Chapter 31 #2
Shit, I should have remembered she was obsessed with this thing. She sent Calanthe to steal it, for fuck’s sake.
“I don’t think so,” I said through gritted teeth, surging suddenly forward, twisting the tip towards her chest, catching movement in my peripheral vision.
This, I recognised as Cherish’s hawks, their wings as sharp as daggers.
She must have been fine if her hawks could still attack Cleodora. Right? At least I knew she was alive.
We hit the Greenheart queen from four sides, drawing blood from her chest, her shoulders, her arms. I smirked viciously; she smirked back as rats surged up from the ground and set themselves upon Baby.
“Fuck,” I grunted, my knees threatening to buckle as every bite and scratch hit my soul, raking weakness through me. I tasted blood. But like he had in the rebels’ house, Baby sank his teeth into the vivid green rodents and devoured them.
Hames skidded across the ground to my side, dirt spraying as he threw up a shield of thick, glimmering blue, allowing me to catch a breath. The rats dissolved upon impact with it, but it left Baby unharmed. Cleodora bared a sharp canine like she felt their pain. Good.
“Cherish?” I demanded, strengthening my grip on the sword, encouraging Baby to come behind the shield.
“She’s—it looks bad, Letta,” Hames said in a voice so tight I didn’t recognise him.
“She’ll be fine,” I said decisively, my breath tighter, shorter. “We just need to get her to a healer.”
On the plus side, keeping Cleodora occupied meant she couldn’t collapse Lazankh’s walls. “Kier, take Cherish on your dragon, get her out of here.”
“Letta,” Ryvan hissed, jumping behind Hames’s shield, driving both hands towards the ground at—fuck—the swarm of gleaming emerald rats sneaking up on our backs.
My heart thumped, the beat strangely hollow. I swung my sword, piercing the small, green bodies and ignoring the twinge of guilt. They belonged to Cleodora; they were hardly innocent.
“We’ll take the injured woman to safety,” Nidash offered, his thunder-deep voice startling me. “We’ll do what we can for her.”
I nodded. I refused to think about Hames being here, at my side, instead of pumping Cherish full of healing magic.
I refused to entertain the thought that he’d already done so and it had no effect.
She’d be fine. She was brave and strong, and she’d endured so much that we never knew about because it was too hard for her to voice it.
She wasn’t about to be taken out by a stab wound.
Fiarron and Rook came to stand beside me, the former glowing so brightly it hurt to look at him. They shared a low conversation, then murmured to Hames and I. I nodded, passing their instructions to Baby, then Valour when she and Kier joined us.
I caught his eye. Are you okay?
He nodded, but I didn’t buy it.
“Kier—”
Cleodora struck the second I was distracted. I turned to find her glare fixed on me, because of course it was. At this point, she was obsessed with me. And all because of some ancient crackpot prophecy?
“Give me the sword,” she said in that mild, disarming voice I hated.
Her rats gnawed at the shield Hames had thrown up.
We all exchanged a quick glance, and then power drove into the sapphire wall, Baby and Valour hurling themselves at it, lending their magic.
A wave of lethal, crackling magic erupted like an earthquake and blast into Cleodora, knocking her off her feet.
“Now!” Jakoda yelled, gesturing at Kier’s dragon. Shit, we really were retreating. The most powerful people in the city, and we couldn’t gain even an inch of ground against Cleodora.
I reached across and grabbed Kier’s arm, pushing him towards the huge dragon who soared across the ground towards us.
He was too quiet, too cold in our bond, but we didn’t have time to talk about that right now.
It incensed my rage though, until I shook with it, until I swore Valour grew in front of my eyes, bristling, snarling.
She leapt ahead of us, following Fiarron and Jakoda. Khali must have taken Cherish back to Lazankh because there was no sign of the kickass councilwoman. I scanned the trees as we ran, checking Jakoda, Ryvan, and Hames were all here.
“Mothershitter!” Ryvan squealed somewhere deeper in the woods. I was too stressed to tease him about squealing or inventing a new curse word, especially when a vivid orange glow joined the blue of Kier’s dragon. A flickering orange light.
“Fire,” I spat like a curse. “Kier, we need to run faster. Can you smother the fire with your fog?”
“I can try,” he rasped in a voice I didn’t recognise. Broken glass and shattered stone and grit. I squeezed his hand as we ran on, twigs crunching underfoot, Cleodora laughing behind us. Why was she laughing? “It’s been a while since I—”
We ground to a halt and recoiled as a rolling wave of fire cut across our path, moving almost like… mist. Ruthless gods.
“Do you like my new pet?” Cleodora called through the trees, the sudden crackling of flames nearly drowning her voice. “I should thank you for the idea, Kier.”
My stomach twisted and roiled as a figure made of fire walked out of the blaze, the skirts of her dress trailing embers, her hair like lava, eyes glowing like coals.
And I remembered, with horror so dense I choked on it, Cleodora taking too much interest in the Haar—how he was created, how he was controlled.
All so she could make this fire version of her.
But if it was anything like the Haar, it could devour a whole city in minutes.
“We need to get to Lazankh,” I breathed, pulling on Kier’s hand, sprinting blindly towards the darkest part of the forest. “Right the hell now.”
Figures moved through the trees, casting shadows on the fire, but I couldn’t check on the rest of our family with Kier trembling and cold. But if we lost someone else, if someone got hurt like Cherish…
“Give me the sword and this all ends, Zaba,” Cleodora said so sweetly that my teeth threatened to rot.
Kier whipped his head around to stare at me as we raced through the trees in a wild zigzag, dodging the spread of the fire.
“Yeah,” I panted, “she calls me Zaba. Mostly to be a bitch.”
He squeezed my hand and looked like he wanted to say something, but we both yelled when a tree crashed into our path, flames devouring its bark, eating deep into the trunk. “This forest has been here for centuries,” he said instead.
We veered right, trying to work our way back to the others, to where the vivid blue glow of Kier’s dragon waited to carry us to safety. Could she be burned if the fire reached her? I didn’t have the breath to ask.
Another deafening crash told me more trees had collapsed. If the fire or the psychotic queen didn’t kill us, we’d be crushed under falling lumber.
“There,” Kier breathed, pointing through a gap in the trees, the vivid light brighter.
I aimed right for it. Kier kept as close as possible, the frost in our bond slowly beginning to thaw.
I peered at his throat to see if the bleeding had slowed, and my foot snagged on a root, sending me to the ground.
A sharp spike of pain went up my knee, bringing tears to my eyes.
Kier pulled me back up, bracing me against his body as I panted through gritted teeth, tears rolling down my cheeks.
“Zaba—”
“I’m fine,” I rushed out, scanning the trees, my heartbeat deafening. “Keep moving.”
Easier said than done when every step sent a bolt of pain up my thigh, but I grit my teeth and forged on.
Some people used love as their fuel, or hated, or familial loyalty.
I was powered by stubbornness. It got me through the next row of trees, carefully navigating the roots and bracken this time. I hated how much I slowed us down.
“We’re close now—” Kier snarled deep in his throat when violent orange fire shot up in a solid, impenetrable curtain from the ground. The heat of it slapped my face, scalding my body even through my clothes, and I hissed, backing up.
“Hand over the sword, and I won’t kill either of you,” Cleodora proposed, far too damn close behind us.
I turned slowly, until I could see both her and the fire, not trusting either to remain where they were. Cleodora’s endgame was Kier and I both dead so we couldn’t fulfil some batshit insane prophecy; leaving us alive wasn’t in the cards. We had to think fast enough to find a way out.
Baby—
Wait. Where were Baby and Valour? They’d been right behind us and—she was smiling. The Greenheart queen was smiling.
“Where are they?” I breathed, some of Kier’s cold spilling into me, hardening my voice to pure ice.
“Just beyond the trees,” she replied, annoyingly beautiful and put-together in a gown of richest, darkest green velvet, her hair a matching updo to the fiery woman she’d created.
It reminded me so much of Celandrine that my heart twisted.
Celandrine never existed. She was a lie, a story made up to trick me.
To trick all of us. What happened to the other figureheads?
I weighed the sword in my hand, considered the words etched down its blade, the gems around the pommel, the silk around the handle.
I clenched my jaw, but forced my arm to lift, willed my hand to open.
Cleodora caught the sword out of the air and swung it in an impressive arc, the smile on her face genuine and bright.
“Go,” I hissed at Kier, whipping around and relieved when he immediately followed, racing down the thin snicket of woodland where the fire hadn’t reached.
Baby and Valour were just on the other side of the trees, she was right about that, but in what condition?
They didn’t feel hurt like when Jyrard leashed Valour, or eerily silent like when he knocked Baby into the pool, but what if she’d found a way to cut me off from those bonds like she shut off my bond to Kier with that green wave and—
I skidded back, dirt spraying up my legs as I veered right to avoid the huge branch that rained fire all around us.
Kier wrenched me to the side to save me from an errant spark as it fell, and pain rocketed up my leg as my knee twisted.
Fuck, fuck, motherfuck that hurt. My eyes stung. I panted, breathing through it.
“I can carry you,” he offered, giving the branch a wide berth and keeping an eye on the canopy as fire raced across it. My heart stuttered at the sight, the rapid spread of flames like nothing I’d seen before. But the heat of it, the smell, the noise…
I flinched when Kier squeezed my hand. “The last time I was around so much fire…”
Sympathy bathed my soul in warmth, allowing me to fight through the memories of the theatre collapsing, Zaugustus already dead when we found him.
I swallowed a tight knot and forced myself to move faster, my painful knee be damned.
I wouldn’t lose Kier like I lost Zaugustus.
We’d get out of here, get behind the walls, and wait out Cleodora and Jyrard’s army.
Except there was only enough food and fuel in Lazankh for a two month siege, and we still didn’t know how she brought down the shields in Skayan. If she wormed her way into someone’s head like she did mine, she’d know where the weak points were, and we’d be screwed.
“There,” Kier urged, running faster, his chest pumping like a bellows.
Hope surged as I saw curls of fog hit the ground where his boots slammed the dirt, slowly at first and then coming faster.
I could have kissed him when it began suffocating the fire, but we didn’t have time.
The treeline was just ahead, and on the other side of it—fuck, the army. We really didn’t think this through.
“Where’s your dragon?” I rasped, wheezing. Smoke had gathered in my lungs; I felt its heaviness, its sickly residue.
“Carrying Fiarron, Hames, and Ryvan.”
“Not Jakoda?” I demanded shrilly, fear leaping on me like a jaevar who’d been waiting to strike. Claws sank into my heart, and fangs of panic bit my chest. “Where is she?”
“We’ll find her,” Kier promised, which meant he didn’t know. She could be trapped by the fire. She could be dead.
My knee buckled when we reached the field, but Kier pulled me back up and together we stared at the back of Cleodora’s army. The group closest to us were Bluescale; they turned at the movement, realised who now stood among them.
I didn’t have Baby or Valour, but I had the stone of power under my leathers, and within seconds light blasted down my arms, pooling in my hands as I readied for a fight.
“Lazankh,” Kier breathed, his voice guttered and empty.
I took my eyes off the Bluescale warriors for a split second, allowing myself only that lapse, but it was enough for horror to drive through me like a spike.
The walls were covered in fire.