Chapter 56
JO
There’s no escaping the inevitable.
All we can do is prepare.
The biggest concern is Wren taking command of our army.
Sam doesn’t believe Wren is strong enough to control our men as well as his own, but we want to prepare for any scenario.
While small doses of mangi stones don’t seem to affect his ability, we’re hoping enough of it can at least deter him.
Especially if he’s weakened. We amass as much of it as we can, giving it to the soldiers who will be on the front lines.
There’s little we can do against the trolls other than bear the brunt of their demolition.
The only chance we have to stop them is by taking them out by the head.
Not their heads, but the one that controls them, and I’m not sure exactly who that is.
Messer said they were Kai’s doing, but after realizing he double-crossed us, there’s no telling what’s true and what’s not.
The city as a whole offers protection we’d otherwise be without on a battlefield.
We have the element of surprise, but it is also packed with people, so we spend all night getting as many residents we can to evacuate.
The rest we usher inside the palace walls.
It’s the most fortified area of the city, but as we deposit the smallest of babies within its halls, I’m afraid it won’t be good enough.
I pray it is though, with Beau and Hallis guarding the doors.
Height is our best advantage.
It gives us a clear view of their advance as the morning sun begins its ascent.
We watch as they set their catapults. I wish I could feel the sun’s warmth, but the overcast sky prevents it.
I look up at the sky, heart stuttering when I find it empty of a black eyun.
It hurts to breathe as I search anyway. I can’t help it.
Desperate to see his familiar figure cutting through the winds.
Acker’s arms offer little warmth, but I cling to them anyway. He sways us side to side, keeping our muscles loose. Every so often he’ll tuck his nose into the crook of my neck, breathing in deep.
His breath fans across my skin when he speaks. “What are the odds your mother offs me in the middle of battle and tries to claim it was enemy fire?”
I know he’s trying to distract me, but I play along. “Sixty-Forty.”
“Here I was thinking fifty-fifty was being conservative.”
I smile, but it’s momentary. “She’ll come around.”
He hums. “Like my mother will?” he asks.
“Uh, no. That woman has hated me since I was twelve,” I say, thinking of the day I moved next to her on Urchin row. “You know what’s strange? I don’t remember her ever showing up in Alaha. It was like, one day she was there, and people acted as though she was always around.”
“Probably Wren warping people’s minds,” he says.
“Maybe.”
Then he spins me in his arms, tucking me close to his front as he looks down at me. “So we agree, then? No in-laws at our wedding?”
“Acker,” I say, half in exasperation and half in warning.
He continues. “I mean, we can both agree our fathers are out of the question.”
I slow our swaying. “I do have a father.” His expression becomes serious as I tell him. “Sam is the man who raised me. Until I was seven, anyway.”
“Sam?” he asks, perplexed. “The general? He’s not who I remembered your father to be when we were children.”
“My mother would bring me to visit with your family during the summers, but also in part to allow Osiris, my real father, to see me. Sam, or Leo as you know him, would stay in Maile.”
“Did Sam know that you weren’t…”
“Yes,” I say, answering the rest of his unspoken question. “He was aware of my mother’s mistakes when it came to her Match. It’s why she despises the Bond so much. She feels like it strips people of their minds.”
He doesn’t comment on that last remark. Instead, he resumes our swaying. “Are they together now?” he asks. “Your mother and Sam?”
“They don’t say. Before my mother killed Osiris, Edmond agreed to extract his magic for her in exchange for sparing his life, knowing she was planning to kill him next. She gave Osiris’s magic to Sam in hopes the Bond would transfer along with the magic.”
“It didn’t work?” he asks.
I shake my head. “He gained Osiris’s magic, as well as the stolen magic of others, but not the Bond. He changed his identity so no one would question how he came upon his newly acquired abilities.”
“So, your father then,” he says, a smile pulling at his lips. “He’s invited to the wedding.”
I roll my eyes. “Can we talk about this another day?” If we’re still alive.
His eyes rove over my features, soft as they were on the boat when I watched him fall in love with me as I was doing the same in return. “I just want to hear you say yes,” he says, a wry smile on his lips.
The dream of my memory has me reaching up to touch the piece of gold in his nose. “I suppose … if even nomads get married–”
Fredrich cuts us off. “It’s begun.”
We spin in place to look out toward the front line just as a boulder smashes into the city wall.
It takes a moment for the sound to meet us where we stand on top of the roof of a furniture repair store.
The second is already flying through the air, scoring the land as it comes up short. In the distance, they begin to reload.
“Why don’t they send the trolls first?” Zion asks.
“You said they were difficult to keep in line, so maybe they’re not being cooperative,” I say.
Acker isn’t so sure. “Or maybe they’re waiting for an opportune moment.”
“What the hell is that?” Zion asks, pointing the sword in his hand at the objects moving toward Wren’s army.
“Those,” I say with a small smile. “Are rabbits.”
And they haven’t been fed since they left Maile, so they’re very, very hungry.
Even from this great of a distance, it’s obvious the men on the front lines don’t know what to make of the creatures scampering toward them …
at first. Then they begin to thrash, swinging their weapons and falling out of formation as they run from the animals.
Little by little, the men begin to meet their fate, dropping to their slow and painful deaths one at a time.
“What the fuck,” Fredrich says, uncharacteristically troubled. “They’re poisonous?”
“Venomous,” I correct. “And, yes. Duh.”
His furrowed brow and creased eyes turn on me. “You didn’t think to tell me?”
“They’re not a threat as long as they’re fed.” I shrug, turning back to the sight beyond the city walls.
“Dear gods,” he mutters. “I almost died the night I snuck into your room.”
“Which time?” I ask.
Acker throws up a hand. “Don’t answer that. I don’t care to know.”
Zion looks between the three of us. “Me neither,” he says.
The rabbits hinder the army’s efforts to breach the walls, and it takes nearly half a day for them to make progress.
It starts as a break just wide enough for a person to fit through.
Then another, a tad bigger, as three and four soldiers at a time push through.
The siege continues to swell, no longer a trickle of force, but a tsunami.
By the third break, my mother makes the call.
We can’t hear it from where we stand. She’s on the battlement along the top of the wall of the front lines. When I insisted I fight alongside her, she refused. The steel in her voice contradicted the water in her eyes as she stood firm on her reasoning.
Mothers and daughters aren’t meant to experience battle together.
We watch as a ripple of archers knock their arrows, getting into position.
They release in the same wave, arrows cutting through the air with a collective whizz of sound.
It’s a sight to see as they arc into the sky, only to fall back toward the sea of men with stunning accuracy. They drop like flies.
But not nearly enough. It does about the same amount of damage as scooping a spoon of water out of a basin in a bid to empty it.
My mother calls for another round of ammo, and the cycle carries on well into the afternoon.
The goal was never to keep them back forever, but to slow their progression in hopes that Wren wouldn’t be far behind.
But as his men encircle the city from the east, there’s yet to be a sighting.
More and more men begin to flood through the wall and into the streets.
Our men on the ground work to cut them down.
The siege at the city’s wall becomes hundreds and hundreds of men deep and my mother deploys the last effort.
Tar spills down the wall and over the men below.
Their armor and uniforms are a mix of Roison and Alaha colors, and I can’t help but think of the people I lived and trained with over the span of my life.
Many of them down there as someone ignites a flame and sends a blaze of fire across the siege.
Somehow, out of all the battles I faced against the Strou, this makes me the sickest. Their screams can be heard from where we stand as their limbs flail in futile protest. Bile burns up my throat.
When fighting the Strou, I almost didn’t find them human. With their scarred skin and faces, they more closely resembled monsters. Their violence felt inhuman. But now I understand with horrifying fear; we’re all just humans, and all equally capable of cruel and depraved things. Myself included.
Acker reaches for me, but I step out of his hold. I can’t hide from this any more than he can.
“Come on,” Fredrich says under his breath. “Where is he?”
The front line collapses, and we watch as my mother issues the call for retreat.
Like a rock jutting from a riverbank, the tide of people separate around her.
Their attempt to avoid her ability is in vain as she siphons the air straight from their lungs.
I also realize how lenient she was with Acker, because the men surrounding her die almost instantly.
They crumble to the ground, their counterparts running over their bodies to get away.
I keep my eyes on her, silently willing her to concede.
Then Sam appears like an apparition next to her.
And I can breathe again as I watch him speak to her the same way he does to me when I’m being stubborn during battle.
Posture firm, shoulders tense. Finally, she retreats.
Sam covers her back as she crosses the battlement and she’s within distance of a neighboring roof.
Metal against metal sounds from the streets below. The fight has well and truly overrun the city as archers continue to pick off anyone with yellow or blue insignias on their uniforms. The melee scrambles onto the rooftops as the enemy tries to eliminate their greatest threat–our archers.
The fight reaches us as three Roison soldiers leap from rooftop to rooftop, descending on our location.
Zion cuts them down with quick work of his sword.
It takes less than four moves before he’s kicking them all off the side of the building, and I look toward Acker with raised eyebrows.
His answering smile is brief, because another bout of soldiers are making their way up to our roof.
And the battle continues until there is no longer a front line at all, and only mayhem drowns the city. We maintain our position to keep an eye out for Wren or Kai. All the while Zion and Acker keep the fight from swamping our roof.
That is until the fight takes a turn for the absolute worst.
A thundering quake shakes the air, rattling the windows of the city’s buildings, and it’s enough for the entirety of the battle to go still.
Another booming sounds, and we turn our attention to the west, at the giants running straight for us.
One of them swings a flail, and each hit of the spiked ball into the side of a building brings forth a new quake.
“Holy shit,” Fredrich murmurs. He pulls his blade from the chest of a soldier, pushing the body over the ledge as he keeps his sights on the incoming giant.
Acker readies his sword. “We stay together,” he says, reiterating the plan.
Head peeking over the tallest of buildings in the city, the giant swoops his hand over the archers stationed there, squeezing them in his fist. Blood and guts ooze from his hand. And when he opens his palm, he holds out his tongue and licks the human residue from his skin.
I cover my mouth to stop the bile threatening to come up.