by Morgan Rice
They ran over a small rise, and below, Sophia saw a battle that was only one step away from being a slaughter. The ochre uniforms of the New Army surrounded a group of people. Although those people fought back bravely, holding their ground, it was obvious that they were losing. Too many bodies already lay on the ground.
There was no time for subtlety, no time for some clever plan or elegant ruse. This time, there was only enough time for one thing.
“Kill them,” Sophia said.
Aia bowed, put her golden helm in place, and charged, along with the others. Twelve warriors didn’t seem like enough, but they scythed into the ranks of the New Army, cutting through the first ones they met with impossible speed, their weapons flashing out to clear spaces around them while their armor absorbed the few blows that they couldn’t avoid in the chaos of the battle. They weren’t invulnerable, but looking at them then, it was easy for Sophia to forget it. There must have been ten times as many soldiers of the New Army as there were warriors on her side, but with those twelve there, it didn’t matter.
For a moment, Sophia thought that it would be that easy; that the twelve would just cut through the New Army’s contingent, and it would be over. That they would save the people there without a single loss.
Then an entire battalion of enemy soldiers came over the next hill, muskets shouldered as they marched.
Sophia doubted that even the golden armor would stop that many shots, and she cursed herself for not thinking that this might be some kind of trick to draw in whoever came to save the others. She’d rushed in without even checking to see if anything had changed since she first looked, and now…
…now everyone was going to die.
“No, I won’t allow it,” Sophia said, her fists clenching. She wasn’t going to lose more people who trusted her. She wasn’t going to let the crushing weight of another enemy overcome people who fought on her behalf.
In desperation, she reached for the fire stone, clasping her hand around it.
She stretched out with her knowledge of her kingdom, feeling the presence of the soldiers ahead of her, feeling their movements even as she felt the power of the stone in her hand. She thought about everything they were, and everything they would carry, searching for something that would match with its hunger for fire. Uniforms, weapons, black powder…
“Yes,” Sophia said.
She fed energy from her kingdom into it, and reached out with the power of the stone. It was hard, even for her, the power of the stone lashing through her, threatening to overwhelm her. She held onto it, focusing the power, drawing fire where there had been none before.
Every scrap of black powder the soldiers held exploded at once.
The blast of it filled Sophia’s ears, the men barely having time to scream as flame and power and energy ripped through them. Their weapons exploded in their hands, their powder bags combusted at their hips, and they died. They died because Sophia killed them.
She fell to her knees, hand loosening its hold on the fire stone while hot tears filled her eyes at the thought of killing so many. They had come to kill her people, they deserved it, but even so, she couldn’t help the feeling that each death only fueled the Master of Crows’ campaign. She knelt there until Lani came to her, raising her up.
People crowded around her, men and women and children. They looked at her with awe. They stood staring at her, while others started to chant her name.
“Sophia… Sophia…”
“We’ll follow you wherever you go, your majesty,” one of the warriors there said.
Another one knelt, holding up his sword. “Tell us what you need from us, and we’ll do it.”
She struggled to find the words.
“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me. I have to know. Does anyone know where my daughter is?”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
If Rika had learned one thing about ruling, it was that there was always another thing to do. There had been a time when she hadn’t had to worry about anything more difficult than making progress with the latest piece on her harp. Now though, there was so much more to do.
“The farmers are saying that this year’s harvest might not be as good as we would hope,” Oli said, standing behind the ducal seat that Rika now occupied in her quarters.
“After all the fighting, I guess that was always going to happen,” Rika said. “Do we have enough in the treasury to make sure that the people get food?”
“I think so,” Oli said. “Although there’s the cost of the army to consider as well.”
Rika wanted to say that feeding people came before fighting, but she knew now just how easily someone could use violence to kill those same people if she didn’t protect them. Of course, sometimes a problem could provide its own solutions, of a sort.
“The soldiers we have left might have to go to support Sophia soon,” she said. “There’s going to be a battle. With the New Army’s attack on her kingdom, we might have a lot fewer mouths to feed when they go to help, and… I think if we ask her, she’ll help to send food.”
She guessed that people wouldn’t be happy with having to beg food from Sophia’s kingdom, but right then, Rika’s main concern was ensuring that they didn’t starve.
“You said that there’s going to be a battle?” Oli said. Her brother looked nervous. He’d always liked books more than swords, and Rika didn’t blame him for it. “Does that mean that you’ve seen something?”
Rika’s dreams were becoming more frequent now, almost as if meeting her cousins had triggered something in her. She still didn’t have any of the magical strength of her siblings, couldn’t even stop someone from reading her mind if they wanted to. The things she saw though, that power was becoming stronger and stronger.
“I saw something that doesn’t make sense,” Rika said. “I saw myself leading a war fleet.”
“Well, you do have a war fleet now,” Oli said.
“You know that’s not the point,” Rika said. The point was that neither one of them was exactly suited to leading a military force. That had been more the kind of thing that Hans or Ulf might have done. It was hard to think about her brothers without experiencing the pain of their loss again. She and Oli had lost so much now, from their father to their brothers and sisters.
“I know,” Oli agreed, and some of the sadness in his voice said that he understood what she was feeling right then. “Since we’re talking of war, you should know that Jan was hoping you would come down to see him work with the men.”
Rika’s oldest surviving brother had taken over a lot of the work with Ishjemme’s soldiers. He had started to teach them the tactics that he had learned in the war against the New Army, and to make sure that the recruits could fight with sword and musket equally well. It was the kind of thing that Rika couldn’t do herself, and that Hans had always done before… well, before.
“Then let’s go see him,” Rika said. “We can see how people are doing in the town while we do it.”
Rika had been worried when she became Duchess of Ishjemme that people would start to be distant with her, or even afraid. After all her brother Endi had done in his brief time as a tyrant there, she wouldn’t have blamed them. Instead, as she and Oli started to make their way down from the castle that sat above Ishjemme, people started to smile and wave to her. It wasn’t like a procession, because they weren’t lined up neatly, or pushed into it by the sense of an occasion they couldn’t miss. Instead, it seemed that almost every person Rika passed wanted to stop and talk with her. They actually liked her.
“Are you all right today, my lady?” a fisherman’s wife asked. “I can’t imagine how anyone manages to do all that you’ve been doing all alone.”
“I’m not exactly alone,” Rika said. “Everyone does what they can.”
“My daughter says that she wants to be just like you when she grows up,” a burly woodcutter said. “Brave, and strong and no one bullies her.”
“If someone is picking on her,” Rika said, “she shouldn�
��t have to wait until she grows up for it to stop. You should talk to her now, maybe get her to think about what my sister Frigg would have done if someone was being cruel to her.” She thought for a moment. “Although maybe with fewer axes involved.”
It made for slow progress down towards the training square, but Rika didn’t begrudge her people a single moment of it. It meant that she got to hear about what was going well for them and what needed to change, what was happening in their small land, and what they thought was happening with their neighbors. Endi might have had his spies, but Rika found it far better just to ask people what they thought.
Eventually, she made it to the training square, where the remaining young men of Ishjemme, and some of the young women, were training with swords and axes, shields and pikes. Currently, they seemed to be practicing moving in rapidly changing formations, working to sprint from one piece of protection to another in triangles where one group made for cover, another fired muskets to distract any enemy, and a third reloaded in preparation for their turn to advance.
Jan was a little further over, working with a group on swordplay, showing them how to roll their wrists properly to get around the shield of an opponent. He was smiling as he did it, and that seemed far too rare a thing since he’d come back from Ashton.
“You’re doing a good job here,” Rika said.
He swept into a bow. “I’ll have them prepared, my duchess.”
Rika frowned as he straightened up. “Jan.”
“Sorry, I couldn’t resist.” He moved forward and hugged her. “Besides, it’s good to remind them that you are the duchess here, just in case any of them are having fond memories of Endi.”
“It won’t be like that,” Rika said. “I want to bring people together.”
“You’re peaceful and you’re kind,” Jan said. “It’s one of the best things about you, sister, but people can be unkind and soldiers… well, too often they decide that they want a war leader like them.”
“Then they’ll love the dream I had,” Rika said, knowing that her brother was right, and wanting to tell him about the battle that she’d seen. “In it-”
That was when the vision hit her, hard enough that Rika gasped with it.
She could see her cousin Kate, standing in a place of shadows, her hands covered in blood. Her face was terrifying, given over to hate. She stepped back into those shadows, and was gone.
She saw Lucas, sitting in a place where ghosts and unreal things danced around him, shifting and changing with every passing moment. She saw him growing thinner and less real even as she watched his body both starving and seeming to shift into something that wasn’t made of flesh.
She watched him disappear into nothing, lost to the world, turned into a thing of spirit and air, unable to touch the world. There was a smile on his face as it happened that made it seem almost beautiful, and that made him look at peace with it, yet Rika couldn’t feel any of that peace watching it.
She felt even less in the next moment when she saw a battle unfolding around her, in the surrounds of an estate bolstered with walls of energy to turn it into a kind of fortress. Mighty armies clashed there, the New Army taking on a force that seemed to belong to Sophia, along with another under a banner Rika didn’t recognize.
She saw Sophia throwing power that spoke of flames and of stone and ice, men burning and freezing, caught in crevasses and crushed by the ground under their feet. Rika saw the death there, and the destruction, but in spite of it, the others were fighting back with cannon and muskets and power. Rika saw flocks, clouds, of crows descending. She saw blood, and smelled death, and heard the screams of men who would have preferred it.
They fought, and in spite of the power Sophia was able to bring to bear, Rika could see the elements that were missing. She saw the Master of Crows charging through the battle, unstoppable. She saw Sophia fall, pierced by a blade, or a spear, or both…
Rika came back to herself with a scream, her brain momentarily unable to distinguish between the men practicing in front of her and the blood and horror of her vision. She half collapsed, and only kept from collapsing completely because Oli and Jan caught her. They both looked at her with concern.
“What happened?” Jan asked. “Are you all right, Rika?”
“What did you see?” Oli said, obviously catching the way Rika had looked.
“I saw… I saw death. I saw us failing. I saw the Master of Crows winning.”
The other two looked at her in shock.
“No,” Jan said. “He can’t. We won’t let him.”
“I saw it,” Rika said, holding her head. The pressure of the vision was hard to fight past.
“There has to be something we can do,” Oli said.
A part of Rika wanted to just shake her head. How could the three of them hope to do anything when there was so much horror?
“Rika, focus,” Jan said. “I know you’re terrified right now, but you can do this. If you saw something, there must be something we can change. Tell us.”
“I saw… I saw Lucas in trouble,” Rika said. “We… lose him, and then he isn’t there for the battle that matters. Kate… I think that we need to get them there. We need to find a way.”
“Where was Lucas?” Jan said.
Rika tried to think. “He was in a place with trees that had paper hanging from them, and illusions everywhere.”
“The Isle of Spirits,” Oli said. “There are maps in the library that show all the old isles. Lend me a ship and I’ll go.”
Rika shook her head. “No, I feel… I feel as though I need to do this.”
“And Kate?” Jan asked.
“An island of shadows,” Rika said. “Oli, do you know where it is?”
“I know, but I’m not sure-”
“I’ll go,” Jan promised. He put a hand on Rika’s shoulders. “We’ll find them. We’ll get them where they need to be.”
Rika hoped that he was right. If not… if not then they might lose everything.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Kate stalked through the caverns, the shine of the light from the dark walls lending it an eerie quality. The shadows stretched out in odd ways that didn’t always seem to have anything to do with the light. After the attack by the watchers, Kate kept clear of them, wary of being grabbed.
“People come this way sometimes,” Lisare said in a low voice. “They try to consult with the stone.”
“Consult with it?” Kate asked. She had thought that it would just be a stone. How did you consult with a stone?
“The shadow stone is connected to every shadow in the world,” Lisare said. “People come to ask questions, and see what it sees. Many do not survive. The ones who do…”
“What?” Kate asked as they kept going, through the underground spaces beneath the mountain.
“The stone tells the truth, but a shadowed version of it,” Lisare said. “People come out haunted looking. I have seen a man fight his way through all of it, only to sit down and starve himself to death once he was back.”
Kate shuddered at the thought of that. “And no one here tried to help him?”
“This is a place of death,” Lisare told her. “We tried to warn him, just as I’ll warn you now: the stone is powerful, and it is dangerous. Try to use it before you are perfectly prepared, listen to its lies too closely, and you risk destroying yourself.”
Kate could hear the concern in her voice, but she didn’t trust it. She had learned far too many times how cruel life could be, and how easily people betrayed one another. This woman, this priestess, was just trying to push her back to keep her from what she needed to do.
Kate pressed on in silence, her feet slipping over the shadowy ground without so much as a scrape. The echo of Lisare’s feet sounded far too loud in comparison.
“You need to stay back,” Kate said. “You’re making too much noise.”
“I need to guide you,” Lisare said.
“To a place you’ve never been?” Kate demanded, becoming more
suspicious by the second. “Why? So that you can let something know that I’m coming?”
“Kate, this is the shadows having an effect on you,” Lisare said. “They try to sneak into who you are. They try to bring out the worst in you.”
“But not in you?” Kate shot back. What did she actually know about this priestess? How many times had she been tricked before? Siobhan had done it, tricking her out of her own soul. Her parents had sent her a way to find them, but then… then they’d gone and died.
She couldn’t listen to this. She had to get away before Lisare had a chance to betray her. She should run, she should kill her. She should…
“Kate, don’t!” Lisare shouted as Kate sprinted away.
Kate took turnings at random as she headed through the passages beneath the mountain. The shadows reached for her, but she avoided them. Kate ran on, trusting her instincts, hoping that they would lead her to where she wanted to go. It felt almost as if the shadows were leading her forward, a tugging on the edge of her mind beckoning her, urging her, luring her…
“I don’t care,” Kate whispered.
The words seemed to echo through the tunnels, turning into something that seemed to call Kate forward, and now she was certain that this was the right way, this was the way she needed to go.
The tunnel opened out, giving way to a large, circular cavern, lit by a shaft of light from above that seemed to glance off the rocks, only providing fuel for the shadows that filled the place.
At the heart of it was what seemed like a pool or a pond, except that it was not a pool of water. Like the waterfall above, it was a pool of raw shadows, and those shadows writhed like something living as Kate drew closer. At the heart of it, she could see a round object the size of her hand, smooth as glass, but with what seemed like yet more shadows dancing underneath the surface.
This had to be the shadow stone, the thing Kate had come to find, the thing that might give her back what she had been before. She started to make her way towards it, and even as she did, something started to rise up from the pool.