She had been in this state ever since the fight began. Ever since Glory hurt that beast, Hank recalled. What the sorcery was precisely doing to this body, he did not know. But despite his increasing drowsiness, he was beginning to see how this might all end.
Little Andeana Corona Marsabio, he mused. Who was your father? What universe did he live in? Did he send you all this way to finish what he couldn’t in that other place?
The girl stood up. She looked exactly as he remembered her from the glimpse at Edmund Slider’s house. Dark hair, intense brown eyes, the muscled frame of a warrior . . . the father must have had darker skin, but everything else this girl has comes from the mother.
Her face held a deadly, distant aura. She revealed a knife in each hand. I could warn her, Hank thought as he turned toward the target. But then, I already tried. Eyelids falling, he observed Lizzy trying to get the mayor to sit on the pavement before the old woman fell asleep, as Hank was about to. Wendy and Jennifer were backing up to give them room. Will any of them see this coming? Doubtful.
By the time he swung his head back, the girl everyone knew as Andi had already run and leapt through the air, blades pointing down. She penetrated the barrier twenty feet above the pavement, her trajectory leading to the back of Glorianna Seabright.
The mayor stiffened, a mysterious sense warning her and injecting adrenaline just in time. She pushed Lizzy away and turned into the assassin’s descent. Her sword flung up and blocked the first blade; her free hand shot up and swept aside the other. A masterful reflex, Hank observed with reluctant admiration, and it stopped both strokes cold.
What it did not stop were the four additional limbs that sprouted from the assassin’s torso. Each planted a new blade in the mayor’s chest.
Perfect, he told himself as he watched the girl land on two sure feet. Her extra limbs vanished. Lizzy, Wendy, and Jennifer all backed up, mouths agape. The mayor staggered back and then forward in half-steps, staring at the pincushion full of daggers her own torso had become. “Who . . .” she tried to say, before a backhand across the face sent her spinning to the pavement.
“Queen to g3,” the girl spat, but with a man’s voice. “You’re tested. You’ve failed.”
Then the sorcery broke, and the teenaged brunette fell to her knees and began to cry.
PART 6
Everybody Else
Next to a battle lost, the greatest misery is a battle gained.
—DUKE OF WELLINGTON
CHAPTER 21
Rebirth, Afterlife, and Everything in Between
When Andeana Corona Marsabio was fifteen years old, she had one childhood memory .
It was of a man named Esteban, whom some called The Crown, weaving her newborn body into a cocoon of silk. You are too young for this universe, he told her as he spun the lovely material over her face. And I cannot raise you now. When enough time has passed, you will be free. Sing your father a song, little Andeana.
She had sung a melody, one far beyond her infant years, so beautiful that even her father had paused to listen. Then he had filled her mouth with silk, and she had gone to sleep.
Who knows how long later, she had awoken singing again, still an infant. Her song was a mournful tune in the universe that did not yet exist. There was only perpetual, starlit darkness, and a woman named Dianna Wilson. Within the confines of their dark world, Dianna raised Andi. There were lessons on astronomy, and geometry, and arithmetic—and briefly music, until Dianna realized no one had to teach Andi anything about that.
After years had passed and Andi had mastered the full curriculum of the Quadrivium, she began to learn other arts—how to hold a blade and use it, and how to heal the wounds they caused. Dianna was not a skilled fighter or healer, but knew enough for Andi to excel and eventually surpass her mentor. Dianna then turned to strategy and tactics. Andi continued to practice the arts of the blade, and healing—on herself. Cutting herself became a cleansing ritual, something she needed to keep going in this dark world with only one other. Why was she alone? What was she here for? Where was her father? Where was her mother? Didn’t anyone love her? Didn’t anyone need her? The answers to these chaotic questions were in the straight, measured cuts she made on her own arms—and in the careful manner she healed each one. If Dianna noticed this behavior in her pupil, she said nothing.
One day after lessons, fifteen years after her awakening, Dianna told Andi about a wider universe—one they would create together. That was when Andi learned about a girl named Evangelina, and a boy named Skip, and a girl named Jennifer Scales. She also learned the name of her own mother, Glorianna Seabright, a woman who had been pregnant with Andi in a completely different universe, and who never even reached adulthood in this one.
When Esteban de la Corona was fifteen years old, he existed in two universes at once. In one universe, he had a vision of love with a girl with long, dark hair and brown eyes. The vision, like most of his visions, came true. Even at fifteen, he knew this girl Glorianna would betray him someday. That came true as well. He held to his hopes for peace, and gave her the gift she desired. The only price he exacted was the removal of their child.
In the other universe, Glorianna was already dead, the teenaged victim of a plot hatched by an Esteban de la Corona who couldn’t be bothered to fall in love, much less negotiate peace. When his counterpart sent him this girl, Andeana, from a completely different world, he cocooned the infant and set her aside, so that he could accomplish all he wanted.
He knew he was neither infallible nor immortal. He knew the same of his disciples. He knew this special universe, dominated by arachnids, might not hold. And even if that happened, if everything here failed, he would be all right with that. As long as one person still died.
So he wove one secret spell into his daughter’s cocoon. Similar to the sorcery that caused Glorianna’s miscarriage, it would trigger when little Andeana saw her mother kill or hobble. His daughter would need to know how to wield a blade. In fact, she would have to want to wield a blade. So he embedded in her a fascination with knives, and a need to use them. Then he handed the cocoon over to his greatest disciple.
When Dianna Wilson was fi fteen, she was falling in love with Jonathan Scales. But like Esteban de la Corona, Dianna Wilson existed in two places at once. A different fifteen-year-old Dianna Wilson, in the universe the Quadrivium had created, was receiving a mysterious cocoon from her mentor, The Crown. He told her who was inside and gave her three essential instructions.
“First,” he told her, “keep her in your observatory, and guard her with your life. Second, release her after I die, but take the time to pass on all you know, and make her the last member of the Quadrivium. Third,” and he delivered this last with a nasty smile, “make sure she always carries enough knives with her.”
When Edmund Slider was fifteen, he made the first jump that changed the universe. The Crown told him it didn’t matter when it happened, as long as Slider chose a point where he would be alive in both universes. Since no one could possibly know when they would be alive or dead in another universe, Slider’s teenaged leap involved no small measure of faith.
Fortunately for him, he chose well. The year he arrived the power of the Quadrivium was rising, though they did not yet have their fourth. The Crown told them: She is coming. In any case, once Slider was anchored in both universes, the job of weaving became much simpler. He found the right point to shift fate: just before Glorianna Seabright hobbled her first dragon.
Edmund’s work was about discovery and creation: discovering that tipping point, forging a path for Andeana Corona Marsabio to get from one universe to the other, generating a place for Dianna Wilson to raise the girl. Slider was, above all, a problem solver. Whether figuring out how to find the shortest distance between two universes, or uncovering new ways to make the students in his geometry class pay attention, or making his lover, Tavia, happier, he would consume himself with details and possibilities, using logic to sort it all out.
Lon
g before the night he died, it had become clear to Slider that Glorianna Seabright remained the ultimate problem he had to solve. Sure, dragons were obnoxious, but their new champion, Jennifer Scales, was a bright young girl he couldn’t help but like, not least because she didn’t go around hobbling and massacring people. She had the promise of youth. Glory was calcified into bitter hate. Had he known that Andi was Glory’s daughter and that the girl was a ticking bomb set to kill her mother, he might have lived a long life with his lover, Tavia Saltin. But The Crown had kept that secret; and without that knowledge, Edmund had to take action.
He never considered himself a particularly violent man, unlike Tavia’s brother. While he knew his actions could lead to violence, he also knew he was giving Winoka a choice when he isolated the town under a shimmering blue dome. He hoped they made the right one.
When Tavia Saltin was fifteen, her true love, Edmund Slider, was still in her future. The only men she knew, her father and brothers, were hard and impatient. Nothing she did—not school, not sports, not even her music—was as good as what her siblings could produce. Or so they said, over and over, until her shoulders slouched with the weight of her accumulated failures. Otto, her twin brother, had to live up to similarly hard standards. He found solace in detachment, cynicism, and eventually viciousness. Tavia’s mistake (as Otto once put it) was that she continued to love her family and care what they thought of her.
Ten years later, when Otto introduced his sister to the teenaged Edmund Slider, she was struck by the young man’s maturity. In addition to his potent magic, Edmund possessed a sureness of spirit that showed in his smile—a secure, friendly smile, not the thin and mean sort her father spared. His youth and her career pulled them apart, but she never forgot the smile.
Twenty years afterward, she moved to Winoka to raise her nephew, met an older Edmund Slider, and fell in love with that smile all over again. It was the one he used when he told her how wonderful her music was, and when he told her that arachnids could survive in a world dominated by fear, and when he held her and slew the insecurities planted inside her.
It was the smile that told her he loved her back, unconditionally and forever.
The night he died, she couldn’t tell for sure but she imagined he was wearing it now, in glorious spider form, resting in the wheelchair, all eight eyes closed against a world that raged on without him. Part of Tavia wanted to open those eyes again so she could tell him how much he meant to her. It wouldn’t have been anything he didn’t already know. In fact, she had repeated it multiple times earlier that night, knowing what he was planning. She wanted it all the same.
Instead of touching him, she decided to sing. She taught many of her clients, most of them blind, to sing when their hearts broke. Not only did the music heal, but it also revealed shapes in the world around them, like emotional sonar. Shapes like love, and trust, and hope.
The fighting went on, dragon against warrior, a few feet away. She could sing without fear, because of the barrier her lover had raised to protect her. Even after his death, she didn’t have to be afraid anymore. Her breath caught on a note when she saw a shape lift out of his body. What it was, she couldn’t describe. A spirit? A trick of light? A vision of what may come to pass? Whatever it was, it beckoned her.
She followed it, still singing, off the eastern end of the bridge, and into the nearby forest. Skip called out to her, but she knew he didn’t need her anymore tonight. Tonight is for us, dear Edmund. I will stay with you one last night.
No one else noticed her or heard her song. The arachnid body of Edmund Slider remained in its chair, spent and lifeless.
When Ember Longtail was fifteen, her father, Charles, had been dead for seven years, and she was already a coil of rage. Her uncle Xavier had nursed this wrath in Crescent Valley and honed her fighting skills, to the point where she was a deadly weapon, easily provoked, with no love for anything in the world beyond dragons . . . and a deep hatred of the town of beaststalkers.
Now, in her thirties with a teenaged son of her own, Ember saw her uncle Xavier as old, tired, possibly senile. He would not come with the Blaze that night, to burn down Winoka and restore the legendary Pinegrove. He would not avenge the murder of his brother, Charles. Worst of all, her boy, Gautierre, would not do these things either. Ember had left them both in disgust.
Flying over Winoka Bridge, spotting targets to burn, she had never been happier. She had already killed one of Glory’s footsoldiers, and narrowly missed taking out the foul man who had murdered the newly reborn Eldest, Winona Brandfire. We will avenge you, Eldest!
A sharp sound from the west end of the bridge caught her attention—the massive thunderbird that the mayor of this town had summoned was creating a shock wave. A dozen dragons who had been passively sitting on the bridge were forced into action—good!
And then Ember spotted the two beaststalkers who spilled out of the girders and onto the pavement. Electricity coursed through her long, twin tail prongs as she recognized the blonde locks of the woman who had admitted to murdering her father.
When Elizabeth Georges was fifteen, she made a tragic mistake. She let her devotion to the woman she called Mother overrule her growing doubts, and so she committed murder.
After that, she could only turn to her best friend, Wendy Williamson. While Wendy tried to console her, Elizabeth knew there was no way to undo what had been done. The only thing she could do from that point forward was devote her life to healing.
Nearly twenty-five years later, Dr. Elizabeth Georges-Scales still saw the fierce, thoughtful gaze of Charles Longtail in the face of every patient she treated. No matter how many lives she saved, she found the ghostly stare too piercing to bear. The only thing that kept her sane was the love she had for her husband, Jonathan, and then their daughter, Jennifer.
Reconciling with Xavier Longtail about his brother’s death gave her some measure of peace, but not enough. She knew that eventually she would pay for her horrific crime.
Tonight, she thought as she felt for Mother’s pulse, it could happen on this bridge.
Andeana was still crying a few feet away. Jennifer was frozen in place with shock, Jonathan was still in a melee cloud on the west end of the bridge, Catherine was maimed and bleeding, and Hank had keeled over from the drugs in the arrowhead that had pierced him. Only Wendy dared approach the fallen body of Glorianna Seabright.
“Is she . . . ?”
“She’s dead,” Elizabeth confirmed.
“Lizzy. Do you think the drugs in the arrow . . .”
“Slowed her down, yes. But I don’t think it mattered, given what came at her.” She turned to Andeana. “Who are you?”
The girl kept crying.
“You talked to her like you knew her.” Getting no reply but sobs, Elizabeth heard her voice harden. “How did you know her? Tell me who you are, and why you did this!”
Andeana got up, hands still covering her face, and ran away. She passed through the blue barrier as easily as she had come in, making it impossible to follow. Somewhere in the distance, a thunderbird gave a cry and plunged into the icy river, purposeless without its mistress. Elizabeth moved her fingers from the old woman’s throat to the white eyes, and closed them.
Good-bye, Mother.
“What do we do now?” Wendy asked, saying exactly what Elizabeth was thinking. There were still dragons and beaststalkers fighting, but one or two had taken notice of the events closer to the barrier. What would the reaction to Glorianna Seabright’s death be? Had anyone even seen Winona Brandfire die? Without these leaders, who would be in charge?
As she tried to fight through this tangle of questions, she didn’t hear the sudden warning cry from her friend. It wasn’t until the lithe, shadowy form of Ember Longtail was upon her that Elizabeth understood her peril. By then, someone else had knocked her to the ground and taken the blow meant for her—one of the long, sharp prongs of a split tail, still sizzling with electricity, had driven through the woman’s upper vertebrae
and out the front of the throat.
“Wendy!”
When Wendy Williamson was fifteen, she fell in love with a girl named Lizzy Georges. It had begun as friendship, years earlier—braiding each other’s hair, sharing songs, practicing archery. She didn’t know when exactly it changed, but it didn’t matter. She knew Lizzy would never return that love, in that way.
After they had each completed their rite of passage and moved to the University of Minnesota campus, Wendy waited for the feelings to subside and to fall in love with someone else. But “someone else” never happened, and she let her friend Hank Blacktooth browbeat her into accepting something less than true love. Watching Lizzy fall for Jonathan Scales was pure torture, particularly the first night she met him, when she could taste Lizzy’s favorite lipstick on his lips in the fraternity basement.
An unhappy sort of existence followed, though it got a little better when Eddie was born, and when Lizzy and her family moved back to Winoka. Knowing what she knew about Jonathan and Jennifer, reestablishing a friendship with Lizzy had to wait. It was good enough to know that they were next door, and that the day might come when they could be friends again.
She always thought Jonathan or Hank would have to die first. It didn’t matter much to her which. As it turned out, she didn’t have to wait, thanks to Eddie and Jennifer.
Feeling the spiked prong of Ember Longtail’s tail drive through her body, Wendy thought of them both—fifteen years old, in love, with so much more to look forward to than Wendy ever had. She said a silent prayer on Jennifer’s behalf, as she saw the girl give an outraged scream and drive off her assailant. She said a prayer for her son, whose voice she heard carrying from the far end of the bridge.
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