Guardian of the Vale

by Shoemaker,Tamara

  “After we saw you in the mirror, Kyle and Jayme were going at it, and then a Caster headed back toward them,” Daymon said. “What happened after that?”

  “Marysa jumped him,” Jayme answered, tugging his ear. “Just about sent me into a heart attack; the guy was twice her size, but she was quick and smart. He was lumbering around like a sore cow, and she ducked under and got his neck in an elbow grip. He didn't last long after that, and then she broke his Cast on his group of people. Since the Casters were controlling such large numbers, they'd all interconnected their mind-links. When Marysa broke his Cast, it cracked the Cast for everyone, which left relatively few Alliance facing a backlash of angry formerly-Casted Elementals and Naturals.”

  “And Kyle?” Alayne's voice was tight. “What did he do?”

  Marysa glanced across the clearing to where Kyle was pulling a pack onto his back and nodding as another Last Order member explained something to him.

  “He gave up. Jayme verbally flayed him about his betrayal of you, Layne. He'd obviously been struggling with his decision, because when Jayme threw him in the mill, he didn't protest. He helped us round up the rest of the Casters. I wasn't sure if he could still be trusted, admittedly.” Marysa shook her head. “But then, I almost died. I'd made a mistake—taken my attention too far from the Casters, and while I was listening to something a Natural was telling me, a Shadow-Caster who'd gotten free closed in. He got me around the throat; his knife was right there. I thought I was done, and Jayme was too far away to help. But,” she shrugged. “Kyle didn't hesitate. He jumped on me and the guy, knocking us apart. He took a beating, too—it wasn't easy for him. I stood there, staring stupidly at them.”

  “You were in shock,” Jayme murmured.

  “It's no excuse; there's no time for shock when you're fighting for your life.” She shuddered. “Anyway, by the time I got my act together and Jayme came tearing over, Kyle had killed him, but he'd nearly died in the attempt.”

  Alayne glanced uncertainly back at Kyle and then at Manders where he spoke in low tones to a couple of the leaders not far away. “That's his MO, though, Marysa. He gets people to trust him and then he turns their world upside down.”

  “I'm not contesting that, Alayne,” Marysa murmured, stepping closer to Alayne and laying a hand on her shoulder. “He certainly has that capacity. I'm just saying—as Manders has—that maybe we can give him one more chance. His value to our side might outweigh the drawbacks.”

  “Might.” Alayne shook her head. “It's a risk.”

  “It is,” Marysa agreed. “But what isn't?”

  Alayne didn't have an answer to that.

  A step sounded behind her, and she turned. Manders approached their group. His expression was set. “We're ready. I've briefed the company leaders. Rachyl, Eryc, and I will lead the eastern forces. Luke has given me his signal that the western forces are ready and waiting, and just now, I've received word that the southern forces you brought up are ready, Marysa.”

  Marysa looked relieved. “I was certain I'd left them in good hands.”

  “Good. Are you each clear on what you're doing? Marysa and Jayme, you'll fight with the eastern forces. Alayne and Daymon,” Manders turned his attention to them, “no matter what, no matter if CommonEarth erupts in fire and water, you get inside that spire and you take out Tarry, are we clear? The success of everything depends on it.”

  “Sir, Tarry is well-guarded—”

  “Everything, Alayne!” Manders stressed. “Did Marysa explain how the Casters were mind-linked in order to maintain their control over such large numbers? Tarry has done the same with her generals to keep control of such an expansive area, but with the added twist that she is the only control. It doesn't matter how many generals we take out, she'll still maintain her power, but if we take her out, the generals are incapacitated as well. She's the kingpin we have to get. So Alayne?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Don't fail me.”

  Alayne swallowed hard. “I—I'll try my best.”

  Manders shook his head.

  “Don't try. Just do it. And Daymon?” Manders shifted his attention to his nephew behind Alayne.

  “Yes, Uncle?”

  “If you get in a tight spot and all hope seems lost ... you know what to do.”

  “What's that?” Alayne asked. “What is he to do?”

  Neither answered her, and Alayne watched Manders jog across the clearing toward the treeline. He stopped, turned back, and waved his arm high over his head.

  Next to her, Marysa raised her arm, and a jet of fire left her fingers, arching high, high into the star-spangled sky.

  The battle at Clayborne had commenced.

  Chapter 23

  A roar of sound from Clayborne's spire accompanied a surge of movement through the trees. The Alliance had been expecting the Last Order's attack, thanks to Bryce Marshall's defection. He'd turned tail and run straight for Tarry, and every last EA soldier was primed and waiting for them.

  Manders had anticipated it and had told Alayne to expect it, but the answering roar from the Last Orders chilled the blood in her veins.

  She and Daymon stayed at the back of the clearing. Alayne's breath lodged in her throat as the clearing slowly emptied. Hordes of LOs moved to the north and to the south, while a strong contingent went right through the middle of the clearing, hurtling into the woods on the far side of it.

  Daymon gripped Alayne's hand as he rested his weight on the balls of his feet. A moment later, he sucked in his breath.

  A figure hurtled toward them on the winds, dropping into the clearing and rolling to slow his momentum.

  Alayne gasped when the man stood. It was Luke. “You're supposed to be with the western forces!” she choked out.

  Luke shook his head. “My brother sent me to organize the group over there, but in the end, he wanted the Guardians on the eastern side of Clayborne nearer you.”

  “But—”

  “No time, Alayne, sorry,” Luke interrupted. “Daymon, a word?” His voice was tense.

  Alayne frowned as Daymon walked two paces with his uncle, who spoke in a low tone. Daymon nodded several times. Both looked serious.

  “What's going on?” Alayne asked. “Is it about my parents?” Luke had been her parents' Guardian for years until they'd fled the Alliance. The EA had eventually caught up with them and taken them prisoner.

  “You'll see in good time, no doubt,” Luke finally said, returning to her. “In the meantime, get into that spire as my brother told you to do.” He turned away, joining in with the LOs leaving the clearing.

  Alayne pushed her annoyance at their secrecy from her mind. “Can we get in through the chute?” she asked.

  “I was thinking the shuttle platform,” Daymon said.

  “It's crawling with Alliance soldiers,” Alayne observed. Fiery beacons lit the perimeter of the shuttle landing. Tiny dark figures stood in formation around the outside of the platform. “They're blocking both entrances.”

  “We can handle them, Alayne, you and I.” Daymon reached for the elements. “We'll go invisibly from behind, and then down through the chute to Tarry. She's in the common room.”

  Sure enough, through the enormous arching windows of the spire, the common room was now brightly lit, and the vast majority of people seemed to be pacing back and forth in front of the windows of the common room.

  “Okay,” Alayne murmured. “That might be best.”

  Before she could reach for the elements, though, screams issued from the northern end of the clearing, and a wave of Alliance soldiers with their armbands glowing in the moonlight flooded the area, overwhelming an entire platoon of LOs, hurling their elements as they stampeded into the area.

  “Day—”

  He'd leaped in front of her, hurling gusts of powerful wind at the closest enemies, but elements met and clashed with the wind in the center of the clearing. Water twisted into a spiral the height of the trees as the air wrapped around it, and bursts of light
ning from within the spiral radiated over the clearing. Trees bent double at the edges of the clearing, their branches scooping up fighters from both sides and tossing them like rag dolls to the ground.

  In the woods to the north, Alayne caught a flash of stripes and fur and sleek haunches. She took off running toward the animals. “Now!” she screamed, and the great cats erupted from the woods, tearing into the clearing, their roars of fury paving the way as they dug their sharp teeth into flesh. “Only the Alliance!” Alayne called. “Attack only the ones with three rings on their armbands!” She drew her knife, and as a heavyset Alliance soldier closed in on her, she hurled her blade dead center in the man's chest. He keeled over with a thud onto the ground. Alayne jerked the knife back and swung around, catching another Alliance soldier beneath the arm. Her grip ached on the hilt of her knife, and her eyes stung with sweat, blood, and fury.

  Cats flashed by her as they brawled with the Alliance fighters who streamed into the clearing. Two entire companies of LOs had retreated to face them, and the whole clearing lit up with explosions of fire and water. The earth shook; chasms opened and shut. Alayne rolled to her feet behind another LO. A cat charged the soldier, mistaking it for an Alliance member.

  “No!” she screamed. “He's LO!”

  The cat lurched to the side, narrowly avoiding her. He skidded to a stop directly in front of an unfortunate Alliance soldier whose armband gleamed in the cat's eyes.

  The cat sank his teeth into the man's neck. He went down with a scream.

  “Alayne!”

  Manders's voice from the far end of the clearing somehow penetrated the confusion and noise. Alayne looked around.

  “Get. To. The. Spire!” He yanked his arm toward the spire before pounding a blast of water into an entire platoon of Alliance soldiers, mowing them down.

  Wrangling the water elements on the elemental harp was his undoing. Behind him, a dark, familiar shape emerged from the shadows, wearing a Commander's uniform, wielding two knives.

  Simeon Malachi grinned, a horrendous grin that Alayne had seen in her nightmares for so long, his sheared-off nose stretching beneath the force, and he drove his knife through Manders's back.

  Alayne's heart stopped. “No!” she screamed. Her voice echoed across the clearing, through the battling EA soldiers and Last Order fighters, around the chaos of the elements and the roars of the animals, shrieking the entire distance from one end of the clearing to the other.

  Malachi raised his gaze to hers, met her look with a leer, and plunged his knife again into Manders's back.

  Manders lay on the trampled grass, not moving, flashes of surrounding fire elements reflecting in a pool of his blood as it soaked into the ground.

  Alayne found the power to move from somewhere, plowed across the clearing toward them, and ran into a wall of ice Malachi hurled at her.

  The ice wall exploded in a fiery inferno as all of Alayne's fury and shock erupted from her fingers.

  Both Last Order and Alliance soldiers fell, smoldering, beneath her element twist. Alayne couldn't bring herself to care. She started again toward Malachi, churning the winds in her hands, hurling them with all her strength at the man.

  A towering wedge of water divided the wind, and it passed harmlessly on either side of Malachi.

  Alayne couldn't hold on to the element strands; they were waving too wildly out of control, and the earth began to shake, harder than any Earth-Mover had moved it yet. The woods erupted in fire, and Alayne realized in horror that she would burn out not only the Alliance, but the Last Orders as well.

  “No,” she choked on a sob as she strained to regain her control, but it was too late. The entire northern woods were burning, an inferno that took no note of battle lines or the fighters' allegiance.

  “Alayne!” Daymon yelled from far behind her.

  She had to reach Manders. If she could just touch him—

  But too many obstacles were in her path. The great cats, frantic from the fire, barreled across the clearing, flattening everything in their path. Apes from the northern woods ran through, shrieking horrendous, keening wails.

  Daymon grabbed her around the waist. Alayne struggled, kicking, scratching against him. “Let me go, Daymon! I just need to touch him!”

  Malachi had stepped over Manders's still body, moving in on the remaining soldiers in the clearing. The fire burned high over their heads, sending showers of sparks tumbling in a brilliant, orange rain over everything.

  “Daymon! Daymon!” Alayne hit him as hard as she could, but she had no leverage; he'd tossed her over his shoulder. “Let me go!”

  Daymon struggled with her to the southern edge of the clearing, away from Manders, away from Malachi, away from where she most wanted to be. He set her down, gripping her shoulders in a vise.

  “Don't you understand, Alayne, it's too late!” His shout cracked beneath the emotion. “It's too late, he's dead, and there's nothing you can do for him now.”

  “But the Vale—”

  “It can't raise the dead, Alayne. Tarry will win if we don't do what he told us to do. He said at all costs. Are you willing to let this cause fail because you didn't do what he said?”

  Alayne gripped her hair in her hands, her mouth open in silent agony. Malachi still stalked through the clearing, throwing his element at hapless stragglers, his form lit by the out-of-control fire.

  Alayne pushed Daymon to one side, gripped the earth element, and pulled. Three burning spruces, flames shooting from the tops of their sixty-foot-high trunks, keeled forward, crashing on top of the unsuspecting Malachi, who had just spotted Alayne on the southern edge of the clearing.

  The vile Commander disappeared beneath the blazing inferno, and in the end, he wasn't afraid to scream.

  Alayne turned back to Daymon. “Let's go,” she said dully. “Shuttle platform, now.”

  They pulled the air element, refracting the light until they were invisible, and notched the bends. Daymon wrapped his arms around Alayne, and they rose on the air toward the top of the spire so brilliantly lit with beacons. EA soldiers stood shoulder-to-shoulder around the perimeter of the platform, facing outward, their gazes trained on the chaos below.

  The grounds were a mess. All the elements were at play, and Alayne could see some of the animals had made it onto the grounds near the spire, causing chaos wherever they went. Still, the far greater numbers of the EA overwhelmed the attack Manders had set in place.

  “We have to get in there now, Daymon,” she said as they approached the beacons. “We can't let the soldiers know that we're here; if even one gets away to let Tarry know we're in, we're sunk.”

  “How do you suggest we do that?” Daymon grunted.

  “Diversion.”

  Daymon paused before murmuring, “The western and southern flanks have moved in. You can see the flashes of fire on all sides of the spire.”

  Alayne looked back at the forest fire she'd begun to the north. It was creeping closer and widening in intensity to the east and the west. Manders's death numbed her. She couldn't think about it, or she wouldn't finish what he'd asked her to do.

  Daymon passed high over the heads of the watching soldiers and landed silently on the plank boards. No one turned their way. Alayne counted in her head: Three, two, one...

  Fire exploded across the sky as she whipped the fire element from its place on the harp and created a vacuum. The forest fire leaped into the heavens, momentarily leaving the northern woods dark and silent while the fire spread in a wide swath across the sky.

  Every soldier on the platform shouted, looking to the northern sky while the chute doors slid open, and Daymon yanked Alayne inside.

  The doors closed again as the fire melted out of the sky. The northern woods resumed burning, but at a more subdued pace.

  The chute car dropped before anyone noticed anything.

  “Nicely done,” Daymon whispered.

  The breath froze in Alayne's throat. “Daymon, the chute! Tarry will know if the doors ope
n and no one is inside.”

  The car lurched to a stop a floor above the common room. “We're not going to the common room through the chute,” Daymon said.

  “But ... there's no other way.”

  “There is; my uncle told me about it. It's hard to access, granted. It was an old chute from the original blueprints for Clayborne. When they updated it, they moved the chute to the center of the spire, which makes much more sense. But the old chute is still there ... in one of the support structures on the outside of the tower.”

  “Wh—at?”

  “You'll see.” Daymon grasped Alayne's invisible hand, leading her through the wing of empty classrooms toward the end of a hallway and down another one where a window on either side showed that they were at a corner. “This should be it.”

  A moment later, a slice appeared in the plaster as what was unmistakably a knife-cut appeared in the wall. It lengthened and moved until a large square showed on the wall. “Here goes nothing,” Daymon muttered, and a second later, the plaster exploded beneath the force of his body.

  Alayne poked her head through. Sure enough, a long, straight chute ran as far as she could see down—and up.

  She shuddered.

  “No worries,” Daymon said as his arm wrapped around her again. “It's only one floor down to the dormitories, and we can get into the common room from the dormitories without being seen.”

  He pulled the elements, and the wind carried them downward. Alayne shut her eyes and buried her face in his shoulder. He stopped on a stud, the toes of his boot the only part of him touching it. “Now, Alayne, just—a little insurance, if you don't mind. Can you take over the wind that's holding us up while I cut another hole?”

  Alayne trembled as she reached for the element. A moment ago, the elements had whipped out of her control. She took a deep breath and released it. You're okay, Layne. You're with your Guardian. Her panic lessened, and Alayne felt the element harp ease beneath her touch. The elements still strained with tension, but she could grasp them.