CHAPTER 16 Wren
Wren
‘I will delve into the dark abyss of knowledge and guard the secrets entrusted to me’
– Drevenor Academy Oath of Secrecy
AS TORJ’S WORDS hung in the air between them, something inside Wren crumbled. The truth of it settled in her chest like a stone – cold, immovable and agonizingly right. Silas the Kingsbane had already wielded dark alchemy against them; they couldn’t afford for him to gain access to anything else.
Knowledge is the victor over fate. The mind is a blade.
The academy’s familiar scent of fragrant herbs had been swallowed by the harsh reek of metal and blood.
Wren’s throat tightened as she scanned her room one final time, fingertips ghosting over belongings that weren’t just possessions, but milestones.
Each piece told a story: the mortar and pestle worn smooth from countless hours of grinding ingredients, the crucible where she’d first mastered the cure .
. . Even her workbench was a map of her journey from novice to sage, her fingers tracing the burn marks and stains.
But wrapped up in it all was Torj. It was the place they’d come together, the place where they’d finally let themselves fall . . .
But she found herself nodding, a plan formulating in her mind.
‘You’re right,’ she told Torj. ‘We have a responsibility. Everything within these walls – the experiments, the weapons, the research – we can’t let them have it.
Master Crawford’s dungeons are full of elixirs and ingredients that will fuel a fire.
We have enough experiments and stores to set off a chain reaction of fires and explosions. ’
‘We need to get out of here first,’ Kipp said, grimacing as he peered out her door. ‘The enemy is making their way up the levels as we speak.’
‘So, you’re saying the only way out is through a fucking window at this height?’ Cal asked.
‘Something like that,’ Kipp replied.
‘We’ve been in worse situations,’ Thea ventured, though she winced.
But Wren grabbed her sister’s arm, a memory sparking. ‘When you were shieldbearers, how did you escape the Chained Islands? In the initiation trial?’
Thea’s gaze shot to Cal. ‘That would be the work of Callahan the Flaming Arrow . . . He shot an arrow with a rope across the cliffs and we used our belts to glide down the line.’
Wren nodded; she remembered Thea telling her about it years ago. ‘Then that’s how we get out of here. Break a window, use a—’
Glass shattered as Torj kicked a window in, fragments falling onto the enemy below. Several soldiers looked up, pointing and shouting. He was already motioning to Cal. ‘If you can get an arrow in that support beam over there, it should hold—’
Several men from the People’s Vanguard burst into the room and attacked, and Wren found herself surrounded and protected by Warswords, with Kipp, Dessa and Zavier pressed close to her as well.
The clash of steel, the cries of pain were all too familiar, as was the claustrophobic feeling of being jostled among sweaty bodies, but Cal was now tying a length of rope to an arrow.
‘The weight will change the dynamic of the—’ Torj started.
‘I know, Bear Slayer,’ Cal reminded him gently. ‘I’m not a shieldbearer any more.’
‘No, you’re Callahan the Flaming fucking Arrow,’ Kipp said, clapping a hand on his shoulder. ‘Aim true, or we’re all fucked.’
Cal rolled his eyes at Wren as he handed Torj one end of the rope to tie around a pillar behind them, his bow creaking as he notched the arrow to the string. ‘No pressure.’
But Wren was too anxious to offer a smile back.
Her friend’s arrow soared, embedding deep into the untouched healer’s workshop facade in the far corner. After testing the taut strength of the rope, Cal looped his belt over it and climbed up onto the windowsill. ‘See you down there,’ he said, before launching himself into the night.
Dessa screamed, but she was soon being lifted by Kipp.
‘Shouldn’t a Warsword take her?’ Thea called.
Kipp only grinned. ‘I know I’ve been a shell of my former self since the beautiful Dessa left me, but she knows from plenty of experience that I can handle her—’
‘I didn’t leave you.’ Dessa slapped his arm, the height before her suddenly forgotten. ‘We mutually agreed that our time together had run its course. Actually, those were your exact words.’
‘Semantics, dear Dessa. Did you truly think my heart would not be bruised by our separation?’
‘The only thing that’s bruised is your head from walking into that pole at the Mortar and Pestle,’ Dessa replied with a snort.
‘That’s what that’s from?’ Kipp exclaimed before he looped her arms around his neck. ‘Better hang on.’ That was all the warning he gave before he leapt from the window, his belt hooked over the rope, Dessa plastered to his side as they flew through the air.
‘Poor girl,’ Thea mused quietly. ‘Wren, you’re up.’
Wren looked at her own belt of potions. ‘I can’t use this—’
Before she could finish her sentence, she was swept up into a pair of warm, strong arms.
‘You’re with me, Embers.’ Torj’s voice vibrated through her, low and intimate despite the mayhem around them.
His arms tightened, a silent promise in their strength, and she curled into him instinctively, one hand splaying across his chest, his lightning scars seeming to sing beneath her touch.
Their eyes met briefly – a thousand words passing between them in that glance – before he lifted them both to the windowsill.
In that moment, with death pressing close from all sides, the fierce tenderness in his gaze nearly undid her.
Wren’s gasp died on her lips as they launched into nothingness.
Her stomach lurched violently, left somewhere behind as gravity seized them.
The cold whipped her face and bit her skin through her clothes.
The scent of chemicals tangling with smoke stung her nostrils, along with the smell of burning rope coming from Torj’s belt.
But something else caught her attention.
A flaming arrow carving through the dark of night. Setting ablaze the gardens where she’d brought so many wildflowers to life with her storm magic. In seconds, fire consumed all that she had achieved there.
After everything they had fought for in the shadow war, after the battle they’d won on her graduation day, it had come to this . . .?
The ground rushed towards them at terrifying speed, the world tilting as Torj’s boots hit the grass below, but he held her steady as he found his footing, placing her carefully on solid earth.
‘Cal’s got the crops and conservatory. He’s got the Pendelton archers under his command – those who are left, anyway,’ Kipp said. ‘Any ideas on how to trigger the kind of devastation you’ll need to obliterate any remaining shadow magic?’
‘One,’ Wren replied, allowing lightning to surge at her fingers, but movement at the forefront of the building caught her eye.
Through the writhing smoke, a masked figure emerged.
Their movements were wrong – too fluid, too fast. Behind them, the stone of the building itself blackened and cracked, the very air rippling around them like heat above a forge.
But instead of warmth, a preternatural cold radiated outwards, and Wren’s breath frosted before her face despite the nearby flames.
The ground where the figure trod withered, grass becoming ash without passing through fire.
‘That’s Silas . . .’ Zavier rasped, landing behind them. ‘He’s here.’
Without thinking, Wren gathered her power, feeling the familiar crackle of storm magic dance across her skin and culminate at her fingertips. She hurled it at Silas, expecting to see him dive for cover.
Instead, he simply . . . stood there. The lightning that should have struck him dead dissipated like morning mist.
‘Something’s wrong,’ Wren told the others, watching her lightning vanish harmlessly around Silas. ‘He’s not just blocking it, he’s . . .’
She recognized the telltale signs of shadow alchemy at work – the faint residue in the air, the way her royal magic seemed to dissolve like salt in water. It was alchemy twisted into something unnatural, something that made her stomach turn.
Torj was at her side, peering over her shoulder.
‘Look at his skin,’ she told the Bear Slayer, horror dawning as she understood.
Where her magic touched Silas, there was a reaction she’d never seen before – not like this.
His flesh rippled like disturbed water, revealing a network of veins that should have been blue but instead writhed black beneath the surface.
They pulsed obscenely, swelling as they drank in her power, mapping his body with strange, elaborate patterns.
The air between them vibrated with wrongness, the natural order perverted as her storm – a force meant to destroy him – instead fed the very enemy it targeted.
Wren tasted blood on her tongue, felt it drip from her nose as she struggled to fill her lungs with air. ‘He’s not just stopping my magic,’ she said hoarsely. ‘He’s consuming it.’