26. Tabitha
Tabitha
The stronghold’s three days out, and on the second day the realm tells us the war has arrived.
We feel it before we see it. Even I feel it, and I’m the least attuned to this place of any of us.
The air changes. Sanguisca is always hot, always stinking, always some shade of red.
And then, without warning, a band of the sky ahead of us goes cold and wrong, a bruise of white where there should be crimson, and the wind that comes off it isn’t sulfur.
It’s clean. Clean and freezing and utterly foreign, and every hair on my body stands up, because clean is the one thing hell should never smell like.
“Down,” Gavriel barks, and we drop behind a ridge.
It comes over the rise a minute later. And I understand, finally, viscerally, what the Oracle meant about the difference between a splinter and a war.
It’s a Sorcerer. It has to be. Tall, robed in that same cold white light, hovering a foot off the scorched ground like the realm’s rules don’t apply to it, which apparently they don’t.
Where it passes, the red soil pales and cracks and dies.
A skeletal tree crumbles to grey dust. A fire geyser it drifts over doesn’t roar, it just goes out, snuffed, cold.
It isn’t attacking anything. It’s surveying.
Taking measurements. Deciding how best to unmake all of this.
“Scout,” Valerian breathes, barely a sound. “Just a scout. One of the advance party, testing the veil. Nobody move. If it takes our measure and reports back, they come faster.”
“Can we kill it?” Luka murmurs, panther-low.
“I don’t know,” Valerian admits, and that, more than anything, is what turns my blood to ice.
Valerian always knows. “I’ve never fought one.
No one alive has. They sealed us before we ever traded a blow.
” His hand finds mine in the dirt, grips.
“It’s cold where everything here is hot.
Its magic unmakes. If it’s even a fraction of what the ones behind it can do, then one scout could level this ridge.
So we let it pass. We are not ready for that. Not yet.”
We lie in the dirt of my own kingdom and we watch a thing from another world drift across it, killing everything it touches just by existing, and we do nothing, because we can’t. It’s the most helpless I’ve felt since I first fell through the book.
It pauses. Turns its hooded not-face our way. For one endless second I’m certain it sees us, certain this is where I use up a third life on a ridge in the middle of nowhere.
Then it turns away, unhurried, and drifts on, and the cold goes with it. The realm’s heat rushes back into the dead patch it leaves behind, but the ground where it passed stays grey. Dead. It doesn’t heal.
We don’t move for a long time.
“That’s what’s coming,” I say at last, and my voice doesn’t sound like mine. “A scout. And it walked over my realm like a bloke reading a gas meter and left a dead stripe behind it that isn’t growing back.”
“That’s what’s coming,” Valerian agrees grimly.
“How many?”
“An army. A world’s worth, if they choose. The Sorcerers don’t do things by halves. They folded a whole realm into a book, Tabby. They can spare a legion to make sure it never opens again.”
I get to my feet slowly. My legs don’t want to hold me, but they do, because they always do, because I always get up, and I hold onto that, because Azaan told me that’s the thing that’s mine and not hers.
And something hard and cold settles in me, next to the fear, underneath it. Because I look at that dead grey stripe across my kingdom, my ridiculous, stinking, beloved hellhole, and I feel it. Not Tabeitha’s fury. Mine. Mine.
“They want to switch us off,” I say quietly. “This place. These people. Him.” I nod at Luka. “Them.” Azaan, Gavriel. “You.” Valerian. “Everything I’ve got. They want to fold it back into a book and shut the drawer.”
“Yes,” Valerian says, watching me.
“Then they picked the wrong Queen.” I turn towards the stronghold, towards Mordecai, towards the book we need before any of the rest of it is possible. “Let’s go get my bloody book back. We’ve got a war to win, and I can’t win it without it.”
For the first time, when I say my realm, my Queen, my war, it doesn’t feel like a coat I’m borrowing.
It’s a start.