Chapter Twenty-One
Staring out of the cair window, I didn't see much of the forest below. Thoughts of Raza and his Angel theory distracted me, but I was shocked out of them by the cair lurching.
“Damn it all!” Tiernan fought with the wheel.
“What's happening?” I focused on the view.
“The wind has picked up.” He glanced in the rearview mirror at the knights. “See if you can calm it.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.” The knights in the backseat turned toward the windows, their hands lifted to direct their air beags.
I was about to assist them when the first petal hit.
The cair shuddered, and I gaped at the windshield as a black petal struck the glass and dark veins spread out from it like a web. Or an infection.
“What the hell?” I whispered.
More rank petals hit, and I spun to see a whirlwind of black swirl around our convoy.
All the cairs bucked in the ill wind, hit over and over with airborne blight.
So many petals danced around us that the sky went dark.
They covered the cair, blocking our view.
The metal panels held, but the glass went black.
Technically, glass is a liquid, and I'd never seen a clearer demonstration of the fact.
The black petals seeped through the glass and reformed on the other side as if bobbing to the surface of a lake.
“Fuck!” I summoned Light, keeping it close to my hands so I wouldn't burn Tiernan, the knights, or the cair's dash.
Petals drifted about, evading my waving fingers.
I must have looked like an idiot, fluttering my glowing hands about, but even though I had learned to target the blight, I didn't want to risk blasting Light in a flying vehicle.
More and more petals seeped through, and I finally decided to risk it. I held up my hands and focused my magic on the blight.
A whisper stopped me. “You're not my daughter.”
I gasped as Ewan Sloane's voice shivered over my skin.
Ewan had raised me, believing I was his daughter.
Until I entered Fairy and proved him wrong.
He'd been so hurt by my mother's betrayal that he had turned his anger on me.
She was dead, after all. He had no one else to blame.
Ewan was dead now too, and I thought I had forgiven him for his cruelty.
Maybe I had. But I hadn't forgotten, and the storm used it against me.
The knights cried out.
But their voices were faint. I was lost to the past.
“You're a filthy fairy. No kin of mine.”
I shuddered and covered my face, the Light going out.
“Get away from me! Traitor! You're just like your mother! You even look like them now.”
“Father, no!” someone shouted.
It took a moment for me to realize that it was Tiernan's voice, not mine.
It wasn't my pain. I would have drowned in my misery if not for him.
For Tiernan's pain, I roused myself. For him, I would tear free from my past. And as I did, I realized that the whispers weren't from my past. Like a rumor, they had taken the reality of what happened and magnified it.
Ewan had disowned me, yes. He had walked away while I screamed for him.
It was one of the worst moments of my life, and it would haunt me forever.
I could still feel the hollow ache of crying for my daddy and watching him walk away.
Ignoring me. Disowning me. But he never said those things about me being a traitor.
Body jerking, I mentally fought the heartache. The blight had found a way to attack us. Instead of taking our pain, it was intensifying it. And it had gone airborne. I saw the King in my memories and knew this was his doing. I had rejected his truce and his offer to help me. This was war.
Blinking away the fake memories, I saw reality—a petal on my arm.
I brushed it away with a glowing fingertip, and it burned into nothing.
The blight didn't retract this time. By leaving the ground, it had given up a path of retreat.
The petals were essentially kamikaze pilots.
Suicide petals. Great. The Garden of Regret was angry enough to sacrifice parts of itself to kill us.
Or was it capture? I didn't know the Garden's endgame, and that made it so much worse.
Tiernan cried out again, this time wordlessly, and I spun toward him. His hands clenched the wheel while he stared straight ahead, tears streaming down his face. Several petals spotted his skin.
“Tiernan!” I brushed my hands over him, removing the blight.
Tiernan blinked and shuddered.
“Tiernan?” I shook his arm.
He swiveled his stare to me.
“Take us down! We need to land!”
He nodded while I turned to the knights in the backseat.
After burning away their petals, I lifted my hands.
And froze. The windows were black. Petals seeped through the glass like crude oil bubbling up through cloth.
But if I blasted the glass, it would shatter, and we'd be overrun with them.
I couldn't do that, but I had to do something.
“Duck!” I said to the knights.
As they bent over, I shone my Light inside the cair, clearing the petals that were floating within before I settled a sheet of Light over each window. With the back cleared, I moved to the front. Another petal had landed on Tiernan. Muscles twitching, he met my gaze.
“I've got you, babe.” I destroyed the petal and then sealed off his window.
The windshield was next. My window, I left alone.
Instead of sealing it, I rolled it down with one hand while I held the other up, sending Light forth to clear the way before anything got in.
Petals puffed into smoke, and I moved up and out, leaning out of the window.
Once outside, I swept Light across the windshield.
But Tiernan still couldn't see. I had to remove the Light shield that protected the windshield, and then his view cleared.
He nodded crisply—there was a meadow several yards ahead.
Tiernan hit a button on the dash. “Land! Everyone make for that meadow!”
“Wait, T!” I shouted. “They can't see it.”
I sent Light back, alongside our cair and to the convoy, clearing swaths in the storm of petals as my body glowed with magic, keeping me free of the blight.
Improving with every blast, I focused the Light on the black petals, feeling my way to the darkness to target it alone.
Still, with us flying in the storm, my blasts landed short a few times.
Seeing that, Sir Frehar and Sir Galleth—the knights in our backseat—rolled down their windows.
With barely a thought, I vanished the Light that sealed their windows.
With the way opened, they sent their air beags out to help direct the petals away from the cairs.
In seconds, their magical wind cleared an area around the cairs, allowing me to focus on the blight coating the windshields.
The faces behind the cleared glass were horrified and spotted black. Lost to dark memories, the soldiers hadn't heard Tiernan's order to land. Even if they had, they weren't capable of it.
“Gods damn it!” I screamed.
You use Light for everything, Raza's voice shivered through me.
“I'm more than the Light Bringer,” I murmured. Then I shouted, “I'm a fucking fairy!”
With my shout, I summoned the Firethorns. Magical vines, covered in deadly thorns, manifested around the cair just behind ours. Normally, I would summon fire to them and use them as a weapon. This time, however, I called a vine back to me and wrapped it around the rear of our cair.
“What are you doing?” Tiernan shouted as our cair lurched.
“I'm tying them to us. Keep it as steady as you can. I'll tell you when to descend.”
Concentrating on my mór, I sent it shooting back from the cair behind us. Vines lassoed out and latched onto the cair in third position, and then the next, and the next until I made a chain of cairs tied together with sharp Fey magic.
“Now, babe! Land!” I stayed leaning out the window, keeping the fireless Firethorns strong while the knights cleared the air around us.
The vines went taut. Wind lashed my braid into my face.
I held out a hand, pouring more strength into the Firethorns.
A snapping sound made me wince, and the cairs buckled, but we were descending.
It was working, the cairs followed like tethered horses.
Inside them, soldiers screamed and wept, hands over their faces.
“Seren! Get inside now!” Tiernan shouted.
I pulled back in through the window and braced myself. Luckily, the meadow was large enough for all of us to land in a line. Still, the landing was rough. We touched ground smoothly, but the cairs behind us weren't stopping, their Air magic still activated. The ground had to stop their momentum.
One after the other, the cairs hit the ground.
I yanked on the vines like a cowgirl with her lasso, pulling their noses down.
Clods of earth exploded into the air as the cairs dug trenches, burying themselves.
With a jerk, I removed the vines attaching them to us, so Tiernan could glide our cair out of the way. Then I jumped out.
“Turn off the cairs!” I shouted at Tiernan, Sir Frehar, and Sir Galleth.
As they ran for the groaning vehicles, shuddering in the trenches like scared colts, I set my sights on the blight above us.
Without the knights blowing it back, it came swirling down toward us.
Lifting my hands, I blasted the whole of it, the delicate petals igniting to fill the sky with sparks before they vanished.
Tiernan and our two knights got the cairs stopped, and that terrible whirring of Air magic fighting the earth died.
With the convoy down, we went to the soldiers and got them out of the cairs.
They were covered in petals, but it was becoming second nature to me now—blasting Light at the blight. I cleared them in groups.
Soldier after soldier gasped and sighed as I burned away the black petals.
It wasn't like rescuing the Anthousai or even the Licho.
No one stared blankly or smiled. Once freed, they were shaky but fine.
It had been an attack, not a pruning. The King of the Garden of Doom had sent those petals to drive us mad with our pain instead of taking it.
Was it his way of telling me I'd chosen poorly?
Perhaps. How typical. He was behaving like a jilted lover, showing me what I could have had.
Next, he'd be trying to make me jealous.
Thoughts spinning into absurdity, I rallied and refocused. The soldiers needed me. I could hear Tiernan coming in my wake, checking on the men and women I freed. But I had to keep going, burning petals with Light until the last soldier lay gasping in the grass.
I fell onto my ass beside the man, sitting sprawled to stare at the blackened cairs.
I had to free them next, but I was exhausted.
Focusing the Light, as opposed to giving it free rein to burn as it wished, was taxing.
I panted as I watched black blight ooze down the side of the closest cair.
It wasn't going to give me time to catch my breath.
Stumbling a little, I got to my feet and went to the cair.
Light came to my palms, and I sent it out over the glossy black coating.
Each cair took more energy from me, but I made it through them all.
Hands shaking, I banished the last of the blight from the final cair, and instantly fell to my knees.
“Seren!” Tiernan rushed over to kneel beside me. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah, babe. Just drained. You?”
“I'm fine.” The skin around his eyes twitched.
“It showed you your father?”
Tiernan slid an arm around me and shifted me so that I leaned against him. “Yes. But it was worse than what actually happened. The blight twisted my memories.”
“Mine too.” I looked off toward the trees. There wasn't any hint of the blight there, but I could feel it gathering. “It's learning, Tiernan. It wasn't made to be a weapon, but it's becoming one.”
“To survive.” His gaze followed mine.
“Yeah. Ewan used to say that even a mouse will bite if you back it into a corner.”
“We need to get moving. Let me get you into the cair.” Tiernan stood up and helped me to my feet. With one arm around me, he shouted, “In the air! Now!”
I thought it was a lot to ask of the soldiers who were still recovering from the horror of the blight, but they did as commanded and rushed into their cairs.
They probably knew what Tiernan did—that if we didn't get out of there soon, we'd be facing another attack.
And their main defense against the blight was drained.
Tiernan settled me onto the front passenger seat and hurried around to the driver's side.
As soon as our knights were in the back, Tiernan took off.
He jerked the wheel toward him, pointing the nose of the cair up to take us higher than we'd been before.
As the ground fell away, I leaned my head against the cool glass and tried to tamp down my fear.
If it hit us again before I recovered, we'd be fucked.
There were multiple reasons why I relied heavily on Light.
The air assault made me face another. Raza was right.
Not that I thought I was stronger than him.
I had been absolutely honest with him. Strength was more than magic.
But I did think Light was nearly invincible.
The magic, not me. Still, that was nearly as foolish.
Light may be the strongest of Anu's gifts, but it was still a tool.
And like any tool, it could break. It all depended on the user.
I had nearly been taken down by a single petal.
Perhaps this was what I needed. Coming on the heels of my talk with Raza, it seemed like fate.
I'd gotten too big for my britches, as my mother used to say.
Too full of my own importance and power.
The Twilight Star had become Queen and then Light Bringer.
World-Strider. Bringer of Darkness. So many names to puff up my pride.
This knockdown was necessary. It had literally grounded me.
Lesson learned: anyone could be brought to their knees.
Suddenly, victory didn't seem so assured. Maybe that was a good thing. With blinking revelation, I saw the necessity of fear. It kept you alive.