A dozen soldiers soon gathered with him on the bank, and the witches began to creep from the trees.
Water rose behind them, and slimy water plants crawled from the dark river. But Dain cried to them to hold steady, and they formed pairs, half slicing at the plants as they rose, half parrying with whatever witch darted forward with her black daggers or thorny whips.
The unmistakable scream of a Draken filled the air, and one of the massive beasts barreled into the area.
Dain and his soldiers scrambled to get out of the way - he’d misjudged the size of the clearing, and the Draken was nearly on top of them as well as the witches.
It chomped and stomped witches, clouting them with its enormous wings. The spot was cleared in a matter of seconds.
Was this the male or female? It swung its great head in Dain’s direction, and he saw the eyes were human, not slitted like a snakka.
Male, then?
The Draken seemed to nod, head bobbing, and its tongue lolling out through teeth as large as Dain’s forearm.
The other one swooped low, and Dain and his soldiers gaped as darkness began to spool from her scales, slithering into the trees like shadows.
He prayed this Draken was on their side.
Screaming began to echo between the trees, and one by one, the witches were dragged onto the beach, each wrapped in tendrils of smoky darkness. The shadows tightened, squeezing the witches until their bodies popped apart into pieces of limb and torso. Within a matter of minutes, the beach was quiet. Not a person moved.
The male Draken shrunk and shifted, drawing clothes about him as he turned back into the young man Dain had met the night before. He surveyed the gore with a greenish look on his face, tilting his head up to the female hovering in the sky. Dain had the sense they were communicating in their minds, and he shook his head with the weirdness of the day.
He’d always known such magic and horror existed. He’d seen bits of it under Mara and Zorander’s command and in the brief attacks on StarsHelm.
But nothing, absolutely nothing, had prepared him for Sulit.
Nik turned to Dain. “Coren’s already gone ahead to search for Mara. Sy is getting ready to follow. And Jyesh, too.” He swallowed hard over the First Son’s name. “Shuri and I can make a few more rounds here, but I don’t think you’re outnumbered anymore. You’ll need to convince the Sulit you only wish to help them - protect them from the Brujok.”
“How do I know the difference?” Dain asked. He stubbornly wished he were going ahead to protect Coren, but really, he’d be no help against Mara. Here, at least, he could regroup his soldiers and aid the Sulit.
Nik smiled and said, “If they attack you first, they’re Brujok. Sulit witches are naturally peaceful.”
And before Dain could process this vague advice, Nik had shifted back into his Draken form and risen into the sky, the other Draken matching him with each movement.
GRAND KNEW THE TWINS were close. She could smell the singe of magic on the air, and the trees wouldn’t shut up about the wonders waiting for the Brujok ahead.
She also knew these children were her last opportunity to salvage any portion of her plan.
Even now, her sisters were losing to the humans. To the Draken. She hissed her disgust as she moved forward, touching each tree carefully, gleaning its thoughts. Those cursed Draken had stayed hidden and silent for hundreds of years, thousands even. And they chose now to surface and choose an ally? Grand was livid.
Curse the Sulit Mother for allowing the winged beasts into her forests to kill her own daughters. Curse her for not accepting her dead Brujok sisters back into her earthen womb. They would never be reborn, their souls never given fresh young bodies. Their bodies would rot on the surface of the dirt instead, their magic wasted to the air and MagiSea.
Grand knew that meant the Mother was displeased with them, but she had never cared less in her long life.
Curse the Mother! She - GrandScream - was displeased. Grand had served the Sulit Mother since she’d been a tiny slip of a witch, and it had gotten her nothing.
Grand no longer cared that the Mother disapproved of her plan to fix everything. Spilling Sulit secrets to human ears should have never happened. It wasn’t her fault - all this mess had begun with that idiot Ferula and the spellbook.
Ferula had been punished, yes, but the damage had already been done.
Mara had read the book.
Mara.
Who was never even supposed to be Queen.
Who was even now somewhere in the Listening Forest, working to reshape her destiny.
Grand paused in her seething thoughts to cast a truthing spell on a few of the trees. It was a draining bit of magic, but useful. The trees had been giving her muddled information, turning her in circles. She leaned against a smooth trunk, panting with the effort. There was a distraction spell on this grove.
It was hiding something.
The trees knew these children.
The trees accepted these twins as the twins of the prophecy. The ones Grand had been searching for nearly her entire life. A bark of delirious laughter escaped her lips as she understood that they had been directly in her grasp in Rurok.
She’d even touched them with her own hands.
But their magic had not yet awoken then, and it was always impossible to gauge power before the right time. This meant the witch who had spelled the grove must be a seer. Grand glanced back to her sisters, sneaking through the forest behind her. They were nearly upon the clearing, circling the silent grove like carrion birds.
StrikeShadow breathed deeply, her eyes rolling back in her head. “Oh,” she muttered. “Yes. This brings back memories.” Opening her eyes, she grinned, wide and lazy as a catten. “The last time I was here was so much fun.”
“Why have you been here before?” SmokeFist whispered, slipping near.
Strike just shrugged. “Mara’s business.”
Grand shushed them as they drew to the edge. The seer who lived here had strong magic. There were complex wards at every turn, stretching even above the trees.
The crowen had reported the place quickly enough, and although Grand hadn’t wanted to leave the battles with Riata and Sulit, she was unwilling to trust this mission to anyone else.
It was time.
Working together, the three Brujok dispelled the wards from a slim section. Just enough to sneak in, to the far left of a quaint cottage. A sparkling pond of clear water took up much of the clearing, its tail scampering off into the woods beyond, where it must join the Shedreck River, and farther along, the MagiSea.
Neat rows of herbs bordered the cottage, and a few bushes near the back door drooped with jewel-toned coinberries. Grand crept closer to the cottage, noting the collection of smooth stones of every color, lined along the windowsills and across the doorway.
Yes, this seer was strong in Sulit magic.
But Grand knew her twist of Brujok would be stronger.
“I scent Mara’s Knight,” Strike hissed, her grin growing. “Dear Prodigal, where are you?” she sang, her voice barely a breath on the wind. Grand leered at a shadow passing the window from within.
The human would be the most vulnerable to their magic.
“Smoke takes the man. Strike, you help me neutralize the seer. And whatever happens,” she warned, “do not lose the children.”
Both witches nodded, surrounding the cottage in silence.
Pressing her fingers into the earth in a shadowy spot near the wall, Strike called the darkness to her, slipping it beneath a thin crack under the door. The tendrils would be a nearly invisible caress to anyone inside, giving up their location to Strike, who could then send larger, ominous shadows to suffocate and drown her victim in darkness.
An angry yell came from inside the cottage, and Grand smiled. Strike’s magic had been discovered and the battle begun.
The man burst out of a different door, brandishing a dagger in each hand, a bow sword strapped to his back. His back was to SmokeFi
st, and she began to gather her power as he searched in vain for his attacker.
Calling a tiny flame to her palm, she waited until it began to produce a soft gray smoke. Creeping closer, but always careful to stay behind the man, she coaxed the smoke into a dense cloud, then shoved it at the human with all her might.
It plowed into him like a brick, knocking him straight to the ground.
The witches cackled, and Smoke pounced. He rolled to his back, flinging daggers in one sinuous motion. Grand watched as one sailed over Smoke’s shoulder, but the other caught her in the upper arm. She bellowed and tumbled down on him, the fire slipping around her fingers. It never rose more than an inch, but that was usually enough to ward off humans.
Her smoke twined around him, binding his fingers to themselves and twisting down his throat, gagging him. He writhed beneath her and kicked her away, scrabbling for the dagger in the dirt.
Grand was confident in Smoke, so she turned from her sister’s fight to survey the cottage again. The seer was still in there with the children. Grand wasn’t certain what type of seer this witch was - whether she had quick flashes of far-in-the-future prophecy, or if she continually saw a few seconds ahead.
She hoped not the latter. Those were difficult to fight.
Strike and Grand glanced at each other, readying their spells, then burst into the cottage. Shadows zoomed around the room, ready to bind anyone there, and Grand’s shriek bounced off the walls, shattering the windows.
But no one was there.
The cottage was empty.
Grand and Strike pushed through, checking the cupboards and closets, but there was almost nowhere to hide. Yelling in frustration, Grand kicked open the other door just in time to see Smoke sink her dagger deep into the man’s chest.
He groaned, but his head dropped back in the dirt and rolled to the side, his eyes desperately seeking something in the trees before going glassy and still.
Grand cackled. The fool father had just given them his children’s location. She sprinted into the forest beyond the clearing, following Kashar’s lifeless gaze.
She heard Smoke and Strike not far behind, and her fingers slapped at the tree trunks as she passed, trying to read what they’d seen.
None of them were expecting to be blown sideways by a giant fireball ripping through the trees.
All three screamed and scrambled away from the flames. Smoke had caught the brunt of the attack, and she crawled and rolled away as best she could, but her skin was already blackening and flaking from the burns.
The forest was silent around them, not a single animal stirring.
Smoke choked on the char of her own hair, pulling her blistered body up to lean against a tree. “Where are you?” she yelled.
Grand had been scanning the trees, but she’d seen no witch or child anywhere.
Few witches could call flame like that, and it was even more rare for a seer to have such power. Perhaps this witch would be worth recruiting.
“Join us, our seer sister,” she called into the whispering trees. “We wish no harm to the children. Surely, you have seen their destiny in your mind!”
A cracking twig alerted her to the movement before she saw it.
The Weshen girl stepped from behind a thick trunk, surveying the three witches. She stared with interest at Smoke, who was panting in pain.
“You killed my father,” she observed, her voice flat and low and not childlike at all.
Without warning, she flicked her fingers, and another ball of fire launched at Smoke. The witch was gone before she could scream, nothing left of her but a black stain on the tree.
The girl blinked her gaze to Grand and tilted her head, bird-like.
“How?” Grand breathed, too intrigued to fear for her life. Weshen did not call fire with their shifting. And non-witches never had that much power. Only the oldest of pureblood witches should be able to produce such a flame.
The little girl only shrugged and held up her palm, where a burning shaft of fire stood, shaping itself into a sword of flames, balanced in the air. “The trees tell me things,” she said, clutching her fingers into a fist and suffocating the fire.
Grand straightened and looked past the girl. Where was the brother? The seer? “I don’t believe you. Why would Sulit trees tell anything to a Weshen child?”
“Because one day, she’ll need it,” another voice answered, just behind and to the left of where Grand stood. She smiled and turned, careful not to startle the boy.
He walked forward a few steps, saving her the trouble of squinting into the shadows. A starbird nestled on his shoulder, rubbing its downy head on his neck. Two more hopped from branch to branch above him, their white bodies twinkling among the rose-colored leaves like young stars in an early morning sky.
Grand wondered if the trees spoke to him as well.
The boy kissed the starbird. “The animals tell me their secrets, not the trees.” He answered her unspoken question, and she raised a brow at him.
“We don’t plan to kill you,” the girl offered, just as a horrible scream echoed throughout the forest. Three faces swiveled toward the noise.
The children skipped through the trees, vanishing before Grand could get her body moving. But the boy’s starbirds flitted to and fro among the branches, almost like they were leading her forward. Grand didn’t trust the creatures, but their flight matched the noises she heard ahead.
She came up short at the river, where Strike had the seer cornered.
The seer was bled freely, her dress soaked with a growing red spot. The little girl and boy moved as one to attack Strike, the starbirds pecking at her eyes as flames grew like a lattice over Strike’s body. Strike shrieked and batted the birds, shaking her dress, but it was all too much, and she slumped to the ground, moaning.
Grand watched the boy approach her next, the glint of a knife in his hand. The girl stepped to her brother’s side, and Grand resisted the urge to attack. Just a few more steps.
She opened her mouth and let loose the weapon she’d been saving, the one that would nearly drain her dry. Her scream stunned the children and the dying seer, and the three of them stumbled to the forest floor, their eyes vacant and hollow as their brains were slowly paralyzed.
Grand screamed until her throat gave out, the noise ending in a hoarse cough.
“Sleep,” she whispered to the twins, reaching into her pocket for a bit of powdered duskdrowse root. It would extend the effects until she could reach Mara. There was still one last trade to be made before the game was won.
There was no time to mess with the seer.
Grand used the last shreds of her magic to weave a pallet of branches and then she rolled the children’s stiff bodies onto the mat and looped a vine about her shoulders, dragging them through the trees.
Chapter 32
COREN HAD BEEN FLYING far ahead of both armies and the elite unit, pushing aside her guilt at leaving the Riatans to their fate. She had helped them prepare as much as she could, put people she trusted in charge, and left Jyesh and Sy to help with their magic.
Now was the time to find her brother and sister.
Nothing else could delay her.
Nik and Shuri had been alternating between helping the soldiers and keeping her updated, but now the two Draken forms flew ahead of her. Shuri used her magical senses to look for either the twins or Mara beneath the dense canopy of the Listening Forest.
In the distance, an inlet of the MagiSea darted into the interior of Sulit, and Coren knew this had to be the Shedreck River. She was below the falls, likely almost parallel with Weshen Isle, though she could see neither.
She still had the map from StarSeer, though it was harder to follow from the sky, as so many of the landmarks were covered by trees. So, she swooped in, following the river until it forked. Circling back around, she dropped to the ground and walked along the riverbank, pushing her senses forward.
She wanted to believe her heart would help her find the twins and Kashar.
Footsteps sounded behind her, and someone called her name. Turning, she saw Nik jogging toward her. A beautiful young woman with oddly-colored hair followed on stiff, uncertain legs.
Coren stared at the girl for a long moment before she realized what she was seeing. “Shuri?”
The girl grinned and nodded, but the smile didn’t stay long. “I sensed the twins’ magic. The witch’s cottage is just through here, but I... I don’t feel any life left.”
Coren clamped her lips shut and shook her head, refusing to listen. She did follow Shuri’s directions, though, and crashed through the forest without another thought for stealth.
Breaking through the trees, she took in the picturesque cottage and lake, with rows of pretty vegetables. It looked like a perfect place to raise a family, and her eyes pricked with angry tears. How far hers had come, only to lose themselves again.
Her twisted, sad family.
She took a few steps forward, scanning the clearing. She didn’t sense any life either, but that didn’t mean...
A body lay behind the cottage.
Coren broke into a run, dropping to her knees in the dirt, and her resolve finally cracked. A great, ugly sob wracked her body as she bent over the man she’d barely learned to call Father again.
Kashar’s eyes were dull and vacant, his body already cold. And if he could die... if they were too late to save him, then what hope was there for the twins? All the strength and fortifications Coren had been shoring up since the day of her banishment began to crumble with this first significant loss.
“Brujok,” Shuri whispered from somewhere behind Coren, but she didn’t even look up. Of course, it was Brujok. The witches would have killed him first, captured Penna and Kosh, maybe StarSeer, too, and they’d be on their way to wherever Mara was.
“I’ll check the cottage,” Shuri murmured, slipping away. Nik stayed close, and Coren was glad for a friend.
Dream of Darkness and Dominion (SoulShifter Book 3) Page 33