Chapter 35
She hung a moment in the water, trying not to think of the countless bodies of the Fodder that must be lying below her.
Still, when her arm brushed something, she couldn’t prevent her shuddering recoil, thrashing away desperately from the imagined clutch of some half-rotted corpse there in the darkness.
Slowly she calmed herself, treading water.
She could hold her breath a long time with the power within her but not indefinitely; she needed to come to the surface eventually.
Cautiously she sent out small bursts of power, creating a faint light that struggled to pierce the murky water, traveling up until they hit rock.
She was beneath the island, millions of tons of sea and rock above her. She tried not to panic.
Her silver fish was churning inside her, filled with the power Gry had given her.
She forced herself to relax and heed it.
As she did, it grew within her, filling her until she was all sleek power, suddenly sure and in her element.
Without needing to think she stretched out then, hands forming a delicate inverted V shape, her body undulating in a sinuous wave of power that left a trail behind her as she moved smoothly away, headed unerringly toward the surface and the light.
She swam until Gry’s gift gave out, and there was a joy in it, even in the midst of her heartbreak, to be weightless, the water’s caress like a mother’s hand smoothing away her pain, absolving her of all she’d done.
But when the power ran out, she was forced to rise, aware of being cold and wet only now as her head came up out of the water.
She’d almost reached First Island. The swell around the island’s wooded shoreline was heavy, and at first she struggled to reach the shore, her power almost gone, before finally managing to make it onto a narrow shelf of shingle, half swept up on an inrushing wave.
Here, the trees grew right to the water’s edge, their roots visible where the sea had washed away the thin soil.
She pulled herself up the shallow bank by holding onto the roots and collapsed onto the ground just inside the tree line.
She knew the Masters had to be on their way.
They’d know First Island was the only place she could swim to.
She needed to hide. Her power was too drained to survive another direct fight.
Through the tree line she glimpsed the outline of a fallen-in building a short distance away, one of the many dotted around First Island, raised by some long-ago Channeller apprentice and now a ruin, stone and tree bone merged into one.
Giant roots snaked out through doorways, branches curved through crumbling windows while the roof had long since collapsed.
With the last of her strength, she dragged herself over to the half arch that had once marked its doorway and crept in.
In the corner, there was a nook formed by two collapsed walls and some enormous roots.
They lifted off the ground slightly, leaving a gap not visible from above.
She slipped in underneath them. She was still shivering and sodden from her swim, but her exhaustion was so great that even so, after a few moments, she slipped into unconsciousness on the stone floor.
Outside, day darkened into night as she slept, and lightened back to day again. Above her, the first fingers of dawn were stretching across the horizon when a shadow passed overhead, circling the ruin once.
She was woken by the sound of a voice shouting, “Bring Lord Huath! I’ve found her!”
It was a young guard, crouching on the stone floor and peering in at her, his eyes wide and terrified. There were answering shouts for him to “Come away before the traitor blows your head off!”
She heard the familiar sound of a Fodder wagon laboring up the hill from First House, bringing the power for Huath to use to kill her. A sudden defiance rose up inside her. He might have caught her, but he wouldn’t find her huddled and terrified.
Slinging her satchel across her chest once more, she climbed back out over tangled tree roots, hard like bone, stretching up over the shattered walls.
And all she could think was that she’d fight her way back to the sea and let the waters take her before she’d let Huath touch her.
Do anything to shake his impregnable certainty that the world and all that was in it was his to control.
Lord Huath’s fair hair appeared through the trees on the other side of the building, and he looked down at where she stood, nursing her scant store of power. “Well,” he said, “haven’t you given us the runaround?”
The Fodder wagon creaked to a halt behind him.
“To think you were there all that time, creeping around Ailm’s Keep, poisoning my nephew, and none of us knew.
I should’ve ended you years ago. This is the gratitude I get.
Half the Masters on Second Island wounded, two sons of noble Families needing to be reconditioned, and I’m going to be late for a party I’d almost been looking forward to because it seems if I want you ended I’m going to have to do it myself.
The Masters want me to keep you alive, let them study you.
But they’re not here yet, and I’m not really in a studying mood. ”
And he swiveled his yew staff around almost casually before sending a shot of such blinding ferocity that it burned away her clothes where it hit her in the stomach, opening a wide gash across her belly.
The choking smell of burned skin filled the air as éadha toppled backward off the tree root and onto the shattered stone.
She stared stupidly down at her stomach, half expecting to see her silver fish evaporate into the air through the gash as blood began to pump out.
But it wasn’t gone. Fighting the urge to scream in agony at the sudden, blinding pain of it, she pushed the edges of the gash together with shaking hands.
It was clean where Huath’s fire had seared through flesh and skin.
Bending over, she wove a filigree of silver threads across the opening, a mat of power that’d staunch the bleeding and hold the wound together for now.
As she did, she used her feet to push herself back underneath the tree roots, out of sight.
There was the sound of feet approaching.
“I’m still sensing power; she’s not dead yet” came Huath’s voice. “I don’t want my head taken off by a bolt, so let’s do this.”
As he spoke, the wall to her right began to shake, stones that’d been sealed together for centuries protesting as they were pulled apart until with a slide and a shudder the remains of the wall collapsed.
There was no way out; she was trapped. Huath could kill her any number of ways.
Bring down the other wall on top of her or drag her out and finish her off himself, there on the shattered remnants of the ancient building.
Her body, already exhausted from the earlier battles and the long swim, was weakening rapidly from the gash in her stomach even though she’d stopped the bleeding.
There was no way she could fight Huath off in this state, and all she could think now was that she wished she’d drowned instead.
Huath was the Channeller she’d always feared and hated the most, ever since that day he’d terrorized Ionáin as a small boy.
It was a bitter thing to realize he was going to be the one to finish her.
Rage filled her then. She would not die cowering in a hole. She would make him look her in the eye as he killed her.
She reached for a thick tree root to lever herself up.
But to her shock, her hand passed straight through it; it was an illusion.
What her hand landed on wasn’t the smoothness of roots, or the cold hardness of stone.
It was something altogether greater, altogether more powerful than wood or stone.
Something warm and alive. The next moment, a jolt flowed up her arm, and in her head a star exploded as a voice spoke, smooth and hissing like metal sliding on stone.
“Mahera,” it said, and the world went white.
Her head snapped back on her neck as the young dragon sent power flooding into every cell of her being.
It was like and unlike anything she’d ever felt before.
Unquestionably hers, the power she’d given it all those months before, but grown so strong, so mighty from being held in a dragon’s heart—so beyond anything she could’ve imagined.
Dimly she heard the sounds of Huath and his men shifting the fallen stone, searching for a body.
With a flick she healed the wounds on her belly and her shoulder.
The power within her overflowed, and when she looked behind her she saw it’d taken the shape of great golden wings, hazy and transparent.
And she understood that for her, fear was ended.
Climbing up between the roots with easy steps, she stood above Huath, and she was rage, she was fury, she was vengeance.
Her voice when she spoke echoed with the voices of the silenced.
“We endure, and we will outlast you.” She shot up into the air, up and up, spreading her wings so they blazed in the morning light.
Huath came after her, roaring to the men below as he powered up their arrows. She stopped them easily with a thought, and they fell lifeless to the ground.
He flew on, leveling his yew staff at her once more. “Bitch, you are one, I am many. You might have pretty wings, but I’ve killed many with wings as pretty, and you don’t frighten me.”
Holding herself steady in the air, she stared at him. “I should. I am the end of your world and all of your kind. You should be frightened to death.”
With a gesture, she blocked the threads from the Fodder wagon so that he only had the power already drained to draw on.
Still he flew on, too overcome with rage for caution, higher and higher so they could see the outline of First Island below them, Second Island in the distance, and the sun on the towers of Erisen.
She flew easily, feeling the air rush past, the surge as her wings lifted her high on the morning wind.
He whirled his staff and, with all his years of dragon combat, lay down fire in her path to catch and tear at her wings, but they were illusions impervious to fire, and she flew through them unharmed, wheeling about as she felt his power begin to fade, spent in firebolts that fizzled into nothing.
He hung there in the air, only realizing then that he had no power to draw on.
He reached out as he’d reached out all his life to those around him, those he’d taken and taken from in a never-ending stream of lives defiled.
But she blocked them all, all the spidery, grasping threads, and watched as the realization hit him then that a man, alone, cannot fly.
Still she watched as he began to fall, unmoved and unmoving as he tumbled down the morning sky, over and over the flash of his white-blond hair, falling faster and faster toward the trees below until at last he disappeared without a sound beneath the canopy.
“Mahera,” she said softly.
The young dragon uncurled from where it’d hidden itself inside an illusion of stone and tree bone.
éadha bowed her head, returning the power it’d given her along the golden thread stretched between them.
The dragon spread its wings above the trees and sprang like a cat into the air of morning.
It flew up to greet her; girl and dragon, heads bowed toward each other, almost touching as the sun cleared the sea.
A watcher would’ve seen their wings blaze gold in the sunlight until the girl extinguished hers with a thought, and the dragon rushed up beneath her.
She caught one of the huge thorny spikes with one hand and sat astride the enormous mailed back between the wings.
The dragon swung its head toward her and seemed to smile.
Together they flew, the girl’s power flowing into the dragon as it wheeled once above First House.
The dragon threw back its head and sent a bolt of flame shooting toward the wall with the small oak door facing east, incinerating the new-grown trees in an instant.
Below, she could make out Masters and Fodder wagons, fiery arrows being readied, yew staffs cocked.
There would be a day for that fight, but it was not today.
And so the dragon flew away north and west on the world’s winds, its impossible flight powered by one girl’s heart, beating steadily in time with the dragon’s wings as they left the Channellers far behind them.