Chapter 53
Lightning tears the air apart – a hundred forks, bright enough to dull even the sun as they dive across the sky before plummeting down and slamming into the ground between the Torailians and us with enough force to crack stone.
My eyes squeeze shut and my entire body clenches at the brightness and the sound that follows. Thunder bellows out with such a monstrous roar that Loch drops to the ground screaming.
How anything that size could possibly be controlled seems beyond belief, but as I regain my sight from the blaze, I see it was exactly that. Controlled.
Some forks struck the Torailians directly, their screeches barely audible beneath the lingering rumble of thunder before they fell silent, once and for all, their charred bodies littering the ground.
‘Kyor?’ My heart stutters at the sight of him kneeling on the ground, but as he twists to face me, he raises his hand to show me the tiny sparks bouncing between his fingertips.
He still has magic. He didn’t drain himself.
The relief that floods me is instant. Of course he didn’t. He’s a soldier, a commander; he knows exactly how far he can stretch himself.
The lucky few Torailians who were not struck directly by lightning were blasted off their feet and are now scrambling as psychic orders are almost certainly screaming through their skulls to retreat.
Among that final few is the woman who infiltrated my mind. Who had the audacity to call Fen a beast.
With the sudden urge to take one more utterly deserving life, I take a single stride towards her, only to have my route blocked.
‘Thank the Gods, Rose.’ Caz stands in front of me, bloodied but on her own two feet. And she’s not the only one. Thessa and Ruben stride towards me. As do the rest of the group. Somehow, we’re all here. We’re all still standing.
‘How the fuck are we still alive. Again?’ Benny asks.
I don’t bother replying. None of us know. Instead, I turn to look at Kyor.
‘After this,’ I say quietly, ‘we will talk.’
He nods. Once. No defence. No excuses.
‘But right now,’ I continue, ‘I have something here I need to finish.’
Stepping away from the group, I pull at the magic simmering within me.
Magic I may not accept but will not deny.
A magic I’ve only ever called on once, to speak to the kraken.
But I reckon if it can work on a fucking great mythical beast in pain and held against its will, it shouldn’t be too hard to use on a patch of broken and beaten mortals.
I raise my voice inside my mind and turn back to the Torailians.
You don’t get me. Not today, nor any day.
My voice is resonant. Commanding. A warning that needs no vines or ice to validate it.
And there’s no doubt that my voice reaches them as fear flickers in their eyes.
I will tell you this once and only once.
If you try to hunt me down, I’ll see the rest of you dead, like your compatriots.
I gesture to the bodies littering the ground.
There will be no mercy beyond what I’m offering you now.
Remember that. I offer you mercy, but I will only extend it once.
Several heads bow as if accepting my word, but one pair of garnet eyes refuses to fall. Not that it matters. She will not get the followers to take me again, and she and I both know it.
Then, because it’s what my little brother wanted, I bend down and pick up a single arrow from the ground. The first present I have got him for longer than I care to remember.
With a confidence I’m not sure I feel, I turn back to the group. But before I move, I reach deep, not for my magic, but for something else.
Something I choose. Fen.
Do I want to know what you said to them? he asks, the joy at our minds’ reunion buzzing in my veins.
A threat I’m sure you would approve of.
As I climb onto his shoulders, Ruben sidles up beside me.
‘I penned the horses in with flames.’ He points to a ring of smoke rising in the distance. ‘Thought we might still need them, assuming we got away alive, that is.’
‘We’re cockroaches,’ I say, feeling a smile on my lips as I say the words. ‘We’re a Godsdamn roach infestation.’
As we move forward, Fen sniffs beneath me.
I’m not sure I would consider myself in that category, but I understand the sentiment.
Don’t worry, it’ll grow on you, I promise.
There’s no need to run from my would-be captors. Instead, we stride, our fearlessness evident in the backs we clearly expose to them. To let a single arrow fly would be death to them all, and they know it.
Still, as we reach the horses, I turn back to see them attending to their dead and injured. Lifting the bodies, bandaging the cuts.
All but one.
Her gaze is locked on me with a stillness that implies it has been there all along. You can run, half-breed, she calls after me, but you cannot escape what you are.
A hiss reverberates through the channels as I snarl my response back to her.
Watch me.
We ride hard, eager to put as much distance between the Torailians and us as we can. Those we left may be in no fit state to fight again, but there are almost certainly more close by, and to call them to attack would take little more than a thought in one of their minds.
And so for a while, no one speaks. Ruben’s fire pen caught all but one of the horses, and without question or conversation Caz and Thessa have doubled up, although even they are silent.
It’s not until several hours later, when there has still been no sign of pursuit, that the tension starts to release its grip on the group, although we maintain our pace.
Better safe than sorry.
As the stress fades, Kyor and Elska up their speed to scout ahead, while I remain at the back of the group, just in case I need to rip the earth up by the roots again, although it is not tree roots that steal my attention as we continue thundering along, but rather a branch. Or rather, what is on it.
A stray raven.
On impulse, I reach out to Fen. Slow down. I want to try something. Pull me back if I’m gone too long.
I have too many powers that I cannot control, and I know I’ll remain a liability if I do nothing about any of them, so before Fen can object, I deliberately thrust my awareness out towards the onyx corvid.
The first try lasts a blink of an eye. That’s it.
And then I find myself back on Fen’s back.
But a blink of an eye is not nothing, and if I can achieve that, I can achieve more.
Determined not to be defeated after my first attempt, I try again, this time focusing on the sensations that I have felt every time the slips happened before.
The way my consciousness felt as if it slid out of my body and into somewhere anew.
Somewhere I either wanted to be – like with Kay – or needed to be – like with the ring.
The aim here is to move somewhere I want to be rather than need to be, and as I’ve done that more times than the other, it shouldn’t be hard, should it?
Softening my eyes and limbs, I draw in a low breath and let my mind slip away.
The instant I open my eyes again, my view has changed, and it is more than a little disorientating to see myself still sat upon Fen’s back, with eyes white as pure ice.
I understand now why the others were so concerned.
It’s definitely not normal, but I am well past the days of believing I can ever call myself that again, and with anticipation quivering within me, I launch myself into the air.
Down below Fen lifts his head to see me soaring, dipping his chin in acknowledgement a moment later.
Enjoy your flight, Little Raven.
I let out a terrific screech in acknowledgement, making his ears flick at me.
Horrendous noise, he mutters.
This whole exercise is for safety as much as it is to test my new magic, I tell myself as I arc back towards the Torailians, wings slicing cleanly through the sky, wild and unbound, like I have slipped free of gravity’s expectations entirely.
The breeze does not buffet me or try to throw me off course.
It greets me like an old friend, lifting me higher, carrying me forward as if it knows exactly where I want to go.
Below me, the world shrinks into something distant and manageable. Problems look smaller from up here. The sky opens wide, endless and inviting, and for a fleeting moment I allow myself to simply exist within it.
No powers. No heritage. No enemies. Just speed, height, and the intoxicating freedom of flight.
I bank slightly, scanning the horizon, senses sharp even as my heart soars. There is no sign of the Torailians, but I must go further, make sure they are not regrouping to pursue us. Even that thought cannot quite smother the thrill.
This is what freedom feels like, I think.
True freedom, felt for the first time ever, and there is a possibility that I could remain a simple bird forever. Free, content in the wind.
But lonely, I realise with a sigh, picking up speed to reach my new enemies faster.
Even with my increased focus and speed, it still takes over an hour to reach the Torailians, but I’m happy when I see they’re still in the same position we left them in.
Their dead are now wrapped in white cloth. An odd choice, when so many of them are now stained red, but perhaps the ruination of the cloth does not matter, I think as I notice a funeral pyre built long and wide for all the bodies. I didn’t realise they burned their dead, like the Eastern Islanders.
Of the four dozen who attacked us, less than half survived, and as I swoop low, I see them in small clumps of twos and threes, consoling each other.
Guilt strikes hard. They’ve lost friends.
Family. Loved ones. I know that grief. The pain of a life ended too soon, too cruelly.
If any one of us had not made it today, my heart would have torn into a thousand pieces.
Well, maybe not if it was Stide or Thessa – unless my sadness was for Caz – but the others?
The thought alone is unbearable. And the Torailians have lost so many at our hands.
I push the guilt down. They attacked us. We were just defending ourselves.