21. Maxim
Chapter Twenty-One
Maxim
Lava splashes up around my legs as I race across the sand dunes.
I’m barely conscious of the direction I’m heading, only that I’m sprinting away from Thyra and Miriam and my Mothers.
My hand burns where I touched the dark blood that rose from Thyra’s fist.
A disconcerting, tingling scorch. A power that has unsettled me.
As I hit the base of the mountains standing at Ember’s border, I turn sharply east, wary of taking my fire too far west and hitting the channel where Antony’s mother sleeps.
Overhead, the snowstorm has stopped, but the frost is thick on the ground and finally…finally…the ice calms my power, neutralizing the heat on my legs, the frosty air wafting up across my chest, cooling my face.
Beads of sweat roll down my temples and clump my hair.
I drop to my knees at the edge of the mountain peak to the left of the breach where Hadrian focused his worst attack.
Pure devastation lies below me along the plains. Then, far into the distance in the north, I make out the shapes of the first eagles rising into the air.
They’d better not fucking fly south. I have no mercy for Iron Fae today.
Movement below me snaps my attention to the rubble of Ember Towers near the one from which I dragged Kaiba.
Stellen and his wolf have reached the border already.
Damn, but that wolf can move fast, carrying Stellen at speeds that rival my golden serpent. I’m certain the beast must have some wild wolf in her. Rare strength.
More surprising is that Stellen didn’t change his mind and take Thyra back, after all.
My brow furrows when he dismounts from his wolf instead of riding east toward the charcoal tower I told him he could use.
He crouches to the ground, one hand hovering above the melting ice, his head tilted sharply to the left.
Then he points.
His wolf sprints to the right, racing toward the rubble that remains of the next tower over. Stopping at the highest mound of snow, she begins furiously digging.
Stellen runs behind her, his feet leaving the air as he leaps over the mound, gaining air before he crashes down on the nearby block of stone keeping the snow constrained. His punch cracks the rubble into two, sending frost flying and broken stones tumbling across the ground.
What the actual…?
I’m running before I know it, my bare feet crunching on the sharp icicles now forming down the side of the mountain.
I leap from the next jutting outcrop at the side of the ridge and land at a crouch a hundred feet below. Now at ground level, I break into a run.
I’m only two hundred paces from Stellen and closing quickly, but he doesn’t give any indication he’s concerned about my approach, continuing to dislodge rubble where he stands.
“Stellen.” I snarl. “What are you—?”
“Listen,” he says, his power compelling me to hear beyond my own pounding heart.
I drag myself to a stop.
A very faint thumping sound drives me into another crouch. As hard as I can, I strain my ears to hear the soft thuds coming from the ground.
Thump. Thump-thump.
Nearby, the wolf has hit solid ice, her claws scrabbling against the hard surface. The white air wafting off the snow brings the bite of powerful frost.
“Are there chambers dug into the earth beneath these towers?” Stellen asks.
I shake my head. “Not to my knowledge.”
His unearthly eyes send a chill down my spine as his head tilts sharply again. “I count at least ten heartbeats.”
“You can hear heartbeats?”
He blinks at me. Then indicates his left ear, jabbing at the pointed top. “I’m a fucking Lethian. In case you missed it.”
I’m more surprised by his anger than his sarcasm. He was anything but cold and strategic when he was holding Thyra, but I thought that was an anomaly. Now, I’m unsettled by how much feeling he’s portraying.
Something’s changed.
Not my biggest priority right now.
“Ten heartbeats here,” he says. “Twelve more over there. Still more in that direction. The beats are slow. Whoever they are, they’re running out of air. Assuming Iron Fae weren’t tunneling beneath your towers, your warriors must be trapped within the ground somehow.”
They’re alive.
Countless lives to be saved.
I don’t know how they’ve ended up in the earth, but I’m not about to waste another second asking questions.
“Stand aside, wolf,” I call to the white beast, barely controlling my flames long enough for her to leap clear before fire blasts from my hands.
The wolf quickly backs away and circles behind me, a disconcerting path since I can’t keep her in my sights.
My focus has to be on melting the ice and freeing the fae trapped beneath it.
“Easy, Nara,” Stellen calls to the wolf, inclining his head toward the next tower. “Let’s mark the spots so Maxim knows where to burn.”
He sweeps to the side, his bloodied robes dragging in the snow, the wolf on his heels as he hurries to the next tower. Once there, the wolf digs furiously while Stellen smashes through stone, making it clear where I need to melt the snow.
I focus first on the spot in front of me.
The ice covering the rubble melts in a rush as my flames hit it, sending water streaming around my legs. I’m barely clothed at this point, having burned through my pants so I’m wearing only a tattered covering across my pelvis.
I keep up my flames until I can make out the inner base of the tower, clearing it completely of frost.
Another muffled sound reaches me, but I’m not sure if it’s voices or more thumping. I’d give anything to have Stellen’s Lethian hearing right now.
I’m about to blast more fire at the tower’s base when the stone floor moves, a rock slab rising and sliding across the floor, water pouring down through the opening.
I jolt backward. There is a chamber under the tower.
A moment later, ten Ember warriors clamber up through the narrow opening, one by one, their faces smudged with smoke.
I wish I could help them. More so when some of them are carrying the bodies of the dead.
Instead of assisting them, I’m forced to immediately retreat, cautious of my fire again, my focus flying to the next tower, where Stellen and Nara have created a clear path to the next group of survivors.
Before I can race away, one of the emerging men stumbles toward me, his eyes bleary, his facemask torn and clothing blackened with soot.
He takes a knee, swaying on the spot. “Thank you, my king.”
Don’t fucking thank me when I could burn you to death any second now.
“What is your name?” I snap. I know hardly any of my warriors by name. A consequence of having to keep my distance from them.
The man’s shoulders slump and his voice rasps. “I’m Jaivyn, my ki—”
He doesn’t finish speaking before he descends into a coughing fit, spitting out black smoke, just like Kaiba did.
My attention flashes to the white mist stubbornly rising from the nearby ice that hasn’t melted in my fire. I point to it. “Breathe that in.”
Jaivyn looks up at me with bloodshot eyes. “My king?”
“Breathe in the frost! All of you! Do it now.”
Within seconds, the men are hunched over the ice, dragging frosty air into their chests before coughing out black sludge. Expelling the toxic iron.
After which they look at each other and give hushed exclamations that tell me it worked. The frost has cleared their breathing.
I’m edging away, anxious to get to the next tower and the one after that, but I stop myself for another moment because I can’t afford to make mistakes through a lack of knowledge.
“Jaivyn,” I say, pointing to the slab of stone and the opening into the ground. “Explain that.”
He leans over the block of ice, edging nearer to it, his focus now on my hands. I guess he’s alert enough to recognize the danger of my fire again.
“A year ago, General Kaiba ordered us to dig chambers beneath the towers.”
“Which ones?”
“All of them. We started in the east, but we’d only got as far as this one.”
Which is why the warriors manning the next tower to the west, where Kaiba was, had nowhere to hide from the smoke.
“As soon as we started choking, we raced into the chamber, but then the slab froze over. Our fire couldn’t melt the frost sealing us in.”
Their fire can’t. But mine can.
Without another moment of hesitation, I pelt toward the next tower to the east, following the path Stellen and his wolf are creating for me.
I don’t give a fucking shit if I burn off what remains of my pants.
My warriors are alive.
I have my cousin Kaiba’s foresight to thank for it. Ironically, he probably had the men dig chambers as a way to escape my fire, but only he can confirm that for me.
For the next two hours, I burn ice while Stellen and his wolf stay ahead of me, keeping out of the direct line of sight of the emerging warriors while they work.
At one point, I’m certain Stellen’s trying to break through to the stone slab himself, but it looks like his frost power splashes across the rock, only sealing it in more firmly.
I understand why he’s becoming more frantic when I reach that spot.
The men are clearly running out of air, emerging gasping and clawing at the grit, struggling to drag themselves to the ice even when I roar at them to “Fucking move!”
When I reach the final tower at the base of the charcoal mountains, a deep silence greets me, a heaviness that defies the brightly shining afternoon sun sitting high in the sky above us.
Stellen and Nara stand to the side, having marked out the spot, but the grim look on Stellen’s face and the fact that his head isn’t tilted…
I blast my fire across the frost that resists even the now-burning sun, melting the spot Stellen marked out to reveal the stone slab.
The stone doesn’t move.
I don’t hesitate, punching my fist into the rock, cracking the slab down the middle, snatching the two halves before they can fall into the darkness below.
Nothing stirs.
I look to Stellen, a flood of helplessness making me want to smash everything around me.
“I can’t safely pull them out,” I say. “I burn what I touch.”
If I could be certain I’d control my fire like I did when I pulled Kaiba from the tower… But a fire within the walls of the chamber below us would kill the fae I wanted to save.
The corners of Stellen’s mouth are turned down. His chest, like mine, is heaving. The hot sun can’t be doing him any favors. Within the space of two hours, we’ve run the length of a third of Ember’s border while working hard to shift rock and ice. And that was after traveling through the night.
My strength is nearly depleted. So must his be.
“Fuck it.” I prepare to jump into the chamber. “If they’re dead, anyway—”
“Enough death.”
Before I can stop Stellen, he closes the gap at a run and drops into the dark chamber.
Opposite me, his wolf gives a soft howl, her head hanging low, her fur matted and sweaty.
“Goddess of Truth and Light,” I whisper. “Bring me hope.”
A moment later, Stellen emerges, carrying two bodies, each of which he places onto the ground now awash with a mix of melting frost, chunks of ice, and gritty sand.
In quick succession, he smacks his fist down on each man’s chest.
Black smoke emits from their mouths.
The warriors jolt, gasping for air.
Stellen doesn’t wait, disappearing back into the chamber.
Five times more he descends, emerges, and brings life back to men who had taken their last breath.
And all I can do is watch. Fucking stand aside while my enemy carries my people up into the sunlight, hitting their hearts with a fist covered in frost that forces the toxins from their chests.
The men seem too dazed to immediately understand who is in their midst.
But Stellen clearly isn’t taking any chances.
“That was the last of them,” he mutters as he stumbles over to Nara.
Quickly alighting on her back, he gives me a nod before he races away, the white wolf’s powerful legs carrying them up the side of the steep mountain and over the ridge.
Seconds later, they’re out of sight.
I’m not sure if he can hear when I murmur, “You could have let them die. You didn’t. For that, you have my gratitude.”
Back along the border, golden serpents are emerging from the sand, freed from the ice that must have been pinning them down. Warriors are slowly taking to the air, creating defensive formations.
In the nick of time.
Across the border, eagles are returning. Only a few. No doubt scouts sent ahead to assess for Hadrian what damage has been done.
The birds double-back quickly, and I’d like to believe the presence of so many Ember warriors has startled them.
“We’re still here,” I snap beneath my breath.
And now I have Thyra.
If I can survive whatever blade visions she might have… If I can shake off the burning within my hand where I held that dark blood…
If I can resist the undeniable need to go to her…
Soon, my fate will be mine to control.