Chapter 3
When the greenway spit us out into Sector Three, a nasty storm greeted us—typical for an area affected by Mistfall. Pelting rain, constant lightning. The second we emerged from the greenway, gusting winds slammed into each of us, blowing us off course.
I turned into the wind, beating my wings furiously to stay upright, and spent a few seconds up above the chaos, assessing it all.
Freyda raced past me, along with the other avian familiars who had accompanied their Roses.
They would catalog the damage, give us a picture of the Mistfall’s true scope.
The terrestrial familiars followed them from the ground—foxes, ermines, lynxes—leaping across chasms and between huge crags of earth that had been thrust up through the ground like a new range of mountains.
A range of moving mountains, shifting atop a burning underground sea.
And across this chaos poured the Mist—a roiling silver ocean, no longer contained by the gods’ ancient magical boundaries. In its wake, the ground split open with great yawning groans.
Cira hovered to my left, her slender face crowned with speckled brown feathers, her eyes huge and golden. “Earthquakes and thunderstorms!” she shouted. “Lovely. My favorite combination!”
Brigid, to my right, flung out one of her massive gray wings to gesture toward the watchtower in the distance. “Graystone burns!”
Graystone: an Order outpost now submerged in Mist. Only the burning watchtower was visible.
I glanced quickly in the direction of the nearby settlements—the tiny, stubborn towns of Two Bluffs and Oakvale that we planned to forcibly evacuate next week.
Even through the rain and wind and Mist, I could see that they teemed with darkness and hear their villagers’ distant screams.
Invaders. Each of my heightened senses prickled. What would it be this time? Shifters? A titan?
Kilraith?
There was no time to wonder. I whirled about in the air to face the waiting squadrons.
“Red Team, secure Oakvale; Blue Team, Two Bluffs,” I roared as the rain lashed my face. “Green Team, follow the familiars and eliminate any hostiles in the open Mist. Gold Team, you’re with me. We’ll secure Graystone.”
In an instant, they obeyed—four squadrons, sixty Roses.
I watched them tear off like arrows through the storm.
Black and gray and brown, beautiful and deadly efficient.
Red and Blue Teams, led by Danesh and an older Rose named Wenna, sped toward the villages; Green Team dove into the Mist in unison, their wings matching each other beat for beat.
Every formation was precise, every captain belting out clear commands.
I spun around and followed the rest of Gold Team toward Graystone. A quick, dark thought came flying at me: How many of us would die on this mission? How many of us would return home?
Such thoughts were not new to me. But the Warden’s words tickled the back of my mind, stoking unfamiliar flames of fear: It saddens me that you don’t trust me with the secrets you carry.
The image of her tired black eyes, the silent strength of her sword arm.
The head of Nerys rolling across bloodstained stone.
I pushed hard against the memories, refusing to let them take hold of me no matter how clever their grasping fingers. I was a soldier; I could not afford distractions.
As we approached Graystone, we dove beneath the Mist’s canopy to get a better view.
Cold raked across our feathers like a thousand icy fingers as we slipped through the silver.
Confused whispers snaked into our ears, urging us to stay, to sleep, to run, to hide.
The Mist had many things to say these days, much of it nonsense that contradicted itself.
It was as if the knowledge of its own destruction was slowly driving it insane. But we knew these tricks and flew on.
“Hold!” I ordered, switching from the common tongue to one of the coded languages we used in the Order.
My team pulled up around me, our wings beating hard to remain stationary in the howling wind. I scanned Graystone for signs of hostiles and saw nothing; there were no Roses either. Were it not for the blood-curdling screams rising up to greet us, I would have thought the place abandoned.
Then I realized with horror that the screams were coming from inside the outpost’s burning buildings.
“Fire nymphs?” Cira shouted from my left.
I hoped so. If it were fire titans—much more powerful than nymphs and far less human, much harder to reason with—we were in trouble. One squadron alone wouldn’t be enough, even with three elementals in our ranks.
“A Unit, take the eastern buildings!” I shouted. “B Unit, the western buildings! C Unit, with me to the main house! Eliminate all hostiles, and rescue all the Roses you can find. Roses priority, staff disposable!”
No one hesitated. It was protocol, and the humans we’d allowed into our ranks over the last few weeks—to support the war effort and relieve us of our more menial duties—knew it as well as we did. If necessary, we would save ourselves and each other before we would save them.
Another flutter passed through me, a chill of bad feeling.
Nerves? Memory? I kept expecting to see the Warden’s face rise up out of the darkness to stare at me in disappointment.
A wild image flashed before my eyes: the Warden standing over me, prying open my mouth with both hands and pleading, “Tell me your secrets, Mara!”
I shook myself, furious and spooked. What was wrong with me?
“Mara?” Brigid cried from my right, a rare note of uncertainty in her voice.
I nodded sharply at her, then roared, “Deploy!”
As one, we dove ten feet and then split into three groups, hurtling toward the burning buildings below.
My unit slammed into the front doors of the main house three times before they finally flew open.
Someone had barred them from the inside.
The entrance hall was deserted, but we heard screams from the corridors on either side, calling to us from deeper within the outpost.
“Caralind?” I shouted over my shoulder—one of the low-magic elementals on my team, and a good one. Earth was her affinity, not fire, but I hoped she would be able to read the signs well enough.
“Searching!” she replied, already surveying the room on quick gray wings. After a few seconds of examining the flames, she reported back breathlessly. “This fire is definitely nymph-made, not titan. But there’s something else here too. A magic I don’t recognize.”
The word Kilraith slithered through my mind with a vicious smile. I squashed it flat. I’d beaten him before; I could do it again.
“The nymphs who did this should be nearly burned out by now,” I said. “They won’t be much of a threat, but the fire will. Pair off in Ruby Formation. Each pair takes a hallway. You have your orders.”
I flew up the stairs, my partner—Caralind—racing up behind me.
The air was scorching, the splintering floor even worse.
Our feet were feathered and bore gleaming black talons, but they weren’t impervious to damage.
Flames crawled up every wall; groaning rafters crashed to the floor.
We turned a corner and recoiled, barely evading a small firestorm thundering down the hallway.
I glimpsed a grinning face within its flames.
Godsdamned nymphs. They couldn’t just let their fire be fire; they had to show off and animate it.
Each room we came to was empty, and as we plunged deeper into the outpost, the flames grew and grew. The heat felt physical, a smothering force. A burning rafter crashed down right behind us, throwing us both to the floor and showering us with sparks.
“We have to turn back!” Caralind shouted, shaking embers from her wings. “The walls are buckling!”
She was right, but I couldn’t leave yet. If the Roses in the outpost were all dead, where were the bodies? And if they had fled, who was screaming? The shrieks were turning desperate, bordering on animal.
I pushed down the hallway toward the sound, raising one of my wings to shield my face. Through the smoke I saw a door I hadn’t noticed before, split in two by a section of fallen ceiling.
“Mara, get back!” Caralind cried.
“Someone’s in here!” I shouted back at her, hoping I was right.
I peered into the room, and my heart dropped when I saw them: ten young girls, all new recruits I recognized at once.
We’d sent them to Graystone earlier that week to prepare for their trials.
And now they were huddled in the middle of the room, encircled by a ring of fire clearly controlled by the nymph standing in front of me.
Except for her hair of flames, her fiery fingertips, and her impossibly bright blue eyes, she looked human. And on her face was naked desperation.
“Don’t come any closer,” she hissed. She thrust out a hand at me, the flames dancing at her fingers coalescing into a ball of flame. “I don’t want to kill you, but if you take another step, I’ll do it.”
My own fingers, hidden under my wings, itched to draw one of the arrows from the quiver strapped around my torso.
Caralind spat out a low curse. I felt her elemental magic simmering behind me.
She could use it to shift the ground under our area of the house, throwing the nymph off-balance.
Then I could lunge and fling her against the wall so hard her fire would vanish and she’d never wake again.
“Please, help us!” screamed one of the recruits. They were drenched in sweat and tears, stained with smoke, overheated, coughing. I thought of Farrin as a child, how frightened she had been as Ivyhill had burned around her, and felt a spike of rage.
“Let them go,” I said, “and I’ll consider sparing your life.”
The nymph shook her head slowly, and with a slight turn of her wrist, the ring of fire around the recruits shrunk, roaring closer to them. The girls screamed, sobbed, clung to each other.