“I know, but honestly, I think we’ll only have bad options and worse ones today.” Rubbing the space between my eyes, I try to think. “The path we’re on is the best way to Rido’iti, so I think we’ll have to force our way straight through the worst of this.”
“Hopefully someone can come up with a better plan than that.”
Yet, despite Tessen’s hopes, we can’t. All we do is find a way to spare Soanashalo’a and her family the danger.
“Are you sure about this, Soanashalo’a?” I ask after the others leave her wagon to prepare things in ours. “I can’t ask you to leave your people behind. They need you to lead them.”
“You did not ask, I offered,” she corrects. “First, I helped you for Osshi’s sake, and then for your own and out of gratitude, but now it is for the safety of my people. There are hundreds of us spread throughout Ryogo, and we will be caught in this war as much as anyone. If there is anything I can do to help you stop this before lives are lost, I will do it.”
“Even if it costs your own?” It might come to that. Despite what I’ve learned, and even though I can’t be damaged or drained quite as easily, there’s no way I can promise everyone will be alive at the end of this.
She lifts one shoulder and gives me a smile that is almost believable. “What is a life when it is given in protection of family?”
“The most precious thing in the world. Don’t pretend it’s worth nothing.”
“True, and it is my gift to give.”
I can’t argue with that, not when I’m doing the same thing. “All right. Be ready to leave as soon as possible, then.”
We have an ambush to ruin.
…
Most of the wagons backtrack a mile, and then turn east down a path almost too narrow for them to pass. They’ll be armed and on guard, but we’re nearly certain the Ryogans aren’t watching that particular trail; the hanaeuu we’la maninaio who travel this area never use it.
Three of the wagons will continue along the road we’re on—ours, Soanashalo’a’s, and one more. When she explained what she was doing and ordered her family to safety, five refused. None of us could turn them away.
As we near the stone-strewn road, I signal Miari and Natani, who are walking beside the slow-moving wagons. With Natani funneling her extra power, Miari forces the stones to sink beneath the mud and then move, breaking them into pieces and scattering them through the forest on either side of the road. When it’s done, I glance at Tessen. No change, he signals.
Sanii came up with the second part. Because Chio’s skill was with lightning, he made sure to teach em about the damage that kind of power can do to a spell. According to our andofume, a lightning strike is one of the only things that can break a spell like a garakyu without a mage’s involvement. Another is to completely shatter the globe—a task that’s apparently harder than it should be given how fragile the garakyus look.
None of us can create or control lightning, but there is plenty of lightning in the sky. And we have Etaro, who’s more than capable of yanking that globe loose from the branches above us.
We let the first wagon slowly enter the view of the garakyu. Then, exactly as a flash of blue-white lightning streaks across the sky, Sanii shouts the spell that shuts the garakyu’s magic off, and Etaro rips it out of the tree, pulling it down to the ground so fast it shatters. Hopefully the Ryogans will think a lightning strike took out their inanimate spies.
But the movement of the garakyu releases something else.
Black nets fall.
“Etaro!” I ward us, layering the magic like I would for arrows and bracing for the first touch of the black stone.
They don’t land. Etaro and the wind whip the things away, sending them flying through the air until they’re wrapped around the trees, well caught.
“They’re moving in.” Tessen winces, trying to listen to the enemy through the noise of the storm. Then he gasps, sharp and pained. “Arrows! Incoming!”
Three dozen strike at once. Etaro knocks a dozen of them out of the sky. Only a portion of the ones that hit, thank the Kaisubeh, are spelled and tipped with Imaku stone. I’m already braced in a corner of the wagon, now I close my eyes and focus entirely on the wards.
The wagons pick up speed, jolting and jerking down the pitted path. I’m braced for another flight of arrows. It doesn’t come right away, and it makes me wonder how well they can see the road from their perch. The trees are thick. The rain is, too. Without the garakyu to guide their aim, maybe they can’t see we’ve moved. Maybe they don’t know yet that their trap missed. That’s what we were hoping for. The rest of the plan won’t work if that part failed.
We stop, and I don’t need to give anyone signals or orders. Everyone pours out of the wagons and moves into position. We’ve tried hard to avoid killing any of the Ryogans, and except for the one guard, we’ve succeeded. That streak is probably going to end today.
When we begin moving again, Rai and Nairo run alongside, eyes on the trees and hands engulfed in flames. Etaro is stationed between two of the wagons, ready to deflect the next round of arrows.
“Soldiers to the west,” Tessen says from the wagson’s open door. “Approaching fast.”
Sanii and I, running behind the wagon, relay the warning. The desosa inside my ward shivers as every single member of my squad draws on it at once.
“Where are they, Tessen?”
“Almost in range, but spread farther than we expected.”
“We knew we might not get them all.” And if they’re carrying the weapons from Mushokeiji, the trap won’t last long without me there to reinforce it. But I can’t see anything beyond the first line of trees. “Say when, Tessen.”
He nods, eyes closed to listen to the incoming enemy.
Rai and Nairo shoot jets of flames into the trees, trying to force the tyatsu to change direction, keep them from spreading out too far. Shouts. Orders issued in Ryogan.
“Incoming!” I scream in Itagamin.
Another volley of arrows falls on the caravan, their aim directed by the soldiers on the ground. This time, five of them break through. I’m protecting too much space. Too many people. I can’t keep the layers in place over it all.
“Khya, switch!”
I slide to a stop, eyes closed. Natani is by my side, his hand on my shoulder and an extra rush of energy flowing into my body. Using it, I activate the wardstones we hid along the road and brace myself.
Impacts. Shouts. Sparks.
The tyatsu are trapped, stuck inside a ward strong enough to stop almost anything. Almost anything. But the moment I bring up the trap, I lose focus. For an instant. A second. It’s enough.
Arrows get through. An animal bellows in pain. Someone screams.
I bring the wards back, but whatever damage is done, is done. Ordering the others to watch the sky for another attack, I run toward the trapped tyatsu. The chances of this working aren’t great—the chances of it working on my squad wouldn’t be—but this is the only way out without blood.
They brandish weapons and scream insults, more than half of which I don’t understand.
“Flames, Rai,” I murmur in Itagamin.
As soon as the sparks surrounding her hands turn into a column of fire. The tyatsu scramble back, eyes wide with fear. One of them runs so far back he slams into the opposite wall of the ward. There are scattered mutterings of, “Akukeiji. Akukeiji.”
“Evil mage,” Soanashalo’a translates for us.
“Oh good,” Rai intones in Itagamin. “At least they don’t have the wrong idea about us.”
“Listen!” I project my voice over theirs. It takes two more bellows before they shut their mouths. “I don’t know what you’ve been told, but we’re not here to hurt you.”
They stir and protest. I hold my hand up and wait until they settle. “We’re not here to hurt you, and we don’t want to, but we will. You’ve been chasing us since we got here, and I will kill you before I let you hurt us.”
“Then
kill us, akukeiji,” the eldest says, spitting on the ground near the edge of the ward.
Oh yes. This is going to end so well. “Return to your leader and tell him to believe Osshi’s story. Danger is approaching, and when it lands, it will sweep you out to sea and then happily watch you drown.”
The one who spoke goes still; the others rail, yelling threats.
“Ask your leader. He knows.” I stare down the man at the center of the group, the one I think is in charge. “Your ancestors tried to exile the bobasu to a rock in the middle of the ocean. They sent a single ship and thought that’d be enough to hold the man who found a way to defy your Kaisubeh. It wasn’t. Varan survived, escaped, and now he’s returning with an army at his back. They could destroy an entire town in a day, raze it to the ground, and nothing you’re capable of will stop them.”
“We stopped the bobasu before.” The leader says it, but his eyes and weight shift.
Rai raises her eyebrows. “Did you not hear her say the word ‘army’?”
“There are thousands of warrior-mages crossing the southern ocean right now. Only ten of them are your bobasu.” I look away from the leader to scan the faces of the others. “I don’t care how powerful your stone weapons are, you don’t have enough. You can’t make enough, not in the time you have left. Even if you did have the time, you don’t have enough stone.”
“You’ve trapped us. You’re trying to trick us.”
“Why?” I want to reach through the ward and smack them with the flat of my sword. “All we’re trying to do is save your lives. And the lives of every person you’ve ever known.”
“Khya!” Tessen shouts in Itagamin from the caravan. “Time’s up!”
“Call your men off.” I hold the officer’s gaze, hoping he’ll listen. “If they attack, we’ll fight. They’ll die.”
I don’t wait for an answer. I turn and run back to the wagons.
More arrows fall, almost none of them the spelled, stone-tipped ones that rip through magic. It makes it easier to maintain my wards and it means they’re conserving their most powerful weapons for when they’re sure they have a shot. But it also proves they’re not giving up.
One of my wards shudders, something powerful smashing against it. I look that direction as I leap into the wagon, feeding more desosa into the trap.
“Most of the soldiers on the hill are the archers,” Tessen says, tension in his tone. “They’re closing in from the northeast, Khya.”
“Guess your rousing speech didn’t work,” Rai mutters. “Time to run?”
“Miari? Natani?” I call their names out the door. “On Tessen’s mark!”
They call back a confirmation and then I climb up to the roof. Tessen follows.
There’s an arch to the roof, but it’s gentle, and it makes it easy to crouch in the center holding on to one of the two pieces of wood running parallel down the length of the wagon. They usually hold extra cargo, giving the hanaeuu we’la maninaio a place to tie down crates and boxes, but now they keep us on the wagon as it bounces and shakes.
“I really wanted them to stop following us,” I whisper.
“I know.” He smiles sadly, but his eyes are on the road behind us. “But if you thought that was going to happen, we wouldn’t have made this part of the plan in the first place.”
It’s true, and it’s not the first time I’ve killed someone. It won’t even be the first time I’ve killed a Ryogan. What it will be is the first time I have ever crafted a plan and given an order that will end five or a dozen or fifty lives. We won’t even know. I might never know.
When Tessen shouts, “In position!” though, I don’t hesitate to follow that with an order.
The road passes through a hill, a tunnel carved through dirt and rock. As soon as we’re out the other side, Natani gives Miari the power she needs to collapse it behind us.
Rumbling stone from the mountain blends with the thunder overhead. Shouts echo out from inside, warnings called down their line. Screams. Then, with a rippling shudder and the sound of a rockslide, the entire hill begins to cave in.
Tessen and I watch the Ryogans die from the top of a hanaeuu we’la maninaio wagon.
Only after we lose sight of the crumbled, broken hill do I swing down from the roof and walk inside the wagon. Zonna is sitting on the bed with Nairo, and there’s blood on Nairo’s sleeve. My throat clenches. “Status?”
“Other than the wound Zonna’s fixing, we don’t know.” Sanii stands by the window, arms crossed and expression pinched. “It’s not over yet. Not until Lo’a says we’re safe.”
And that won’t be for several miles. Soanashalo’a planned a route that balanced speed and secrecy. Our plans and the Ryogans’ deaths will be for nothing if we let them catch up to us and have to fight our way out again.
“If Osshi wasn’t in trouble with his leadership before today, he almost certainly will be now,” Nairo says as he changes into clothes without bloodstains and holes. “Even if they do believe what Khya told them, I wouldn’t be surprised if they think he set them up to fail.”
Then Etaro clears eir throat. “How many do we think died?”
“I don’t know. More than should have, considering we warned them.” I’m holding on to that fact, and hoping at least one person from the squad I spoke to is left alive to remember it. That was one of the reasons we trapped them in the wards. Hopefully those traps held long enough to keep them out of the tunnel and alive.
Our trail twists and turns, but with Soanashalo’a guiding our three-wagon caravan and Tessen watching for pursuit, we make it to a clearing, safe for the moment.
When we finally stop running, when Tessen is as sure as he can be that we’ve lost them in the forest and that the rain will have all but erased the signs of our passage, I ease out of the wagon to see the damage for myself.
One wheel broken, but it had been quickly fixed while I talked to the Ryogan squad.
One of my people injured, Nairo bleeding through the hastily secured bandage on his arm, but Zonna healed that quickly as soon as they got back in the wagon.
One ukaiahana’lona dead, the massive beast shot twice in the moment my wards failed.
One of the hanaeuu we’la maninaio dead, shot through the throat in the same moment.
The rest of us made it through, and right now that’s more than enough for me because what I told the Ryogan officer is true.
The worst is yet to come.
Chapter
Twenty
We almost abandon the wagons. If not for the trunk of Imaku stones, we might have.
Even with the protection of the forest and the region’s small hills, the wind breaks branches and buffets my wards. Clouds thicker and darker than I’ve ever seen obscure the sky totally until day and night become even more meaningless. Not even Tessen has any way to sense the difference. I think it takes two and a half days to reach Rido’iti from where we were when the Ryogans ambushed us, but no one can tell.
We can’t enter the city—not when every tyatsu in Ryogo is looking for us—and so we leave the wagons behind, only Soanashalo’a coming with us as we head to the western edge of the city on foot. We’re only carrying weapons and enough food for a day of travel. Even the trunk of Imaku stone stays, safer here until we know we have a way home. Thankfully, the ships we’re hoping to find here—ones we’ll have to steal if we can’t convince them to carry us to Shiara—can be reached by traveling along the rocky coast.
“Your friend really thinks we’ll find a ship and crew brave enough to sail out in this?” I can’t believe it. I have my wards to protect me and my brother to save, and even I don’t want to get any closer to the ocean than I am right now. If it feels like the storm can obliterate us more than two miles inland, I’m not so sure I want to see the height of the waves.
And yet that’s exactly where we’re headed.
Turning as he walks, Tessen seems to be following something in the sky. “Do you feel it, Khya?”
“Feel what?
” Whatever it is, it’s beyond my senses.
“The way the desosa—” He shakes his head. “Just, concentrate. What does it feel like?”
Confused, I close my eyes and reach for the desosa and draw it in. At first, in the air immediately surrounding us, everything seems normal. Then I reach higher and—
It burns. It feels like trying to fill my veins with lightning.
Hissing, I flinch and yank my mental reach back. “What bobasu-cursed torment is that?”
I’ve felt the desosa powered by the hottest fires of the forge. I’ve felt it pouring down pure and powerful from the desert sun at high noon. I’ve felt the desosa electrified by lightning.
I have never felt anything like this.
It’s as though each individual particle is as powerful as ten, but those small specks aren’t meant to contain that much energy. The particles are breaking, and the energy each shattering spark releases burns like embers. And from the grim resignation on Tessen’s face, he doesn’t perceive it much differently.
“It’s Varan,” Rai says in Itagamin. “It has to be.”
“It might be.” It could be something he caused purposefully, but it could also be what Tsua feared would happen—that whatever he was doing is causing the storms to get worse and worse until they…well, until they either become one never-ending storm that will drown everything, or until they burn themselves out, like a blaze left unattended.
“Even if we somehow win, we might still lose,” Sanii says softly.
Swallowing, I try to believe we won’t have to face that fate. Then lightning flashes, the bolt thick at the top and splintering and splintering into hundreds of smaller pieces, spreading across the sky into one second-long, sun-bright flash. The roll of thunder is almost deafening.
What will happen to Shiara in a world of constant rain? The rocky landscape can’t absorb that much water. We’ll—they’ll—either adapt or drown, but I don’t know if the first can possibly happen fast enough to prevent the second.
Sea of Strangers Page 32