He shudders, ignoring the Strykers’ looks of absolute disbelief. He runs a hand down his face, then looks up at Tamriel. “We’ll gladly pledge our swords to your cause, Your Highness. We may not be soldiers, but we know our way around a blade.”
Tamriel nods, the blood draining from his face. “Very well. Report to—"
Cassia’s cry cuts him off. She runs into the room, Ino and Matthias close on her heels, and lets out a heart-wrenching sob when she sees her parents. Mercy leaps out of the way as her siblings fling themselves into their mother’s arms. Cassia and Dayna burst into happy tears.
“Master Adan is likely in the great hall. Report to him,” Tamriel says over their cries.
The Strykers nod and quietly shuffle out of the room.
“Momma,” Cassia sobs, her voice muffled. “I’ve missed you so much.”
“I’ve missed you, too, my babies,” Dayna says between sniffles.
Matthias reaches over and brushes a sweaty tendril of hair from his father’s forehead. Adriel opens his eyes and reaches up to grasp his youngest son’s hand. Already, some of the color has returned to his cheeks.
Standing beside Tamriel, watching them, something tight fractures inside Mercy’s chest. Family—they’re her family. For the first time in eighteen years, they’re all together . . . all except one. Liselle should have been here. When Cassia reluctantly steps out of her mother’s embrace, her smile not quite hiding her sorrow, Mercy can tell she’s thinking the same thing.
Tamriel touches her elbow. “Go on,” he whispers, nodding to Dayna and the others. His eyes are shining and slightly red-rimmed, and it strikes her then how much it must pain him to witness this reunion. Like her, he’s never had a family. Not a real one, at least. Calum had been the closest thing he’d ever had to a brother. Even so, he smiles at her. “Spend some time with your family before the attack.”
Some of them might not survive it, he doesn’t need to say.
Mercy shakes her head and starts toward the door. “Let them have their reunion. They deserve it.” They’d gone through so much together, it seems only fitting. She can’t help but feel like an outsider watching them hug and cry and talk over one another.
Tamriel frowns, but he doesn’t argue.
She’s halfway to the door when her sister calls, “Where are you going?”
She turns to find Adriel and the others staring at her. Cassia raises a brow. “You didn’t think you could just sneak out of here, did you?”
“I just thought—”
“You thought wrong, little sis.” Matthias strides over to her, grabs her hand, and guides her back to Dayna and the others. The second they reach Adriel’s bedside, Matthias pulls them all into another group hug, with Mercy squished in the center. She squirms, and her brothers’ deep chuckles rumble through her. “Don’t try to fight it,” Ino whispers. “You’re one of us—you’re going to have to put up with being hugged every once in a while.”
“I can’t breathe.” Somewhere behind them, Tamriel laughs. Melodramatic as always, it seems to say.
Adriel’s rasping voice cuts through them. “You should go now. Prepare for the fight.” When they break apart, he looks each of them in the eyes. “Stay together. Protect each other.”
Ino and Matthias nod grimly. Cassia touches the elf-ear crest pressed into her leather armor and smiles. “We will, Papa,” she vows. Mercy merely nods, still in awe that her family is reunited.
“I love you, my children. If I could, I would be up there fighting right alongside you.” His gaze shifts to Mercy and Tamriel. “This will be a bloody, horrific, destructive battle. The other attacks were simply to get the king’s attention, to show off. Firesse has more tricks up her sleeve. Mercy, if the tide of the battle turns, you must promise me that you’ll do whatever it takes to survive. Flee the city. Lie low until the war is over. Let the guards and the soldiers do their jobs.”
“But—”
“Promise me.” His eyes flash, his tone making it obvious he will brook no argument. “We did not come this far only to lose a daughter we just met. Survive, all of you. Promise me that.”
“I’ll do my best,” Mercy says with a tight nod. That’s the best she can offer him.
Dayna kisses her cheek. “I’ll see you after the battle, Bareea,” she whispers. For the first time, Mercy doesn’t feel like correcting her. Mercy was the name Illynor had given her, one more way for her Guild to tighten its hold on her. Bareea was a little baby girl who had her whole life ripped from her. Bareea had had a home, and a family who loved her. Perhaps one day, she could be Bareea again.
“I’ll see you then.”
Tamriel bows to her parents, grabs her hand, and leads her out of the infirmary. Cassia and her siblings trail behind them. Mercy tries to ignore her mother’s quiet sobbing as Ino pulls the door closed, but the aged wood only partially muffles the sounds of her cries.
Fear and foreboding fill her. She is the greatest apprentice the Guild has ever trained. She has spent her life learning to become a living weapon. Until she’d come to the capital, she had spent every day of the past seventeen years perfecting the art of killing, and today will test everything she has ever learned.
Today could be the day she dies.
A sharp knock sounds on the door of Mercy’s bedroom just as she finishes pulling on her chainmail breastplate. The silver and black links jangle softly as she walks to the door and opens it. She’d expected to find her siblings there after arming themselves from the guards’ store, but instead Nynev is waiting outside, her expression hard as granite.
“The attack has begun,” Nynev says without preamble. She’s dressed in leather armor, a quiver of arrows on her back and her bow in hand, and there are three hunting knives strapped to her hips. She scans Mercy once over and gestures for her to follow before she starts down the hall at a jog. “There’s something you need to see.”
“What is it?”
“It . . . Just come and see for yourself.”
Tamriel is waiting for them in the great hall. He has donned fine silver armor emblazoned with his family’s crest, and a longsword is sheathed at his side. His expression is grave. Mercy tries to ignore the image which pops into her mind at the sight: him crumpled on the floor of his mother’s house, bleeding out from the gash Calum had carved into his back. He’d nearly died that night. He has nearly died so many times since. She twists the sapphire ring on her finger and prays the Creator does not claim his life today.
“Ready to go to war?” he asks. He reaches out and grabs Mercy’s hands, gripping them like a lifeline. “We will make it through this.”
She nods, her throat tightening when a distant boom rumbles through the castle.
“Come on.” Nynev leads them through the massive castle doors and out to the top of the stairs. From there, they can see all the way down the sloping main street and over the city walls, to the cramped, crooked houses and the large infirmary tents beyond.
Or—where the infirmary tents had once stood.
Mercy sucks in a breath when she sees the inferno blazing across the fields, great plumes of black smoke rising into the cloudless sky. As they watch, the white tents turn black and collapse as the flames consume them. Several death carriages have been abandoned on the sides of the road, their wooden frames alight. Others careen toward the safety of the city gates, streaked with soot and burn marks.
Tamriel jerks toward the stairs, but Nynev catches his arm. “Don’t be an idiot,�
�� she hisses. “There’s nothing you can do for them now.”
His face fills with anguish. “The sick—”
“The death carriages have spent the last several days relocating everyone the healers deemed healthy enough to survive transport to Beggars’ End. Most of the tents are empty.” The huntress pauses, pain flashing through her eyes. They had all caught her choice of words. Most—not all. “They saved as many as they could, Tamriel,” she says in an uncharacteristically gentle voice. “Niamh told me those who were left behind were as good as dead.”
He closes his eyes, his chest rising and falling rapidly, and sucks in a shuddering breath. Mercy can see him fighting the urge to charge down there, to risk his life battling Firesse and the Cirisians to keep his people safe. She exchanges glances with Nynev. The huntress offers her a solemn nod, remembering the promise Mercy had made her and her siblings swear, and tightens her grip on her bow.
Already, ash has begun falling from the sky, and the air is thick with the acrid scent of smoke. Distant booms echo across the city. Cannons. When she squints, she can just make out the silhouettes of the guards standing atop the distant city walls, firing cannonballs blindly through the black clouds of smoke.
“That’s not what I wanted you to see, though,” Nynev chokes out. Mercy has never heard her sound that way—strained and high-pitched. The huntress points to a gap between the columns of smoke, where several hundred elves march toward a line of Beltharan soldiers across the field. “Watch.”
Just before the two sides meet, a cannonball crashes into the middle of the Cirisian ranks. Blood and dirt and bodies go flying. For a few long moments, nothing of note happens. The Cirisians skirt the hole in the earth the cannonball had made, stepping carefully over the bodies of their brethren lying limp in the dirt.
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