Chapter 23
FROENZ LEAPT TO his feet. The head of the axe in his hand was bigger than the one on his neck.
A contingent of dwarfs raced into formation, creating three lines before their lord, one of shields, one of spears, and one of axes.
The rest set up along the perimeter, merging in front of the doors, behind Endreas.
Fairies swirled up, up, up and away, fleeing via some unseen cracks or vents perhaps.
The brownies, too, vanished. Imps darted frantically back and forth between the columns.
Goblins hunkered down behind the dwarfs, as if preparing to take bets on the fight to come.
She should’ve been looking for a way to take advantage of the situation, yet she couldn’t quite pull her attention away from Endreas.
His fitted armor at first appeared to be leather, but the scales were black and iridescent.
Color rippled over their surface as he moved.
From the stiff shoulder pauldrons shadows wafted like a torn cloak fluttering behind him.
His hair was drawn back, fixed in elaborate plaits, giving his cheekbones a deadly edge.
Both of his swords remained at his sides, sheaths fixed to the cuisses constructed of the same oil-like scales.
He didn’t look at her. His black eyes remained fixed on Froenz.
Python slithered back, up to the dais, next to the lord’s throne.
“How dare you enter my hall?” Froenz bellowed.
“Your hall?” Endreas glanced around at the dwarfs surrounding him, a smirk playing over his lips. “Everything in the Realms belongs to the King. Are you the King, dwarf?”
“You should not be able to enter this place,” Froenz said, almost as if to himself.
Endreas’s smirk grew into a smile, but it quickly wilted as his gaze moved away from Froenz and found Python. “Oracle.”
Python gripped the back of the king’s throne. “What are you waiting for?” he growled to Froenz. “Kill him!”
“Yes, kill me,” Endreas said, drifting over to one of the flanking dwarfs, who was glaring bloody murder up at him.
Endreas removed his glove and ran his finger down the curve of the dwarf’s axe blade, drawing blood.
“Ouch,” he said, licking the blood from his skin.
For a split second, his gaze flicked to meet Magda’s.
Finally.
But then he was tugging his glove back on and returning to the center of the hall. With Elven flourish, although she once would’ve called it Pixie flourish, he drew his swords, spinning, whipping tendrils of shadow around him.
Sweat could be heard dripping onto the polished floors as the dwarfs stood poised at the ready, waiting.
“Now . . . lord dwarf, you, the oracle, her, and that,”—he pointed his sword from Magda to Kaelan—“will return with me and submit to the King’s justice.”
“My lord—” Python growled.
“And the others?” Froenz asked. “My people?”
“If you come peacefully, we will allow the women and children to leave.”
“And if I refuse?” Froenz asked in the same granite voice.
Endreas slid his swords back into their sheaths.
“I have a friend who has been waiting to exact her own kind of justice for what you’ve done to her children.”
A thunderous thud accompanied the hall’s quaking. Crystal globes fell and shattered around them. Cracks appeared in the ceiling. Faces turned upwards, mouths agape.
Magda drew back her knives and crouched, slapping Kaelan’s cheek. “Wake up.”
His eyes fluttered. He rolled onto his back as another deafening boom sounded from above. The hall shook with increasing violence.
And then a distant shrieking roar echoed through the earth and into the hall, filling Magda’s heart with claws of ice.
The troll in the back blubbered, “Dragon.” The word echoed softly through the hall.
And then a mass exodus began, goblins and imps and the troll shoving through the line of dwarfs to open the hall’s doors.
Endreas stood at the center of the hall, arms folded, face serene as the hordes streamed past him. “What say you, dwarf?”
Froenz strode down the steps of his dais, his men parting before him and closing again behind him.
“This is my hall!”
He lifted his axe and let out a war cry to match the roar of the dragon above. The lines of dwarf warriors surged forward.
Endreas spun. A black whirlwind formed around him, growing and growing, spinning up to the ceiling. Shadows peeled away from the cyclone and resolved into Elven warriors, who met the dwarfs’ axes with their swords as the shadows sloughed away from their blades like phantom sheaths.
“Damn it,” Magda growled as she was buffeted by the dwarfs pushing by her to reach the Elves. She grasped Kaelan’s arm and attempted to heave him up, but she was too weak to carry him.
Another boom from above splintered a nearby pillar. She threw herself over Kaelan. Hunks of stone crashed and shattered around them. Fragments pelted her, cutting her arms. Dust choked the air.
She hooked her arms under his shoulders, intending to drag him towards the doors. But they were at the far end of the hall and the battle barred the way. She let Kaelan slump to the floor again, waving the dust away, searching for another exit. Surely Froenz didn’t enter through the main doors.
She crouched, covering Kaelan again as an Elf almost backed into her, and a dwarf’s axe thunked into the stone a few inches from her knee.
Another Elf appeared, a woman, she grabbed the dwarf’s head by the hair and yanked it back, slitting his throat.
Blood poured in a crimson gush across the dwarf’s chest.
The Elf’s deep green eyes lingered on Magda quizzically for a moment before she was drawn away by the battle.
Magda locked her arms around Kaelan’s chest again. “There has to be a way out of here.”
“I believe I can help you with that.”
From his perch on her shoulder, Hero hissed.
Near Kaelan’s knee a little man had appeared wearing a brown silk suit and a pert expression on his walnut face.
“Kirk,” she spat. “You traitorous little—” She grabbed for him, but he disappeared and reappeared on Kaelan’s other side.
“I’ve been sent to assist you,” he said imperiously.
“Just like you assisted me with the Enneahedron? Where is it?”
“It is quite safe.” He winced and grimaced as another dwarf fell, dead, next to him. “But I do believe we should go.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you. I should murder you! You—”
A splintering crack, like lightning, interrupted her.
A huge chunk of ceiling crashed. Dwarfs and Elves fled, but not all of them made it clear.
A black scaled snout that made Anqa’s beak look like a sweet little canary’s thrust through the hole.
A snort of smoke shot from the dragon’s slitted nostrils, filling the hall with sulfur.
“Oh shit,” Magda muttered.
“No more time to argue,” Kirk said. “Hold on.” He placed his hands on Kaelan’s leg.
A jet of violet-white flame funneled down through the hole.
Wrenching, piercing cries filled the hall. A sound she knew too well—the screams of blood spilling.
A wolf’s fangs bore down on her. Two ice blue eyes trembled before her. A low growl rippled out of the beast’s throat. Hero darted down her shirt, balling at the small of her back, digging his claws into her skin.
“Thank you, Kirk,” Python said as he stepped forward.
The brownie bowed. “Yes, Master.”
Python placed a hand on the wolf’s head, which came up to the oracle’s shoulder. Two slate-gray wings stretched from the wolf’s back . . . not a wolf after all.
“Semargl,” she said, hugging Kaelan’s shoulders tight. He groaned softly, but didn’t wake. “I thought they were extinct.”
Python ran his hand over the top of the semargl’s head. “If the Elf King had his way, all of the wolf breed would be.”
Kirk had magically transported them to a rough-hewn stone chamber.
Behind Python and the wolf-semargl, a yawning opening as big as a double garage showed the star-soaked sky beyond.
On either wall, torches guttered against the salty ocean breeze.
The crash of water breaking against rock churned somewhere nearby.
Just when she was about to speak, the call of the dragon pierced the night, echoing from a distance.
She swallowed hard, resisting the urge to skewer Python with her dragon blades. “You planned this, didn’t you?”
“No,” Python said, smiling sadly. “I do not make the future, I only see it.”
She laid Kaelan’s head gently down on the stone floor and rose. The semargl’s wings flexed again, his head and ears lowering, his icy eyes never leaving her.
Python stroked the creature’s head. “You’ll have to forgive my friend. He does not trust Elves.”
“All this time, you knew I would come back here?”
“No,” he said. “I only hoped you would. So many visions I’ve had, so many paths that could be, but you are our best chance, our only chance.”
“Chance for what?”
“To bring an end to the Elf King’s tyranny.”
“You mean for him to bring an end to it,” she said, gesturing to Kaelan. “Is he really who you say? An . . .”—her jaw locked up for a second—“Elf Prince?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Then why did you say—?”
“Because I foresaw that you would find him and bring him forward. And that is just what you did.”
“I didn’t bring him forward. We were accosted and dragged into Froenz’s hall. And where is the Enneahedron?”
“Here.” Python took it from his pocket and held it out to her.
She hesitated, nonplussed by his willingness to hand it over. Charily, she took it from him. Relief and a fresh influx of much-needed strength passed into her from the smooth stone.
“You will take the Prince and become Radiant, correct?” Python asked.
“Is that why you lured me to this island?” she said.
Python’s expression was impossible to read. “I had to bring you before Froenz and the others.”
“The other dwarfs?”
“There were more eyes in that hall than you realize.”
“Why?”
“I had to convince them to support you.”
“Support me? Froenz was going to kill me.”
“I would’ve persuaded him otherwise,” he said. “It is in their interests to join with the Crown, as much as they hate Elves.”
She stuffed the Enneahedron deep into her front pocket. “I am not an Elf.”
“You are Ljósálfr—light elf,” he said.
She shook her head, digging her hands into her hair, grinding her teeth. “What do you want from me?”
“To become Radiant and then take the Crown and then destroy the Elf King,” he said as if it were all so simple and obvious.
“Why don’t you kill the King?” she asked through her teeth.
“The gods have chosen the Elves to rule Alfheim. This cannot be changed. Your strength is our strength. That is what Froenz and so many others in the Resistance choose to forget. If we wiped out all of the Elves, Alfheim would die, we would all die. But if he”—he nodded down to Kaelan—“is the Prince foretold, then you and he can change this world for the better. So all those displaced and exiled can return to their rightful homes. I will do what I can to show the Resistance that Ljósálfar are different from the dark elves that rule here. They will not believe at first. They have been hounded, hunted, persecuted, and tortured.”
The semargl whined and nosed Python’s hip. He stroked its head again. “This must be done, Magdalena.”
“You want me to start a war,” she said.
“War has already started,” he said, gold eyes flashing.
“Too long your kind has turned your backs on the plight of the other races, ignored the crimes of the King. That has to change. And it will. Yet, my visions . . . they are so dark now. I cannot see what is to come, but I know that you are crucial to this—”
“Then why did you allow Lavana to find me? To nearly kill me?”
“I sent Kirk to rescue you, didn’t I?” he said.
“You survived. Your warrior survived. But the Crown must not know about the Resistance. If I had not helped Lavana, she would’ve brought the Crown’s warriors.
She would’ve brought attention to those in hiding on the other side.
If the Crown finds out that you are colluding with the Resistance, she will kill you.
She and the King are already in conference.
The King wants her to turn over all the refugees, and to turn back any others who attempt to enter her Lands. ”
“You expect me to believe that the Crown is in collusion with the Throne? That’s insane. Why would she—?”
“To prevent war,” he said, “and . . . I am told . . . to save her own life.”
“But—”
“We need this war, Magda,” Python cut in. “Any deal made with the King will result in more of the same. There cannot be peace. The Throne must yield to the Crown and your kind—you—must seize control of the Realms and return it to those of us to whom it rightfully belongs.”
The semargl’s wings shot up, buffeting the air, her fangs snapped together. Her growl filled the room. Python stumbled back.
Knives out, Magda spun.
Endreas smiled. “What interesting company you keep, Magpie.”