by Shannon Hale
“Rollan! Look at me!” Meilin shouted. He blinked. She pointed toward the shore, where a boat was casting off amid burned timber. “That is a boat,” she said and turned his face back to hers. They were inches away from each other. He thought he liked that. “We need to get to that boat. Now.” And then she slapped him again.
He stood up and stumbled after her.
Rollan was vaguely aware of things flying past his head as he ran. Arrows? He was running down the pier behind Conor and Meilin, the only one not completely demolished by fire. A few people waved encouragingly from the boat. Something stung him in the calf, and he stumbled but kept going. He was running out of pier. He saw Conor, Briggan, Abeke, Maya, and Tarik in the boat. Meilin jumped in. She turned to look at him. He was at least four feet from the edge of the pier and the boat was four feet beyond that, and increasing. No way could he jump more than eight feet, not without the Granite Ram.
“Run!” someone yelled from the boat. Maybe several people.
Someone else shouted “Jump,” and so he did, realizing in mid-leap that the person who had shouted had been himself. He flew through the air, reaching out, but knowing he was too far to make it. As he braced himself for a plunge into the cold sea, something caught him. Something invisible. It felt like he was sitting on a cushion of air and was being drawn to the boat. He saw Meilin’s hands outstretched, palms upward, her face screwed up in concentration. The crystal talisman around her neck was glowing. She had caught him.
Rollan readied himself to tumble onto the boat when something knocked him from Meilin’s talisman-enhanced “hands,” slamming him into the ocean. Freezing water stung his nose. He gurgled and struggled, fighting his way to the surface.
He gasped for breath, and Tarik and Meilin were there, reaching in the water to pull him out. Their hands were on his wrists when a second attack knocked the air out of him.
He went under again.
He clawed his way up, but the boat was moving away. Meilin reached out, yelling for him to “Swim, swim!”
He thrashed in the water and suddenly felt a tug upward. Meilin’s ghost grasp had hold of his shoulders and was pulling him out and toward the boat. He was nearly there when Wikerus sliced through the air at Meilin, grasping at the Crystal Polar Bear with his feet. Meilin screamed, and Rollan dropped back into the icy waters.
Essix dove down with a screech, talons out, going for the raven’s eyes. The raven let go of the talisman and flew away, but it had done its damage. The cord around Meilin’s neck was cut, and the Crystal Polar Bear slid from her neck and into the waters below.
Rollan dove, aiming himself at the sparkling crystal talisman as it fell. It didn’t occur to him that he was freezing. That he was so tired from running and fighting and bleeding that he was just seconds from passing out and making those icy waters his grave. In a burst of instinct he simply knew it was the right thing to do, and that he would be just as miserable and empty in the cold air as in the cold water, so he might as well do the right thing.
He could see the bear falling, still faintly aglow. Everything seemed to slow — the talisman, his kicking legs, his fading thoughts. He stretched his arm, trying to grab the talisman before it was gone, just managing to catch hold of it with numb fingers. He held the crystal bear to him, his energy gone, his goal achieved. He closed his eyes. Perhaps now he could sleep.
A tremendous force slammed into Rollan, rocking his mind awake enough to clamp down on lungs about to take a deep breath of ocean. He flailed and felt his hand break the surface of the water. His head followed, and he gasped for air. The fog in his brain cleared enough for him to realize his hands were empty. The talisman was gone.
He started to go under again when hands reached him. The boat had rowed around, and Tarik and Meilin pulled him back in.
“No!” He coughed seawater, struggling to speak. “No, put me back! The talisman —”
“It’s too late,” said Tarik.
A huge, gray creature, like the Great Beast version of the horror dog of the Ardu, was swimming away from their boat. One of its elephantine tusks had hooked the Crystal Polar Bear. It swam to the far shore and leaped out of the water on its belly, offering the talisman to a man in a black hood. He took the talisman and held it up, showing it proudly to Shane and a couple dozen other Conquerors on the edge of the burned docks.
“No!” said Rollan. “No, no, no!”
He rose, trying to jump in after it, but Tarik held him fast.
“It’s done, Rollan!” said Tarik. “Don’t sacrifice your life for what’s already lost!”
Rollan struggled, his eyes on the shore. The Conquerors gloated over the Crystal Polar Bear that he and his friends had fought so hard for. The great gray, tusked beast stared back with a face as sharp as a spear. And Aidana — his mother — watched him with her dark eyes. Her face was covered in scratches, blood dripping off her chin, down her neck. She lifted her hand as if she would —
Shane approached Aidana, putting a kind arm around her shoulder, and her hand dropped. The two of them watched the boat recede, sadly, their shoulders stooped, their heads bowed.
Suddenly Rollan was shuddering with sobs he didn’t know had been building. He pushed his palms against his aching heart and sobbed.
Tarik’s arms were still around him — not holding him back now. Just holding him. Tarik patted his back, pressed Rollan’s head to his shoulder, not speaking.
When the sobs slowed, Rollan still kept his face hidden, afraid to see their faces, to know if his friends thought him weak, careless, foolish.
He wiped his face off with his scarf and sat down, Tarik sitting beside him.
“A walrus,” Rollan whispered. “Wouldn’t you know it’d be a walrus. I know for sure now. I hate walruses.”
The other kids laughed, the sound honest and nervous and full of pain.
“Rollan, are you okay?” Conor asked. “That woman. She almost killed you.”
Rollan just stared into the distance. So many things found and lost so quickly. He’d lost the talisman. He’d lost his mother — again. Had she wanted to come with him there at the end? But even if she did, she was under the Bile’s control. Oh, the Conquerors touted it as a cure-all, but forgot to mention how at any moment anyone who drank the Bile could become the Devourer’s puppet.
She said she’d gone back to that house in Concorba where she’d left him on the steps waiting for a miraculous family who never claimed him. She’d gone back for him. And he’d go back for her. Somehow. He would save her from the Bile’s control, if the only way was killing the Devourer with his own hands.
Rollan rubbed his face. He wasn’t crying anymore, but his eyes were hot and stinging.
“Something happened to you,” Tarik said. “Something more than losing the talisman.”
Rollan shook his head. He didn’t want to speak.
“All this struggle and hardship must feel overwhelming,” Tarik said. “I believe you have known more loss than I can imagine. Life is full of loss. I have learned that what matters is how we fill the hole that the loss leaves behind. The Devourer is a great hole. He tries to consume the world to fill his loss, but domination will not satisfy his hungering need for wholeness.”
Rollan saw Meilin put a hand over her face to hide her anguish. Rollan’s heart hurt even worse. Meilin would understand if he told her about Aidana. Conor too, he believed. Tarik would comfort him. Abeke would be silent but not judge him. With a start he realized he knew how they all would react. This was his crew now. This was beginning to be his family.
But he didn’t feel capable yet of telling the story. The pain was still as fresh as an arrow just entering his heart.
“Use what you have lost,” Tarik said. “Draw from it. Swing from that loss and each punch will have more power.”
Rollan nodded, but he didn’t feel much like punching. He slumped to the
boat’s deck, sitting with his knees pulled to his chest. Between the legs of everyone else standing, he saw another figure huddled directly opposite him. Maya. He almost didn’t recognize her with her red hair burned almost completely away, a pink wound across one cheek. The normally lively blue eyes were vacant. He couldn’t tell if she was looking at him or not.
“The fire,” he whispered. “It was her.”
Conor dropped to one knee beside him. “She saved us. There were a hundred Conquerors, more maybe, each with a spirit animal. After Maya . . . blew up . . .” Conor paused, his eyes clouding with some memory Rollan did not have. “After that, a large part of their army was just gone.”
Rollan saw Abeke sit down next to Maya and take her hand, saying something to her as Maya continued to stare forward.
“A hundred or more . . .” Rollan pressed shut his eyes. “The Conquerors were serious about this.”
“And prepared enough to know we were coming,” Conor said. He was looking at Meilin, who was holding Jhi’s paw in an affectionate way that Rollan had never seen her do before, as Jhi licked at a wound on Meilin’s leg. Everyone looked pretty beat up. Burns, bloodstained clothes, horror still in their eyes. He lifted a hand to his neck, felt the tender bruises forming there, shaped like his mother’s fingers.
Tears began to well up, and a part of him wondered if all that seawater he’d swallowed trying not to drown was streaming out of his eyes.
Maya’s empty eyes found his. Maybe it would be better to be burned out from the inside, he thought. To be emptied of thought and feeling and be as alone on the inside as he was in the world. He closed his eyes. Numbness. The invitation was alluring, the promise of never feeling again. Death might feel as welcoming as a warm bed.
Jhi left Meilin and ambled over to Maya, who looked at the panda, a little hope in her eyes. Jhi pressed her forehead against Maya’s, and the girl’s eyelids flickered, closed. Her body collapsed into slumber, her face at peace.
But Rollan’s limbs trembled, rejecting the lure of sleep and forgetfulness. Jhi looked at him with her peaceful silver eyes, and Rollan shook his head. Even though he chose to stay awake and ache with the memory of all that had happened, as if the pain would keep his mother alive and well, he didn’t know how much more he could bear. His heart felt ripped to tatters, his body beat up and abandoned.
A sudden weight on his forearm, a prickly grip on his skin. Essix looked at him with an unblinking eye. He wasn’t ready to tell the others, but Essix knew. She knew about Aidana and her raven, she knew how Rollan’s heart had been ripped, half-mended, and then ripped again. She knew what he did, what he said, and of those things left unspoken — all the details of the broken mess of his whole self. And still she hadn’t abandoned him.
The cold wind picked up, ruffling her brownish gold feathers.
Rollan loosened the neck of his coat, exposing the skin. He lifted his chin — an invitation.
Essix leaned in and became a mark over his heart.
Shannon Hale is the New York Times bestselling author of The Goose Girl, Rapunzel’s Revenge, Ever After High, Dangerous, and Newbery Honor winner Princess Academy. Her past pets include rabbits, birds, dogs, cats, lizards, and a snake who broke the world record for longevity. Currently her pets include four small children. She can be found herding them with her husband, author Dean Hale, somewhere in Utah.
Visit her website at shannonhale.com.
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Book Five
Against the Tide
By Tui T. Sutherland
THE PEOPLE OF STETRIOL CALLED IT MUTTERING ROCK.
They knew vaguely where it was, deep in the scorched, arid interior of the continent. They knew of
the muttering sound that made the earth tremble for miles in all directions around it.
And they knew the name of the dark, sinister creature imprisoned there.
Most of all, they knew never to go anywhere near it if they wanted to survive.
So no one had visited Kovo the Ape’s prison in hundreds of years. Not that it would be easy, if anyone had even wanted to try. Muttering Rock was far out in the Stetriol desert, many days from the nearest source of water. Each side of the rock was a sheer cliff face with no handholds, as if someone had sliced away the edges with one swipe of a powerful blade.
The top of the rock was baked by the sun to a blistering two hundred degrees or so — no one had ever measured the exact temperature, of course, but it was enough to instantly and badly burn any foot, or boot, or paw that tried to step onto it.
The cage itself seemed to be growing out of the top of the rock, a vast network of impenetrable branches as hard as diamonds. It glowed a pure, blinding white, particularly at its sharpest points, where it still had the vague shape of the giant antlers planted centuries ago by the Great Beast Tellun.
And of course, there was the eagle overhead: Halawir, the sharp-eyed guard who watched Kovo every day and all night too.
So: no visitors. Not in a very, very long time.
Hence the muttering.
“First I will peel off their skin,” growled a voice like thunder in the distant mountains. “I will crush their skulls between my fists. I will wrap their bones in their green cloaks and set fire to their homes. Their fortresses will be dust beneath my feet.”
The malevolent eyes of an enormous silverback gorilla glowered through the gaps in the cage. His thick black fur was heavy in the heat. There was no room in his cage for pacing, so he sat, brooding and waiting, as he had for generations. Kings and empires had risen and fallen since his imprisonment, but still, he waited.
And while he waited, he dreamed of vengeance.
“I have killed four Great Beasts,” he murmured. “When I am free, I will punish those presumptuous Greencloaks who follow them. I will tear their spirit animals apart and then I will kill all the feeble humans myself. Some of them I will strangle slowly, and others I will drown, and some I will crush beneath my feet.” He brushed one leathery palm against the antlers that hemmed him in.
In the distance, a bird of prey shrieked, piercing and desperate in the broiling air.
“Not much longer. Worthless humans. If I were free, we’d have all the talismans already. We’d be the kings of this world and everyone would bow to us.”
His colossal muscles rippled as he pushed against the cage walls. “Soon. My time is coming. They’ll come for me soon,” he muttered, squinting out at the small square of empty desert he could see. “Gerathon has been free for weeks. Slow, despicable humans. Perhaps I will rip off their toes.”
He lifted his head, his giant nostrils flaring as he sniffed the air. A slow, cunning smile spread across his face.
“Gerathon,” he rumbled. “At last.”
“I understand your eagerness to spill the blood of your enemies,” said a voice from behind him. “But after the centuries you’ve already waited, what does another month or two matter?”
“I will wait as long as I have to for my plans to come to bear,” said Kovo. “Stand where I can see you.”
A brown-haired boy inched into view and stopped a few steps away from the cage, not far from the sheer edge of the cliff behind him. He was thin and small, barely old enough to drink the Bile, and terribly sunburned. Long, bleeding scratches marked his shoulders, and he didn’t seem to notice the smoke rising from the burning soles of his shoes. But perhaps that had something to do with who was really inside him, looking out through snakelike yellow eyes, pupils huge and dilated.
“An unusually small creature for you,” Kovo growled. “Looks mor
e like one of your snacks than a messenger.” He glanced at the sky, but there was no sign of Halawir. Useful timing, that: his ever-watchful guard missing right on time for his visitor.
“Oh, I am sure I shall eat him later,” the boy said, and although it was not Gerathon’s voice, not exactly, there was still an eerie hiss to it that echoed the serpentine Great Beast. “Sssso . . . it’s been a long time. What have you been up to?”
“Terribly amusing,” Kovo snarled. His dark eyes gleamed from deep beneath his forbidding brow. “Did you come here to flaunt your freedom?”
“No,” Gerathon said, almost sympathetically, for her. “I came to tell you how well we’re doing. The Conquerors just stole the Crystal Polar Bear from those scruffy Greencloak midgets. Plus I was able to do some entertaining mental torture on one of them, since his mother is one of my creatures. Oh, his face when she tried to kill him. It was delightful.”
“Marvelous,” said Kovo. “Leave me here for eons if you like, just as long as you’re having fun.”
“Your time for fun is coming too,” Gerathon said, covering the boy’s mouth as she made him yawn deliberately. “We have almost enough talismans to free you.”
“That is . . . almost what I want to hear,” Kovo said with glittering menace.
“Trust me,” Gerathon said languidly. “We have our ways of knowing everything the Greencloaks do, and we know exactly where the Four Fallen are going next. As always. We’ll get the next talisman, and then we’ll destroy them.”
“I notice you haven’t destroyed them yet,” Kovo pointed out. “Care to explain why they’re still alive?”
Gerathon waved the boy’s hand dismissively. “They’re still useful to me. To us. To our Reptile King. Don’t worry, they’ll all be dead soon.”