All around us, under the bold broken moon, the night came alive. Howls, hisses, and terrible cries I couldn’t name rose up—from the castle, from the grounds, and from the forest we ran toward.
A primal cold tightened my lungs and slid up my spine, something ancient and electric. It ripped open wells of the blind, ragged energy of panic inside me; I ran faster than I ever had in my life.
We reached the tree line and plunged into the forest that covered the hill. Dry ferns swished against our calves, and the stark silver moonlight filtering down through the trees barely warned us of fallen logs to leap over. Slender giants towered above us, pines with shaggy boughs that didn’t even begin until far above our heads; we dodged their night-blackened trunks as we careened down the hill in no particular direction, trying to get as far away from the castle as possible.
The trees swayed around us, branches reaching, but no wind blew through them. Ferns curled and snagged at our ankles. Zaira tripped and went sprawling with an angry yelp, but she tumbled to her feet and kept running, without losing much momentum.
Behind us, something let out a horrible cry, half hiss and half scream, far too close. Another answered it.
Ragged panting approached behind us, and the rapid thud of paws striking the ground. Any second, I expected knife-sharp claws to pierce my back.
Zaira cursed and whirled, balefire blooming on her hands. Its stark blue light caught in the reflective eyes of the two serpent chimeras that had guarded our door. For a brief moment their fangs gleamed in the glare, their serpentine bodies bunching to spring—and then a wave of fire consumed them.
I scuttled back across the forest floor, choking on a yelp. The flames reared up like a triumphant beast, climbing tree trunks with flickering blue claws.
Pale sparks kindled in Zaira’s eyes as she turned to me. “Don’t seal me,” she said. “Let this cursed forest burn. Let my fire eat it and grow stronger.”
I nodded, too short on breath and heavy with dread to reply. And we kept running, leaving the balefire raging behind us.
Something swooped past my face, and wings buffeted the back of my head. We barely fought our way through a stand of saplings that snatched us and struck at us with whippy boughs. Needle-sharp teeth bit my ankles. Vines and brambles grabbed at us, slowing us down. And all around, howling lifted through the forest, rising to the belly of the night.
A stitch stabbed into my ribs like a stiletto, and my legs burned with the effort of running. I glanced back over my shoulder to see if anything was coming up behind us.
Backlit by the distant blue aura of balefire, shadows lumbered and bounded and writhed toward us. Dozens of them, from dog-sized to bear-sized, forming a wide and spreading arc as they closed in on us.
“Zaira!” I gasped.
She turned, planted her feet, and lifted her arms. I scrambled away from her.
Zaira drew a line of fire in front of her feet, eerie and beautiful: a thin, blue-white curtain that danced and twined and reached up hungrily toward the trees. And then it spread, racing forward across the ground, consuming all in its path.
Everything on the other side of that line was death, beautiful and unanswerable, a leaping garden of flames the color of lightning and bone. Cries of agony rose to the night, but they were swiftly silenced; horrible smells of scorching flesh filled the air.
Zaira laughed, with the free, giddy joy of a child, and raised her arms higher. Fire chewed its way up the tree trunks, turning the forest to a burning cathedral of blue light, revealing every stark detail with the bright clarity of day.
I cringed away from the flames and the stinking smoke, keeping some twenty feet directly behind her. “Zaira,” I pleaded. “Enough.”
She couldn’t hear, or no longer cared. Balefire shivered down her hair and trailed from her arms like wings. She was a living flame herself, deadly and hungry, reveling in destruction.
Graces preserve us. I didn’t dare go near her, let alone try to coax her into running with me. But if I sealed her power now, she’d drop like a stone, and I’d have to try to haul her through the forest with no way to protect myself.
A deep, furious snarl came from the forest, in the impenetrable darkness beyond the end of Zaira’s line of fire. She spun to face it, and a liquid arc of balefire leaped toward the sound.
It struck a massive branch that leaned down to block it, trailing a cloak of moss. The branch sprang back up into position, burning and dripping fire.
Beneath its glowing arch stood the Wolf Lord of Kazerath, the mage mark glowing white hot in his eyes.
“You dare burn my forest,” he growled. “You dare.”
Lines of flame raced along the ground toward him this time, while I yelped and jumped out of the way. But roots buckled up out of the earth to catch them, shaking off showers of brown pine needles. The Wolf Lord stepped over the fire, slow and inexorable as time, swirling the edge of his fur cloak up to keep it from catching.
A terrible cracking and groaning sounded above us, loud as cannon fire.
“Zaira, look out!” I cried. I didn’t dare grab her, but waved frantically as I scrambled to the side.
She hissed, cursing in the language of fire, and leaped out of the way just in time. With awful grandeur and a crash greater than thunder, a massive dead tree collapsed into the spot where she’d just been standing. At once, a cloud of sawdust enveloped us; I coughed on wood dust and smoke, my eyes watering.
The fallen trunk lay in pieces between us and the Wolf Lord, a decaying wall three feet high. I backed away from it, wishing desperately that Zaira would run. But balefire knew no fear.
A section of tree trunk wide as a door simply melted away, crumbling and vanishing into the ground in the time it took me to blink. The Wolf Lord stepped through the gap, never slowing his stride.
Something grabbed me from behind.
I shrieked and tried to twist free as branches caged me, and wiry vines snaked over my arms and waist, pulling me against a gnarled tree trunk. A twin-boled tree seemed to be giving Zaira similar treatment, pulling her—flames and all—into the crevice between the trunks in an attempt to crush her.
She flared up like dry tinder in a column of furious blue fire. A wave of heat struck me, searing my face; the twin trees shook and spasmed, whole limbs crumbling into ash.
The Wolf Lord approached, his pace regular as a clock ticking out the last seconds until midnight. He drew a sword white as bone, with edges that shone like diamond, and advanced on Zaira.
She stepped out of the flame-wreathed remains of the trees that had held her. I could barely make out her figure at all; she was a creature of fire, transcendent as the Graces themselves, moving with a dreamlike majesty.
Hells. I was stuck to a tree, with the forest burning around me, and she didn’t even remember I existed. If the Wolf Lord didn’t kill me first, her flames would.
I wriggled an arm loose from the vines and drew my dagger, then started slashing frantically at the branches that held me, desperate to get away from both of them. Sticky sap smeared my arms, and chips of bark flew. But it was too late.
The Wolf Lord raised his sword, and a great rustling roar filled the forest around us. In the shadows beyond and behind Zaira, where her fire had not yet reached, things with gleaming eyes coiled to attack.
Zaira sliced the air before her with her arm, and the Wolf Lord burst into flame.
There was no warning, no slow licking flames building to a grand crescendo. Her balefire was already stoked to an inferno with all the rich lives of the forest, drunk on what it had consumed. Fire burst up all around them both, an exhalation of violent light, like the blue breath of the Nine Hells.
The Wolf Lord staggered. His flesh began to char; the stench of ash and burned meat grew stronger. But even as his skin blackened and fell away, even as his hair sifted down as ash, even as his fur cloak turned to one of living flame, he did not fall.
“You fool,” he snarled, his voice a tortured thing. He swung his
burning blade at her; it clanged off the air an inch from her enchanted corset, shaking ripples from the air, and then began to push its way through. A line of light glowed white-hot at the edge of his blade as the balefire consuming his sword ate through Zaira’s own protective shield as well.
Zaira slipped back out of his reach before the blade touched her, but the Wolf Lord stepped forward, closing the gap again. His hands had charred nearly to the bone, and the lines of his skull showed through his face; but still, terribly, he lived and moved. A scream of pure horror backed up in my lungs, but my throat was locked too rigid to release it.
“You can’t kill me,” the Wolf Lord rasped, with a tongue that blazed with balefire. “All the life in Kazerath sustains me. I cannot die.”
I realized then that the chimeras that had been about to leap on Zaira had fallen dead. Even now, trees untouched by balefire withered, dropping needles in a rattling rain. Insects fell from the sky like snow, their lives expended to keep the Wolf Lord’s going.
He raised his blade again, even as it burned away. I could only watch, knife still in hand; there was nothing I could do, no way to get close enough through the flames to affect what was happening. I was going to die here, a hapless spectator to this terrible duel, a mortal caught up in a war of demons. My fingernails scraped against rough bark, and hot ashes stung my eyes.
“Your magic is life, and that has sustained you,” Zaira said, her voice distant and cold. “But my magic eats life and grows stronger.”
She lifted her hand, as if beckoning the Hell of Death up from under the earth. And he became a great tower of flame. It roared up high and broad as one of the trees of his forest, white and wild and howling. A scalding wind blasted my face.
The forest screamed.
Every animal, every insect, every bird cried out as if it were dying. The trees thrashed and groaned, and the leaves rose up as if wind swirled through them; the ones too near the fire caught and became whirling showers of sparks, spreading the balefire farther.
I pulled myself from the tangling branches at last and ran a few steps away, choking on acrid smoke and ashes. I threw myself to the cool ground, covering my head as trees writhed and wolves howled and birds wailed around me, and sparks fell sizzling on my jacket. It was madness, a nightmare of fire and screaming, and I had to bite my own lip to keep from joining in.
Then everything fell suddenly silent, save for the crackling roar of the flames that raged through the forest.
I lifted my head. Balefire blazed on the ground, in the trees, everywhere, raising smoke thick and black as night itself to blot out the moon and the stars. I coughed, even lying on the ground beneath it; particles of wood and ash and gritty burning things coated my throat.
There was no sign of the Wolf Lord. There was nothing left for him to bind life into. She had obliterated him utterly.
Zaira stood triumphant, trailing a brilliant cloak of flames, pacing forward to meet the embrace of the conflagration like one transfixed. I didn’t bother trying to call her name. She was lost to the fire.
“Revincio,” I croaked.
Everything went dark as a demon’s soul.
Zaira hit the ground with a soft thud.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I dragged myself to my feet and limped over to where I’d heard Zaira fall, stirring up ash and rattling dry-seared ferns. The fire was gone, but smoke still hung thickly in the air; I coughed again, all the way down to the bottom of my chest. Wolves keened in the distance, but it was a mournful sound, not the bay of the hunt.
I nearly tripped over Zaira in the darkness. I dropped to my knees beside her and felt her throat just to make sure; her pulse beat quick and strong. Of course. She was fine. She got to sleep now, even.
I wanted to collapse over her and cry for a while, and then curl up among the ashes and sleep until dawn, myself. But we were still far too close to the castle. If the wolves came hunting vengeance, or Ruven came looking for his lost “guests,” I couldn’t do much more than bluff until Zaira woke up.
For all I knew, that might not be for days. I’d never seen her unleash on this scale before.
They’d taught me how to carry someone at the Mews, for exactly this reason. I slung her over my shoulders and stumbled through the night, with no sign of a path and no sense of direction other than away, aching from a dozen cuts and bruises, cold to the bone. Zaira’s limp weight bore down on me like all the mountains of smoke piled above us.
It blended into one long, dark nightmare. I stopped a few times to put Zaira down, drink a few swallows of water, and rest, but the howling of wolves in the far distance always convinced me to struggle back to my feet and keep going. There was no part of me that didn’t ache, but it didn’t matter; hurting was better than being dead.
Finally, on one of my breaks, I laid Zaira down as carefully as I could on some moss and leaned against a tree to rest for just a moment. And when I blinked my gritty eyes open, it was dawn.
Grayish-pink light slid between the trees, falling softly to the rolling mounds of frost-silvered pine needles and yellowing ferns. Each sliver of sky between the looming tree trunks formed an empty pillar of air, holding up a world where dawn continued to happen in a miraculously ordinary way, as if this weren’t the first day of some strange new world. Hundreds of miles away, that same rosy light touched the sky over the Imperial Canal, sliding down the façades of the palaces on the grand curve; it would be hours yet before it reached my window and fell on my empty bed. Perhaps my mother was up, already on her way to the Imperial Palace to manage whatever crisis the coming war presented her with today. Perhaps this same light kissed Marcello’s eyelids open, in the officers’ barracks of some border keep.
Or perhaps the captain at Highpass had gotten on the courier lamps to report my absence, and my mother and Marcello had been up all night, making Hells only knew what preparations to send troops into Vaskandar to get Zaira and me back.
I levered myself away from the tree trunk I’d slept against. Bark stuck to the back of my coat, and pine needles clung to my hair. My breath misted in the frigid mountain air, which had settled into every fold of my jacket and pierced deep into my weary bones.
Zaira stirred, wincing away from the light. “Too early,” she groaned.
Then she searched the twig-scattered moss around her. She blinked her eyes open in bleary confusion, and sat up.
Her hand immediately flew to her temple, and she winced. “Ugh. My head hurts like a demon used my skull for a pisspot.”
“You probably need to drink something.” I handed her my flask. She started gulping down water, gratefully. “You may have strained yourself last night.”
“What happened?” Zaira wiped her mouth on her sleeve. “Why did we sleep in the woods?”
I hesitated. “How much do you remember?”
Zaira frowned. “Uh … Running away from chimeras. I set them on fire, didn’t I?”
“You set a few things on fire, yes,” I said. I almost started laughing again but took my flask back and drank until the bubbling in my chest subsided.
“I’m starving,” Zaira moaned. “I can’t even think. Give me food, and then tell me how awful everything is after I eat.”
I passed her the last of the bread. My own stomach rumbled emptily, but she needed what meager rations we had more than I did, after last night.
As Zaira devoured the bread, I felt in my satchel for my morning elixir, and my fingertips slid across Marcello’s button. I imagined him shaking his head at me, at a loss for words at how far I’d strayed from what he would have advised.
“To be fair,” I murmured, “this was only partly my fault.”
“What?” Zaira asked, between bites.
“Oh, nothing. I’ve just lost my mind and am talking to a button.”
Zaira grunted acceptance and kept eating.
I waited until she swallowed her last bite. Then I told her, “I think you killed the Wolf Lord.”
She stared at
me, eyes wide. “I don’t remember that.”
“I imagine you wouldn’t. But it was memorable nonetheless, I assure you.”
Zaira mulled that over for a moment, then sighed and clambered to her feet, leaning on a young tree to steady herself. “Well, what’s done is done. Sorry if I mucked up politics or history or anything. Which way do we go?”
I shook my head. “We’re completely lost,” I said. “I’m a child of the city. I know how to find my way home following the canals in Raverra, or the temple spires in Ardence. I have no idea whatsoever how to navigate a forest.”
Zaira glared around at the time-creased, moss-splotched trunks of the ancient trees as if they offended her on a personal level. She peered up at the scant glimpses of gray sky that the boughs overhead afforded us, but thick clouds entirely blocked the sun. “Then pick a direction, and we’ll walk until we know where we are.”
As we walked, it started to snow. At first, only a few flakes drifted down through the heavy pine branches, specks of bright wonder floating on the air. But soon it thickened, laying a dense silence upon us, transforming the world one tiny piece at a time to the stark white of winter. Snowflakes caught in Zaira’s curls, glittering like jewels as they melted, but she never seemed to feel the cold. I clutched my coat around myself and shivered.
We came out of the trees in a scarred patch of bald rocks, slick with a quarter inch of fluffy white snow. My boots took wet, black bites out of the pristine white coating with each step. Through the soft haze of falling flakes, I could make out mountains rising on both sides of a long, wooded valley; their peaks vanished into low, thick clouds, and only the sweep of their forested flanks was visible in the gray distance.
The Wolf Lord’s castle stood on its hill far behind us, black and jagged. Dark scars of burned trees marred the forest between. I could make out no sign of the village we’d stayed at; we weren’t high enough to see that far, and the snow further choked our vision. The deep, wet chill sank into my bones. I yearned for a warm fire and a hot bath.
The Defiant Heir Page 25