Chapter 34
She ran, legs fleet and effortless. But her breath still came in gasps like someone who’d been running for miles, the air fighting to get through the choking lump in her throat.
It was hard, rigid with tears still to be cried.
As she ran, the temple bell began to toll, calling all to class.
Soon these empty halls would be thronged with apprentices and Masters.
A plan half forming in her head, she stopped at the doors of the Banqueting Hall.
There was no one there to bar her entrance this time.
In the Fodder alcove she wrenched open the service hatch.
The elevator rested at the bottom of the long shaft, but she didn’t need it, pulling the doors shut after her and flying down in near-perfect darkness, enveloped by the immense weight of the granite cliffs, the only light a faint rectangular glimmer around the edges of the elevator far below.
Burning through the elevator, she stepped out into the holds.
This early in the morning, the night Keepers would just be finishing their shift.
Her face would be known down here. If she had a convincing enough air of a girl with an errand and her luck held, she might just win through to the iron door leading out to the sea-cave entrance.
Ailbhe’s sailboat hadn’t returned yet to Erisen and was moored in the dock.
But as she hurried through the hold, nodding to the occasional Keeper passing with a lantern, she noticed a door not far from the sea cave that had never previously stood open.
Inside it was brightly lit, with carpets and furniture visible through the doorway.
It had to be Gry’s quarters. She veered swiftly and peered in.
His long frame was visible on a single bed set into an alcove in the far wall.
She’d assumed he was asleep, but as soon as her head came around the door, his face lit up. “éadha, how are you here?” he hissed.
“Shhh. I can’t stay. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” éadha saw then his ankle was shackled to a long chain that allowed him to shuffle around his quarters but no more. He saw her look and shrugged his shoulders.
“Are they channeling you?” she asked, looking over her shoulder back into the main hold as she spoke. No one was paying them any attention.
“No. Judicious exposure to the suffering out there, implicit warning this is what happens to bad boys, no channeling. They’re not looking to start a second Channeller war.” His look changed quickly to one of concern. “But what happened? Who’s after you?”
“Dathin, everyone else, too, I suppose.”
“I’m so sorry. I half guessed it that night at the Midwinter Ball when you talked about shielding that girl, then Hera told me she saw you use your power on the stairs.
I thought you were only a Channeller like me.
If I’d realized you were a Leah that day in the boat off First Island, when you said we should just keep going—I’d have rowed you all the way to House Críoch myself instead of telling you to just hide your power.
If you make it out of here, go to Hera. Our Family will do everything we can to help you. ”
They both heard it then—the sound of the elevator clanking in its shaft.
Gry’s face darkened. “Unlikely to be the morning delivery of pastries. If you have a plan, I’d put it into action now.”
She was halfway to the sea-cave entrance when the elevator doors opened.
Out came Master Dathin, Master Joen, Master Ruadh, and the Second Island Librarian, their Keepers close behind.
Quickly they fanned out and began searching for her.
éadha dived into the nearest empty bunk and with all her shielding skill shut herself down into a lifeless bundle of drained Fodder slumped unconscious after a night’s channeling.
Every scrap of power, of energy, she hid behind a thought-wall made of her exhaustion and pain.
She heard the Masters approach, talking quietly to each other as they surveyed the enormous space, trying to work out where she might’ve gone to ground.
She waited until the line of searchers had passed her bunk, and then she quietly began the short walk to the cave entrance.
She would have made it if a junior Keeper from her time in Records hadn’t seen her and called out cheerfully, “éadha, what brings you back down here?”
All four Masters turned at once, raising their yew staffs as the young Keeper screamed and darted out of the way.
éadha immediately lifted her shield, and in the same instant Master Joen began shooting at her, followed by the other three.
One, two, ten shots at once, all pulsing into her shimmering wall and rebounding to the shooters.
After Ruadh and the Librarian took hits from the rebounds, they changed up.
Aligning their staffs so they all shot at the same point, one after the other, creating a continuous stream of power that overwhelmed her shield, burning through to hit éadha on the legs, the arms, the side of her head before she could fly up into the air.
There was a burning smell of singed cloth and skin.
She flew upward, feeling dazed from the blow to the head, which had burned away part of her hair.
Ruadh followed her while the others remained on the ground. She was surrounded.
It was the fight of her life. Without a staff like the Masters’, she sent her power flowing through her hands, using them alternately to shield and to shoot.
The shots came from everywhere at once, from men schooled in warfare all their lives.
But she was a warrior born, and she knew their formations almost as well as they did from her long days on the sidelines of the combat grounds.
With a sure grace she danced through the hail of bolts, sending some back twofold, deflecting others, avoiding still more.
When Ruadh and Joen both drew their staffs back at the same moment to send massive fiery bolts in her direction, she arrowed straight up in the air so they shot at each other instead.
She dived down behind the Librarian, who was heavier and slower than the others, using him as a shield so he took a blow meant for her, direct to the chest, staggering backward and falling to the ground with a heavy thud.
Their Keepers, meanwhile, ringed the edges of the fight, concentrating intensely as they connected their Masters to the Fodder nearest them, their fingers flashing, like weavers working the strings of a loom.
Switching between threads, dropping them as they weakened and snatching others instead from the people lying prone in the bunk beds farther inside the cave.
éadha didn’t have the Masters’ reserves of Fodder power to draw on, but she was drawing only from her heart, not dragging strength from reluctant prisoners, and so her shots came faster, more easily.
The four men struggled to adjust to the speed of her, slow to move out of the way as she answered their long lines of power with short bursts of white fire.
Where she could, she blocked their threads reaching toward the Fodder so the Masters’ power fell away, and she could dive through the gaps created by their faltering.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw their Keepers’ bewilderment as she cut off the threads they were holding, stopping them from reaching the Masters.
At first the Masters blamed their Keepers for not being fast enough with the threads.
There were shouts of fury echoing against the cavern walls, turning to confusion as they realized then what éadha was capable of—stopping the very threads that were the heart of their power.
She, meanwhile, was trying to fight her way to the cave mouth, thinking she’d have a better chance against them out in the open.
But each time they blocked her escape, and in the end she knew it was all a beautiful dance of death to which there could only be one ending.
Trapped in a narrow space with only her own heart, her own strength to draw on, surrounded by Masters fueled and furious, there was to be no mercy shown her, no chance taken.
All they needed was time: time to wear her out, to exhaust her power and close in for the kill.
She dropped to the ground, too tired now for the energy needed to stay in the air.
The circle of Masters began to tighten around her, Ruadh still in a pattern above her head, the others on the ground as the Librarian got back onto his feet, cutting off any possible escape route.
Her shots became more sporadic, weaker. All her strength now was focused on her shielding, preventing them from landing the knockout blow that’d finally deliver her to them.
Panting and helpless, she retreated against the wall of the holds, feeling the familiar cold slickness behind her.
Seeing her trapped, they began edging closer to her, yard by yard, hunters with a wild beast at bay.
Master Dathin, who’d held back a little until now, stepped forward.
He pushed up his sleeves and raised his staff for the devastating shot that’d finish her off.
As she backed and backed, she ended up close to Gry’s quarters.
From the corner of her eye she saw him give a slight nod, and summoning the last of her strength, she caught the nearest Master, Joen, by surprise, leaping straight over his head and landing with a diving roll at Gry’s door.
As she landed, he said, quietly enough not to be overheard, “Take me hostage.”
There was no time to think. Master Dathin would turn and hit her in seconds. Rising to her feet, she caught Gry around the neck with one hand while holding the palm of her other hand inches away from his head.
“Stop or he dies,” she panted as the Masters turned to face them. She could see the calculations running across their faces—could they hit her before she could kill Gry?—and the realization that she was faster than them.
“You wouldn’t dare,” snarled Joen.
“Try me,” she said, and in the same moment dragged Gry backward into his quarters and kicked his door closed.
Inside, she immediately dropped her hands, releasing Gry. He turned and jammed his chair under the door handle before looking at her.
“A minute, maybe two, before they blow this.”
Badly winded from her fight, éadha bent over, her hands on her thighs, trying to catch her breath while ignoring the pain from the various wounds on her head and her shoulder.
“éadha,” Gry said then. She looked up at him. “Just outside my door to the left, there’s a metal flap. The chute for dead Fodder. It leads straight to the sea. Channel power from me now, and it should be enough to let you fight your way to the chute and get a good distance from here.”
“I can’t,” she panted. “Then I’ll be as bad as them.”
Still standing by the doorway, Gry shook his head. “No. It’s not the same. It’s a gift from me to you, not something taken. Don’t you see? This is about more than you and me. It’s about hope for all of us. You have to get off this island, and this is the only way.”
éadha straightened, looking him in the eyes as she said, “No. I’ve hurt too many people, and you’ve already given up too much. It isn’t fair.”
With a growl of frustration, Gry crossed the narrow space in two quick strides, and before she could even react, he’d caught her up in his arms and he was kissing her.
And it was like an explosion in her mind, whiting out as his lips met hers, and they were so hard and so strong, driving into her until she almost didn’t exist. There was a fire roaring up inside her to meet his, to burn the world down.
In the same instant, she felt him drop every guard so that his power, his entire life force shone out in front of her.
Without needing to think, without letting herself think, she reached out then, along the wild thread between them, and she took him into her, the entire strength of him.
He was giving himself to her, every part of him, and it was like standing in the heart of a silver gale, silent and blinding and utterly overwhelming.
On and on his strength pulsed into her, and now he wasn’t holding her anymore as the life force poured out of him and his body began to weaken.
His head slipped down so it was resting against hers, and she tried to stop, she did, but he whispered, “Don’t stop, let me do this,” and so she didn’t stop, even as his legs buckled, and she had to lay him down, unconscious now, on the sandy floor.
As she did there was an explosion behind her, and the cave door catapulted across the room, ripped from its hinges and crashing into the far wall.
Master Dathin stood in the entrance, the other Masters just behind him.
Swinging his staff up, he pointed it at her, and she felt him pause as his Keeper drained the Fodder all around him for a killing blow.
She stood then, flexing her fingers, standing up on the balls of her feet before sending a blast of almighty power rocketing straight into his unguarded chest. As he fell back, she ran through the gap, and her run became a dive so that she was already flying by the time she hit the Fodder hatch and burst through it.
She flew down the long, pitch-black slide, hearing the slap of water at the end, and the next moment she was engulfed by the freezing, inky-black sea.