Abeke looked frantically for Tarik, and found him struggling in the grip of a man twice his size, his otter thrashing crazily, trying to escape the coils of a tremendous boa constrictor, aiming sharp bites at the snake’s head.
She ran toward the Greencloak, staying low. She aimed her arrow, but afraid of hitting Tarik, she was only able to shoot his attacker in the knee.
She and Uraza started for Meilin again, but were struck by a wave of force, a flat wall of wind that shoved her heavily off her feet, through the air several feet, and onto the ground yards from Meilin, who shouted something at her. The Zhongian was standing over the bodies of Zerif’s two impostor girls, slapping wildly at the air like an old madwoman, oblivious to the lizard biting at her boot. Abeke thought Meilin had lost all sense until she spotted the masses of arrows being shot at her from all sides. Meilin’s face was tight with concentration, unable to do anything but focus on keeping herself, and Jhi behind her, defended from the onslaught.
A badger flew at Abeke, stopped midair by Uraza.
Meilin needed help. Abeke looked desperately at the battlefield. Where was Rollan? Was he dead? And Maya?
“Abeke!” she heard Maya yell, as if in answer to her thought. Abeke spun to see the red-haired Euran still standing at the edge of the docks, eyes wide like she had seen a whole army of ghosts. She was pointing to Abeke’s left with a terrified hand.
“GREENCLOAK FILTH!” Tahlia shouted, suddenly much closer and much less unconscious than Abeke had supposed. The Conqueror twitched her arm, and a knife flew straight and true into Abeke’s shoulder.
For a moment, Abeke felt no pain, only rocked back by the force of the impact. She stared at the leather-wrapped hilt sticking out of her shoulder, stunned just long enough for Tahlia to kick a booted foot into Abeke’s face. She fell back, and the impostor girl dropped roughly onto her chest and yanked the knife free. Then Abeke felt pain, and screamed.
“Louder!” Tahlia spat.
Uraza, apparently finished with the badger, pounced, knocking Tahlia off Abeke.
Abeke scrambled for her bow, but a heavy war hammer slammed down. Abeke rolled back in time, but the hammer shattered her bow.
She looked up into the face of a huge man, his brown hair tied in two braids. His face was covered with scars, and his mouth was a cruel grimace. He lifted his hammer and struck again. Abeke scrabbled over a crate and just missed getting crushed.
She heard Uraza’s yowls, the calls of a leopard deep in a fight. Her cat could not come to her. Abeke pulled a dagger from her boot with her right hand. Her left shoulder stung with the knife wound, her left arm dangling. The braided man swung his hammer again. Abeke ducked, but he followed with a fist punch to the side of her head.
Her vision clouded and her head dropped to the ground, eyes facing the battle. She wished she had fallen looking the other way, because here she saw the dead and nearly dead. She saw Meilin turn to look at her, a moment of inattention that rewarded her with an arrow to her thigh. She saw Conor knocked from the back of Briggan, striking the wall of a nearby building hard, and slumping to the ground. She saw Briggan flicker, return to his natural size, and run limping, to Conor’s side.
And in a huge mass, the Conqueror army swarmed forward.
There was a scream, and Abeke shuddered. She had hoped when the time came for her to die, she would do it with dignity. But the scream was one of mad lunatic fear, an animal scream. This was not the way she wished to end. Abeke pressed her lips together to stop the shriek, and found they were shut already. The scream was not hers.
“STOP IT!” the voice yelled.
By now that war hammer should have struck again, ending Abeke. She opened eyes that she had screwed shut and saw the soldier’s braids blacken, turn into ash, and blow away in the wind.
“STOP IT!” came the voice again.
The soldier’s face screwed up in a grimace of pain, raising his arms in an attempt to protect himself from an onslaught of heat. His sleeves started to char, catching fire like a log in a campfire. Abeke struggled to turn her head away from the sight.
“STOP IT!” the voice shrieked, and Abeke spotted Maya on the docks, eyes wide, lips pulled back to bare clenched teeth, her hand a rigid claw held high above her head. A wave of heat like a desert storm rolled across the dockside, the pulse of white light burning into Abeke’s vision. Abeke held her arms in front of her head and opened her mouth to shout but the air in her lungs was pulled from her in a hot gasp. She felt like she had looked into the face of the sun on a midsummer’s day, and the sun had looked back and screamed.
Then, as suddenly as it had come, the wave was gone. Maya lowered her arms and blinked. Everything was on fire. People, animals, buildings, crates. Conquerors ran in circles or toward the water, covered in flames, screaming. Abeke slapped at her clothing, hoping to douse flames that she soon found were not there. She drew back her hands, now smeared with a greasy, gray ash. She stood, and something thumped off her belly and onto the ground. It was the steel head of the war hammer — the wooden shaft burned away — covered in the same greasy ash that covered Abeke. Ash, she now realized, that had once been a braided soldier.
THE DOCKS WERE AFLAME. FOR A MOMENT, ROLLAN THOUGHT the Conquerors had unleashed mythological fire demons upon them, as the flames danced and ran like men. Then he realized they were men. On fire. Many were running haphazardly to the shore, some rolling on the ground. Others, those that appeared not to be actively on fire, were running the other direction, away from the docks and the battle.
Rollan scanned the scene desperately for his friends and found them unburned, small islands in a sea of flame. Conor, mouth agape, watched a fiery shape plunge into the sea. Meilin, covered in ash, held a blackened arrow, tip still flaming, staring at it like a confused wizard holding an unfamiliar wand. Abeke was slumped against the only crates not on fire, her hand covering a bleeding shoulder. She was staring at the dock, where Maya was kneeling, as if she had collapsed. Her head was down, her whole body slumped except for her right arm, extended palm up in front of her. It was like an invisible force was holding that arm, keeping her from falling.
A figure emerged from the water. Shane. He was burned and bedraggled, but very much alive.
“FORM UP!” he shouted.
A few others pulled themselves upright, and Rollan noticed several heads appear on the rooftops. Far fewer than there had been before. But still many more than the five Greencloaks.
“Come on, Rollan,” Aidana said, suddenly behind him.
“I need to help my friends,” he said.
“No, you don’t. Not by running into the fray and getting killed.”
She grabbed his wrist and pulled him, running.
“What was that!?” he gasped, slowing his pace.
“The docks are on fire,” his mother said. “We keep moving.”
“Did you know this was going to happen? Did your people set off a . . . a . . . fire bomb or something?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said.
Rollan opened his mouth to speak, but Aidana squeezed his hand and looked in his eyes. “I only knew there would be a fight, and that it would turn ugly, and that your friends’ side would have no chance. I didn’t want you there.”
Essix was nowhere to be seen, but Rollan knew she was telling the truth. People from the town pushed past them, running toward the blaze. They were carrying buckets. He stared at the flickering bit of dock he could see, mesmerized.
“We should go help,” he muttered. He felt strangely numb, as if he were just a boy in the audience of a town-square trouper show, just watching, unable to take part.
“The townspeople will help,” Aidana said. “The Greencloaks must have caused it. They bring destruction wherever they go.”
Destruction, like an ice palace in ruins.
“My friends . . .” he mumbled.
&nbs
p; “Your friends?” Aidana’s voice broke. “I’m your mother, Rollan. Please, son, I need you. Your friends, they use you. The Greencloaks are a violent bunch, intent on ruling the world, and liars all. Someone in your party told the Devourer you had Suka’s talisman and where you would cross back into Eura. All we had to do was wait.”
“No. No! None of them would —”
“How else could we have been waiting for you?” said Aidana. “You can’t trust them, but you can trust me. I’m your blood.”
Rollan shook his head. He could find no words.
“Let’s go, Rollan,” she said. “Not with Shane, not with the Greencloaks, let’s just go somewhere and be a family. Away from all this.” Her voice broke at the end, and her chin trembled.
He nodded. The trouper show continued on behind him, with the battle and the burning, as far away as a dream. But his mother held his hand, and her hand was warm. Only she felt real. He started to follow her down the alley, away from the noise.
A cry from high above. Essix pierced the smoke-filled sky and streaked toward him. She landed on his shoulder and firmly clamped her talons onto him, steadying herself.
“It would seem Essix agrees,” Aidana said.
With Essix on his shoulder, Rollan’s head cleared. He blinked, looked again into his mother’s eyes, and nearly stumbled backward. For just a moment, he swore her eyes changed. Her pupils narrowed, her irises lightened to the yellow of tarnished brass.
“Rollan, is there —”
“What happened to you?” he asked, his voice trembling. Essix squeezed his shoulder, and he thought he saw faint black lines ghost about his mother, streaming away from her head, hands, and feet. Rollan took a step back.
The smoky string drifting from Aidana’s left hand pulsed, and her arm shot forward spasmodically, gripping Rollan’s wrist.
“Let go!” he shouted and tugged his arm back. “What’s the matter with you? Stop it!”
Aidana’s arm flopped with his effort, like the slackened arm of a doll, but her grip was like a vise. He winced with the pain. Any more pressure and he was sure his bones would break.
“Please,” she said, teeth clenched as if it were she feeling the pain, and then closed her eyes. He watched her brow furrow, and the black lines flickered. She let go, breathing heavily as if she’d just run a mile. “It’s not what you think.”
Essix shifted her weight and Rollan realized the black trails behind his mother were gone. He hadn’t imagined them, had he? No, those snake eyes. He’d seen those eyes.
“Something more is going on. Something is clinging to you — inside you —”
Aidana shook her head despairingly.
“I didn’t know,” she said. “I only took the Bile to make the sickness go away. I wanted to be myself again. I wanted to be your mother.” Tears wobbled in her eyes. “But now I’m less myself than I’ve ever been. I do things . . .” Her head lowered, as if she didn’t quite have the energy to hold it up any longer. “It’s like I’m a passenger in my own body. Since taking the Bile, sometimes it . . . controls me.”
The Bile.
It was like someone had taken a blindfold off of him that he didn’t know he was wearing.
The Bile, he thought with revulsion. The magical cure-all Bile!
Rollan touched the spot where she’d gripped his wrist, marks of her fingernails still raw and red there.
“But you fought it,” he said. The lines had flickered as she let go. “You can break the control. Just now, I saw you do it!”
She stared at him, a spark of hope in eyes otherwise empty of anything but despair. “I try. I really do. But it’s so hard.”
Rollan took his mother’s hand and pulled her up. “You never had help before. But you do now.”
A smile lit her face, and she leaned her face down to his until their foreheads touched.
“I love you, Rollan,” she said.
They stood this way until a bright flash in Rollan’s peripheral vision caught his attention. He tried to draw back, but found Aidana was holding so tightly he couldn’t fully disengage.
“Mother,” he started, and realized there was a whine in his voice that he had only ever heard from spoiled rich kids in carriages on the streets of Concorba. “You can let go now,” he said, and then saw her face was frozen in something that looked a lot like fear.
She was shaking. Her whole body had locked up, and she seemed to expend vast amounts of energy just to open her mouth in a whisper.
“Run,” she rasped, and as he watched, the pupils of her eyes enlarged, nearly overtaking her now-yellow irises. Her grip slackened, releasing him. He fell to the ground with the suddenness of it, and Essix flapped off his shoulder to avoid being toppled. Aidana was standing where she had been, frozen in place, slowly mouthing something he could not hear.
He stood, and Essix dropped back onto his shoulder. When she did so, he was almost blinded by the appearance of hundreds of streams of pulsing black light driving into his mother’s back. Her arm slithered slowly into her cloak. Wikerus materialized and immediately flapped up to hover above his mother’s head like a dark cloud.
“Mother!” he said. “You need to concentrate! You can —” he started, but was interrupted by her scream.
“Run!” she yelled and flung a knife at his face.
Essix seized Rollan’s hair in her talons and tugged just enough for the knife to sail past his ear, but by then Aidana was on him. Her fingernails raked across his cheek, and he felt something hard slam into his ribs. Essix screeched, and her beak drew back a chunk of meat from the soft flesh of Aidana’s hand.
Wikerus let out an enraged caw and took to the sky, Essix leaping to catch him in a clash of feathers. Rollan scrambled backward, gasping for breath. His mother advanced awkwardly, as if on borrowed legs, her hand dripping blood onto the street. Her snake eyes stared without any hint of emotion, her mouth frozen in a terrifying grimace. Her voice gurgled from her throat like a thing trying to remember how to speak. Forward she lurched.
Rollan tried to speak to her, managing only a wheezed cough, but by then she had leaped atop him. Her knee landed in his stomach, knocking out his breath and bending him in half, vomit rising in his throat. Her hands clamped around his neck. He gasped for air that would not come and clawed weakly at her hands. He could feel hot wetness running down onto his chest, soaking his tunic. Whether it was his blood or Aidana’s, he couldn’t tell. Her teeth were bared, her mouth foaming like a rabid dog’s. But even so, as the edges of his vision grew dark, he could see tears falling from those inhuman yellow eyes.
Rollan’s arms grew heavy and his brain fogged. He began to wonder why he was struggling so hard. His fingers loosened from the hands around his throat and his eyes rolled to the side. The building he lay beside was made all of gray stone, except for a small, high window, which was of redbrick. The mix of the colors reminded Rollan of how old meat drains of blood. He closed his eyes to sleep.
And then, air. Beautiful, smoke-stained and dust-ridden air. He could breathe! His mother had let go and rolled off of him. She was thrashing on the ground, batting at the mass of talons and feathers clamped to her head. Her blows grew weaker, and under such an attack, her eyes would not last long.
“Essix, stop!” he tried to yell, but it came out a rasped whisper. Even so, the falcon let go of Aidana’s face and took flight. Aidana’s body collapsed to the ground, shuddering. Her eyes had survived, but the rest of her head and neck were covered in deep cuts and scratches. One wound below her jaw was bleeding profusely. Her cloak lay crumpled in a heap near his feet, and Rollan grabbed it and pressed the mass to her wound.
“You’re going to be okay,” he said. “Once the bleeding stops, you’re going to be okay.”
His breathing was too shallow and his speech was too fast. His hands were shaking. A part of his brain knew he was in shock, knew
he needed to stop and think, to figure out what he could do in a rational way, but nothing except what he was doing right now seemed possible, at least not until he felt the sharp prick of a knife’s blade in his forearm.
Aidana was holding a throwing knife to his arm. Just holding it there. He pulled his arm back, and she dropped the knife, deliberately, onto the ground in front of him. Her mouth moved in silent words, her yellow eyes brightened from the color of tarnished brass to that of the heart of a flame.
“Rollan!” someone shouted. Meilin? He couldn’t tell.
He leaned closer to his mother. He felt like he really needed to hear what she was trying to say.
Footsteps sounded behind him. “Rollan! Are you okay?” Conor. That was Conor.
He put his ear to Aidana’s lips.
“Kill . . . me . . .” she whispered.
Rollan stumbled backward, slipped on the knife at his feet, and landed on his backside. She didn’t stand, just shook violently, as if her every muscle was working hard to keep from attacking again. Her eyes flickered yellow, pupils dilating again, and her gaze darted to where the weapon lay.
“Can you run?” Conor was asking. “We need to go. I mean, really, really need to go.”
Rollan felt himself being pulled, first to his feet, and then away from his mother. Rollan stared at her as he went. He saw her eyes close, and he thought maybe that was it, that was the right thing to do, and he closed his too. His head felt light and wobbly, his body as distant as the sounds of battle. He tripped and fell, deciding that a nap right now made a lot of sense, except that someone was slapping his face. He opened his eyes and felt hands on either side of his face.
“Rollan! Rollan!”
Meilin. She was holding his face. That seemed sweet. She was right in front of him, her face in his. It was like a painting, a portrait of Meilin in front of a furry black-and-white flag. No. Not a flag. Jhi. He looked up and their eyes connected. Some of the smoke in his brain cleared.