by Jenna Rhodes
The ground rumbled. She fell to one knee as buildings swayed, shutters flew open, and bricks tumbled down from a nearby structure. Sevryn’s gaze stayed fixed upward, where a brilliantly blue sky turned dark with storm clouds, swirling over and downward. Funnels surged to the earth before the clouds sucked them back up. He narrowed his vision, trying to pick through the chaos to see the threads of instability behind the unnatural storm. The force of the vision set him back on his heels, shocked for a heartbeat or two as his eyes locked with another’s.
Daravan.
Locked in the storm’s center, or perhaps he was its epicenter, power flaring about him, from the darkest of grays to silvery white, blinding and yet compelling. Looking into that sharp-paned face was like looking into a still water reflection of himself, but he had never felt that kind of power flowing through his own frame. Daravan’s strength rolled off him like tongues of flame that he could feel radiating hotly. He put a hand up to shade his eyes, uncertain of just what it was he was seeing.
“Sevryn . . . what are you seeing?”
“A vision. Perhaps.”
He was no more certain when Daravan’s eyes widened slightly and fixed upon him.
His father. Not a man he remembered in that position, because his mother had raised him alone until she left to follow, without telling him just who she went after. If Gilgarran had known whose son he adopted off the streets, he never mentioned it, nor had he stored the information away within his spymaster diaries. Gilgarran had either never known it or known it so well he had no need to write the truth down to remember it. Sevryn chose to believe that his own ignorance had been Gilgarran’s as well.
“Father.” Barely audible, yet filled with the power of his Voice, in case it might be heard.
Daravan’s focus stayed locked upon him, and then the figure stretched out his arm, hand extended. Instinctively, he reached back. Vision touched flesh, and Sevryn staggered as a force slammed into him and reached deep inside, grabbing his essence and shaking him like a dog shakes a seized prey. He fought for release, but the thing that was and was not Daravan towered over him. Time slowed to a near stop. He thought he heard a soft murmur of surprise at his back which would have come from Rivergrace, but he couldn’t be certain. An ice so cold it felt like fire encased his hand.
“Give me all that you are. Give me back the life I gave you.” An intense need accompanied Daravan’s demand, a need that shivered inside of Sevryn, icy and determined, splintering him from the inside out.
Sevryn could not speak his denial, but Daravan felt it and shook him harder. He clenched his teeth. “Don’t do this. You saved us at Ashenbrook.”
The scalding ice encasing his hand moved up his arm, burning through his clothes as though they weren’t there and perhaps in Daravan’s existence, they weren’t. Stormy gray eyes with all the shadows of darkness falling bored into him.
“You know nothing of what I did or why and the only good you can do me now is to surrender. All or nothing,” Daravan replied. “The aid I want is what I can take from your thin blood. I hold an army at bay. What is that worth to you and your precious Kerith?” He spat to one side as if the word befouled his mouth.
Sevryn realized coldly that the actions taken at Ashenbrook that he’d thought heroic had begun to unravel. Whatever Daravan intended, whatever he plotted, lay still in front of them and he meant no good. He could feel it in the bond that stretched unwillingly between them now. Daravan had done what he’d done to save his army of Raymy, to retreat and attack when he had the advantage, not when three armies joined to meet them. Sevryn struggled to free himself, his heartbeat thrumming in his ears, fire and ice devouring him, Daravan taking what he could. He could feel himself losing bit by bit.
And then Grace touched his shoulder. He heard her voice although he couldn’t discern her words. It didn’t matter. Her warmth flooded him. With a gut-wrenching twist, he tore his hand free from Daravan and dropped to his knees. Time caught up with a rush and a roar, punctuated by a voice laced with fury. It battered his hearing to numbness and then bled away to nothing.
Faintly, he heard Rivergrace say, “What is happening?”
“Daravan. He is either losing control, or he has far more control than we know and should fear.” He pulled himself to his feet. “Catastrophe lies in either instance.” He watched as rolling clouds closed in about them.
Lightning struck from boiling black to glistening darkness. And then . . . the sky opened and the enemy broke through.
RAYMY RAINED FROM ABOVE. Twisted and tumbling to right themselves, hissing and stinking of saltwater and lizard slime, they hit the dirt mostly on their feet, still clad in battle gear. Gore splattered their green-and-gray bodies and weapon-filled hands as if no time had passed for them between the battle of Ashenbrook and now. Ravers fell with them, their carapaced bodies wrapped in sodden rags of dark cloth, once disguising them but now their likeness poking through with sticklike projections. Bred to ravage the pathway in front of the Raymy, they were also fodder. They rose on their oddly stilted legs, buffeted aside by their betters. The reptilian warriors stood like men, legs bent oddly, shoulders humped and spined, mouths sneering open to reveal nothing but sharp, shining teeth. An army which eats its dead. A bitterness rose in the back of Sevryn’s throat.
He threw an arm across Rivergrace to shield her; the only thing Sevryn could be thankful for was that it wasn’t the entire army. Maybe two to three dozen dropped down, but with only him and Hosmer on the ground to face them, and Rivergrace there as well, he didn’t like the odds. Raymy didn’t have central hearts where they might be expected, but the enemy certainly knew where his vulnerable spots were. “Grace, stay as far back as you can.”
She replied calmly, “I’ll be at your back.”
He heard her move into a guard position. She moved with him like his shadow as he stepped into his own defensive stance.
Hosmer did not hesitate, although his face had gone white with astonishment. He blew three sharp blasts on the whistle around his neck, the piercing noise bouncing down the lane and off the buildings. In the far distance, Sevryn could hear a two-blast answer. Backup, on the way. They could not arrive soon enough.
He remembered the days when it took himself, Jeredon, and Lariel combined to take down a charging Raymy warrior. Now he had a better idea of how to bring one down. Take them off at the legs, both Raymy and Raver, before they could leap. Then go for the head. Cripple them, if nothing else, step into the next and leave the wounded until you could return for the kill. A brutal way of fighting, but he wasn’t in it for honor. He had only to last until reinforcements arrived.
To Hosmer, he shouted, “Take their legs out first. Then their heads if you can.”
Not that the City Guard would be prepared to meet such as these, he thought as he stepped in, cutting low, ducking the blade swung at his face. He fought dirty. No legs, no warrior. At least, not a standing one. He could feel Grace moving at his flank, with the sense to imitate his actions. He could hear her faint grunts as she connected, her following gasp of dismay that she had, thinking that this was his Grace who ought never to have to swing a weapon. And yet, he knew that she had carried the Souldrinker, that immense broadsword Cerat, when no one else could have survived the burden. She had taken the weapon to destroy it when no one else could bear to take it up. He reminded himself, as a Raymy grinned fangs in his face and Sevryn stabbed him in the torso to double him over, then swept his ankles out from under the beast, that Rivergrace stood alone. The Raymy toppled. He had no time for satisfaction as two jumped him, one at his flank and the other at his back. He surged in the opposite direction, letting their momentum swing them off balance before kicking the weaker-looking one away, and burying his sword to the hilt in the guts of the remaining reptile. Warmish blood spilled over his hand. The color disconcerted him for a moment. Red yet with a green-and-black cast to it that reflected in the su
n, like an oily sheen. He kneed the second one back, took off a leg, and left it to bleed out. He found it mildly disconcerting and distracting that the fallen appendage flopped and kicked a pace away from the body.
He heard a flurry behind him, followed by a triumphant noise from Rivergrace. Across from them, Hosmer also followed his lead and, to Sevryn’s relief, three more guards galloped up, jumping from their horses to join the fray. They drew weapons and shields and fell into formation, leaving no flank open as they attacked. Shrewdly assessing the handiwork, the guards flew on the Raymy with the same determination to cut them out from below and leave them fallen.
Overhead, the sky rumbled darkly and shuddered, and a drum of thunder rolled through him, shaking his very bones. With it, the sky split open a second time, and Raymy fell through as if poured from a bucket. The street and alley filled with their hissing forms.
Rivergrace uttered a small sound. Sevryn backed up and caught her by her free wrist.
“Run,” he told her. “I’ll hold them.”
“No one holds that many. I can’t leave you.” She tossed her head futilely to clear her hair from her brow, frowning. “And, look, there’s something . . . wrong . . . with them.” She pivoted him to his right.
One of the Raymy she had cut down lay curled in the dust, bleeding and panting, but his wound did not keep him down so much as the bubbling pustules that covered his already warty form, pustules that leaked a foul yellowish-green fluid to join his blood in the dirt. “They’re revolting, but I don’t remember this from Ashenbrook.”
The Raymy snarled at him, forked tongue slicking in and out of his jaw, swollen and blackening at the edges. He recoiled. Sevryn split his lungs open and stepped back a pace as foulness spilled out.
Recognition jolted him. “He’s sick.” Sevryn jerked her back, uselessly; they were both doused with the gore of battle, but he could not help himself. “Plague.” He looked at the others downed, writhing nearby. Disgusting blisters blanketed them, and the Raymy wheezed as if they could barely breathe, yet struggled to get to their feet, ready to fight and kill if they could. Wherever they had been, they had been contaminated, and now they carried it like a blanket wrapped tightly about them like a second skin. A deadly blanket. His hand closed tightly on her shoulder. “Stay away from them.”
“Have you ever seen anything like it?” Rivergrace shook under his touch.
“No. Never. Whatever it is, it’s bad.” He stepped back and swung her around with him. A Raymy surged at them. Rivergrace jabbed to impale him, and Sevryn swept his head off as the beast stumbled to a stop. It bounced away from him, still spitting in hatred and battle fervor.
Hosmer looked at them from across the wide ring of enemies, readying to join them, as the force weakened down the center.
“Don’t touch the bodies!” Rivergrace cried to him. “Plague!” She threw Sevryn a wild look. “We have to stop this.”
“How?”
She dropped her sword and straightened, taking as deep a breath as she could, and with a short cry of defiance, she set the world on fire.
Flame shivered out of her, drawn from her slender form like a thread which expanded and burst into conflagration as it gained the air, and she aimed it to the blood-coated earth where it anchored itself into a river, a spiraling river, of fire. Sevryn reached to grasp her hand, but the heat shimmering off her drove him back.
Beyond Hosmer and his brace of guards, the sky still rained down Raymy, though the quantity had slowed to a mere handful or two at a time, filling the entire quarter of the city. Yet these fighters did not rise to battle. They lay in miserable heaps, sisssssing and gnashing their teeth in agony.
“Quarantine,” muttered Sevryn. He raised his voice and sent his Talent thundering toward Hosmer, as he repeated, “Quarantine!”
Hosmer raised his blade in knowledge.
Sevryn turned to Rivergrace. “How long will the fire hold here?” he asked as the thread snapped off and she stumbled back in weariness.
“Till dark, I think. I don’t . . . know.”
He caught her just before she fell.
“YOU LEFT HOSMER THERE? In the circle of fire? In the middle of plague?” Nutmeg’s face looked at her, shock-white, her eyes stricken.
“Yes.” Grace hung her head down, unable to look at her sister’s face any longer.
“How could you?” Nutmeg swung from one to the other.
“There was no choice. You have to understand that.”
Tolby clasped Sevryn’s shoulder in response. “I know that, lad, no need t’explain further. We have to accept what’s been done. Hosmer is a smart man. I’ve raised him to know how to deal with contamination, be it an orchard or a sick animal. He’ll make do.”
“He shouldn’t have to make do,” Lily said tightly. She would not look at either Rivergrace or Sevryn as she spoke, one of her hands twisting in her apron.
“It will be fine,” Tolby reassured her.
“You’re his sister,” Lily added, unrelenting, to Grace. “How could you leave him?”
Rivergrace’s mouth worked, but no words came out. She cleared her throat and tried again. “To protect Nutmeg. I have to keep her safe if I can. He was on the other side.”
Meg looked at her wildly. “Did I ask for protecting?”
Tolby stepped forward, his voice dropping. “That will be enough. From everyone. What’s done is done, and Hosmer is a man full grown. He’s a son of mine, and he will do the job he took on when he took th’ uniform of the City Guard. Settle that within yerselves, for I won’t hear another word on it. Understand?”
Lily turned sharply on her heel and left for the kitchen where the pans and crockery could be heard clashing upon the tables and shelves. Tolby grunted as the noise reached them.
Keldan tilted his head at his father. “They still have to leave.” He beckoned at Sevryn and Rivergrace. “But the streets to the gates are cut off.”
“Aye. Through the fields, I’m thinking.”
“Can we get out that way?”
Tolby’s eyes narrowed a bit in thought, and the corner of his mouth quirked as though he bit down on the stem of a pipe in rumination. “Mayhap,” he answered, finally. “Mayhap.”
Even that answer was a bit more certain than the actual probability, Sevryn thought, as he sat his horse and watched Keldan and Nutmeg at the edge of the vineyards, where the rock rose to meet the ground and the bases of the vines were old, gray, and gnarled, until they sprouted fresh green sprouts to join the framework meant to hold them as they grew. The perimeter of the vineyards, however, stood as a wild tangle of old, never trimmed or cropped vines, unproductive yet singularly determined to weave together, as high as one man standing upon another’s shoulders. Still, the barrier didn’t look insurmountable.
“You’ll not be getting through this way,” Nutmeg threw over her shoulder. She rode their stout little mountain pony stallion who had mellowed in his years in Calcort, it seemed, and only snorted in mild annoyance at being held to bridle and saddle at Nutmeg’s hands.
“And why not?”
“No one ever has. It’s been warded since even before th’ time of the Mageborns, is all we were told. Cannot your own eyes see?”
“I’m not that trained,” Rivergrace murmured. “I can see a kind of weaving, but that just may be the vines. I don’t think I could manipulate it. If it were water or fire . . .” She shrugged.
Sevryn ran a fingernail along the edge of his jaw in thought. He’d been trained by Gilgarran, but it didn’t come easily to him. Daravan’s taunt about thin blood echoed through him for a moment. He narrowed his eyes, glowering at the edge of the vineyard, and then he caught it. An immense, golden wire weaving that reached high enough to stave off even a catapult hit. Little things could get through: mice, bees, songbirds, but nothing of substance. The barrier stood as nothing a Vaelinar would make
; he would tweak and bind together the natural threads of the earth, but this stood like an alien edifice, something smelted out of will and metal. He let out a whistle. “I can see why no one’s breached it yet.” His horse did a lazy turnabout, and Sevryn put the side of his boot flat into his side to halt him. “What makes you think we can get out this way?”
Keldan grinned, as he shadowed Nutmeg, and came around the end row of vines. “Because there’s a backdoor, a-course.”
“Naturally,” said Grace dryly as she pushed her horse past Sevryn.
He did not like backdoors. Traitors could make use of them. Keldan saluted his frown as if reading his mind, saying, “Not this one. You’ll be lucky to get your horses through it, and the only reason you’ll make it through is because you’ve magic of your own.”
“And you know this because?”
“We’ve been through the gate. Or Garner has, mostly. There’s an archway, more like a short cave, and it leads out to a wash above the river. He said it made his skin crawl, told us not to try it. Made it sound like we’d be skinned alive if we did.”
“Keldan,” warned Nutmeg.
“He did!” Keldan leaped onto his horse, which he rode without bridle or saddle, and wrapped one hand in the mane. Both tossed their heads at the same time. “Thisaway.”
Scowling, Nutmeg fell in behind him, and just shook her head at Grace when they traded looks. Sevryn brought up the rear, warily, making sure they had not been followed. He did not fear the Raymy breaking quarantine, but assassins were another matter. Having failed, they would be back. Not the Kobrir, but the others, he had little doubt. He’d had private words with Tolby. They could, and would, use the quarantine to mask Nutmeg’s comings and goings as much as they could, but there would be those who would come, by rooftop if they had to, past the City Guard. The only question in their minds was when. It would be best in any plan to do the deed before the child was born, because once there was a baby and its sex was known, its death had to be suspect. Someone would always try to put forth a half-Dweller, half-Vaelinar heir, valid or not. That’s how fortunes were made in the shadows. No, it would be better by far for Tressandre’s plans to have mother and unborn child indisputably dead. Tolby had told him as much, and Sevryn uncomfortably agreed with him. Impetuous Nutmeg had not thought of those consequences, of any of them, really, except the immutable condition of love.