He smiled. “I know that, major. A genuine defender of the Chair, who would lead her Commissar’s enemies into a trap. Let me ask once more: will you defend my palace with even greater vigor and constancy?”
Nodding, she took the sword. “Yes.”
Lornk signaled to the Buzzards to let her free, then strode up the steps and raised his arms. “Defenders of Betheljin, I am your new Commissar. Help our Caleisbahn friends secure the grounds and the city wharves. I must go immediately and solidify agreements with the Center of Kragnash. I shall return before the sun sets again on Traine.”
* * *
The Kragnashians carried them, traveling faster than any horse or steed, to the Korng palazzo. The gate stood open, the courtyard empty. Ashel slid off his bearer’s carapace, the Korngs, Samson, and Wineyll dismounting from the others.
Lornk smiled as Elsa poked her head out the front door. “Cousin!”
“My lord!” she cried, running into his embrace.
“Where are the Commissar’s troops?” Ashel asked.
“They were called down to the square this afternoon,” Elsa said. “I suppose the Commissar thought he could come back and take over this house at his leisure.”
The friendly Kragnashian beckoned, and they followed its hulking figure through the ground floor gallery to the library.
Ashel clasped Samson’s arm. “Do you want to come with us?”
Eyes tight, trembling, the Oreseeker nodded.
“She’s still alive,” Wineyll said, her voice quavering. “She’s still alive.”
The Kragnashian squeezed through the library door and hunched into the passage. It chittered at its fellows, and they parted to make space around the Device.
Crouching with his left hand on the knob, Ashel held the maimed one to Wineyll. “Will you come through with me?”
“Yes.” She threw her arms around Earnk, and they held each other for a long moment before she took Ashel’s hand.
“For Victory,” Kelmair said softly. The mantra echoed through the room, the voices rising as the world faded into an electric buzz.
The Hunt
Bethniel squatted between folded roots and hunted for Meylnara’s mind. It was like grasping at dust motes in the dark, her thoughts slipping into a void. She tried to remember everything Selcher had ever told her about Listening. It wasn’t supposed to be something you could learn to do, or do at all if you weren’t born with the ability. But Bethniel had to pry into Meylnara’s mind and wrest away her connection to the forest. She must do it to save Vic and send her home. She had no choice.
The knot of Kragnashians protecting Meylnara passed, pushing through the trees. A conflagration roared in its wake.
Elesendar, the destruction of the forest was starting.
She stumbled after them, trying to stay out of sight and keep ahead of the blaze behind her. Sparks flew forward on the wind, igniting other trees and shrubs. Meylnara’s mass rolled away, moving fast. Rising off the ground, Bethniel flew ahead of it and landed in a small hollow surrounded by messernil. The turf felt firm under her feet, and when she glanced behind her, she saw the hollow had lengthened. The blood drained from her head, and she swooned with vertigo. Grasping a trunk to steady herself, she Heard Meylnara.
She Heard the wizard’s pain. The burning trees tore at the rogue like the sharp bite of an unscratchable itch.
She Heard the wizard’s strategy. Meylnara herself was firing the forest. It was like digging after a splinter with a knife—it hurt yet had to be done. She would trap the Council within their own encampment. No more supply lines would get through, and they’d starve. When the drudges were gone, she would kill the wizards one by one until she found the One who carried the child, and she would keep her until the babe was born. The fire tore at her—it sizzled on her skin and hair—but it had to be done.
Slowly, afraid she would lose the connection, Bethniel removed her hand from the tree. Meylnara was still there, jabbering about her plans, talking to her People. Bethniel could not see the protective knot through the trees, but she knew where it was. Facing that direction, she stepped backward, her foot finding smooth turf. Another step. Another. Five steps more, and she bumped into a tree trunk. Glancing quickly over her shoulder, she saw the path veer left. She adjusted her course and Listened again, trying to find a way to pry Meylnara’s essence from the trees.
The forest made a path for her, leading her on a course that kept her in front of Meylnara’s People. She walked and Listened and learned. Meylnara desperately wished she was Kragnashian. She despised her own reeking species, which stole lands that had once belonged to the People. Small and weak, humans bred and spread like vermin. They had been invited guests on this world, but within three generations they had dug deep roots into the land, and within five they’d forgotten they’d even come from somewhere else. Deep in Meylnara’s thoughts, Bethniel felt the rage as if it were her own.
Yet the forest burned. It cried, a thrumming that vibrated through her soles, up her calves and into her thighs. The fiery itch drove Meylnara mad, and she screeched and scratched her neck, her arms, her scalp, scoring bloody trails with her nails. Within the mass, the People massaged her with their tendrilled legs, but it did not assuage the pain. And yet, Listening, Bethniel realized Meylnara had no idea the forest was aware of what she had done and that it was determined to destroy her.
Fresh tears spun down Bethniel’s cheeks. Meylnara couldn’t be killed without a Sacrifice. A protest blubbered out of her nose, and she swiped at long, ugly ropes of mucus. Why did she have to do this?
To save the ones you love.
She sucked in a shuddering breath and shoved mortal terror into the box. She would do this. For her brother and her sister. For her mother and all the people of Latha. Of Knownearth. She had to. It’s what Father would have done. It’s what Thabean did for me.
The day stretched like a yellow ribbon as Bethniel sought a way to take Meylnara’s soul. Each time the Caldera tribe attacked, Meylnara emerged from her protective knot until her People repelled the assault. Each time, brush thickened around Bethniel, driving her into the protective folds of a massive tree trunk. The forest echoed with screeches and trills, chitinous scrapes, thumps, and thuds as huge bodies collided and fell. Meylnara sent fallen trunks barreling into her Caldera enemies, exchanged lightning and fireballs with the Council wizards. When each sortie ended, the rogue sank within the protection of her People, the forest path would open, and Bethniel would move again.
As the afternoon wore into evening, Bethniel glimpsed Council wizards zigzagging overhead, spraying fireballs into the canopy. Embers rained, and Meylnara grew increasingly distraught, her People harried by the Caldera tribe, her body flayed by the burning trees.
The hours stretched, and the sun sank toward evening. Bethniel’s throat was dry as paper, her limbs shook, her head spun. Her vision blurred; one tree became two, two rocks four, but she kept on, rifling through Meylnara’s thoughts, looking for the key that would let her insert herself where the souls of the trees belonged.
Beneath the canopy, green-tinged light melted into black shadows. A soft exhalation pricked her ears.
“Highness, the Kia led us to you,” Lillem said, carrying a pike dripping Kragnashian blood. Pallid and beaded with sweat, Gustave stumbled behind him. The bandage over the pirate’s stump was an ugly brown, but the sword in his left hand was coated in green slime.
Her breath caught, and she thumbed the steel-tipped blade of Lillem’s pike. The wizards had more metal than she knew existed in Knownearth. Hissing, she shook blood onto the grass and sucked the sliced thumb. “It’s very sharp.”
Lillem’s eyebrows pinched together, but his mouth softened. “It hurts less when it’s sharp.”
“Is this how you’ll help me end it?”
“It is, Highness.”
“I still don’t know how to do it. I need more time,” she said.
“You will have
it.”
The Fulcrum, the Sacrifice, and the One
The trees had no voice, but they screamed. Vic felt it, a loosening of her sinews and a sizzle over her skin, as if traveling through the Device. Around her, burning limbs tumbled down, snapping, cracking, lighting underbrush on fire. Smoke billowed in dark, choking columns. Flames licked through the understory and canopy, fire and smoke wiping the forest away. Meylnara had burned a large circle around the Council’s camp, ringing it with fire. Preventing escape, Vic thought grimly. The rogue was willing to sacrifice some of the forest that contained her essence so her People could hem in the Council and destroy them at will. The Council responded by spreading out and setting fire to massive quadrants of trees, beginning the destruction of the forest that would lead to Meylnara’s death. Vic snuffed out the fires as she could, but extinguishing the entire conflagration was hopeless. Despite the deluge the previous day, the soil underfoot was dry as sand, the air parched. The trees screamed, and their dying exhalations were a painful reminder of promises made to the Caldera tribe. The One. The Fulcrum. The Sacrifice.
She stood in a dell. The grass was char. Nettles smoked like incense. Blackened crisps coated a smoldering log, the remains of lichen. A pair of geilmors twisted out of the earth, their trunks scarred, their whirling needles black crisps. Yet high above, green spikes on the uppermost branches reached for the sun. Vic laid her hand on one of the trees and shut her eyes, thinking of Joseph’s small body curled in the dirt. Of Bethniel floating above the canopy. Of Ashel, waiting for her. Bring my sister, and bring my wife. Bring my loves home.
Sashal. Thabean. Joseph. Three beloveds dead because she’d failed. Wasn’t that enough?
Just do the job.
The necessity of a sacrifice was nonsense—there had to be a way to simply put Meylnara back into herself and then kill her. She and Thabean had debated how to do it, and she thought she’d have time to figure it out. But there was no more time.
Just do the job.
She floated into the upper canopy, staying hidden there, and opened her senses, feeling for Meylnara’s waveform. The Caldera tribe harried Meylnara’s People; monstrous shadows swept through the smoke and green of the understory. When the titans met, they tore each other apart, and the scent of cut grass mingled with woodsmoke and ash. The Council wizards were everywhere, and picking out Meylnara’s waveform from the soup of energy was like finding the single thread that would unravel the weave of an entire tapestry. All those months of seeking Thabean in the woods came to this—finding Meylnara in chaos.
A catapult’s throw away, Samovael hurtled out of the forest, firing energy bolts into thrashing greenery. A fireball bloomed, and he veered off and down under the leaves. Tree tops settled and became smooth again, disturbed only by columns of smoke. The setting sun behind her, Vic flew to the site and hunted for the roiling ball protecting Meylnara. Branches whipped and swirled, and she got ahead of the disturbance and plunged into the trees. Landing, she hid behind the folded trunk of a giant messernil. Flames crackled. Smoke wafted through the fading light. Vic pushed both palms against the bark. “I will do the job.”
The tree quivered, and a cramp seized her womb, aching for Joseph. Tears welling, she focused her concentration on the subaudible thrumming coming through the bark, a whisper of air stealing in and out of her lungs, her heartbeat slowing to the sluggish rhythm of water and sap moving through channels in the wood. A child of the steppes and tundra, she’d never seen a tree until she was sold into slavery, never seen a forest until she came as a refugee to Latha. There, the old mothers had been her guardians and guides. They weren’t divine, but they were conscious, and so was this tree, this forest. Her hand pressed to bark, she felt twigs shiver with the breath of the wind. She felt the achingly slow movement of each leaf, turning its face toward the dimming light. She felt the cells absorb that light and convert its warmth into life, just as her cells converted the food she’d consumed that morning. Her mind opened, possibility opened, time and place opened. Her blood seethed with the life of the forest, vibrant, varied, violent in its own slow, inexorable way. And there it was: a filament of wrong, like the thin line of infection that travels up the arm toward the heart. It was there—she just had to tease it out of the weave, take hold of it and slowly extract it, trace it to its source, and restore it to its proper place. A blissful black tide rose, flooding her eyes. She reached for the filament, controlling the Woern, knowing this work would be delicate, like slitting a throat with skill and care, so the blood ran back into the body.
She grasped the thread, and it melted away, fading from the forest. The trees sighed. Water shot up the channels of every trunk, burst from the pores in every leaf, and dew saturated the air. Mist caressed skin of plant and animal, a balm to the scorched skin of the earth. Above, clouds caught the last rays of the sun and blazed orange and pink, but that fire heralded rain.
A bemused smile curved her lips, the trees’ joy shining through her own grief. How? She had done nothing—did merely joining with the forest enable it to rid itself of Meylnara? Was her energy a catalyst that pushed the rogue wizard from the ecosystem?
She sobered. However the woman’s essence had been expelled from the forest, she still needed to be killed.
Just do the job.
Foliage peeled back, limbs bent apart, soil bubbled over grass, forming a path that arrowed toward her. The path widened, brush laying flat and sinking into the ground, grass springing up to form a clearing.
Darkness dropped through the forest like a curtain, and three figures stumbled through the twilight. One eye swollen shut, blood covering half his face, Lillem gripped a pike with a wicked blade, tainted green from tip to butt. Half his jerkin was ripped off; what was left was stained black with his blood. Gustave dragged his feet, his head hung low. A bandaged stump was all that was left of the arm Meylnara had smashed, but his remaining hand held a sword slicked green.
Unscathed, Bethniel followed them, walking backward with sure steps, no hesitation but no speed either. The path closed after her.
“Madam.” Gustave collapsed against the messernil. “You live.”
She laughed softly, embracing a bit of humor on this dark day. “I live, Gustave, as do you.”
“Marshal,” Lillem saluted and handed his canteen to the pirate. Gustave slurped at a slurry redolent with spring, and his grimace melted.
Bethniel’s hair awry, soot streaked her cheeks. Her eyes were sunk deep into dark hollows, her lips pressed together in concentration as she knelt beside them. “I knew the Kia would bring us to you,” she whispered.
“Report, lieutenant,” Vic said.
“We’ve been staying ahead of Meylnara, trying to give Her Highness time.”
“To do what?”
“To save the forest.” Saluting again, he moved off and disappeared among the shadows between the trees.
Dread budding, Vic peered at Bethniel. Her sister’s lips twitched toward a laugh; her eyes brimmed with tears. “What are you doing?” Vic asked.
“It’s all right; I’ve got her. When it’s done, you can go home.”
Hot bile clawed up Vic’s throat. No. She swallowed. Elesendar, no. The thread of wrong had vanished, but it was none of her doing. Shrine, no! She squeezed Bethniel’s arm. “What did you do?”
Tears spilled over a beatific smile, a painful echo of Ashel’s. “I was terrified that you’d have to finish it. But I managed to get her, and she hasn’t realized it yet. She’s distracted by the fires, so I can go out and meet her.”
Coughing with dismay, Vic shook the princess. “I will not allow you to do this. It is my purpose here! Not yours.”
Beth palmed Vic’s cheeks, smoothed her hair. Waves of warmth coursed down her spine. “Victoria of Ourtown. I love you.”
Vic stared at her, all the strength gone from her limbs, helpless as a kitten being washed by its mother. Bethniel kissed her cheek. “Take care of my brother, and try to love
my mother.” She placed a hand on Vic’s belly, and her lips stretched downward. “Oh, Vic.” Her arms flew around Vic’s shoulders. “There will be others. There will be. I love you, sister.”
Mandibles clacked. Rising a hundred feet off the ground, a roiling ball of carapace and heads and legs emerged from the woods. Bethniel released Vic and stepped into the clearing, alone. A flimsy bolt of lightning touched the mass and died.
A voice in Vic’s head screamed, Get up, shield her! But she watched, paralyzed by the kiss and last words.
I love you, sister.
The mass rolled closer, and Vic imagined herself unleashing all her power at that wall of chitin. The Kragnashians’ puny resistance to wizardry would not stop her. She would burn them, freeze them, crush them to the size of a pome. She would burrow through the mass surrounding Meylnara until she found the wizard, and then she would rip her head off her body.
She should do any and all of those things, but Vic slumped behind the tree, overwhelmed by grief. Thabean. Joseph. Bethniel.
The princess sent another thin, bright fork of electricity; it glanced off the carapaces like a stone on a pool. The chitin wall split open, and Meylnara stepped onto the grass. Her guard melted into the surrounding trees.
“I remember you,” the rogue said. “You were a latent; now you are a wizard. Are you Council or rogue?”
“Council.”
Sneering, Meylnara hurled a fireball.
Vic’s paralyzing despair evaporated in an explosion of desperate fury. Roaring, she launched a countering fireball and flung herself in front of Bethniel. Flaming orbs crashed together, raining sparks on dew-soaked green.
Lightning forked from above, striking Meylnara and wreathing Vic in a crackling nimbus that fried the nerves. She whipped up an ion shield and batted aside the electric surge. Ozone and singed hair jabbed her nose as Samovael dropped into the clearing and fired again. Smacking aside his attack, she flung him at a tree. “Keep him there,” she yelled, and rocketed toward Meylnara, her rage propelling her. The wizard would not kill her sister. Not today. Not ever.
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