Chapter 45 The Phoenix #2
The nightmares had been trying to show her something. Had been trying to show them both. She’d been dreaming through her mother’s eyes, her memories, Slaide’s memories. But there was something else.
It was as though the Fates were screaming something at them, but neither could hear it clearly. One thing struck Hazel for certain, though: the Fates wanted them to stay together.
The fated witch and the fallen bastard.
And here she was, hiding in the back of a wagon, headed away from him like a gods-damned fool.
No. No, she wasn’t doing this. Every fiber of her being screamed this was wrong. In a split-second decision, Hazel threw herself from the wagon. To her surprise, the cat followed.
The dust cleared, revealing a dirty, coughing Hazel kneeling in the middle of the road.
“You there!” a man’s voice called. “Are you alright?”
Hazel looked up to see a knight walking toward her. Shit. Better move. She ignored the man and scrambled to her feet.
“Hey! I’m talking to you!” the knight tried again.
Before he had time to process, Hazel was running, orange cat slung over her shoulder.
The knight detected what was going on a breath too late, and his hesitation was probably the one thing that allowed Hazel to get ahead of him.
“You! Guards, stop her!” he yelled, raising the alarm. Moments later, more voices joined the shouting and the giant bell tower bell rang out, alerting the entire castle to join the chase.
“Hazel! Gods!” Slaide called to her, sun-bleached wolf’s skull concealing his identity.
She was almost to him, and even though her problems didn’t end there, she knew it was where she needed to be.
With mere steps to go, another Raven Blade Knight stepped out from an alcove to her left. Hazel’s boots slid on the dusty cobblestone, and her feet almost swept themselves out from under her. He blocked her path to Slaide as the other knights approached from behind.
Trapped again.
Almost instantly, a dagger burst through his throat, and he slumped to the ground, clawing at the wound and gurgling as he choked on his own blood. When he fell, he revealed a pissed off Slaide, who stepped forward and retrieved his dagger from the knight’s neck before he was even dead.
He sidestepped the body and growing pool of blood, seizing Hazel by the wrist. And then they ran.
“I don’t know what you were thinking, but that was one of the most stupid—" Slaide’s words were cut off by the scene ahead. They were too late.
The road before them was blocked by a handful of knights and their commander, mounted on his pale steed.
“Well, would you look at what we’ve got here? The rebel witch and the thorn in our sides,” he deadpanned.
Slaide pulled Hazel behind him. “I’m going to need you to trust me again,” he murmured out of the corner of his mouth. “Can you do that?”
She could, couldn’t she? He’d lied—at least omitted—more than she’d ever have guessed. But each of those times had apparently been to protect her or someone else. If she wasn’t going to trust him, she should have stayed on that damn wagon.
“Yes.” She squeezed his arm as she looked straight ahead. Something told her this wasn’t going to be as simple as diving off of the balcony and trusting he wouldn’t let her fall to her death.
Slaide’s body tensed beneath her grip, the arm she was holding slipping into his pocket ever so slowly. The air shimmered, vibrating as though it was being pulled apart.
The next moments happened in the span of a breath as the world around them stood still. Hazel wondered if that was her imagination or yet another facet of Slaide’s magic.
When Slaide removed his hand from his pocket, he released a handful of black powder, shrouding them in the fine dust—and giving them a moment to escape. But to where?
Slaide apparently had an answer for that, too. Moments later the air that was still vibrating sundered, creating a rift large enough to fit them both—a gaping maw of swirling smoke and glittering stars.
“Grab them!” the commander shouted, his urgency evident in his panicked voice.
“I’d say after you,” Slaide said, voice low, “but I’m going to assume you’ve never rift-jumped?”
Hazel shook her head. Her stomach lurched prematurely.
“Right. Well, in that case, I suggest you hold on.” He grabbed her hand and shot her a warning glance when she immediately squeezed it tightly. “And you might want to close your eyes. This is much worse than flying.”
Without warning, he pulled her in tight, wrapping his muscular arms around her waist.
And the next thing Hazel knew, she was falling into an abyss.
The pair emerged from the rift in opposite fashions. Slaide stepped out of the vortex with a casual air befitting someone with a lifetime of practice under their belt.
Hazel, on the other hand, tumbled out into an ungraceful pile, scrambled to her hands and knees, and vomited.
She looked up at Slaide to find him assessing her with a discerning scowl, one brow lifted toward the heavens.
“That was…” Slaide’s words trailed off as a stupid smirk tried to grace his cocky face.
“Shove it,” Hazel grumbled. “What in the name of the gods was that? How are you even standing right now?” She continued hugging the grass. Her cat, seemingly unfazed, sauntered by as though showing off.
“That was a rift jump. It’s a tear in space and time that allows me to travel to certain places quickly—and without being seen.
As for that,” he gestured toward Hazel and her apparent obsession with the ground, “you just get used to it. Like sailors and their sea legs. Time and practice, things you unfortunately do not have the luxury of. But at least you’re not dead.
” He walked toward the cliff side jutting out beyond the trees.
As Hazel mulled that over, she came to a realization that pissed her off. “You mean to tell me you can jump to wherever you please, and yet when Agnes and my father were in grave danger we had to fly and take Philip?”
Slaide turned, looking as though he wouldn’t waste his time responding to her.
“No, smart ass. If you’d paid attention at all, you wouldn’t dare ask me something like that.
I would lay my life on the line for that horse.
You think I wanted to ride him that hard?
To run him down unfamiliar roads at night, where he could easily break a leg?
We did that for you. Trust me, if I could have jumped there through a rift I would have.
But I’d never been to Agnes’s cottage. So it wasn’t an option. ”
Hazel thought she was beginning to understand how this rift jumping thing worked, but it only made her stomach revolt more to ponder it.
She watched Slaide as he looked out over the horizon. They were atop a grassy knoll, a line of trees to their backs that thickened into dense forest. He stood at the highest point of the hill and looked out over the world, surveying the fallout.
Something had his attention, so she climbed up beside him.
A tower of heavy black smoke billowed into the sky, ash and embers falling like snow. She could hear echoes of shouts here and there, and there might have been someone screaming. But nothing indicated that what she heard was Agnes herself. There was no agony in the voices, just fear.
As she watched in horror, a column of flame shot into the air, rising above the ramparts and licking the sky. She could hear its roaring intensity even from their position. Holy gods…
The flames devoured themselves, giving way to something else entirely.
A phoenix. A phoenix made of fire.
Hazel thought she heard shouts from the awestruck spectators.
It spread its wings as wide as the courtyard itself, tilted its head back, and bellowed another jet of flame into the sky.
With a blood-curdling screech, the phoenix exploded into a ball of light, energy, and flame, shooting millions of scorching embers in a radius wider than the castle itself.
Those shouts of awe turned into screams of terror. Though she could not see from where they were, she had to assume fire was catching and beginning to spread through the courtyard and beyond.
Hazel watched in a gut-curdling mix of sadness and horror. The eruption of that phoenix could mean only one thing.
Agnes was gone.
She wanted to scream and cry, but the tears wouldn’t come with the adrenaline coursing through her body after witnessing the chaos Agnes had started. She’d sparked a flame.
A revolution.