Spark

by Anna Holmes

  The warden lifts his gray eyebrows, causing folds of skin that travel up his bald head. “Oh. It seems insubordination is catching.” He stoops, picks up the whip, considers the handle. “Unfortunate.”

  The whip whines through the air. I stiffen, wait for the blow, but when the crack sounds, it’s not against my skin, but the guard’s face. He screams. His blood spatters the ground like fat raindrops, sparks dancing over the floorboards. The warden steps forward. “It really is a shame, Northshore. If you had just behaved, this wouldn’t be happening to poor Sam.” Another crack, a strangled cry, more rain. The guard drops next to me, a pair of raw gashes cutting across one eye. I don’t even know if the eye is still there under them. “That looks like it hurt! If it weren’t for you, Northshore, I wouldn’t need to do this!”

  He raises the whip again, and I throw my hand up. “Stop, please! Just stop.”

  The warden holds his arm high. “Stop, please what?”

  I struggle to meet his jeering gaze. “Stop, please, sir. Please.”

  He grins and drops a rag onto the guard’s body. “That’s better. Now clean up your mess.”

  Caelin’s hand shakes my shoulder. “Alain!” I manage to look down into her worried face, and she sets her hand to my cheek. “Are you all right? What happened?”

  I try to find words in the numb recesses of my brain, but any way I try to describe it, I find the attempt inadequate. At last, I cover her hand with mine and move to the desk, try to shove it with a hip. It’s heavier than I expected. Caelin still looks at me in concern, but in a moment, she sees what I’m after and positions herself behind the desk. It finally budges with a pronounced groan. Caelin huffs, putting her hands to her waist. “What is that thing made out of?”

  “Lead, probably,” I answer, stooping. In the dust on the floor a few feet off from the manacle hitch is a darkened mark. I clear the dust away to find a scorch mark—no. A brand. A very familiar brand. The whine of magic grows just slightly louder. Caelin bends, stares at the three concentric circles burnt into the floorboard. “What?”

  “Either somebody got clumsy making a prince,” I say, gritting my teeth and repositioning myself to kneel just next to the mark, “or this is a lock.”

  I line up the brand in my skin with the brand on the floor, take a breath, and thrust my hand down with as much force as I can muster. The scars sear a bit—painful, but a fraction as much as the initial brand—and I suck in a breath through my teeth, but hold firm. Light burgeons along the seams of the floorboard and travels out, pushing the desk the rest of the way to the back of the room. The whole room gives a shudder, and the desk begins to sink, followed by the section of floor usually underneath it.

  Caelin jumps back slightly to avoid falling in the widening gap. She peers in. Some of the floorboards arrange themselves into steps down, and just as the searing intensifies into something almost unbearable, lights flare to life somewhere in the new chamber and the heat in the palm of my hand fades. “Whoa,” Gavroth pronounces reverently.

  I shake my hand out and glance down. From here, not much but the desktop is visible, but that vague hum of magic I've been following vainly around this camp turns into a chorus of old enchantment and raw magic. “It’s here,” I say, my posture collapsing in relief. “It’s still here.”

  Gavroth thumps a meaty hand into my shoulder. “Nice work, sir. I’ll go get the doctor and we’ll—”

  A sound like a tree crashing down through an old forest cuts him off. Caelin rushes to the window. “No, no, no,” she snarls.

  “Another fight?” I ask, not even bothering to suppress my weariness. At once, the lethargy drops away. “Elle.”

  Caelin looks to me, that same appraising look they’ve all been giving me on her face. I know. There’s shiny blue shards of something sticking out of my skin. It could be a diversion. But Elle is my little sister, and I will not be sitting this one out. I loose the knives from their sheaths on my leg, and she just nods once. “Let’s go.”

  I keep close to Caelin, who can sometimes spare a moment to make up for my ineptitude. I’ve maybe hit two of the attackers—once again out of uniform but still unmistakably Legion by the posture and rigid fighting stances—but mostly I’m just running away and trying not to get hit. She’s much better at heading off the seemingly endless flow of comers, wounding them and then kicking them aside as we get into position.

  Elle clings to the corner of a building, her face screwed up in fear. It’s not much cover. That sound we heard from the warden’s office was the deathmage collapsing one of the less sturdy buildings. She still has rubble tangled in her hair and dusting her clothes. “Come on,” I call to Elle over the noise of metal on metal and the shouting echoing around the spiral. She can’t hear me. I gesture with one of the knives. You're safer here, I tell her.

  She closes her eyes and lets go of a high pitched eek as she bridges the gap, dashing across the wide path. The attackers seem mostly baffled by the maneuver. While one is distracted, I stab out with one of the daggers and tear it across his leg. He crumples by the time I skirt around him, grasp Elle by the arm, and place her behind Caelin. “Watch behind us,” I instruct. “If we move, you move. And let me know if someone is coming.”

  “O-okay.”

  Honestly, if someone is coming up behind us, Caelin will know faster than Elle can even speak, but the poor girl has seen more than enough for one day. Hopefully being behind us will keep her from seeing much more. A swordsman lunges forward after Elle, and Caelin takes off his arm, which falls with a splat.

  “What was that?” Elle asks, her voice pitching even higher with each subsequent word.

  “Uh, try not to think about it,” Caelin answers.

  We’re in decently tight quarters here. The building collapse cut us off from the path out of camp, leaving only this high point, the Gallows Round, and the pit. Even still, with the tightening of the spiral, we don’t have line of sight to the Round. I can hear the fighting, the occasional fricative interjection from Tressa’s bow, the staccato clicks from Bannon’s crossbow, but with no realistic measure of how many there are, it’s hard to know exactly what we’re dealing with. That, and there’s no sign of the mage yet.

  It’s driving Caelin mad, too, from the aggravated chops she keeps taking at the comers. All the rudeness she told me she wishes had been available to her at her birthday party comes out here. You’re not who I want to deal with. Swing. I wouldn’t be wasting my time with you if it weren’t necessary. Hack. At last, she turns just slightly toward me. “Where is she?”

  I listen. There haven’t been any spells thrown about recently. She’s either hiding, dead, or has another means of engagement. I cast a quick glance back at the warden’s office. We only made it a few feet from the door. If they’re looking for the focus, that’s what we have to defend. So far, nothing to indicate she’s gotten inside. I’m about to answer when a woman with wild blond curls and shrouded in a long black dress steps into view. Her sharp eyes narrow on me, but when they cut over to Caelin, they grow furious. “Murderer,” she hisses, darkness fomenting in pools at her fingertips. “You will pay for what you did.”

  “Found her,” I tell Caelin under my breath.

  “Oh, good,” she answers.

  We’ve done this dance before. I step out in front of Caelin. “No further,” I warn. “Prince Dustrise, I take it.”

  “Northshore,” she sneers. “Traitor to your nation. Don’t think yourself precious to us.”

  “I know what you want me for. A lot harder to test my magical capabilities when I’m dead. Even for you.”

  “I don’t have to kill you,” she says, expanding the cloud of swirling black light. At the center, something throbs sickly green. “I can just make you wish I had. And then I’ll take from you what she took from me.”

  “Won’t work.”

  “What?”

  “One, she didn't take anything from you; your own countryman killed your husband. Two, I’m in a precarious si
tuation right now. Degrading cryst, emotional duress, Droft’s theory, all that. Killing her is the same as killing me.”

  Dustrise lifts a golden eyebrow. “How convenient for you.”

  Caelin sighs and peeks over my shoulder. “No, it’s true. Trust me, I’d much rather just fight you myself, but I’m dying for two these days.”

  She frowns at Caelin. “You shut up.”

  “All right, then,” she says with an audible shrug.

  I glance back. “Dear, should we just let her leave with Sergeant Crow if the person who killed her husband is all she's after?”

  “You’re a liar,” Dustrise interjects. “Why would she?”

  “Your guess is as good as ours. I don’t know why she does anything anymore.”

  She considers for a moment in the way that anyone with any amount of experience does when thinking of Jori. At length, she says, “Whatever game you’re playing is a waste of both of our time.” Darkness gathers around her other hand. “You’ll be coming with me either way.”

  Caelin pats my shoulder with a sigh. “It was a nice try, dear.”

  From around the corner, two bolts snap off the end of Bannon’s crossbow. One sinks directly into the eye of the fighter next to Dustrise, and the other bounces straight off one of her clouds of darkness as the man falls.

  I shout, “No, don’t kill them!”

  The second pool of dark changes, the green center going redder just before Dustrise sends it into the dead man’s chest. Bannon curses under his breath and fires again at Dustrise. This bolt hits her shoulder. The corpse jerks up to its feet again as though suspended by a string running through its sternum. Caelin begins steering me out of the way. “I think this one’s going to be my fight.”

  From the look of that axe in the dead man’s hands, I’d say she’s right. “Elle, go back to Gavroth, please.”

  “What are you going to do?” she asks fearfully.

  Dustrise cuts the connection between her and the dead man and starts amassing her energy anew. The corpse lurches toward Caelin, and I test my own magic between my fingers. I feel a few sparks today. No miracles, but not nothing. “What I was engineered for,” I answer darkly, the crystal ridges already bursting through my skin before I even release the spell.

  I’ll give the Legion this—there’s some use for monsters.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Caelin

  The hardest fight of my life so far has been with this man who has no life left to fight for. He doesn’t tire, doesn’t hurt, doesn’t miscalculate, because there is no calculation, just attack after attack after attack. No parries, no blocking. I stab him in the chest, and it doesn’t budge him or even slow his next swing. I roll and spring up and glance around. Riley put more bolts into his chest, but that barely even slows him down. Even if I get the axe away from him, I’m afraid he won’t stop coming, and he’ll end up battering me to death with his hands. I have to figure out a way to drop the mage. If I’ve learned anything from Alain, it’s that unconscious casters mean no more spells.

  She and Alain have moved away toward the gallows, and what’s left of her people must be in that direction, too. I jump over a swordswoman clutching her arm to her chest and whimpering softly and glance back at the dead man. I’m hoping that the lack of calculations mean he won’t be able to correct if he trips. I catch my breath for the briefest of moments and start wading through the rubble of the collapsed building.

  Sure enough, the corpse doesn’t seem to know what to do about the broken beams reaching up for its ankles, nor does it react quickly to being tripped. I allow myself a quick bit of relief, then put on speed again.

  With the building more or less gone, it’s easy to round the neighboring structure and pop out into the courtyard. There she is, still trading blasts of spells with Alain— and a bit flustered, I note with just a touch of pride. I shouldn’t be proud. He’s bright blue, and with more of those things sticking out of him. He shouldn’t be casting. I don’t know what to tell him, though. Stop being the only one of us who can consistently handle a caster of this caliber? Not likely.

  “Focus on the mage,” I yell. “Take her out. The dead ones are a distraction.”

  The prince disappears immediately. I groan and kick myself internally. Of course she did, because I came in here bellowing like a buffoon. Tressa fires one of the specialized arrows, but when the little satchel bursts, none of the shimmering powder sticks to anything. “It’s a spell,” Alain calls. “She’s still here somewhere.”

  Riley splits off from one of the dead and positions his back to Tressa, looking over his shoulder to her. “I’ll cover. You do what you do best.”

  She nods and shifts her bow so she can see tracks. Alain edges closer to me and watches the axe wielding corpse finally catch up. “What now? I can try setting them on fire.”

  Riley snorts. “Then we’d have the added danger of the whole place catching fire around us. And flaming corpses charging after us. It won’t stop them.”

  “You have a point,” he admits, looking at the dozens of shafts poking out of them.

  “What about that freezing thing you did at the Eastern Shore camp?” I ask.

  Alain shakes his head. “Too much magic. I have maybe a few more smaller spells left. Going to have to make it count.”

  “Going to have to come use one of them,” Tressa yells.

  There are two sets of identical footprints heading away from each other in a mirror image. “Clever,” Alain sighs. He sets his hand to the ground, and one set of tracks sets deeper into the red earth. “Those are real,” he tells Tressa.

  “Thanks, Prince. Time to catch us a deathmage.” She grins as she takes off.

  “Riley,” I call, starting to inch my way backwards toward Alain and Tressa. “Let’s back this up.”

  He nods, firing another pair of bolts at one of the dead men. The force takes a leg out from under him, tripping him and the one behind him and buying us another minute. Riley reloads.

  “Show yourself, mage,” I hear Tressa order. “It’s over.”

  The air ripples, and she comes into view. Tressa’s bowstring tightens, her aim adjusting, fingers sliding on the fletching. “Then let it be for us both," the prince snarls, the short syllables sharp in her Rosalian accent.

  She starts to hiss something just out of my earshot as the arrow looses. Alain yells, “No—!”

  A bang, a loud warble, and a high pitched scream. Tressa crumples to the ground, a sickly pink barbed chain wrapped around her front legs and digging in tighter, tighter. The mage too is toppled, her own legs saturated with blood, Tressa’s arrow in her shoulder. Alain holds his hands out in front of him, his eyes wide. Riley and I both dash over, and I put my sword to the mage’s neck.

  She laughs, spitting up blood. “Go on, then,” she chuckles. “Finish this.”

  “My pleasure,” I tell her coldly. My sword slices clean.

  The dead drop around us again, and the spell digging into Tressa's legs dissipates. She swallows a wet cry in between labored breaths. Riley skids to her side on his knees and pulls her upper body out of the dirt. “Tressa,” he breathes.

  She opens her eyes, wild with pain, and looks up at him. “Riley—please. Keep your promise.”

  He seems stunned, locked in place.“Tressa,” he says again, his head tilting in uncertainty.

  “Look at them,” she pants, limply waving a hand toward her knees. The bandages, the flesh—all shredded to the bone. “There’s no coming back.” She looks around. “Where’s Kai?”

  “I’m here,” he says, gasping for breath as he edges around the corner. He’s wounded, too, blood soaking the front of Arrow’s fancy shirt and coat. He bends in front of her, takes in the extent of the damage. His face goes gray, and he covers his mouth with his hand.

  “It’s okay,” she says, reaching out for his arm. “Not even you can fix everything.”

  He drops his head, his shoulders shaking. “I’m sorry, Tressie.”

&nbs
p; “I’m sorry. We never got to talk it out.”

  “It's my fault—it’s….”

  She gives him a weary little grin. “You and your big head. People want to kill me on my own merits, thanks.”

  Kai bursts out with a laugh wrapped in a sob. “You always were competitive.”

  Riley looks to Kai, stricken. “There’s…nothing? Nothing at all?”

  He looks at the ground and shakes his head silently. Riley’s hand settles on his crossbow, his eyes shutting. Tressa sets her hand to his chest. “I wish—things had been different,” she says.

  His hand closes around hers. “Me too.”

  My eyes sting, and I blink quickly. Riley lowers her carefully. She holds her bow to her fluttering chest and takes a deep breath. “I’m ready.”

  Riley looks up to the sky. “Gods forgive me and receive her in glorious death,” he murmurs, lifting the crossbow.

  “Wait!” Alain cries.

  Tressa opens her eyes. "Prince, please. I am trying—to die here—before I bleed out slowly and painfully.”

  “I know,” he blurts. “I know. But just—please, let me try something.”

  Riley turns his head to look at him, both a little furious and a little hopeful and a little furious that he’s hopeful. “You couldn’t. Look at you.”

  Alain holds up his hands and slowly, carefully kneels next to Tressa. “I have an idea. It’s…unorthodox. Tressa, I would need your permission.”

  Kai frowns deeply. “What are you doing, Northshore?”

  Alain ignores the doctor, locking eyes with Tressa. “Please,” he says. “What we talked about before.”

  Her eyebrows lower. “Would that work?”

  “Please let me try.”

  She looks him up and down critically. “And if it kills you?”

  “It won’t,” he promises. My heart catches. It’s that same sound I heard in my own ear, talking to Jori. Doubt.

  Tressa drags a breath through her shuddering torso, then nods. Alain places his hand to her shoulder, then twists to look at Kai. “I need a blanket or a sheet or something. Bannon, go wet a cloth. Caelin.” He pauses, then stands, kisses my forehead, and starts to lead me further away. When we get further away, he says, “Can you go check on Elle?”