Chapter 27 Silver
Silver
They’re here to kill her. They won’t stop until it’s done. A bleak wave of horror washes over me, leaving the tips of my fingers numb.
“We need to hide you.”
She leans closer, to look through the same arrow notch that I am, even as the sounds of jarring battle music and shattering glass assail us.
“I’m not sure that will work,” she notes, her voice weirdly distant.
“I don’t think any of them have seen me, but they still seem to have a pretty accurate sense of where I am. ”
And it’s true; they’re all aiming for the section of wall nearest us. I remember suddenly how well the magic knew how to get to the Citadel when I was ordered to enter it and I curse.
She turns her head toward me, hair framing her face, and her eyes are inscrutable. “Is there any way to stop them?” she asks.
There’s a burning in my chest as I wish, fervently, that I could tell her yes. That I could be her hero right now and avert what’s coming. But, slowly, painfully, I shake my head. “If I knew that, then I never would have gone to the Desert Realm,” I say, voice grim.
Her eyes go from inscrutable to completely blank, and she turns to the arrow notch again, stoic except for a slight trembling in her hands. I glance back to see what she’s seeing, only to find her courtyard flooding with soldiers rushing to engage the threat.
She surges to her feet. “Don’t attack them!” she yells. “They’re not in their right minds!”
“Get down!” I hiss, pulling her back to the floor.
She looks at me with a kind of quiet dismay. “Why? It doesn’t even matter. None of this, nothing I’ve tried to accomplish, will end up mattering at all. The least I can do is limit casualties.”
My stomach lurches at the detached tone of her voice. At the conclusion she’s implying. “Don’t talk like that.”
“I thought you didn’t want me to keep anything from you.”
The bitterness that leaks into her tone makes me wince, and my hand tightens around her arm. “Fine,” I say. “Talk like that. Talk however you want. Just don’t give up, Mance. There’s gotta be something we can do. Something.”
“I just wanted peace,” she says faintly. Her head thunks back against the stone and I flinch at the sound. “How could something like wishing for peace create so much bloodshed, so much lying and manipulation, so much war? It doesn’t make sense.”
Her words make me feel cold. I get to my feet and start pacing, brainstorming. “I’ll increase their fear. I can make the armies flee.”
“The Primes seem to be plenty afraid already and it’s not stopping their actions.” I look again and it’s true. Their expressions range from angry to frantic, but their bodies keep moving with that stiff purposefulness that is all too familiar to me.
“Then we’ll run,” I say, coming to a stop and crouching in front of her.
“Forever?”
“If we have to!”
She lays a hand on my leg, and I want to rip it off, because I can feel what she’s about to say before she even says it. “Maybe it’s time to stop fighting, Silver.”
“No!” The word resonates in my mind, but I’m not the one who spoke it.
We both whip around to see the door to the stairwell slamming open, so hard that I hear it splinter.
And in the doorway stands Livid. Fists clenched.
With all her predators behind her.