20. Flood Risk Management #2
“Ready to go!” Ciarán repeated. “We’re leaving now!”
Tiernan limped out from the hall behind Orla, dragging Fana by her wrist as she struggled with her thick travel cloak.
“Is it him? Already?” Tiernan asked. Ciarán looked towards Una, who had taken up guard by the main doors with her hackles raised. Tiernan’s face clouded, and he tugged Fana towards the stairs. “We’ll meet you up there.”
Ciarán scooped Jonquil from the bottom step and pressed her into Fana’s arms before turning to Orla.
“Grab your things. Help Wren gather hers, and follow Tiernan to the top floor.”
Orla nodded and took my arm to lead me back upstairs.
“Ciarán?” I asked, craning around to watch him. His hands glowed orange with magick, and the dust at his feet gathered and grew into two Nightmares.
“I’ve got the gate,” he said, gesturing for his Nightmares to attend the copper plate in the belly of the keep. “Go with Lady Quill.”
“Gate? What gate?” Orla pressed as she guided me back up the stairs after Tiernan and Fana. “Not the reservoir gate, right?”
“I don’t know.” My slurred speech helped sell the lie, and Orla sighed in frustration as we ducked down the second floor hall towards my room to grab mine and Ciarán’s packs.
I found my mended hoodie where I’d left it and pulled it over my head, but I saw Orla eyeing my arm bandages as I did.
“You said Ferrin was coming,” she said, helping me shove my few belongings into my pack. “How do you know?”
I blinked, trying to force my faculties back to one hundred percent.
“Una,” I explained.
“Una could be growling at anything. Why are you all so sure it’s Ferrin?”
I shook my head, not trusting my mouth enough to speak out loud.
“Hurry! Orla, your pack!” Iseult hissed at us from the hall and shook Orla’s bag at her.
Orla screwed her face up in frustration. “Why does everyone seem to know what’s happening except me?”
Iseult shoved Orla’s things into her arms and grabbed her hand to lead us back down the hall towards the open air walkway.
“It’s your uncle,” Iseult said. “He found us.”
“Yes, so I’ve heard, apparently,” Orla hissed.
“Where’s Ciarán?” I asked. “He’s supposed to come too.”
“Playing the hero, now let’s go!” She pulled Orla towards the stairs.
“What do you mean ‘playing the hero’?” I stopped in the corridor.
“I mean he’s going to help give us a chance to escape, so come on!”
I shoved past them to run to the open walkway. I hit the barrier with so much force that Orla had to grab ahold of my hood to make sure I didn’t fall over the edge and into the figures gathering in the mossy yard below.
Moonlight glinted off Ferrin’s coiffed hair. Foot soldiers gathered behind him, but I couldn’t tell if they were real or Nightmares.
And standing just beneath us, orange bo staff in hand, Ciarán stood between Ferrin’s forces and the keep.
“He’ll be fine as long as he has Una. Wren, don’t—” Iseult snapped, but I was already whipping around and barreling down the hall to the steps.
“Get Orla out!” I yelled back. Orla, in return, yelled my name after me, but I knew Iseult would make sure she got to safety.
And I wouldn’t leave without Ciarán.
Una still stood guard in front of the main door, and I shoved past her onto the top step of the keep.
“You’re supposed to be on your way out,” Ciarán said through our tether. He stood at the bottom of the steps with his hand outstretched, as if that might keep me back.
“This wasn’t part of the plan!” I didn’t have the wherewithal to reply mentally.
Ferrin and his squadron were more intimidating here at ground level, but the concussion dulled my fear and filled me with false confidence. The glowing weapons of green cut through the steam rising from the vents, and Ferrin grinned at me through the multi-colored fog.
“We won’t hurt you Wren.” A familiar voice cut through the fog and made the breath catch in my throat. “Go with him, and Ferrin won’t hurt us either.”
I knew that voice, concussion or no, and it was absolutely impossible for it to be here.
Baritone and clipped, yet somehow still casual and likable—I’d listened to that voice hold an audience’s attention with facts about polar wander and paleomagnetism.
I found him in the fog, and maybe my concussion was worse than I realized, because the tall, willowy man standing in the moss couldn’t be in Skalterra. When I’d last seen him—the only time I’d seen him—my father hadn’t even known what “Skalterra” meant.
Yet there he was.
My father who had abandoned me. Who had rejected me. Who hated me for having the audacity to have been born.
My father who was standing with Ferrin and his men.
“Stand back, Wren,” Ciarán warned. “It’s a trick. Get out with the others.”
“It’s not a trick,” a young woman intoned.
She stood near my father with thick honey-colored hair braided over her shoulder.
I hadn’t seen her since graduation, when she and her friends had tricked me into spending a night in the forest alone.
“Either she complies, or we die. There is nothing tricky about that.”
She shouldn’t be here either.
“Linsey,” I breathed. “Linsey, no…”
She had been a terrible friend, but if Ferrin threatened her, I’d have to comply.
“You don’t have many connections back home,” Ferrin sang through the steam.
“It took a little bit of research, but it wasn’t too difficult to find the name of your father or that of your closest friend.
I thought it might be fun for both of us to summon them.
You get to catch up with your Keldorian pals, and I get to ensure your cooperation. ”
They were Nightmares. That made more sense. I should’ve realized that immediately. This damn concussion.
“Get upstairs now,” Ciarán growled through our link. “My Nightmares are opening the reservoir gate. If you don’t leave, you’ll be caught in the flood.”
“And what about you?” I hissed back.
“I’m making sure Ferrin stays down here to drown.”
“You’ll drown too, idiot!”
Ciarán’s free hand played with the jar of ashes at his belt and said out loud, “Run, Wren.”
“Oh, no, the Saergrim will stay right there,” Ferrin called out. “Unless she wants her father and friend turned into rotsbane, of course.”
Ciarán’s head swiveled between the two Nightmares. He’d seen my father in his last day as Liam. He would remember him.
Except Maxwell Brenton, acclaimed geophysicist, hadn’t exactly left a good impression.
“Do it,” Ciarán said.
“No!” I staggered down the steps to pull on Ciarán’s cloak.
I hated my father, and I hated Linsey, but I didn’t want either one to become a rotsbane. I didn’t want them to die.
“Then stop playing and come back to the Rift with us,” Ferrin called.
“They want you as collateral to use against your grandmother,” Ciarán murmured, a protective arm still keeping me back.
“I’m concussed, not stupid,” I snapped.
“I have to say, I’m shocked. Did you really think you’d be safe from me here of all places, Grimguard?” Ferrin taunted. “Surely you aren’t so eager to die where your parents did.”
He placed a hand over his vest, and I remembered the twisted scar Ferrin had sustained in his fight against his sister and Ciarán’s parents.
A mighty creak groaned inside the keep, and muddy water surged around my ankles, cascading down the steps around us. Neither Ciarán nor Ferrin seemed to notice. I tugged on Ciarán’s cloak, watching the water spill over my boots as more creaking echoed behind us.
“Would you like to hear how they died?” Ferrin called. “I made sure to draw it out. They were the last Grimguards. I wasn’t sure when I’d have the honor again, so I made sure it lasted.”
“Stop it.” The words quaked as Ciarán said them.
“Your mother died first,” he said. “You look like her. Not that I knew her long, but that image of her on the floor, begging for my blade to put her out of her misery? It’s stuck with me.”
“I said stop it!”
Ciarán ripped free of my grip on his cloak and flew at Ferrin. Nightmares bearing weapons of orange rose in his wake and joined him in his charge.
Ferrin grinned and held up a fist.
A spasm rocked Maxwell and Linsey, and a sudden surge of magick sparked in the air. They doubled over as their bones snapped and splintered.
“No!” I couldn’t let them turn into rotsbane. “Ferrin! Stop! I’ll go—I’ll—”
Ciarán’s staff sharpened into a javelin that struck Maxwell in the chest. My father, still human, crumbled to dust.
But Linsey—
Her shriek was poison in my stomach, turning my limbs heavy and churning what was left of my last meal. I tried to summon a weapon, any weapon, even a flail, but my brain was sludge.
An earth-shattering crack rang out, and water thundered through the keep behind us as Ciarán’s Nightmares finally opened the dam.
Ferrin shouted for his squadron to retreat to high ground, and Ciarán doubled back to barrel into me.
Magick flickered feebly in my hands, and Linsey’s eyes met mine. They widened in recognition, her lips started to form my name, and then she burst from her skin into an overgrown mess of claw and shadow as the lake surged forward and swallowed us.