Phoenix Heart

Season Two

Episode Four

“Pillar of Souls”

Sarah K. L. Wilson

Copyright 2021

Table of Contents

Copyright Page

Note to the Reader:

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Behind the Scenes:

OTHER BOOK SERIES BY SARAH K. L. WILSON

Note to the Reader:

Phoenix Heart is a series very much like your favorite streaming tv. There are seasons and episodes. These episodes are designed to be read in roughly two hours, though fast readers will read more quickly and those of you who really like to absorb the story may take longer. They’re intended to be fast-paced, exciting, and they release frequently so that you can keep up with the story even if you have a very busy schedule. Perfect for lunch breaks, a single evening of enjoyment, or younger readers who like bite-sized chunks, this story will keep you wanting more.

Of note: I’m offering you a prequel short story for free download when you join my subscribers.

Also of note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, events and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Enjoy!

Chapter One

If someone had ordered a small fortress built in the foothills of the Crown Peak mountains and then ordered that it be shaped as if naturally formed of the rock and not of human hands, this, perhaps, would be the result.

The track we were following wound up around the base of it and then split off. One branch – the more well-traveled of the two – ascended further up the mountains. The other branch – grown over by scant weeds – ascended to a low, sharp peak. The peak was surrounded on three sides by steep drops, far too vertical for anyone to climb. To my surprise they were formed in such a way that they looked like sawn boards set on end in a cluster – if boards were made of granite and higher than three castles stacked one upon the other.

I’d never seen such a thing before. It gave me an unsettled feeling in my belly as we wove our way slowly up the path. This path was no natural trail widened by man as the other had been. This was formed of chisel and hammer into the planes and edges of the strange cluster of standing stones. Even if it had not led to the terrible plinth, I would not have trusted the footing of it – especially when it went over a wide crack between the standing rocks, wide as my hand and deep as the peak itself, descending into blackness.

I glanced around at my companions, wondering if they were as wary as I.

Flara looked ahead with a set jaw and determined face, as if she had known all along that we would take this path. Without her glaringly bright phoenix, she looked smaller – more like the woman recovering from grave injuries that she was and less like a fearsome thing that might steal what I loved from me.

The guards – Frandtz, Gerhardt, and the other whose name I still did not know – looked grim. Had they seen the phoenix souls trapped within the plinth, or had they seen only a dark pillar reaching up into the sky? Why did they think we were coming to this place and how had they known to come here? I had thought they were only fleeing with us as they had been ordered to do by Duke Fontellrae, to escape the Hand of the Rat gobbling up his territory and the lives of his people.

But this was not the path to safety. This was the path to the goal Judicus and I had chosen.

I wanted to ask them what they were thinking, but with Judicus passed out in the cart and the phoenixes dead for the day, none among them could understand my signs or mental voice.

I swallowed down fear and exhaustion and watched the path ahead. From where we were on the path, I couldn’t see much of the plinth rising above us, and for that, I was grateful. I didn’t want to see the souls trapped within or whatever puzzle might lie without.

We were, perhaps, about halfway up the chiseled rock trail, when it widened and formed a sort of shelf in the side of the hill. There was a single path leading up from the shelf to the plinth and it was rough and narrow, cut in steps rather than smoothly, not nearly wide enough for a donkey and barely wide enough for a man.

“This is as far as the carts go,” Gerhardt said, soberly.

“Defensible,” Frandtz remarked, looking around him, and I realized he was right. A natural rocky wall about as high as my chest blocked the shelf from the open side of the cliff, hiding the carts and donkeys from view below. The only path up was the difficult vertical one we’d taken. The shelf butted up to it so you could stand on the edge of the shelf and be at the level of someone’s head coming up the path. A tiny force could likely hold off a larger one from this spot – provided they had the food and water to last.

“We’ll rest here, then?” Gerhardt asked.

“No fire,” Frandtz agreed.

The others seemed to shudder at that, looking over shoulders toward the lands of Duke Fontellrae which we had fled. High as we were, scraps of clouds blocked our view of the valley below and even if they had not, the thick smoke in the air would have made too great a haze to see through. But we all remembered the fires. By the scent of smoke hovering in the air, they likely still burned, consuming the lands of Fontellrae and the hillside beyond.

I swallowed down misery at the thought. My misery would be nothing to that of the men with me who had friends, and maybe even family, below.

“We’ll set a watch. You ladies should sleep,” Frandtz said gruffly. “We can’t travel without rest, and you will have to walk some, so sleep while you may.”

He murmured to the other guards, and they passed around a flask of water and some hardtack to eat, and then Frandtz went to stand by the trail to keep watch. Gerhardt tended the donkeys, unhitching them, and the third guard bedded down on the rock under one of the carts.

To my annoyance, Flara laid herself out beside Judicus and shut her eyes. There was no room for a third in the cart.

I watched them, uncertain what to do, but after a breath, I realized I was being a fool. Flara was unlikely to hurt the sleeping rope worker. After all, he’d saved her life, and she had as much right to share the cart as a bed as I did.

I slipped down from the cart, took the blanket Gerhardt nodded to when his eyes caught mine, and bedded down beside the cart as Gerhart was doing on the other side.

I was just Sersha again. Just Sersha sleeping on the ground. And though it ached to remember it, the fact remained - without Kazmerev and Judicus, I was always just a girl from a little fishing village who could not read or speak, who had no value on her own, and no connections. And I felt hollow when I remembered that and hollower still when I remembered that right now, they both needed my protection and care and I seemed to have none to give.

Chapter Two

I woke to the sound of someone softly crying and jerked up to sit. Where was I?

Oh yes. The natural fortress in the hillside. Frandtz was still standing watch. He glanced back at me and then back to the perimeter. He didn’t look like he was the one crying. Both of the other guards were on the ground fast asleep on the other side of the cart from me. One was snoring. Or maybe both were. It was hard to tell.

That left only the cart.

I stood up, rubbing my eyes blearily. I felt ill in the way one does when they haven’t slept enough and now are awake again – an aching head and enough nausea that all I wanted to do was lie down again.

Someone snuffled like they were crying silently.

I leaned over the cart. Flara and Judicus lay back to back. She was curled up like a sleeping cat on one side. It was him who was making the noise. As I watched, he sobbed silently, shaking, his face screwed up and eyes sealed shut against his tears.

I hovered over him, unsure what to do.

He drew in a shuddering inhale.

Throwing caution to the wind I laid my hand on his shoulder and his eyes sprang open. He saw me, recognition flashing in his eyes, and then he closed them in what looked like relief and he took my hand in his, drawing in a shuddering breath.

We stayed like that for a long moment, and I wished with all my heart that I could murmur empty words of compassion over him and sing him back to sleep. It was a gift I could not give, and I felt a pauper to come to him with empty hands that could offer nothing. I settled for grasping the hand clutching mine with my other hand so his was encased in both of mine – a pitiful comfort but the best I could give.

If I could speak, I would tell him that we would soon go after his sister. That she would be safe. That I would get the arrowhead out of his leg when he was ready, and it would heal properly. That he didn’t need to fear because he wasn’t alone anymore, bearing an entire family on shoulders too narrow for the task. He had me and Kazmerev to help now.

I could tell him none of that, but I tried to pour it into my touch as if I could speak with the warmth of my hands where words would not spark.

After a moment, he let my hands go and opened his eyes, his cheeks flushing as if he’d been caught at something. He sat up quickly and gasped in pain.

“Your leg,” I signed. “Some of the arrow is still in the leg.”

“The arrowhead,” he gasped, nodding his head in understanding. He closed his eyes and stayed like that for a few breaths, the blood draining from his face and leaving it white as mist, before whispering, “Help me down.”

I helped him ease himself out of the cart. His leg didn’t want to bear his weight.

“We need to see what we are dealing with,” he said, shaking his head as if to clear it. He glanced over his shoulder at Flara sleeping in the cart. “Is she still ill?”

I shook my head. I’d healed her properly, at least.

“Then what’s she doing sleeping beside me?”

I gave him a wry look. Surely, he must know why. How could he expect me to know what went on between the two of them?

He reached down and felt his leg, hissing. “Can you cut it out and heal it again?”

“When the sun sets,” I mimed. I didn’t want to tell him I was worried it wouldn’t, even though the sun had crawled a little further into the sky.

“We can’t just sleep until then,” he griped, as if we’d been lying in bed relaxing instead of barely catching a few hours’ sleep. “Come on, let’s go investigate the plinth.”

“Are you ...” I began, realizing I was missing the next sign.

“Sure?” he asked, and he sounded irritable before he caught himself and blew out a long breath. “I apologize, Sersha. You’re likely exhausted. Please. Go back to sleep.”

He hopped forward. Then another step. I let him go, arms crossed over my chest. Was he really going to hop all the way up that treacherous path?

Another hop and now Frandtz was hurrying over.

“My lord rope worker,” he said in a low but slightly frantic tone. “Please, my lord, you’ll do yourself a harm.”

I sighed and scooped Judicus’s pack from the cart, slung it over my shoulder, grabbed one of the waterskins, and hurried to catch up with him as he hopped forward again.

“My name is Judicus Franzer Irault,” Judicus said with a mild smile, made mysterious by his one bandaged eye. “I’m not a lord anymore. What’s your name?”

Frandtz seemed to swallow down whatever he was going to say, shaking his head and eventually just answering. “I’m Frandtz of the house of Fontellrae, sworn in service to the Duke.”

“Are you standing watch for those sleeping?”

“I am.”

“Then I thank you,” Judicus said, hopping past him.

Frandtz hurried to get back in front of him.

“Please, sir, you need rest.”

“Do you have orders concerning me, Frandtz?”

Frandtz nodded, trying to keep his voice low. “My orders are to keep you alive, sir.”

“I’m not a sir, but I appreciate it,” Judicus said mildly. “I can’t get far out of your reach going up this path. You’ll still have the trail up the hill in sight, and if anyone comes to do us harm, you’ll see them.”

“That’s not what I’m worried about, my lord.”

Judicus ran a hand over his face. I recognized that from his dealings with Mally. Impatience. Annoyance.

“If you stop fussing like a mother hen, Frandtz, then I won’t interfere with your orders. Does that seem reasonable?” he asked, and to my surprise, there was steel in his voice. “If it doesn’t seem reasonable to you, then I will walk down from this mountain without you or your men and there will be nothing you can do to stop me.”

Frandtz swallowed down whatever retort was on his lips, nodded his head once in jerky fury, and strode past and back to his watch spot.

What had gotten into Judicus? What had made him so ... raw?

I thought of his sharp words – so unlike him. I thought of him sobbing in his sleep.

His sister. It had to be his sister.

I slipped my arm under his and he sagged gratefully onto my shoulder.

“Oh good,” he said, his voice absent as if he was trying not to show me something under the surface. “You have the pack. We’ll need my notes to figure out this plinth. Up for a hike?”

I nodded and ignored it when his face went scarlet. Whatever he didn’t want to tell me was not sitting easily with him. The least I could do was pretend I didn’t see it.

It was going to be a long morning.

Chapter Three

The hike was even longer than I’d anticipated and by the time we reached the top I was grateful for the waterskin and Judicus was pale and cursing. I could imagine why. Every bit of weight he put on that leg must feel the bite of the arrowhead – an enemy within – and as much as I was supporting him, it was still hard to climb a near-vertical trail while leaning on someone else. Even with two good legs, I was on all fours at least half the climb.

In the glare of noon – muted by the peach-colored smoke that filled the air – I could no longer see the trapped spirits within the plinth. We arrived, huffing and puffing, to a simple inverted bottle of a plinth, a single design carved on its multi-faceted surface – that same design of the Cult of the Tattered Ribbons.

We circled it tiredly and when we reached the far side, I saw another symbol etched into the plinth, but this symbol was ... odd. It moved when I looked at it, like a woodland animal trying to be invisible on the forest floor. The harder I tried to catch a glimpse, the quicker it skittered away. I squinted harder, giving myself a headache, and had to turn my back so that my eyes could rest as my temples throbbed from the effort.

But when I turned my back, I had the horrifying sensation that the symbol was going to reach out and grab me. I settled for standing with my side facing it so that I didn‘t have my back to it but also didn’t have to look at it.

“They call that Reiven’s Syndrome,” Judicus said a little hoarsely. He was still looking at the symbol, his face twisted in his usual mix of interest and pain. “When you can’t look at a thing but can’t look away. They teach us to tie knots for it, but this knot is stronger than anything I’ve seen before. I’m not sure how to pick it apart. Or what to do with it if I do.”

I cocked my head to the side in question.

“Yes, well, I can’t just leave it there,” he said with a wry smile, running his hand through his hair and then looking at it with a puzzled expression when he forgot again that I’d cut his hair. “If you untie a ropework knot and just leave it, it doesn’t go away. It just claws out like tentacles, snatching at anything or anyone who comes near.”

He looked over the edge of the sharp cliff as he spoke and then threw himself backward.

“You said something about a rent in the earth on the tapestry?” he asked with a gasp. His back was pushed against the plinth in a way that made me queasy.

I nodded and stepped forward to see what had bothered him.

My breath stuck in my chest as I looked down a long, long drop – far too long for the height of this hill. It sank into a dark gap in the rock. Clinging to the walls of the gap were stone creatures. Octopi, crabs, things that had four long legs and a long prehensile nose. They were built with careful detail and memories surfaced as I watched them – memories of a stone octopus killing everything in its reach in the valley near the Temple of the Tattered Ribbons cult and of the stone creatures that rose from the sea and walked with our island on their backs – the Creatures of Sydonon. And now, here there were more stone creatures. They didn’t seem to be moving. But when I turned from them to Judicus, I got Reiven’s Syndrome all over again.

The skin on my back crept like it was covered in bugs. Surely those things must move. They must, even now, be scaling the wall. They must be about to grab us.

I turned back and glared – quickly so I would catch them. They were still in place.

“It’s the same either way,” Judicus said with a shiver. “No matter where you put your back, it feels like something’s watching you. What if we sit so that we’re both facing opposite directions? We could watch each other’s backs.”

I nodded quickly and helped him sit to face the plinth while I sat to face the edge of the cliff. I’d notice something immediately if it moved.

“It’s going to be tricky to figure out what to do with this knot. I feel like I need to tie it into a new knot as soon as it’s untied from this one – but what knot? What does it do?”

I rummaged into my bag and handed him the small book that Fontellrae had given me, and he took it.

“What’s this?” he asked. We were sitting side by side with our backs to opposite dangers, but we were in front of each other enough that he could see my hands as I signed.

“The duke gave it to you.”

“Fontellrae?”

“He thought it could help.”

Judicus opened it. “Did you know this was written in his own hand?”

I shook my head as he read, looking up from time to time to check the plinth. The minutes passed slowly and when he looked up, I expected him to talk about the plinth. Instead, he spoke.

“Thank you for saving my life, Sersha. Can I assume you’ve seen Kazmerev?” he looked shy as he said that. Though why he’d be shy, I couldn’t fathom.

I nodded.

“Is he well?”

I nodded again. He flushed hard.

“You must have healed Flara, too?” he was looking at the book again when he said that, and I realized he knew her name.

My own cheeks were hot when I replied, “Yes.”

“Thank you,” he said simply, graciously, and then left it at that so he could return to his book. He read very well for a man with one eye covered.

I sat and watched the edge of the hill and if my eyes stung a bit, I had every right to let them. After all, I’d been through a lot. And there was smoke in the air. Who wouldn’t have stinging eyes under those circumstances?

It certainly wasn’t because I thought my heart might be bruised. Because I should have learned a long time ago that people like me aren’t the ones people want to love and marry. We’re the useful ones. We’re the reliable ones. And I should be happy with that. I shouldn’t be remembering a dark cave and hours spent signing and a friend I hadn’t realized I’d grown so close to. I shouldn’t be remembering any of that.

Chapter Four

“This book is written in Fontellrae’s own hand,” Judicus said again, squinting as his fingers skimmed over the thin paper – a wonder all its own. “It is begun some time ago. Hmmm. Did he say why he was giving it to us?”

“He said it would help,” I signed when he looked up.

“It ... does not seem relevant at first glance,” he said, glancing up at the plinth and then back at the book. “It cites a prophecy from someone named Clarinfas the Sighted. He speaks of a man seeking a sign and climbing up into these mountains. It’s your typical prophecy-type thing – vague. Lots of references to everything being destroyed by fire.”

He coughed awkwardly and I raised an eyebrow and sniffed. Everything literally was being destroyed by fire in the valley below. And what could we do to stop it?

“I see your point,” he agreed, reading further. “There’s something about honored banner men and women who will find the Seeker of the Sign and help him to ‘return the stones to dust and that which is not a flame to the fire.’ Now we are getting somewhere. The Stryxex are ‘not a flame.’ I still don’t see what they have to do with the plinth.”

“Judicus,” I signed, but he wasn’t looking up. I laid a hand tentatively on his knee and when he startled, I tried again. “Judicus. When it was still dark and then at dawn, we saw something within.”

“Within the plinth?” his eyebrows rose, and he tapped his chin with his forefinger. At my nod, he followed with a second question. “Who is ‘we’?”

I pointed behind us and he ran his fingers through his hair.

“You can’t tell me a name. Yes. Was it one of the guards?”

I shook my head.

“Flara, then. The other Flame Rider. What did you see?”

I didn’t have a word for souls, so I tried, “Phoenixes.”

“Phoenixes? Trapped in the plinth?” He frowned, scrutinizing it, and then looked back at me.

I made a helpless gesture. I had no words for what I’d seen.

“Their souls, perhaps.”

I nodded.

“They, certainly, would want to be returned to the fire. So, we read on.”

He seemed to be in his element as he opened the book again and read. I, on the other hand, felt a cold chill over my back. Behind me, trapped somehow by magic, were the souls of phoenixes and before me in the open pit were the strange stone creatures and to my sleep-starved mind, it seemed as though they might come alive and begin to move at any moment.

I shivered, edging a little closer to Judicus. He seemed not to notice.

“He finishes chronicling the prophecy and then he makes notes here that can be skimmed over. This one is about a sacred trust to his family and duchy to protect the way to the plinth. Odd. This one is about the need to keep strangers from it. Which is even stranger since he has allowed us access. And another prophecy. Oh dear.”

His face had gone white. I watched him intensely as he fell silent, his lips shaping words but no sound coming from them. He flipped through a few more pages before I grew impatient and tapped his knee.

He looked up, blinking, like a creature from under a rock after the stone has been lifted.

“Oh. Yes. Sersha. You wouldn’t believe this. His ancestors believed that the day someone came to them asking for knowledge of symbols and mentioning the plinth their lands would be razed and their home destroyed, and none could save them.”

His eyes met mine in shared horror.

“He knew the moment I arrived and asked. He knew and he gave us the library, and the men, and his hospitality.”

He looked like he was going to be ill and then, true to form, he scrambled to all fours, moaning in pain as the movement hurt his leg, and then leaned over the edge of the cliff and vomited.

I still didn’t know how he kept enough food in him to live. He seemed to always be ill from something.

I made my way cautiously to him, patting his back reassuringly and offering him the waterskin.

“Thank you, Sersha. You must think I’m forever sick.”

The thought had certainly crossed my mind.

“It’s not ... it’s just ... I mean those poor people.”

He made his way back to sit again and I waited for the pain to ease on his face before I signed.

“It is not wrong to care.”

He looked at me miserably, “I care about all of it, and sometimes it feels like I can’t do anything about any of it. And every time I try, I make it worse. I went to find the ai’sletta, who was prophesied about, so I could free my family. Now, my sister is trapped worse than ever before. I came to find this place – which turned out to be prophesied – so the ai’sletta could succeed, and look? All those poor people, dead. Their homes burned. I hate prophecies. I never want to see another one.” He looked forlornly at the book. “Perhaps, we should stop here. Perhaps it’s better if we just don’t do anything.”

We sat in silence for a long time, sharing a heavy feeling of guilt and misery. Because I agreed. And he was right.

He looked up, after long minutes. “What do you think?”

I swallowed, weighing my thoughts, and then began to sign.

“I think that once you have brought the bear into your house you can’t decide you don’t like excitement.”

I struggled with “bear” and “excitement,” but I thought my hasty renditions worked.

Judicus blinked twice and then burst into laughter. Had I ever seen him laugh? He was so serious always.

“What?” he asked.

“We say that in my village,” I signed, smiling, but under my merriment was a bitter certainty that it was true. We were in a mess. Terrible things had happened. People had died as a result of our choices to be propelled along this path. And it didn’t matter that they probably would have died anyway and that the Hand of the Rat and their evil countrymen were the true hands behind this evil. Because now the bear was in our house, and we had to deal with it one way or another.

Judicus’s laughter faded. “Then I guess we deal with the bear.” He opened the book again and kept reading. “There is some speculation on what sign the Seeker will be looking for and what it might do.” He looked up and met my eyes with a crooked smile. “Well, we at least know where to put the sign, don’t we, Sersha? Though what might happen once it is set – that troubles me. What if it doesn’t free those phoenixes at all? What if it ignites the stone creatures below? I don’t like any of this.”

I shrugged, shaking my head in shared worry. What other choice did we have?

He read on as the afternoon bled away and as the immediate horror of where I was sitting began to fade, I fought off sleep.

I was drifting off when he slammed the book shut.

“Well. Well, then.” He looked at the plinth, but his eyes were unfocused, drifting. “So much to think about, and yet no answers at all. There were symbols and suggestions – guesses, mostly. Nothing firm and certainly no understanding of what they might ... do. I’m at a loss, Sersha. And if we can’t find the right path then perhaps, we should take no path at all. To change the symbol might set anything in motion and I’m afraid I’ve already set too much alight. Everywhere I go, flames follow and people I love are hurt.”

I reached out and took his hand and he looked down at our hands, blinking furiously as if he wasn’t sure how we came to be touching.

“If only I knew the right symbol and if only I knew why it was right,” he said with a sigh.

Behind me, a soft voice spoke, and gravel crunched under a boot that had been very, very quiet sneaking up on us.

“I know the symbol, Judicus Franzer Irault. It’s why I’ve been looking for you.”

Chapter Five

“Flara?” Judicus said, tipping his head to the side as he did when presented with an interesting puzzle. The edge of his eye-bandage was coming undone and it flopped slightly when he moved his head, reminding me that he was stronger than he looked – strong enough to bear up under severe injuries.

I pressed my lips firmly together and placed my hands calmly in my lap.

I did not turn around.

Somehow, I’d been expecting this.

“You’re the one who was prophesied,” she said, and she sounded breathless. “We started looking for you months ago.”

“Me?” Judicus sounded confused. “I’m afraid there’s some kind of misunderstanding. There have been no prophecies about me.”

“You’re reading them. I heard you talking about them.”

She’d been eavesdropping on top of everything else. I felt my face grow hot with annoyance. I clenched my jaw until my teeth hurt. I still hadn’t turned around. I knew there was something wrong with me. I shouldn’t dislike a person so much. Hadn’t I wanted to stop and save her when Fontellrae forced me to go on without her? And yet here I was feeling my temperature rise at just the sound of her voice.

I stood carefully, controlling my breath, and offered them both a smooth smile before moving to the other side of the plinth and picking my way toward the path.

Behind me, Judicus was still protesting. “Anyone could be called ‘the Seeker’ it just means someone who is looking for something, and I wasn’t looking for this until a few days ago. You might as well be excited to see the librarians in Briccatore. They’re looking for these things, too. They always are.”

“It’s different,” she said, and I caught a look at her bright eyes as I passed. I hadn’t seen that look since Gundt found Mally. It bordered on worship. It made me feel all twisted up inside. “Look!”

She pulled up the sleeve of her shirt and revealed a tattoo on her skin – an intricate knot with no ends. It wove in on itself.

“What is that?” Judicus asked, grimacing as he pulled himself to his feet and limped over to take her forearm in his hands and examine it. The move brought him very close to her.

Flara looked triumphant. This – whatever this was – was exactly what she wanted.

I left them to it, making my way to the other side of the hill and leaning over the edge in the last rays of the afternoon sun. Below, down the narrow track, Fontellrae’s armsmen had started a fire and were cooking something, one of them still on watch by the wider trail.

Far past them, the foothills rolled into the thick smoke below that cloaked the landscape so thickly that I couldn’t make out any details. All I could see were rising pillars, or waves of smoke, like the sea had grown furious and burnt itself into this horrific landscape.

The sun hung somewhere along the horizon, crimson in shared grief as it shone through the thick smoke.

I watched it and let my mind tumble. If Flara could help Judicus with this knot, then maybe that was for the best. Maybe they were the ones who could do this together. Maybe I wasn’t needed here.

So, what? What else would I do?

I could go back for Judicus’s sister myself. Just me and Kazmerev.

It was a silly thought.

How could I manage that by myself?

Another voice inside my mind reminded me that if the Flamerarch were still in Briccatore then I could tell them about Reichus and they might listen to me. Or they might not. Or they might not be there. They might have been dragged away, one by one, by the raiders.

I could go help Mally. I could make my way across the sea. I could – what? What could I do for her?

I felt foolish. Why was I even thinking about this? I’d developed an overblown sense of myself. I was no more useful than the donkeys who had brought us here. I had use, but I was not the hero of this journey.

It was in the middle of this self-doubt that the sun sank and Kazmerev sprang to life in my heart, bright and bold, a flower blooming into the sky, licking flames dancing with fresh life, bringing with him the scent of charcoal and sulfur and fresh grass.

I sighed with relief. He was here.

Little Hawk. Let’s fly!

My heart leapt. If there was one thing I wanted to do right now, it was fly.

Jump.

I jumped, and he was under me immediately. Warmth and the scent of burning pine sap filled my nose and I buried my fingers into his spirit feathers – black and purple, edged with bright scarlet and sparks of gold. I leaned forward and buried my face into his feathers, so grateful for his warmth, his strength, his closeness. I hadn’t realized how lonely and untethered I’d felt until I suddenly wasn’t anymore.

Gratitude washed through me, a welcome tide.

We whirled upward like a flame loosened from the tip of a bonfire and shot into the sky and for one glorious moment, it was just me and my friend of flame, just the two of us in the wide, open sky. As we dove up into the height of the sky, the smoke cleared and the stars emerged, shining in merry delight and we corkscrewed up and up and into the beauty of it and I felt Kazmerev’s thoughts cradling mine, his firm certainty filling in the holes in my confidence, his strong conviction bolstering my shaky hopes.

We were so high up now that I’d lost sight of Judicus entirely. I felt a pang of worry for him and then stifled it. After all, he had Flara, and she seemed very keen on being close to him.

Aren’t you a bitter thing? You taste like spring onions.

Fair enough. And I was glad we were so high up because I did not want Flara’s phoenix eavesdropping on us.

Lilophrensa, he corrected.

I needed his good judgment. He always saw clearly.

We soared, the cold air brushing my hair back and soothing my pounding head and his warm body keeping me toasty warm at the core as I poured out my heart and our problem out to him.

It’s been a long time since I was young, he said when I was done and there was a sound of laughter in his mental voice.

I didn’t see what that had to do with anything.

Have you considered that you are jealous of Flara?

I didn’t know what I’d be jealous of.

Then you aren’t falling tail over beak for that sickly rope worker?

My cheeks were hot – likely from his endless heat and not anything else. I was not falling for anyone. And besides, Judicus was not sickly, I’d just met him during a difficult time.

He’s courageous and pure-hearted and clever. But he’s sickly. Even I can see that. If a phoenix was forever spewing fire everywhere the way that boy spews his food, we’d think he was about to take the last death.

Well, Judicus wasn’t. Not if I could help it and not if I could fix his leg. Which we needed to do now that Kazmerev was well.

I care not whether you acknowledge it. But you should know it’s affecting your judgment.

Then it was up to him to keep me on the right path. He seemed pleased at that.

I think if the Lilophrensa’s rider has a knot he can try, then he should try it. After you heal him. We don’t have a lot of time. Stryxex are everywhere. Phoenixes are disappearing. The time of caution has passed. We need this puzzle solved and a way to get the duplicate puzzle to Mally, and that means he needs to try something.

I agreed.

And you need to rein in your jealousy. If you won’t admit you’re fond of the boy, then at least admit you need self-control around the other girl. That she is not an easy fit for you.

That was certain enough.

If you love someone then you do what’s best for them, even if it’s hard for you. It is not easy for me to keep my memories of the riders I had before. I could pretend they never existed. Instead, I honor them with my memories. I don’t let my emotions prevent something important. You should do the same. Your emotions are a barking dog. Teach yourself to keep them on a short tether.

As always, he was right.

I could hear the song of his satisfaction as he drifted down from the sky, and I let him enjoy the moment. We’d been apart too much of late. It was so, so good to have him back.

Chapter Six

We descended through the lavender dusk, the smoke around us obscuring the shape of the land below until we were almost upon the plinth.

As it came into view, a gasp tore from my chest. I could see them again. Hundreds of lights battering against the inside of the plinth like trout put in a barrel, smacking their noses forever against the side in an attempt to swim free.

I swallowed down bile, barely able to contain myself for a second time.

What madness is this? Kazmerev’s voice echoed in my mind and even he sounded shaken. This is an abomination. It must be stopped.

And as we grew closer the sound of something that sounded almost like a very low keening – or singing? – met my ears and to my shock, I saw Flara’s very bright white phoenix nestled so her forehead was against the plinth, and it was she who made that sound. I found it deeply unsettling.

Easy now, Little Hawk. Remember. Spring onions.

I was not bitter. I just didn’t like what I was seeing. Before the plinth, Judicus had his head bent low over Flara’s arm, studying her tattoo with his usual fervor and her other hand drifted over his head as if it might come down in a caress at any moment.

I rolled my eyes.

No, that’s certainly not jealousy. Not at all.

I bit my lip as we descended. I definitely did not want Judicus to know I was jealous.

See? You are jealous.

My cheeks were hot as I leapt from Kazmerev’s back.

I strode forward and tapped Judicus on the shoulder, ignoring Flara’s look of affront.

He looked up, knocking her hand on his head and then startling, falling onto his injured leg and wincing terribly.

“Sersha. Gah, that leg hurts! Sersha. I was just wondering where you were. Have you seen this? She has this knot tattooed right on her arm and from what I can tell, it’s a freedom knot. It should release something.”

I glanced uneasily at the souls bumping against the plinth. Beside me, Kazmerev shuffled, shying away. I noticed Flara was not looking at the plinth. Maybe the souls made her too uncomfortable.

“I think we should try it.” He ran a hand through his hair and bit his lip, his eyes glued to the plinth.

“Can you see what is inside the plinth?”  I signed.

He shook his head.

“What’s she saying? We don’t have time for her signs,” Flara said irritably. “We must work this immediately. With the Hand of the Rat swarming across the plains we may have little time.”

I ignored her.

“We should heal your leg  first, Judicus,” I signed. “While my phoenix is here.”

I didn’t have a sign for Kazmerev. I needed one.

I am too great for any sign, Kazmerev said in my mind. Though I would be open to seeing your suggestions.

I’d attend to that directly. After we healed Judicus. And decided on what to do with the plinth.

“Umm,” Judicus said, looking from Flara to me uncertainly.

“The leg,” I signed again, more emphatically. If this knot didn’t work and we had to run again, or if the raiders came and we had to run again, or if Mally decided to go crownless, and we lost the chance we would regret not acting now.

“We must do this immediately, Seeker,” Flara said, her eyes burning with a combination of firmness and devotion.

I could just nudge her off the mountain. Her phoenix would catch her.

Unkind, Sersha.

My face burned hotter still. He was right.

“Flara is right,” Judicus said, smiling awkwardly at me. “I need to do this while I still can.”

“There’s no hurry,” I signed. It wasn’t entirely true, but I was worried about him. We needed to help him first.

“I think, Judicus,” Flara said sweetly, “That you can make your own choices without input from those without your experience. Look.”

She pointed out behind her where the descent of night cut through the smoke enough to show us the fires burning in the distance.

“We only have so much time. The fires are behind us. And so is the Hand of the Rat.”

Self-control, Kazmerev hissed in my mind. I unclenched my fists, taking in big breaths. Yes. I had to control myself.

“But stay close, Sersha,” Judicus said, smiling at me as if nothing was going wrong. “We’ll do your thing as soon as this is done.”

My thing? Healing his leg from what could cripple him for life and was causing him enormous pain right now was somehow my thing?

Big breaths. Wow. It turns out you are more like Mally than I gave you credit for. That’s quite the temper.

If he said anything after that, it was lost in the big breaths I was trying to take as Judicus leaned so that one hand was on the plinth and the other could trace Flara’s tattoo with a long forefinger. She winked at me over his back. And I finally understood the term “bristled.”

Self-control! It’s like you came out of the egg today. You are not newly hatched.

Flara’s weird phoenix was swaying now as its keening song accelerated in rhythm and I was pretty sure Judicus couldn’t see it, or he’d be as creeped out as I was.

Perhaps we should fly again. You need space from this.

Someone was going to ...

I didn’t finish the thought. Judicus crossed his eyes, flung his head back, and then the rock under my feet shifted to something that didn’t feel like rock at all. It felt like I was standing on a living creature. I leapt for Kazmerev, catching him in a hug as he slid under me.

I was only just in time. The rock under where I was standing cracked and slid away, bouncing down the mountainside with a terrible series of quieter and quieter crashes.

Judicus didn’t even notice. His eyes were still fixed above him at the strange knot on the side of the plinth, his finger still tracing the knot on Flara’s arm.

Flara’s eyes widened but she didn’t so much as flinch. Maybe she really did believe all this. Maybe Judicus really was a religious figure to her. The thought made me feel like ants were crawling under my skin.

From the edge of my hearing, I heard the cry of a bird.

We hunt! Kazmerev said and without a word from me, we were in the sky, gaining height, his neck stretched forward and wings beating at the air as one might beat out an errant flame.

In the distance, something twisted at the corner of my eye, and I swallowed down a curse.

Flara hadn’t been wrong. We had very little time after all.

The Stryxex had found us.

Chapter Seven

Ready yourself! Kazmerev told me, and there was an element of excitement in his focused voice.

I bit my lip and buried one hand in his feathers, the other ready for throwing fire or whatever else we must do.

They’re vulnerable down there and we’re their only protection while they do this thing, Kazmerev said and it seemed to me that all his energy was focused on this, that it thrilled him to be on the hunt again. I hadn’t realized how much he was born for this.

We circled over the hill, defensive in our spiral. Below, Judicus and Flara worked without looking up and Liliphrensa continued her odd swaying dance.

I strained my eyes, looking for the armsmen. There they were at their little fire and guarding the pass. Whatever had made the hill above spongey must not have affected them or they’d be more alarmed. Were they under threat of attack?

I saw no small figures creeping up the hill, though it was hard to be certain.

Eyes up!

His warning was just in time. I jerked my eyes up as the Stryxex closed on us. My eyes met the narrowed eyes of the veiled rider and at that moment a gust of wind struck us both so hard that our mounts wavered and shook, blown slightly off course in the same direction. The rider’s hood was ripped away and his red hair shone like a beacon.

Him again!

I felt Kazmerev’s mental growl deep in my own chest.

The Stryxex dove, claws and beak outstretched, a shriek in its throat that sliced through the air like a knife slices through a melon, and then they were upon us.

I raised my hand and poured fire from the palm, but the Stryxex was fast. It rolled, bringing its rider to the side and then under it, almost falling, before righting itself underneath us. My flames passed over it harmlessly.

Kazmerev arched up and then dove down, head-first, like a fish spitting the hook. My hand in his feathers clung to him but the magic kept me tight against his back, even – impossibly – when I was in a place that surely I must fall away or be ripped from his grasp.

Sweat broke out across my brow as we followed the Stryxex, serpent-like in our slide through the air. He was making for the pillar directly and we were hot on his tail.

Something was happening below us. The symbol on the plinth seemed to be clawing out, dark arms whipping out from it like an angry squid – like the stone octopus that we’d fled at the temple of the Cult of Tattered Ribbons. He must have begun to loosen the knot and those must be its loose ends waving wildly as if they might catch him and claw him apart.

My heart felt heavy as a rock. I should snatch him back from that.

He won’t thank you for it.

I needed to get to him before the Stryxex.

Too late!

And he was right. The Stryxex was ahead of us, roaring towards Judicus. The rider produced a wicked-looking javelin.

Without thinking at all, I whipped my arm as if I was throwing something and to my surprise, a ball of fire flew from my hand and splashed across the back of the Stryxex.

It keened loudly, tumbling off course and down the side of the mountain.

Nice work!

Kazmerev shifted, adjusting his course so we were chasing the fall of the creature. Wind rushed around my face, streaming around me as we plummeted.

Keep up the pressure on him!

I threw a second ball of fire and the Stryxex bucked, tumbling now in a terrible roll. The javelin fell away, and the rider clung to his mount’s back with both hands, his legs spread wide and whipping out as he tumbled like flags flapping in the wind.

We were dropping so fast we were nearly to the stone creatures. They were remarkably life-like and from this close, I could see patterns picked out across them like a madman had been set loose with a chisel and hammer and told to be creative.

The Stryxex leveled out, seeming to right itself.

One more! Come on now!

But this time when I flung a ball of fire, it was smaller, weaker. I tried again, and the ball of fire materialized and then winked out.

Your energy fades.

Kazmerev’s voice was tight. I felt my own chest seize with fear.

Oh no.

The fireballs had been too much – too much show and too much energy and now how would I defend Judicus?

My breath was coming too fast, and I lowered my hand to grip Kazmerev for the comfort he could offer, just as something below moved, shifting.

It was one of the stone beasts.

It reached up and snatched the Stryxex from the air, flinging the rider from its back, and to my horror, stone jaws opened, and stone jaws shut over the fluttering Stryxex like a frog eating a moth. An apt description, since the creature looked like an elongated frog with crab-like claws for hands.

My mouth was still open in horror as Kazmerev corkscrewed past the creature at top speed.

If you want a prisoner, catch him ... now!

The red-headed raider fell right in front of me, and I snatched for him to keep him from sliding from Kazmerev’s back. He was smoking and burned from my fireballs, patches of his clothing entirely gone, leaving only red blistering skin. And he was out cold.

What was I supposed to do with a prisoner?

Better question – what are we supposed to do with these?

We were climbing again, nearly vertical as Kazmerev fought for immediate height. I glanced down and bit my own tongue in surprise. Below us, the entire rift in the earth was crawling like a kicked anthill, stone creatures emerging from it to crawl – sometimes over one another – in a desperate attempt to get out. Something bright flowed through them like a thin river of light.

This was not good.

This is really not good.

We agreed on that, at least.

Chapter Eight

We gained height quickly, fast enough that we were close to level with Judicus on the hillside when I finally thought to look up.

I was so stunned by what I saw that for a moment I didn’t know what to do.

Judicus had his arms in front of him spread out, a look of shocked overwhelm on his face like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. His hands fought physically with the flapping, clawing edges of the knot he’d untied as if he could force it into place manually.

He was not succeeding.

With a roar, he screwed up his long face and flung his narrow shoulders forward, wrestling the rope work with ropes of his own, springing from his hands like tendril roots from a great oak as he thrashed against the tentacle-like strands.

Something trickled from the plinth – something that looked like bright light – in a narrow stream down the side of the plinth and down the cliff.

Beside him, Flara’s eyes glowed – literally glowed – shading her smile until it looked otherworldly, and no one needed to tell me that her eyes shouldn’t be doing that and as they grew brighter and brighter her swaying, trance-like phoenix’s form began to dull from the white brightness it had before as the light sucked out of it. It twisted, and what had looked like a bright phoenix inverted to a Stryxex before my eyes.

Kazmerev screamed a terrible bird-like phoenix scream and I thought I might be screaming with him.

I was fooled! Tricked!

And then the top of the plinth split like the cracking of an egg and I realized what the trickle had been before as the spirits that were within flowed out in a river, screaming just like Kazmerev had screamed as they flowed like molten honey and poured down the side of the mountain into the tear in the earth where the writhing stone creatures leapt and struggled toward them. It was the spirits raising them to life. I knew it without knowing how.

I couldn’t form a coherent thought. I didn’t know what to do.

And then Flara took a step back from Judicus and I knew exactly what to do.

Kazmerev! We need to grab Judicus before she –

I didn’t even get to finish the thought.

Flara leaned forward, kissed Judicus chastely on the lips, and then pushed him into the grappling tentacles of the rope work knot he’d been fighting.

The air seemed to suck out of the world and I couldn’t breathe.

The living knot wound around him, tightening, throttling, strangling.

We dove toward them. Not fast enough. Not fast enough.

I could feel the scream of Kazmerev’s flames stretching toward our goal.

Flara was faster than we could be. She leapt from the cliff, was caught by her Stryxex, and spiraled upward into the darkness of the night.

She’d be back. I knew that without having to guess. She’d come for the red-haired man I held captive. How could she not when they were both Stryxex riders?

That could not be my concern, not now.

I needed to get to Judicus.

Kazmerev dove to where I could leap from his back. It wasn’t easy to sustain his physical presence to hold the prisoner while I wasn’t on his back, but I did it as I leapt to the unsteady, spongey mountaintop, grabbed Judicus’s bag and retrieved his belt knife from within. I threw the pack strap over one shoulder, stood, and slashed at the arms of magic clamped around Judicus’s throat.

They held him in inky strands like the cords of a muscle or a thick ship’s rope, one wrapped twice around his neck, while others branched around his midsection, both arms, and one leg. They weren’t just single strands but rather each one was tied in knots upon knots upon knots. Judicus’s own root-like ropes had vanished, and his face was red, mouth open, choking as he gasped for breath, eyes rolled back into his head.

My own gasping sobs filled my ears as I hit the knife against the ropework, but it didn’t penetrate them, didn’t sink in, didn’t even scratch the surface of the magic holding him.

He had seconds, if that.

Stop attacking the arms and get the heart.

The heart? Where was the heart on a knot?

I wanted to sob with the frustrated despair clamping over my heart.

Where is the knot held to this pillar?

Somewhere behind Judicus, I was sure.

I sank to my knees and tried to see if I could see any kind of opening to where the knot was attached to the wall. No chance. The knot had Judicus sealed across itself, pulled tighter with every breath.

I stood, frustrated but beyond terrified by the sounds coming from him as the ropework pulled tighter.

This was a terrible way to die.

I’d only have one shot at stopping it. I stepped close, and quick as I could, I wiggled one hand behind his lower back and pulled him toward me with all my strength – making just enough room for the other arm to slip in. It was a deadly hug. I wiggled the tip of my knife into the center of the knot and pushed.

I felt the moment it found a soft spot and sank in and like a broken bowstring, the arms snapped away from Judicus and fell limp along the plinth.

He fell, heavy, into my arms.

The knife fell from my grasp as I stumbled backward, trying to hold his whole weight in my arms. He sank against me, head over my shoulder, shoulders drooped against my chest.

My boot heel lost its grip and I slipped hard to one side, falling into someone who smelled of pitch and smoke.

Relief shot through me – but only for a moment. The mountain was trembling again.

Shift so I can wiggle under you.

But what about the prisoner?

Keep Judicus in that hug and lift one leg. I’ll slip in from the side and keep the unconscious man ahead of you.

It wasn’t a certain plan, but it was the best we were going to get.

Heart in my throat, I lifted a leg, putting all my weight and Judicus’s on one limb.

My muscles screamed their protest.

Kazmerev ducked under it, and for one wild moment it felt like I was sitting on nothing at all and my belly dropped out through my bottom, and then, suddenly, he was solid and we were lifting up, unsteady and shaky, but lifting, lifting, leaving the trembling pillar behind.

I sucked in a long breath, and clung to Judicus, willing him to breathe, to please breathe, and coughing on the smoke in the air.

The smoke had gotten worse, I thought.

Below us, the stone creatures rolled up out of the tear on the earth flooding into the ravine between the rocks. They did not pause, did not stop, did not turn aside no matter what the terrain in front of them, just kept rolling over the jagged landscape.

And I could see them in my mind’s eye, rolling across the devastated lands of Fontellrae’s people, and over the river, and up toward the people of Briccatore shut in their homes, and my throat seemed like it was closing up, too.

What had we done?

Chapter Nine

We soared shakily over the broken plinth, the knots hanging out of it looking like a fish half-gutted for dinner.

I shuddered.

Somewhere safe, Kazmerev was muttering in my mind, we have to find somewhere safe.

But we couldn’t leave the men who had come with us. We had to warn them. And their carts could carry the prisoner and Judicus as they healed, for soon it would be morning.

Yes. This is best.

I was surprised to hear the note of worry in his mind. He was always so calm.

I don’t like the idea of leaving you like this. Not with those stone creatures out there. Not with that terrifying Stryxex rider.

She’d gone somewhere and he was right, she could come back at any time. Her Stryxex had not been wounded.

How had we mistaken it for a phoenix?

I don’t know.

And this time he seemed shaken to his core. I put a hand on him to try to reassure him. Something magical had happened there – something involving powers beyond us, something that had taken hours yet felt like mere minutes.

None of the other Stryxex have ever had a voice. None of them have spoken to me or greeted me as a phoenix. It was ... like touching a flame only to find it was icy cold. It was ... It was not right.

I didn’t like hearing him panic. He was the strong one! He was the one who was always sure.

In all my centuries I’ve never seen anything like it. It makes my bones feel like they rot within me.

He didn’t even have bones.

Maybe I do now and maybe they are rotting.

But the time to reassure him had passed. We’d arrived at the donkey carts below to where three armsmen stood clustered around the hitched donkeys, weapons in hand, and worried lines in their foreheads.

“We felt the mountain shake,” Frandtz said with a trembling voice. “And now here you are on the back of a phoenix. Have you always been a Flame Rider, too?”

The others mirrored his uncertain look.

I nodded firmly and waved him closer. I would need help getting Judicus on the cart.

He leapt forward and so did Gerhardt, leaving the last guard – whose name I still didn’t know – tending the donkeys. They all shot me uncertain looks as if they’d seen a rabbit transform into a wolf before their eyes.

“Here, let us help you,” they said, but to my surprise they pulled the red-haired Stryxex rider down first, being very, very careful to avoid touching Kazmerev. They watched him with huge eyes, ducking their heads respectfully any time my phoenix’s black eye caught theirs.

See? This is how humans are meant to regard phoenixes.

He couldn’t be that worried if his arrogance was showing this strongly.

I can afford both emotions.

“A prisoner?” Gerhardt sounded a little breathless. “Were you attacked, then?”

I nodded but it was hard to do. Judicus felt heavier by the moment.

Relief filled me when they pulled him from my arms and helped me to lay him in the cart. They scrambled back to the prisoner and trussed him up as I checked the leader of my coterie.

Judicus was breathing. But there were dark bruises circling his throat. He’d likely find it as hard to speak as I did for the next week. His leg, and arms, and waist were likewise bruised, blotchy and terrible to look at. And I did not have the strength to heal him. I’d wasted all of it on the fireballs.

And so, we left the mountain the same way we ascended it – with Judicus passed out in the cart and a Stryxex rider in the other cart, danger all around, and all of us in silent agreement that things were very bad, indeed.

Frandtz had tried to insist we wait for Flara but eventually, with hand gestures from me and a lot of spitting and angry strutting from Kazmerev, they’d been persuaded to leave without her.

“It would be handy if you could speak,” Frandtz had muttered and I agreed, but there was nothing for it but to push them to do something that went against their natures.

“We could go up after her?” the one whose name I did not know suggested, but it sounded more like a question.

“Better not to,” Gerhardt had muttered, shooting a side look at me.

They were silent until we reached the bottom of the hill where it had branched from the main road over the pass. The trail was worn with tracks, but whether they were old or new, I couldn’t tell, and neither could the men with me.

“I don’t know where we should go,” Frandtz said, staring at the trail. “To go back down the mountain is to find the raiders and their fires. But they may have followed us and be further up the trail.”

All of their gazes drifted to me. I took a big breath and then pointed toward the mountain.

I didn’t know what lay in that direction. I didn’t know if these carts had enough supplies to get us there. I didn’t know how we could possibly stop a stone army from rampaging across the land or do anything about those molten souls from the plinth, but I knew two things for sure: we could not go down to the valley with Judicus unconscious – none of us would survive that – and we could not stay here with Flara lingering somewhere nearby.

Upward was the only direction left.

I gritted my teeth as the carts rumbled upward and when, minutes later, Kazmerev dove back to my heart like a meteor falling to earth and the sun rose across the smoke-filled panorama, I clutched Judicus’s hand, and wondered where we’d gone wrong.

Chapter Ten

We found a small spring around midday and stopped there under the gnarled cluster of trees that surrounded it. The three guards and I were all exhausted and only partially from the climb. We’d been looking over our shoulders for hours, expecting to be discovered and set upon at any moment.

Even now, hidden by these trees, we felt vulnerable, and it showed in our hunched shoulders and lack of a fire.

“We have provisions to take us to King’s Hold,” Frandtz said quietly, and I nodded as if that meant something to me. “As long as we aren’t discovered. Grabbing the raider prisoner was clever of you. Perhaps the nobles of King’s Hold can get some information out of him.”

I hadn’t even thought of that. I’d thought only that this man had dogged our heels from the moment Judicus had found us. On top of that, he had been part of Lady Lightland’s plot to seize the ai’sletta and the kingdom. He wasn’t just anyone. He was a pin holding everything together. Just keeping him out of it was justification for keeping him with us.

I wished I could leave him to rot, but he was still a human, so I bandaged his burns and dribbled a little water into his mouth, working to make him as comfortable as possible in the cart.

Judicus was another matter. We were finally somewhere safe enough to dig the arrowhead out of his leg and I did not know if we’d have a chance at it again. He’d been in and out of consciousness since we’d left the plinth and I’d held his hand and smoothed his hair as his eyes opened and then rolled back into his head more than once. But conscious or no, it had to come out and I had to get it out.

Carefully, I boiled water, gathered bandages and a sewing kit, and cleaned the sharpest knives I could find. The armsmen spoke to me as I worked.

“His Grace will be disappointed. I think he expected the rope worker to save us all,” Frandtz said sadly.

“Why would he think that?” Gerhardt asked, poking the fire up for me to keep my water at a boil. I smiled at him in thanks.

“He’s been keeping those prophecies forever and he was so sure that they meant our salvation. It was the charge of his father and his father before him to guard that plinth and to bring the one foretold to it no matter what the cost. I think he’d hoped it would mean something – would do something. I’ll tell you, though I wouldn’t tell many, that I’d hoped so, too.”

“It’ll be alright, Sergeant,” the third guard said. His eyes were on Judicus. “You can’t always see a thing working. Maybe he did do something. You know how a seed works. It grows slow and subtle in the ground, and you never know what it might be until it breaks through the soil.”

Frandtz grunted. “Maybe so, Conwer, maybe so.”

Which is how I learned the third guard’s name.

I learned it again when I readied Judicus’s leg and began to cut through the flesh, sure and certain.

Conwer’s hand shot out and caught me at the same moment that Judicus’s eyes shot open. I touched Judicus’s shoulder gently with my other hand and then pressed it a little more firmly, making calming, shushing noises as he moaned and Frandtz barked.

“Let her work on him, Conwer. You’re no healer.”

“I don’t think she is either,” he said grimly. “She’s cutting unmarked flesh.”

“She’s what?” Frandtz said, springing forward.

“Arrowhead,” Judicus gasped, his voice raw and mangled and barely more than a whisper. He paused, coughing and gasping and I put down the knife, offering him a little water. “Arrowhead.”

And then his eyes rolled back in his head, and he passed out again.

“Is there an arrowhead stuck in there?” Frandtz asked me.

And to my relief, they believed my nod and even helped me extract it when the job proved too much for me. It was bloody work, and I knew it would hurt when Judicus awoke, but when I was done, and the leg was stitched, I felt better. If night fell tonight, I’d heal it. And if it didn’t, this was still better than leaving it in there.

“Maybe we should stay the night here,” Frandtz said uncertainly when I was done. “We could all use the rest. It’s been a trying few days.”

And so, we prepared to spend the night, taking the time to make a small fire and tea and food. We slept in shifts through the afternoon, and I tended my two patients with care.

The red-haired Stryxex rider would have filled me with fear were he conscious. Even now, when he was bandaged nearly from head to foot and each breath was a rasping inhale, he made my hands shake. I was certain not to leave anything like a weapon near him and we kept his wrists bound despite his condition.

If I was being honest, I wasn’t sure he would wake. The burns were severe and extensive, and they made my stomach lurch every time I tended them. I had done that to him. Me. And even though he was my enemy, it made me wonder if it were ever right to do this to someone else. Even someone bent on your death and the destruction of all your friends.

I bit my lip hard and fought to save him if I could.

Judicus slept on, tossing and crying out occasionally. In his case, I was worried. It didn’t make sense to me that he hadn’t regained consciousness. He should have by now. My hope was that his body was simply so weary, it was conserving its energy to heal him. But I worried that might be wishful thinking.

To my vast relief, night fell, and with it came Kazmerev.

He blossomed like the blooming of a fire on oil, springing up with a bright flash of heat and light.

To my even greater relief, he immediately took charge.

You’re somewhere safe, he told me immediately. And wrung out like a rag on the point of collapse. You need sleep and you need it now.

But I would heal Judicus first.

He shuffled uncertainly. You may not have the strength for that. You wore yourself out yesterday. You need to restore what was depleted.

I would heal Judicus first.

Stubborn fledgling, he said, but he sounded affectionate. Perhaps you should lie down beside him, then if you pass out from the effort, you won’t have far to fall.

I wasn’t going to lie down beside him. I flushed at the thought. What would Frandtz and the others think? I wasn’t Flara.

Just the thought of her name sent a chill through me and made Kazmerev blaze with sudden fury.

Now you know why she hovered over him and kept you at a distance. She must have meant to thwart him all along. It was the pattern on her skin he followed. Trusting her like a loyal dog.

I didn’t like that comparison, apt though it was. We had both trusted her. We had both made a terrible mistake to touch that plinth at all. I’d gone into it as willing as he had.

But it was not you who did the deed.

It didn’t need to be. My heart was with his when he did it, so I was equally guilty. And come to think of it, Kazmerev had thought it was a good idea at the time, too.

Hmph. Well, we all learn as we go.

I sat down heavily beside Judicus, laying a hand over his leg, and I thought of heat and warmth to fill him, to heal him, to erase his wounds. I closed my eyes, and I pushed all my heat and warmth into him.

I opened my eyes, but my vision was blurry, the world tilting terribly from side to side.

I told you it was too much, Kazmerev said in my mind as my vision narrowed and narrowed and then grew dark and I swayed, losing my balance and hitting the earth.

I’d just stay here for a moment. Just for a moment.

Sure, you will. And maybe next time you won’t be so stubborn. Sleep, Little Hawk. I will spread my wing over you.

Warmth and softness were my last sensations before my mind drifted into sweet sleep.

Chapter Eleven

“Sersha.” The whisper in my ear was familiar as my own heartbeat. I felt Judicus’s breath wash over me. “Sersha, I’ve been waiting for hours, you have to be awake by now.”

I opened my eyes to see Judicus squatted over me with a lantern in his hand, his dark hair mussed and long face pale in the lantern light. He was shivering. I was not. Kazmerev made a very warm companion.

He slept off and on since you healed him. And he gave you his blanket.

I sat up and motioned for him to join me under the blanket, but he shook his head adamantly.

“We need to talk before the others wake up.”

My head was still thick and heavy with something.

That “something” is called overexertion and it’s going to catch up to you if you keep being so pigheaded. I hope I don’t have to warn you not to heal the burned man. Not until you’re somewhere safe enough to pass out again and maybe not even then.

I really did need to do that.

It will knock you on your heels, like healing Judicus did – maybe even worse since he’s so much more injured.

I should have healed him first.

And why would you do something like that?

Because, objectively speaking, he needed it more.

I never think like that. What is closest to your heart is always that which is most important. Without personal good, there is no greater good. And besides, you barely had enough strength to heal the rope worker. Look at the scars you left on him.

I ran a hand over my face to clear my thoughts and stood, peering at Judicus. Kazmerev was right. I reached out instinctively and then paused, not quite daring to touch the deep ropes of scarring on his throat. He’d removed the bandage over his eye, and it had thick scars to either side, too.

Judicus caught my hand. “Whatever you did to heal my throat healed the rest of the eye, too. Or maybe it healed before when you fixed the leg the first time – I didn’t think to check. Don’t worry about the scars. Scars are lines on a map of where you’ve been, and I’d like to remember my road.” He paused, his pale face grim. “I should be thanking you. I should. But Sersha.” He cursed vehemently and I pulled back, but he held on to my hand, taking a step forward as I took one backward. “Sersha, what have we done?”

He dropped my hand like he had only just realized he was still holding it and his fingers spread wide, his hands moving jerkily in a double wave before he drew in a deep breath and tried again.

“We need to talk. And not where we can be heard. Gerhardt was on watch, and he fell asleep at it. This is our best chance.”

If you don’t go with him, he won’t rest, Kazmerev said, a note of humor in his mental voice. I’ll just stay here and watch over the sleeping humans.

I nodded my agreement to Judicus, and he led me past the sleepers to where the spring trickled in the fading moonlight and the dancing gold of the lantern. He sat on a fallen log beside it – a log so weather-beaten it was grey and the edges fraying. I sat beside him and wrapped the blanket around his shoulders.

He looked at me gravely, his eyes saying more than his words. “Thank you.”

His voice was burred, despite the healing, as if his throat was as permanently scarred as his neck was. I hoped, for his sake, that he wasn’t.

“You should not ...” I stumbled in my signs, not sure of the word I needed. “You should not say this is you. We chose to try together. We had reason to think the phoenix was true.”

I hated having a limited sign vocabulary. It made me feel like a child.

When he replied, his hands danced in the signs at the same time, helping me learn.

“It’s entirely my fault, Sersha.” My heart still leapt a little when he used the sign for my name. Probably because it had been given to me in someone’s last hours. “I was arrogant. I thought I could contain any problem that arose. I thought I could see clearly what the solution was. Instead – I don’t know if you saw what poured from that plinth, but I think it was the souls of phoenixes ripped asunder from their ashes and trapped within. That part, at least, was necessary – what kind of horror is that, trapping a soul in the physical realm?” He shuddered. “But I don’t know what happened next. Maybe they dispelled or maybe they are trapped somewhere else. And whatever I did both freed those stone creations, and also broke the plinth. No one can put it back. And if the ai’sletta needs the pair of them to be tuned the same knot, then I’ve ruined everything. She can’t succeed. The world can’t be saved. And all because I was so certain. All those people talking about prophecies.” He shook his head, hanging it low. “What a ghastly fool I was for beginning to think I could be something for someone. I’m an idiot. A completely ridiculous idiot.”

I realized – to my chagrin – that he was crying. His tears, hot and fat, splashed onto the ground in front of his feet and his head was ducked so low that his face was hidden from me.

“I don’t know why I let myself think otherwise, or why I dragged you along for it. I don’t know if you can forgive me. Every time I turn around, I’ve mired you worse and worse and you just keep believing in me and sticking by me and ... uh.” The sound was like an agonized groan. “You shouldn’t, Sersha. You shouldn’t keep trusting me.”

His voice was so close to breaking.

And I didn’t know what came over me, but I just wanted to tell him somehow that he was worth so much and I regretted nothing, but I didn’t have the signs to say it and I just ... I needed to stop him. I needed to make him see.

I reached out, letting the blanket slip from my shoulders, and took his face in both my hands drawing it up to look at me. He stared back at me miserably, guilt and confusion warring in his eyes.

And no. He needed to know. He needed to see and there was only one way to show him.

I leaned forward and I kissed him. As slow and soft and sweet as I could. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but he didn’t seem to care. He melted into me with a gasp that sounded more like pain than anything, but his palm came up to hover over my lower back – just close enough that I could barely feel the feather touch, more gentle than a child saving a moth from the flame. His lips were warmer than I expected, and so much softer, but though he responded to my kiss with a kiss of his own, that, too, was feather-light and gentle and when we parted, he tucked a stray lock of my hair behind my ear.

I let my fingers feather over the scars around his eye, memorizing how his face had changed.

His lips stayed parted and he blinked at me like he’d been stunned by something and didn’t know what to do.

I gave him my sternest look and signed, “Judicus is my friend, and you need to stop telling me he is not good.”

“If you wish it,” he whispered, and his eyes were full of wonder and his pale cheeks hot and red.

“We are in trouble.” I agreed in sign. “And we do not know how to fix it. But you are key to fixing it and we must have you ...” I hesitated. “Bright.”

“If you wish it,” he said again as if he didn’t know what to say, and the look in his eyes melted from shock into something that looked very much like wanting.

And then Kamerev was there, popping into visibility so that Judicus startled, and the moment was lost.

I sense something in the trees, he said in my mind.

He was still talking when a black rope slithered past us on the ground and snatched up a toad, squeezing it tight in the rope’s grasp and then leaving it flattened on the ground as it slid onward.

I grabbed Judicus’s arm, holding my breath in fear as he whispered, “Kentinius.”

Chapter Twelve

We scrambled back to the camp, avoiding the rope. I made Kazmerev invisible again so he could soar up and scout for us.

He broke through the trees at full speed, as on edge as I was. Could he see anything yet?

I see the camp. The hills. It’s nearly dawn. I hate this part, Sersha. I don’t like leaving you. It guts me every time and I never know if you’ll be safe while I’m gone.

He didn’t need to fret. I had Judicus, after all.

A kiss from you can’t turn a frog into a prince no matter what the stories say and he’s still the same boy who vomits constantly and then absentmindedly destroys massive landmarks.

That was unfair.

I’m not in a fair mood. I don’t think you should be kissing boys while you’re running for your life.

Then when, exactly, would I do it? I was always running for my life these days.

That’s fine with me. Never is just fine with me.

We stumbled into the ring of sleeping bodies and I began to kick out the fire as Judicus reached for Frandtz.

“Frandtz, Gerhardt, Conwer!” he whispered, shaking each guard in turn.

I see them! Kazmerev crowed. They’re behind you on the trail leading down the mountain. Not far. They’ve made camp in a narrow pass and ... oh no Sersha, you need to know this. She’s – ”

His words cut off as the sun cut through the darkness, carving a long golden line through it like a man carves a winter gourd.

I hurried to gather the last of our things and throw them in the carts, dodging the scintillating arm of black rope as it twisted its way through the camp, searching, searching.

Fortunately, we’d bedded the prisoner in one of the carts, so he didn’t need to be moved. He woke as the men scrambled to hitch the donkeys, jarring the cart. The red-haired Stryxex rider moaned through clenched teeth, and I hurried to his side, offering water from a water skin.

He knocked my hand aside, shooting up and grabbing me by the throat.

I was so stunned I didn’t know what to do. My vision was filled with his half-burned face and then he began to laugh as I fought for breath.

His laughter cut off as a black rope shot out and grabbed his arm, ripping it backward and away from my throat until he screamed.

“What is with you people and choking? Is it the only thing they teach you?” Judicus asked irritably.

The Stryxex rider laughed, wheezing painfully through his burned lungs. Judicus released his arm and he flexed his fingers before collapsing back to his bed.

“You’re all dead, you five fools.” His voice was barely more than a croak. “They’re almost upon you and when they arrive you will wish I’d strangled the life out of you so you wouldn’t have to live through what they’ll do to you. You’ll wish you’d offered up your phoenix and your ropework and all your allies. You’ll be willing to offer up your own mother if it means the death you will beg for.”

“Who is us?” Judicus asked precisely but the man was laughing again and then choking, and coughing, and coughing through his damaged lungs.

I offered him the waterskin again and he knocked it to the side, leaving me to scramble to stopper it. We had water from the spring, but we didn’t have time to refill the skins and we couldn’t afford to waste it.

“Which way?” Frandtz whispered from the head of the donkey.

“Up the trail,” Judicus said with a clenched jaw. “There’s nowhere else to go.”

“There never was,” the Stryxex rider rasped. His dancing eyes met Judicus’s. “There never was for you. You’ve been our creature from the beginning though you didn’t know it. Driven by our plan to go out to the wilds to scoop up the ai’sletta for us. You’ve been managed by our Lady Lightland like a dog set to the hunt, and then driven back to Briccatore and used to herd up the Flame Riders, driven to poor mad Duke Fontellrae with his ridiculous secret everyone knew – a cult in his family line for generations. So easy to turn. So easy to twist. We hardly even had to try, and you fell for all of it.” He paused to wheeze a laugh. “Where will we make you dance next, do you think? Even if you escape us now and go over the mountains will you ever know for sure that we haven’t sent you there to do our bidding like we sent you everywhere else? You’re a hound Judicus Franzer Irault. A hound to be used by clever hunters and nothing more. The more you think to set out on your own the more our leash tightens, and we’ll let it tighten and tighten while you serve our purposes, until it chokes you.”

A muscle in Judicus’s jaw clenched as he met the man’s stare. He was walking beside the cart, just like I was. We couldn’t go faster than the donkeys could move.

The guards ahead of us, leading the pack donkeys, had stiff spines and I knew they were hearing this. Were they being inspired to doubt, too? Did they wonder if all their sacrifices and all their loyalties were just as futile as this man said ours were?

“And who are you, exactly?” Judicus asked calmly. He looked as if he hadn’t even heard the man’s tirade. I was impressed. It had shaken me.

“I’m your doom. Your end. Your final opponent.”

We were hurrying as fast as the donkeys could go over land dappled by that hated lavender and blush pink of dawn and interspersed by the darkest of velvet shadows.

“It would help to have a name to put on your monument if it comes to that,” Judicus said calmly. “But if you prefer, I could name you. Fritzen, maybe. I had a cat with that name. What do you think, Sersha? Will that do?”

He looked at me and I froze for a moment, stumbling on the rough path, before nodding. I was not as good as he was at ... finesse? Is that what this was? Diplomacy? Perhaps he’d read a book on it. Perhaps even now the pages were passing before his eyes. Or, more likely, he was following in the footsteps of his self-sacrificing father who had stolen a kingdom with brash determination.

“I am Derries son of Fahtran of the Hand of the Rat and Kiessa of Briccatore and I ride the great shadow souls brought up from the depths.”

My belly twisted at those words. Knowing Stryxex were a created abomination was one thing. Hearing the man admit to it was another. I shivered as we passed through the shadow of a rock three times my height. It stood like a jagged tooth in the center of the trail, forcing us to ease around it.

“I am versed in the old ways, soaked in the lore, the maker of prophecies, the crafter of dooms and I have been training all my life for this single task.”

“And what task is that?” Judicus asked calmly. His face was free of all expression. Even his gait seemed smooth.

We emerged from the shadows into a bright patch of light and the warmth of the rising sun hit my face, totally incongruous with this dark conversation.

Derries snarled. “I will destroy every phoenix alive so that my people may roll over this land like a tide and sweep away every living thing in the name of our dark king. We will sow the land with the creatures of the stone and rock and twists of soul.”

“How pleasant,” Judicus said, a distasteful note to his voice. “I can see why you’re willing to sacrifice yourself for it.”

“I have fulfilled my tasks to the letter,” Derries said, leaning back against the bundles in the cart with a groan.

“He also makes an excellent distraction,” a voice said and from the long shadows of the rocks in front of us. From their depths, stepped three figures. At the sight of them, my heart froze in my chest.

Lady Lightland.

Flara, the fake phoenix rider.

And with them was a dark-clad, extremely thin man about Judicus’s age that I knew without having to ask must be rope worker Kentinius.

“I knew I’d see you again,” Lady Lightland said, shaking her cloak out. “If only to say goodbye.”

Chapter Thirteen

I knew two things immediately.

First, that these three outnumbered us, even if it didn’t seem like it at first glance. The ropeworker was uninjured, Flara had her Stryxex hovering somewhere nearby and he did not disappear in the daylight, and Lady Lightland always had a trick or two.

Second, that I must not let them take me captive. I had seen what happened to Flame Riders who were taken captive. I’d seen those poor phoenix souls trapped in the plinth and while I couldn’t connect one to the other, I knew they were connected and I knew that if I loved Kazmerev at all, I must not let that happen to him. My own death was preferred to that.

We stood there, staring at each other for a full breath.

Out of nowhere, Derries launched himself up and hurtled into me.

I crashed to the ground, my shoulder hitting hard, and his weight fell on me in a second blow. The breath was knocked from my lungs, leaving me gasping and choked.

I scrambled, trying to get out from under his weight, but he shifted and shuffled to keep me pinned, uncaring that our scuffle must be pulling his bandages askew and exposing his open burn wounds.

Somewhere above me, a scream ripped through the air – Gerhardt, I thought – and then another scream and then a splintering sound. A donkey bellowed and the cart that Derries had been riding on collapsed beside us spilling supplies across the ground and on top of both Derries and me.

I struggled harder, managed to get head and shoulders out from under him, only to be slammed back to the earth, my chin striking hard and painfully against the ground.

I moaned, but I didn’t dare give up.

I twisted sharply in his grip and slipped out just long enough to catch one glimpse of the wild scene around me. Judicus stood atop the fallen cart, hands spread wide as black ropes poured from them, spilling out across the ground, and rippling to fight as quickly and brutally as a nest of vipers. They fought against another set of black ropes, tangling and knotting and hen slipping away.

On the ground, Gerhardt lay in an unnatural position, his eyes wide and empty of life. Two of the donkeys sprawled the same way.

Oh no. My heart stuttered over the look on his face. He’d been kind to us. He’d been a constant reminder that there were kind people out there trying their best.

As I watched, Flara’s Stryxex dove down, snatched the second cart up in its talons. The donkeys dragged up, up, up into the air with it, and then the Stryxex released it, smashing cart, and supplies, and donkeys all at once onto the rocks below.

A heavy weight sank into my chest.

And then Derries landed an elbow to my belly and my focus was drawn abruptly back to him. Even with his hands bound, he was too strong for me. He reached up with both hands, forcing my chin back, jamming my head back and down into the earth. He was on top of me, in a heartbeat, grabbing a handful of my hair and slamming my head against the ground. Every rock and stick on the ground stabbed painfully into my skin and no matter how hard I fought I was pinned under his weight.

He was making a horrible sound and it took me a minute to realize was laughter. His hand slid down from my jaw to wrap around my neck. I tried to reach to pull his hands away as I choked, gasping for air, feeling it not coming as panic welled up in me. I couldn’t even reach to stop him. His heavy shoulders and forearms fended me back despite the burns covering them, and I was glad – so glad – that I hadn’t healed him because if this was how strong he was when he was injured, what would he have been like if he were whole?

And then all thought was gone as I thrashed mindlessly, my body taking charge in a last attempt to breathe.

My hand caught something and grabbed it, managing to grip somehow and bash it against his exposed ribs. Again. Again.

My vision was narrowing. Little stars danced across my vision. He had yet to waver.

I moved the item in my hand higher, crashing into his shoulders now, and though he hissed in pain, I could barely get my arm up. I was losing consciousness with the never-ending scream of agony in my lungs. I pled in my heart for air the way one pleads for a stolen loved one.

Something told me I had one last chance and then the only thing left for me would be death.

I seized that chance, pulling my arm up as high as I could and crashing whatever I held down onto him with all my fading might. My muscles screamed and two fingers throbbed in agony from the strike, but his grip had loosened.

I wiggled and scrambled for all I was worth and managed to slide out from under him.

My vision was returning. Air sucked painfully through my lungs, making me dizzy and making my vision dance like a traveling entertainer. I blinked hard and saw that I’d hit him in the skull. Red blood poured from the wound, but he shook himself like a dog and as I was still trying to find my equilibrium, he charged, roaring as he sprang back toward me.

Panic took over, propelling me forward as I crashed what I was holding – a rock the size of two of my fists – into his head again and again until he stopped trying to attack me, stopped moving, stopped breathing.

I was still trembling, still terrified when I realized what I’d done. I scrambled backward on all fours like a crab, the rock falling from my horrified hand.

Oh no.

Guilt bubbled up in my chest.

There was no time to digest the rest of the horror of it, I was yanked to my feet by a rough hand and had a pack thrust into my hands. I just had time to catch sight of Frandtz’s blunt face, blood-streaked and earnest.

“I haven’t lost hope,” he said between gritted teeth. “We weren’t wrong. Now, run girl.”

And then he shoved me off the path and spun, sword in hand as Lady Lightland leapt toward him, her blade out and stained with blood.

Of Conwer there was no sign.

Judicus remained on the wagon, his features clenched in concentration as he turned back rope after rope from Kentinius and also countered attacks from Flara’s Stryxex.

I couldn’t run and leave them like this. There had to be a way to help.

In the distance, a rumbling sound triggered some sense in me that we were in danger – as if I needed that with all of this going on right in front of me.

I stumbled backward in time to witness Judicus leap from the cart, execute a perfect forward flip and then leap toward Flara.

Neither she nor the ropeworker were expecting it. Kentinius’s ropes missed Judicus at the same moment that he cleared the distance. He landed right in front of Flara, lifted her and her Stryxex with ropes of his own, and flung her away from him toward the rocky slopes beside me. She flew through the air, but he didn’t wait to see what happened to her. He plowed past where she had stood to where Kentinius was reeling in his ropes, his eyes wide.

My eyes were on Flara, though, as she hit the rocks beside me with a loud crack and slid to the ground beside me. Her arms were bare and there was no tattoo on either of them. I sucked in a breath at the sight of that. What had happened to the sign she used to trick Judicus?

She was senseless, though not dead, and therefore not a threat to me, but she did have something I wanted – no needed – if I was going to help Judicus and Frandtz – because I couldn’t leave them, no matter what Frandtz ordered.

There was no time to take her knives from each spot on the belt I spotted. It was new – something she’d acquired since I’d seen her yesterday. It was a brass-buckled belt wider than my hand studded with multiple knives of various lengths and a large pouch the size of both my hands set side by side.

I unbuckled it quickly and slung it around my own waist, securing the buckle before I drew her largest knife.

No, I definitely wasn’t going to run and leave them, as if my life was more valuable than theirs.

I spun, knife out, and charged toward Lady Lightland.

Too late.

Frandtz was battling her back, pace on pace, forcing her to fight in the defensive. He was twice her size and had the training of an armsman.

I followed behind him, ready to help but not sure how to do it.

Out of nowhere, a black rope shot out and struck him like a punch to the side. He flinched.

It was all the opening Lady Lightland needed. Her blade flicked out, piercing through him and appearing like the tongue of a snake through his back, red with his heart’s blood.

I had to act. Now. No time for hesitation.

My hands shook, but without waiting for him to fall or her to extract her sword, I dove forward, danced around the side of him, and stuck my knife into Cassanetta’s side. She gasped, looking at me with wide eyes. Her hands left the sword hilt and she collapsed under Frandtz’s weight.

I gasped, staring at the knife in my hand. And I couldn’t pretend it was an accident this time or that I hadn’t meant it because I’d known exactly what I was doing when I planted that blade in her side.

Chapter Fourteen

The ground under my feet shuddered and I stumbled away from the bodies, trying to catch my balance. I caught myself against one of the ruined carts and found Conwer’s body there, trapped beneath the broken cart, his eyes closed and limbs still.

I reeled back in horror at the same moment that Kentinius ran past me, narrowly missing colliding with me. His eyes were fixed on what was behind him. As I watched, he danced to the side, spun, and lifted his hands, fingers spread wide as a pair of black ropes twisted out from them and formed complex knots.

A black rope snaked out and snatched one of the knots, circling it, tightening, and then shaking it as a terrier shakes a rat. The wave of motion ran up the rope and through Kentinius’s arm. I heard his teeth chatter and crack and then he was flung back.

He caught himself on a net of black rope as the first pair he’d woven dissolved in the air and stabilized. With a gasp and a huff, he charged forward again.

Judicus’s face was steady and determined. His eyes caught on mine and then he looked behind me and stiffened, his eyebrows rising.

He was too distracted.

Kentinius’s hand jerked up and I pointed at him. Judicus barely registered my sign in time, barely dodged. The rope slid along his arm, shooting faster than an arrow and he cried out as his jacket and shirt both ripped leaving a thumb-thick line of rope burn along his bicep.

He didn’t pause.

He leapt.

But not to Kentinius and not away from him.

He leapt, instead, to the cart beside me, reached down, grabbed my jacket without so much as a word, and hauled me up to the top of the cart.

I was still gaping at him like a fish pulled from the water when it struck me that the noise was louder.

Was it a rockslide?

It swallowed up a shout from Kentinus in a wall of sound, and then Judicus dropped his hold on my shirt, grabbed my hand instead, and mouthed, “Jump with me.”

I kept my eyes on him and then a rope slid out and fastened around my waist. I panicked, swatting at it like it was a wasp. It gripped harder.

And before I could do anything else Judicus yelled “Jump!” and though I could barely hear it I jumped as the first figure burst through the trees.

A black rope shot from his other hand, hooking around the neck of the stone creature. It charged forward like the tiger it was formed to mock, and we leapt up in the air, aided by Judicus’s ropes, and before I could so much as scream, we were jerked in the air halfway through our jump and thrown onto the stone tiger’s back, gasping and terrified, clinging to each other and the slick surface like a pair of sailors hauled up from a shipwreck.

The black rope around my waist snapped, searing my side with a rope burn.

And even if I could have spoken, I would not have known what to say, as the creature crashed up the trail, flattening any tree or shrub or smaller rock in its path. Its fellows ran behind and before and on either side of it. We were moving on a wave of stampeding, living rock.

I craned my neck, looking behind me but already all I could see were stone backs and there was no sign of Kentinius, of the carts and donkeys, or of the evil deeds I’d done to stay alive.

Chapter Fifteen

I have heard the tales of wild rides on the backs of monstrous beasts but never had I imagined a ride like the one we took that day. The stone creature careened up the mountain path, heedless of height, or slope, or anything else that might deter a beast of bone and flesh. Its balance was uncanny, and the speed with which it ran among its fellows put any horse to shame.

We had no way to hold on, except by gripping the rope Judicus wove around the beast, and no way to get off without being trampled to death. I clung to the rope, and clung to Judicus, and he held on with me, white-faced as the hours bled one into the next. We tried to speak, but my hands were too full trying to hold on, and his voice could not be heard over the thunder of the herd's hooves.

In the end, we rode in deafening noise, teeth gritted, heads and bodies aching with the exertion.

Our best hope was nightfall. If we could just wait until the sun sank behind the clouds, then Kazmerev would appear, and when he did, he could rescue us.

That was what I thought on most as we fled.

Kazmerev.

Kazmerev.

My last and best hope.

But he wasn't the only one I thought of. I also thought of the terrible deeds I'd done. Over and over, I relived the moment of jamming my knife into Lady Lightland's side, of her eyes going wide, of the rock crushing into the Stryxex Rider's skull and his dim eyes when I was done.

I clenched my jaw hard, and I worried. Because evil people couldn't be Flame Riders. What if Kazmerev didn't come back because of this? What if my actions – self-defense, though they were – were enough to lose him forever? I would never forgive myself.

I shouldn't have worried. The afternoon progressed as it always does, the strange stone muscles of the creatures beneath us bunching and releasing, rocking us back and forth in a terrifying fashion. We clung until my fingers went numb and the muscle in my jaw felt like it might burst. But eventually, dusk swept through the sky and the sun sank, and as it did, Kazmerev bloomed through my exhausted heart and leapt bright and fiery into the sky above us.

Kaz, I gasped with my mental voice as he appeared. We need your help, my friend. We need your help.

He was there before I even lifted my exhausted gaze, all warmth and light and love. He ducked under me and with shaking hands, Judicus released the rope of magic and we slid from the moving stone beast onto Kazmerev's back.

For one stomach-dropping moment, we fell through the air, and then he caught us in his warmth. We were both shaking, chilled to the core, our muscles unable to relax after hours and hours of tension.

Kazmerev soared upward into the thick clouds and mist rolled over my face, refreshing me. For just one tiny precious moment, I could forget everything that had happened. For just one precious moment I could.

What are they? Kazmerev asked, and I had to come back to reality and back to a world where we'd just clung to the backs of moving stone creatures for an entire afternoon.

Are they not the stone creatures that came out of that tear in the earth? I asked him in my mind.

I think so, he agreed. But there's more. They're ... I don't know how to say this. I feel as though I sense the souls of those phoenixes trapped now within these shells and gone mad with the terror of it.

I thought I might be ill. Of course, that was what had happened, wasn’t it?

Right on cue, Judicus leaned over Kazmerev's side and vomited.

"I think I might pass out, Sersha," he mumbled. "I'm so sorry. I've only held a knot that long once before – on the ship with the broken mast. But that was different. I wasn't holding on for dear life about to fall at any moment.” He gasped. “It was different."

I patted him on the shoulder, trying to commiserate, trying to show him he wasn't alone.

But I didn't know what to do. Could we land somewhere safe just for long enough to rest? Was there anyone on our tail, about to snatch us from the air?

Were you followed, then?

I didn't know. It didn't make logical sense to follow us. I thought only Kentinius survived, and if that was true, wouldn't he have to be back there picking up the scraps of his friends and ... and ... but here my imagination failed me.

I hadn't seen the Stryxex die. It might still follow.

I do not sense it.

I hadn’t seen Flara or Lady Lightland die, but they were gravely injured when the stampede came through. I couldn’t imagine them avoiding those stomping feet.

In that case, it may only be my wild imagination telling me there was someone right behind us and that slowing would bring them right down on my head.

I think it is your imagination, Little Hawk. And even hawks must rest sometimes.

He soared and I closed my eyes, one hand buried in his feathers and one on Judicus. I didn't dare let go of either of them, and yet I could barely keep my eyes open.

Fear not, Little Hawk. I have you now.

I did not know how long we flew like that, but eventually, he set us down in something that seemed like a very high meadow away from any clear road. I didn't ask questions, didn't even want to know. All I wanted was the promised oblivion of sleep.

I half dismounted, half fell from his back.

"Fire," Judicus gasped. "Need a fire."

But neither of us was up to building one. Instead, I made Kazmerev visible - I could still do that at least. Perhaps, he could make a fire.

"No need. I am here to warm you. Rest, Little Hawk. Rest."

I sat down, drawing Judicus with me and we leaned against Kazmerev's burning feathers. His warmth cupped my heart like a hand holding a baby chick and I leaned into it with all my heart.

Keep me safe, noble fire, I thought, and Judicus and I fell asleep in a heap beside my beautiful phoenix, sharing the warmth of life only he could offer.

"Sersha," Judicus said as sleep began to claim him. His hand twisted around mine as surely as any rope. "Sersha, I feel you holding guilt tight to your heart, but remember this - you did not ask to fight for your life, and you did not try to kill. They came to you. They offered you no choice."

And usually, his words soothed me and helped me, but this time they only made me ache as if I might never recover.

Chapter Sixteen

I woke to the cold of a missing Kazmerev and the iron cold rock of guilt in my belly.

There was no one beside me. Judicus was already awake, squatting against a rock, bent over something small between his hands.

When I sat up, he startled, flushing with something that looked like guilt.

"Sersha. I'm so sorry. I looked in the pouch on your belt for a flint to make a fire. And I found it, but I also found this. Did you take it from one of our enemies in the fight?"

I nodded and he squinted, looking off into the middle distance as if he was working out a problem.

"Flara," he said eventually. "She landed close to you."

I nodded again. His memory was always excellent.

"I found this and completely forgot the flint. I was curious. And now, I wish I'd never picked it up."

I took the flint from where he'd left it on the ground beside him. We could use a fire, even if he was too distracted to light it.

Patiently, I gathered up fuel, little tufts of dried grass, and the remains of dried out saplings, long dead from the fury of the sun beating on this mountain top and the harsh winds constantly blowing them. They were small and gnarled, and they made me worry that perhaps I wouldn't be able to light them at all. We were in for a brisk day if I did not. The wind had already picked up and without Kazmerev we'd have difficulty getting down from this peak or getting warm at all. I clenched my jaw at the thought. Best not to think too deeply about it. I didn't want to fall back into nerves about whether Mally might decide to put her crown on again or take it off. She was far from here - maybe far enough that she wasn't affecting things here anymore - and there was nothing I could do about it anyway.

I looked up to check on Judicus, and frowned when I saw he was still staring off into the middle distance.

He blinked and met my gaze, shaking his head slightly as he inhaled, as if he was coming back to this world after drifting off into another world.

"This is ... Sersha, I can't believe what this is."

"What is it?" I signed, pausing for a moment before returning to light the fire.

"It's another book of prophecies. written by yet another hand." He let a wry laugh rip from his throat, but it sounded midway between laughter and despair. "I think there are notes at the very back that might be Flara's - but they are brief and cryptic. It's the rest that worries me. It matches prophecies in the book that Fontellrae kept so carefully, and it matches prophecies I've seen about the ai'sletta. But Sersha - it's all upside down. It's ... I don't know how to say this but it's all wrong. If this is true - "

He cut off, making a strangled sound in his throat and I paused in striking the flint to speak in sign again.

"Calm down. Explain it to me."

He took a deep breath, nodding. "Yes, there will be time to panic later. Time for all of us to panic."

My stomach tumbled at those words, but I gritted my jaw and kept trying to coax a flame from the tinder I'd set. If he'd discovered something awful, well, we'd deal with it. But we needed a fire first. And maybe in the pack that Frandtz had shoved into my hands, there might even be water and tea leaves and maybe we could have a cup of tea and calm down. Everyone felt better after a little tea.

"If it's true - and I don't know, maybe it is! - then it explains so much. It explains why Flara was looking at me. Why she had that tattoo."

I interrupted him to sign again.

"The mark," I signed, unable to say 'tattoo,' "It was missing from her arm. I saw when she passed out."

"Gone?" he asked, his face pale. "How ... no, I won't ask. You couldn't know either, but Sersha, I think she was deceiving us - deceiving me from the moment I met her. I think her torture was staged to draw me in and make me trust her. And the way she was edging closer and closer to me all the time - I knew that was odd. Perhaps she was using that to gain my confidence."

Doubtless. Though it was very Judicus to only realize it now, and also very Judicus to have barely realized the girl was acting oddly when she cozied up to him in the first place. I sometimes wondered if there were whole worlds in his head that he was occupying instead of joining us here in this one.

"It makes sense of some of her notes in the back, too.”

“Tell me about these prophecies,” I signed, and he looked up, agonized.

“Sersha, they stand everything I’ve been thinking all along upside down. Do you remember this prophecy? Listen. ‘Evening and morning will come swift on each other’s heels, the black fox chasing the white fox until they pause in their chase for her advent, they pant and wait and look to see her arrival, they anticipate the end of an age.’”

It sounded familiar. A spark finally caught on my tinder, and I held it gently in my cupped palms, blowing it into flame.

“We believe that means we are trying to catch the ai’sletta – both us and Lady Lightland and the Hand of the Rat. And they think that, too, but their prophecy keeps going. Listen to this. ‘And those who think they are of the light will catch her and when they think their position is secure a bright light will fall from the heavens and blind their eyes and confuse their minds with a better pattern – the pattern of the Rat and like the Rat we will wait as they unravel their hopes and tie up their own destruction.’”

He looked up at me, white-faced, and I paused from my work of gently tenting small twigs over the licking flames.

“Sersha,” he said, agony in his voice. “That was me. I am the one who unraveled the plinth and tied up the knot with the pattern she showed me on her arm. The one you said was missing later.”

My hands flicked through the signs. “Her false flame bird was bright white. So bright I could not look.”

Judicus’s throat bobbed visibly as he swallowed and looked away. His hands flipping idly through the pages of his book.

“Every note in here mirrors the notes in Fontellrae’s book. They show how phoenixes can be made into Stryxex. But Fontellrae didn’t have all the extra notes. The ones that tell how just a piece of this would be given to his ancestors to guard in sacred trust. The part that explains how they’d be careful to only give him part of the knowledge so that he’d see it one way while they saw it another. You never touched that plinth, did you, Sersha?”

I shook my head.

“If you had,” he said ruefully, “Kazmerev might have been ripped from your heart and imprisoned within it.”

I froze for a heartbeat and then flinched, pulling my hand back from where the licking flames had caught it. I stuck my finger in my mouth before returning to building the fire. It was hard to coax flame from this gnarled wood and there was no point in bemoaning what could have happened but didn’t. Any number of terrible things could have happened so far.

“By releasing the original knot, I broke that particular trap and set the phoenixes’ souls free, but they slipped out, still weakened and broken, and we saw where that led.”

I nodded, still working at the fire.

“And the second knot – that was the problem. It’s a knot of their devising.”

“Why didn’t they just tie it themselves?” I signed.

The fire was burning better, but the wind whipped at it from every direction and if I didn’t build it up more it would be snuffed right out.

“The book suggests that tying it would take a rope worker of uncommon strength.” I glanced up to see him blushing furiously. “But the thing is, that might not be true. It might just be what they believed. A lot of ropework is in the mind. If you think you can’t do a thing, then you can’t do it.”

I tried to keep my expression neutral as I nodded, but a smirk played behind it. He was clearly a strong and capable rope worker. Constantly denying a thing didn’t make it less true.

“So they lured me in and used me. And it makes me feel awful because I should have known. But there’s worse, Sersha.”

“Worse?” What could be worse than being manipulated like that to go against your own ethics?

“Well, if this is to be believed – and I think I believe it – then they used Fontellrae’s family, too, back for generations upon generations. They planted this idea in their family. They fed it. They left them to defend a trust that was a lie. His death and the deaths of his people were for nothing.”

His voice cracked at the end, and I felt the pain with him. It was hard to blink away memories of his dead – the prisoners I’d seen, the armsmen who had traveled with us. I’d grown fond of them. It felt like broken glass in my chest to think of them broken on the ground.

“That means this plan – these people enacting it, the text here with the prophecies ordaining it – it’s all generations old. Older than our grandparents. People have been plotting the deaths of others for their own benefit and following the signs of these prophecies for that entire time, Sersha. Can that even be possible? Can people be that ... rotten?”

I left the fire and came to kneel beside where he crouched so he could see my heart in my eyes. It was aching with him, broken and miserable with him. I didn’t hide it or disguise how I felt. Instead, I let him look deep into my eyes and I hid nothing. We sat for a long moment, gazing deep into each other before I finally signed.

“Was it not your uncle who killed your father?”

“Yes,” he said, and his breath hitched.

“Was it not the people who stood behind him?”

“Yes,” he turned his eyes away, his breath trembling in his chest and his hands shaking.

“Was it not his ... people who talk ... who conspired to overthrow him?”

“Counsellors. Yes.”

“Then how can you doubt? People are evil. Many of them. More than we think.”

He met my eyes again. “But how do you stop an evil that has been planned from so far back? Every eventuality has been plotted out. Every hope we have can be twisted against us. The people won’t join us to fight this. They would think we were crazy if they heard us speak of it. There are too many conspirators to stop. Even if I were willing to die in an attempt to stop it, to throw myself at the leader in a gamble that I could take his life before I was killed – even then, what? There are so many of them they could simply choose another leader, and nothing would change. We cannot flee – not only because my sister is trapped and I won’t abandon her, but also because there is nowhere to go. This details the people in this plot, and they span nations and creeds. The ai’sletta is already on her way to the other plinth, which I am certain must be a trap, and even were we to follow her today, we would be too late.”

He paused long enough to draw in a shuddering breath.

“We’re already too late.”

“It’s never too late to fight for what is good,” I signed.

“And why did they need me to do any of this. Why couldn’t they have used Kentinius? He’s as powerful as I am.”

I doubted that, or we would have been dead back there with the others, but I didn’t say that. Instead, I fell back on one of my aunt Danna’s favorite sayings.

“The devil can create nothing of his own. He can only warp what we create,” I said.

He sighed nodded and then looked at me again with those piercing eyes.

“Sersha,” he said very firmly. “I am taking a new path. I am no longer going to be obeying orders or following my nation’s creeds. I will not honor the dying wishes of my uncle or respect the hopes of those who follow prophecies. I will not be aligned with any nation or ruler or way. I will be a lone hand playing this game for my own ends and purposes.”

“And phoenixes?” I couldn’t help but ask.

“I have no quarrel with them.”

I nodded.

“But I will chart my own course to reverse what’s been done and to prevent a fulfillment of their prophecies. I will set myself up against them, so that they must fight me at every turn and rue the day that they ever made me their enemy.”

His eyes were grim and deadly, but the effect was somewhat marred when he stood hastily and stumbled to the side bushes to vomit miserably, his body shaking with the effort.

When he returned, his eyes were still lit with the fire of determination.

“I don’t have the right to ask, but I will anyway, Sersha. Are you still with me?”

And of course, I was.

Chapter Seventeen

“I’m with you to the end,” I signed, and he sagged with relief.

“I don’t mind admitting,” he said with a furtive glance at the bushes over his shoulder. “The whole thing makes me ill. What is one – or two, I suppose – people supposed to do in the face of dozens – maybe hundreds – of conspirators who have planned and nudged and directed until thousands of people bend to their every whim? How can we oppose it? They have already planned to kill us, tried to kill us, and they certainly will succeed in killing us if we drop our guard. So, we can’t attack them directly. There’s no clear individual or groups of individuals responsible.”

I thought of Lady Lightland’s face when I jammed my knife in her side. Had she died? Would Gundt mourn her?

I shook my head.

“You see the problem,” Judicus said with a sigh, sinking beside my fire.

I opened the pack, found water, and a small camp pot, and tea in a canister, and began to brew a pot. There was little in the way of food – a small packet of dried meat and trail bread – but enough coin we could buy more if we ever saw other people again. Tea, it was.

“So, what do we do? If we cannot fight, if we cannot flee – what?”

“Say no,” I signed.

“That doesn’t work. We’ve done that.” He stared glumly into the flames.

“There is a bird,” I signed. “Sometimes we have to ... word ... hurt? ... no ... something, boys in the village because they put a stick in its beak. A little stick. Wedged just right.”

“Discipline,” he murmured, making the sign.

I nodded. “Yes. Then you have to catch the bird to get it out. Just a tiny stick. But it will kill the bird if it sticks.”

He nodded, “But how can we stick in their craw?”

I made the sign of a crown on my head.

“Mally? Her luck?”

I shrugged.

“It’s a possibility,” he agreed but he was troubled. “We’ll need allies, too. People who can fight with us or help us at least stand up to the ones who arranged this plot. And I need to understand it better, to try to figure out if there’s any indication of who is behind it. Or how we can find them. Anything at all. I feel like I’m a blind man stumbling in the dark or a mute man trying to call for ... oh, I’m so sorry.”

He looked at me, aghast. I waved his worry away. I was perfectly cognizant of my limitations. And he was right. This was a massive obstacle. But just like my voicelessness, it wasn’t impossible. With a friend who could understand me and a new language, I could still speak. We needed the same thing.

“Friends,” I signed.

He nodded, putting his head in his hands.

We spent the day like that, sipping tea, napping here and there. He read the book and read it again, cursing that the prophecies were obscure and difficult to understand, frustrated that they showed no clear hand behind what was happening.

And then he taught me to read. The sounds Gundt had taught me had stuck and Judicus showed me how to string them together in my mind, how to form the words in my mind.

“The hard part is the words that break the rules,” he told me. “That’s what’s going to trip you up later. Here, try with this passage.”

I read it in my mind.

From our heart, ... burst, flesh made stone and from our heart, they seek and flatten, ... and ... and from our heart, ...  will be the banner of victory, our ...  will, our  ...

And then he read it aloud so I could see the words I missed.

“From our heart, they burst, flesh made stone and from our heart, they seek and flatten, strike and waste and from our heart, they will be the banner of victory, our granite will, our stone triumph.”

I nodded, glad for the lesson, but there was a key here, wasn’t there?

“Stone animals?”  I signed. Could that be the “they” in this prophecy? And if it was could there be a clue here?

Judicus shrugged. He didn’t know any more than I did.

But despite being on the run, despite the guilt we shared at our failures, and the horror that this whole murderous thing we’d lived through over the past few weeks had been planned by someone, the day was not unpleasant. It thrilled and relieved me to be able to read, even slowly and with difficulty. It opened a new world to me. And it seemed to please Judicus to teach me, as if this one thing we could accomplish together was of more value than just teaching me a new skill.

I asked him about it.

“If you’re right,” he said shyly. “If our enemies make nothing new and only warp what we’ve made then every un-warped, pure thing we create is a wall against them, don’t you think.”

I hadn’t thought of that.

“Sersha?” he asked absently as the sun grew close to setting. “We might have to part ways.”

I stiffened. There was no need for that.

“Not that I want to,” he said, his eyes intent on mine. “But we need allies, and I am best suited to speak to other nations and find us new friends. And we need the ai’sletta and you are best suited to fly with Kazmerev out across the sea to the lands of the raiders where she will be and bring her back to us. I’m not saying we need to separate immediately. I’m just saying it might be practical. Don’t you think?”

“No, I signed. “I don’t think so.”

He laughed wryly. “Why do I think you’d say that no matter how I presented the situation?”

“Because you know me,” I signed.

“I think I’m starting to,” he whispered, and I hadn’t realized how close he was sitting to me until his lips touched mine.

I reached up to touch his face, my fingers very gentle on his thick scars.

Our kiss only lasted a moment. The sun flared scarlet and disappeared and then Kazmerev was there.

Ewwww, I wish you wouldn’t, he complained, and the moment was gone.

Chapter Eighteen

Everything we’d thought was a lie. That was what I had to get through to Kazmerev. All the guidance, all the ideas of what was happening in the world – it wasn’t what we thought.

Not everything, he objected. Not the important things. What we have together has not changed. Our friends have not changed. Our loyalties have not changed.

Yes. He was right. Yes. That had not changed.

“Have you asked him what he thinks?” Judicus asked in his slightly burred voice. He had pulled back from me and begun to carefully pack our things. He glanced sideways at Kazmerev, eyes bright. “Will he go with us over the mountain pass to look for allies?”

Evendun? Over the mountains? I went there once with Vella. Her people lie in that direction. There aren’t many phoenixes that way. Not many people who like phoenixes either.

I wondered how he found Vella if her people didn’t like phoenixes.

I don’t want to talk about that. It remains too painful.

I would never push him to talk about what hurt him.

I’ll go where you go, Little Hawk. And I admit I don’t know where else he could go for help. But I don’t know that I want to go to Evendun. There are strange rumors about that place.

What kind of rumors?

If I tell you, you will think I’m crazy.

“He’ll go,” I signed to Judicus. “But he doesn’t like it.”

Judicus waved a hand. “The Golden Salamanders are a myth. He should know that.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. I looked back and forth between them but neither one so much as flinched a muscle.

I’ll go. That should be enough.

“We will go,” I signed and Judicus nodded stiffly.

“We should make haste,” he said, grimly. “We are always outnumbered and a step behind.”

That was how I felt, too, and as we packed everything up and Judicus set the pack on his back and helped me onto Kazmerev’s back – not that I needed help, but it seemed to settle him a bit.

I thought about Kentinius out there, perhaps even now racing ahead of us or searching for us through the mountains, and I thought of the thundering stone animals and wondered what would happen if they reached a town or a city. How could you stop something like that? How could you prevent it from trampling everything you owned to dust – and maybe everyone you loved? Would sledgehammers be enough or would it  take an act of magic? Judicus could probably swipe one of those creatures to the side – maybe more than that, maybe as many as half a dozen. But even that kind of power couldn’t stop a whole stampede of them.

We rose into the air, and my heart leapt with joy at the feeling of lifting up above the ground to where we were free, where we could fly anywhere and see anything, where we could escape danger and leave confines behind. For that first moment, I could always close my eyes and feel the world and its cares sink away.

My moment was interrupted by Kazmerev’s worried voice.

I think I see them, Kazmerev said, tilting uncomfortably side to side as he always did when he was worried.

What did he see?

The stone creatures, creeping across the ground. Look.

The night was bright with moonlight and as I peered down from our height, it caught across the landscape. I watched and watched.

There.

Movement.

And a little farther along, more movement.

It looked as if the rocks and the ground itself were moving.

I tugged Judicus’s sleeve and pointed down.

We were silent for long minutes until he stiffened.

“I see them. Oh no, this is worse than I thought! They’re ... they’re ... oh no.”

I felt fumbling behind me.

“Can I put this pack on your back?”

And then it was being eased on my shoulders and my arms were being tugged as he shuffled the bag onto my back. I bore with it as patiently as I could.

These creatures are everywhere. How many of them were there?

He’d seen as well as I had. We’d both been there when they crawled out of the tear in the earth.

There were maybe a dozen then. There are ...hundreds now. Can Judicus stop them?

Judging by the cursing behind me I rather thought not.

There was the sound of something scraping against something else and then a flare of light. I tried to turn but he hissed, “Don’t move or I’ll drop the flint.”

He was lighting a lantern? On the back of a phoenix?

I’m insulted.

So was I. He could have just asked, and I could make Kazmerev visible.

Well.

Well, what?

Well, we’d be very obvious, and we are trying to hide, aren’t we? In case there are Stryxex or rope workers watching the sky?

We were obvious with a lantern wobbling on his back.

“Hold this for a moment, would you?”

The flint was dropped in my hand. I tightened my fist over it and gritted my teeth. For the love of flight, what was he doing?

A lantern is less visible than a gorgeous phoenix. Like comparing a spark to a wildfire.

Fair enough. But we’d better keep a lookout for Stryxex.

Behind me, I heard the sound of rustling paper.

“There was something about this. Something about the ground. It’s here somewhere.”

More rustling. Was he looking at our enemies’ prophecies?

That was so Judicus.

“Here it is. I knew there was something about this. Listen,” he said, and then it was clear he was reading. “The rocks themselves will rise up and guide us and lead the vanguard of the fight, they will crush our enemies before us and make straight paths for us. And a sign will come from the heavens, a symbol that our time has come. Darkness for five long days and nights. Darkness and the winds of the west rushing over our shores to the edges of our enemy’s land and they will taste the bite of winter out of season and know our victory is sure.”

I didn’t feel any winds or see any snow.

The wind is westerly.

And since there was always a one in eight chance of that, it proved nothing at all. It was as silly as saying the sun had risen in the east. Besides, we all knew Mally could stop the sun with her crown. If the night lingered, that would be her doing, not a prophecy.

But they wouldn’t know that. They would think it was time to attack their enemies.

Well, we were worrying about it, but night had only just fallen in a completely natural way. There was no reason to believe it wouldn’t continue to follow the normal course of things.

It’s deviated before. It could again.

I refused to give this book of prophecy any credence.

“And when the time has come and we fall upon our enemies in an avalanche,” Judicus went on, picking up on a different page, “Then the enemies of the tattered ribbons will seek a single word and they will seek to speak it, but they must not speak the word or bow beneath it. They must be prevented from the knowing of it for with a word the world was made and with a word it can be broken.”

Ominous.

I started to turn but Judicus stopped me again.

“No, don’t turn. I’m juggling too many things on my lap. But you see it, don’t you? They’ll certainly take this army as proof that their prophecy is speaking the truth. And when they do, we will know where they are headed. They’ll be trying to prevent some kind of word. And we’re the ones who need to make sure that their plans don’t succeed. We have only one hope, Sersha. We have to get to the passes of the Crown Peak mountains right into Craven Pass where King’s Hold is, and we have to plead with the leaders there to listen. And we need to get there tonight We don’t have time to dally or wait or these creatures will get there first, and heaven help any town or home they find before we arrive there.”

Agreed, Kazmerev said.

And I found that I, too, agreed.

Chapter Nineteen

I’d heard of people following prophecies before, putting their hopes in them, trusting them, even achieving victory by them. I’d heard of people fighting against the predictions of prophecies. But I’d never heard of anyone fighting them and winning.

Once Judicus packed his precious book away into the pouch on my belt, he let me turn and the words poured out in my signs.

“How can we fight this?”

“Well, we have a plan,” he started but I made a fast gesture of negation. I didn’t have the words to explain but I had to try.

“If it was meant to be? If it is more than us?”

“Oh, because it’s a prophecy?” he asked, his eyebrows rising sharply and his narrow face pale in the lantern light.

Tell him to put the lantern out.

I signed Kazmerev’s request and Judicus snuffed it, looking chagrined.

“Just because something is foretold doesn’t mean it comes from good, Sersha,” Judicus said and the passion in his words made them tight and fierce. “You know this. Phoenixes are good to their fiery cores, and who do these people want dead beyond all others? Phoenixes. There must be some power they have that these people fear. It’s all through their writings, ‘Beware of the flame.’ ‘But the fire shall rise up and the flames shall burn away the beauty,’ and more like that. Over and over, it warns against fire and I’m certain they mean phoenixes because that’s who threatens them. It’s the good in them. That’s the one thing these conspirators can’t handle.”

He paused, sawing in a gasping breath. I didn’t realize he was this upset. He was trembling with emotion. He went on, his voice rising and his hands trembling as he tried to stow the lantern back in the pack.

“That’s what I’m trying to say – that just because someone foretells something doesn’t mean it comes from heaven or from anything else that’s good or noble. It might just be a thing they want – and evil people so often want power and control over the lives around them as if our very freedom and joy is of personal offense to them – and then they set about fulfilling these prophecies they’ve made and that gives them legitimacy by bringing them to life.”

His voice rose again, his words tumbling one on top of the other as if his mind were tumbling down a hill, picking up speed as it bashed against one thought only to tumble and strike the next.

“And who is to say there’s anything good in that? I haven’t seen anything good in the people who were killed for no reason, and the phoenixes sent to the beyond, the city overthrown, my sister betrayed, my uncle assassinated, and this terrible stone army marching on our neighbors. What happens when they reach them? What army can withstand this? And before you ask, no I can’t stop them like I stopped those other stone creatures. Those were tied to something, and I found the threads and cut them and I’m not finding threads attached to these ones at all, it’s like they have something entirely different inside powering them and, oh sweet heavens, Sersha,” he was gasping now between breaths like he was going to cry or scream or something. “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.”

I grabbed his hand, trying to squeeze reassurance into it.

I hope he doesn’t vomit again. I feel like a nursemaid when he does, and it doesn’t suit me at all.

But I knew the difference. This wasn’t the trembling of airsickness or of nerves. This was the desperate clawing of panic and fury and despair crawling across him and shaking him in its grasp. I tightened my hold on his hand and he closed his eyes tight.

The frustrating thing about speaking in sign is that people can just refuse to watch. They can block me out like I don’t exist.

But there are some things that are hard to block out.

So I leaned back and I wrapped an arm around his waist. He startled with a little squeak sound I had never expected to come out of a man – but why not, wasn’t he allowed a moment to be vulnerable, too? Wasn’t he allowed a moment to be scared, too? Wasn’t he allowed the desire – just for a little while – to have someone take care of him?

And I leaned in and against his tightly pressed lips, I set my own and tried to push into them every certainty and hope that I had. Because I hadn’t lost my hope.

In a world where phoenixes existed, there could never really be no hope. In a world where friends stood for each other and came back again and again to save each other, there could never be full despair. And in a world where Judicus lived, evil would never win, because he would refuse to bend in the face of it no matter if it blew at him with the force of a hurricane. And I ... I realized this with a solidity like discovering bedrock under your feet ... I would be sure that he wouldn’t break.

Ahem.

Was I forgetting something?

You’re forgetting who will carry you both.

My phoenix would.

He flared bright and hot, and I didn’t care that there might be Stryxex about. I didn’t care that they might see us racing to the mountain pass. Sometimes you needed to make hope visible. Sometimes you needed to raise a flag of defiance. Sometimes, you needed to set your teeth and dare the world to knock you down – not for you, but for everyone who was sinking into the mud of despair and heartbreak.

I made my beautiful Kazmerev visible and when I broke my kiss, Judicus gasped, his eyes flying open. And I didn’t know if the look of wonder in his eyes was for the phoenix or the kiss but either way, it was worth it.

It’s for the phoenix. I would think that was obvious.

“We can do this,” he whispered, and I forced myself to smile as confidently as I could and to feed every care and anxiety to the fire beneath and the fire within.

You can do this, Kazmerev echoed, and his fires burned hot, hot, hotter than the hottest ache of fear in my chest.

Chapter Twenty

We soared over the writhing stone ground, dipping lower and lower.

Lower means we won’t be as easily seen. Plus, I can keep an eye out to be sure that we have a place to set down away from these rock creatures when the sun comes up.

Judicus had grown ill hours ago – I’d known it had to happen eventually – and fallen asleep on my shoulder.

His weight was comforting. I felt, so often, like I bore the weight of the world on my shoulders but having Judicus’s actual weight lessened that feeling.

It felt like it should be dawn by now, a feeling that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up just as they did to Kazmerev. Both of us felt it coming like one feels the shift in the air that calls for a storm.

Perhaps, she’s wearing the crown, Kazmerev said eventually.

I thought he might be right. The hours wore on and I was heavy from exhaustion by the time Judicus woke and took the pack from me.

“There,” he said muzzily, still nauseated from the flight. “I see Craven Pass. And there is King’s Hold straddling it.”

He was right. In the distance, lights shone – just barely discernable from so far away, but steady and growing brighter as the minutes passed.

I wondered how they could have built such a big city up in the mountains.

It’s not as big as it looks at night. They burn fires on the walls that make it look bigger. It’s a tenth the size of Briccatore.

Which was still enormous.

Can you ask Judicus if we have a plan?

Night or fake night, there was still a moon and that made it possible to talk with my hands.

“Judicus?” I signed and he shivered at his name. I pressed on. “Do you have a plan? Where are we going?”

“There’s a tower right in the center where the lord of King’s Hold resides. We need to set right down in the courtyard,” he said confidently. “We need to speak to someone in charge right away.”

In a foreign nation? You’ll be shot from the sky by archers!

I conveyed his concern.

“The alternative is waiting – an hour, a day, any amount is too much with those stone creatures right behind us. Think of them, Sersha. Think of them crashing through the pass flattening everything and everyone in their path. We’re talking hundreds of dead – the innocent with the guilty. The hold would fall. And the land behind it will fall quickly afterward with no warning and no hope to escape. How far do you think they are behind us?”

I looked back. We’d lost them some hours ago.

At least a day by the time we reach the pass.

I conveyed that, too.

“Barely enough time,” Judicus said grimly. “But we’ll risk what we must to warn them.”

We flew and flew, the city growing larger as the hours passed. We stopped once in a lonely spot to take care of necessary business and stretch out stiff muscles for a few moments, eat, drink, and then we were back, flying again.

“Heroism is all very well,” Judicus complained, “but why does it always seem to involve some kind of travel? Why can’t it be done from a comfortable chair with a warm fire and a good book.”

Trust me, it’s worse to carry him than to be carried, Kazmerev replied darkly.

I did not translate.

And I was too busy worrying to complain. What if the city didn’t listen to us? What if the people couldn’t flee in time?

Or what if they tried to fight and were killed?

I looked often at the moon, wondering what had happened to Mally that had her wearing the crown all the time. That couldn’t be practical in a foreign land.

Just be glad we’re stuck in night instead of in the day. This way, I can watch over you.

This was definitely better.

But there was little to do but worry and I made sure to do my fair share of that. And I held Judicus’s hand in mine whenever he let me because I had a terrible feeling that this might be my only chance.

When he’d said the word “hero,” I’d been reminded of a terrible truth. Heroes didn’t live very long. They were always asked to sacrifice something. And this attachment that was growing between us would certainly be one of those things. Because there could be no way to save the phoenixes and turn a prophecy on its head and rescue his sister and still keep this, could there? It seemed like asking for too much. And I know not to push what little luck we had.

The journey seemed to be too long and too short all at once and by the time my legs were screaming for relief, and my hand was still ready to keep holding on for a few days more, we were close enough to the walls to see the guards on watch over a stone door built across the pass, four banners whipping in the wind atop the gate.

The wind stirred them up in swirls and gales, gathering and growing ominously at our backs, and whatever words the men on guard called to us as they pointed were lost in the howl of the wind and the dark of the night.

I thought I saw crossbows being snatched up, but by the time they had them in hand, we had passed.

A bell began to ring, long sonorous tolls filling the night sky. It was as clear and sharp as the chilly air had become around us, piercing enough to carry over the howling gale, and it stirred up people in the city the way that same wind would stir up dried leaves, leaving them scattered and frenzied.

“Follow my lead,” Judicus called into my ear as the tower appeared and Kazmerev began to descend. “And whatever you do, don’t tell them anything.”

Chapter Twenty-One

Bright in the light of many lanterns, the courtyard before the tower was already full of scrambling people when we dove down into it. It was indeed a tower, but it was not just a cylindrical spire. The base of the tower sprawled so that it stood more like an elongated castle than a single tower.

Judicus leapt from Kazmerev’s back almost before he should have, and I clenched my teeth at what must have been a shin-aching landing. His cloak flapped wildly behind him in the rising wind, and I didn’t notice the dirt and wear on it. All I saw was how it made him look bigger and bolder.

Kazmerev’s flames – visible right now – whipped in the wind raggedly, little tongues of flame dancing along his length and breadth that snapped one way and then the other.

“Men of King’s Hold,” Judicus called in a loud voice. “I must speak to your leader. Calamity rides at our heels.”

I had thought that they would run to get someone immediately – or worse – shoot us on sight. Some of them held crossbows, but they didn’t even raise them. One of them spat on the ground.

“Only one of you, Calicarn? Don’t think your flame beast frightens us.”

I don’t frighten them? Kazmerev sounded appalled.

“Be off with you. You’ve stirred the pot and woken good people from their sleep, but you’ll find no inn will take you, no home will house you, no tavern feed you, so turn back and fly away.” The spokesperson appeared to be a gravelly-voiced grey-haired man in uniform. His skin was darker than mine and his form short and somewhat squat and his fellows matched him.

“Such hospitality,” Judicus said with a twist of his mouth. “I don’t know how you can spare it.”

“We’ll spare more if you don’t leave,” the same man said. He stepped forward, singling himself out. “Spare you a whipping.”

“What’s this now Flargard?” a man’s voice boomed out as the door of the tower opened and he stepped out. He was clad in heavy furs, carrying a staff with the head of a lizard carved in the top of it.

“Rabble, Lord Panziar. We were sending them away.” To my surprise, the mocking voice had changed to one of respectful subservience.

The man stepped a little closer, frowning. His face was wide and bluff and darker than my own brown face. So dark that the details of his expression would be hard to see without my night vision.

“Rabble? One mounted on a phoenix and the other ... is that the visage of an Irault I see before me? Is that the face of a man set in bronze in Briccatore? The great traitor? The scourge of Calicarn? The Lord of Chaos? I know that long jaw and those mad eyes.”

Judicus didn’t flinch. He simply said, “Yes.”

“And why are you on our doorstep? Are you here to betray your people as your father betrayed them?”

Judicus visibly stiffened, and I knew why. He wanted to tear into them. Wanted to tell them who his father was, and what he’d done. It was with masterful self-control that he responded calmly. He raised his voice, as dramatic as he had been the first time, but careful and measured.

“King’s Hold stands as a house of power in the mountains, an eagle perched and waiting for the unwary.”

I was surprised to see that the men in the courtyard seemed to stand a little straighter at that. Perhaps, in this place, words had greater power, and the more dramatic the words the more captivating the power. If it was true, Judicus would know. It could take a lifetime to find out everything he held inside.

I have heard that they set great store by words in this land.

Judicus continued, “But even the eagle cannot stand if the mountain rises up against him. Even your great hold cannot repel the rocks.”

“Is that a threat?” Lord Panziar snapped.

“It’s a warning,” Judicus said boldly. “I come to you like a raven screeching in the storm. I bring a warning dire and immediate.”

“Then you’ve warned us,” the man said and there was a note of mockery in his tone. “You’ve warned us that the rocks are on the march. What think you, men, should we catalog the rocks and note their places so we can fend off any attack?”

The men around us snickered and I felt my heart fall. They weren’t going to listen.

“The kabba bird mocks from its seat in the trees,” Judicus said carefully. “Until the Kestrel snatches it.”

“I thought you weren’t here to threaten,” Panziar said grimly.

“Is that a threat?” Judicus asked. His voice was all innocence. “Perhaps it is the Lord of this castle who should decide.”

“And what if that is me?”

Judicus laughed without humor. “We both know that it is not. You are the Speaker for the Tower. That’s why you carry the staff with the head of the salamander on it. An honored role – right hand to the Lord of the Castle himself. But you are not the final authority here. You bend your head to another.”

The courtyard was still, each person waiting as if they expected something violent to happen.

Even Panziar seemed frozen, his eyes fixed on Judicus. He neither agreed nor denied this claim. It was as if everyone but me knew something more was coming.

“I demand the honor of the word and the blade,” Judicus said.

And I thought they’d laugh again, but to my shock, they were even more still than they had been before. Silence dragged out so that only the howling of the wind was left and then Lord Panziar banged his staff on the flagstone – twice, three times.

“The honor has been called for and will be granted,” he announced, and then in a quieter voice he said, “If your companion will observe, she must dismiss the bird and follow.”

Bird? Now I’m insulted. It’s like they want mysterious fires started around the place.

His griping was comforting, but not enough to wash away the dread I felt at the idea of asking him to return to my heart. Maybe he could circle around above us instead.

Take courage. I will warm you from within.

I swallowed, slid from his back, and drew him back within my heart.

To my surprise, Judicus handed me our pack without even looking back.

“Lead on,” he told Lord Panziar.

Chapter Twenty-Two

To my surprise, Lord Panzier led us within the wide door of the tower. The ceilings within were so high and domed that I could have brought Kazmerev with me. He hovered in my heart – present enough that I could feel him, but too absent to comment in my mind. Maybe I would learn, someday, to still be able to talk to him when he was hidden there. Maybe it would make me feel less lonely. I buzzed with the tension of his absence as a hive buzzes with bees.

I couldn’t catch Judicus’s eye. He was in front of me, and we were escorted single file, the soldiers from the courtyard surrounding us in a tight formation. One of them had been sent ahead to warn of our coming. It worried me to be forced back into silence, surrounded by strangers.

The tower was barely furnished or decorated, maintaining only the most basic necessities – plain, backless wooden benches where seating was needed, the occasional stand or shelf for containing important items. Mostly, it was simply stone and more stone, undecorated, undressed, rough stone.

We tromped through the halls, my anxiety creeping upward as doors were slammed shut before we could pass. All I saw beyond the soldiers escorting us were the fleeing backs of people, or the edges of their clothing as they hurried away.

What could make them fear us that much ... or hate us that much? Were these two nations so deeply at odds with one another as that? There had been no rumors of war up in Landsfall, but then again, would we have heard of tensions from so far away?

Judicus seemed unbothered, simply striding forward as though none of this concerned him at all.

I tried to adopt a similar carefree attitude, but I thought that anyone who looked at me would see it was a bluff. Especially, if they noticed me brushing down my clothing with my palms and trying to straighten my mussed hair.

Whoever we were going to see must be as cold and unyielding as the fortress he ruled, and I was worried he’d see only that we were ragged and tired and not that we bore a severe warning.

We reached a wide door at last – closed to us and heavily guarded.

“This one has demanded the honor of the word and blade,” Lord Panziar said without inflection.

“All who pass must don clarity and truth,” the men at the door intoned. I was already feeling ill at ease in their strange tower and the way they spoke in unison and opaquely was not helping.

One of the guards strode forward bearing a pair of heavy bronze carcanets. Lord Panziar held out the first one to Judicus.

He did not take it.

“You asked for the honor. Now you wear the ritual carcarnet or you pay the price of failure.”

I didn’t like the sound of that.

Judicus took the carcarnet and put it over his head. It felt all wrong on him as if it somehow made him shorter.

“Sersha will not wear one,” he said calmly.

The man’s eyes flicked to me and back to him.

“Can your servant not speak for herself? Or is she a raven with no croak?”

Judicus stiffened at that, but his words were calm.

“This is Sersha of Landsfall, a member of my coterie and due all the same honors as I am. She does not speak.”

Lord Panziar raised an eyebrow and held the carcanet out to me. “Then she will receive the same honor.”

Judicus met my eyes and he seemed to be trying to tell me something with just his eyes. Whatever it was, I didn’t understand it. Reluctantly, I dipped my head and let the big man put the necklace over my head. It was too heavy, and it made me feel terrible – lonely and cold in a way I didn’t understand.

The way Judicus bit his lip made me worry I’d made the wrong choice.

I didn’t have time to regret it.

Already, Lord Panzier was striding to the door and the guards there were opening both sides of it in an elaborate movement that involved some of them kneeling and others bowing and still others sweeping their polearms out in a quick, practiced movement.

Well. They certainly were a dramatic people. And they seemed very good at drills. I wished I had Kazmerev here to explain it all to me.

I wished – I didn’t know what I wished, only that it felt like I was once again mounted on a stone creature with no way to leap off. And I did not like that feeling of helplessly hurtling toward an unknown goal.

I had expected a throne room through the doors. Once again, I was wrong.

We entered a long hall with a fire running down one side. The hearth over the fire was carved in a frieze of wolf heads and lizards. Before the fire, sat a long, heavy table made of some kind of thick, dark wood bearing light stripes within that could not possibly belong to this area in the wind-thrashed mountains.

At the center of the table, seated on a high-back wooden chair with a howling wolf’s head over her head, was a woman who could be the sister of Lord Panziar. She was stacked with furs – red fox, mink, and something curly that made me think of mountain sheep but dyed a bright blue – and she wore a thick bronze coronet in her grey-streaked black hair. A scar ran down her dark face on one side and it quirked up when her mouth turned down in irritation.

“This is the singing cricket that begs for the word and the blade?” she asked in a quiet voice as the doors behind us closed with a shuddering boom.

“It is, Great Lady,” Lord Panzier said, bowing low.

I felt my eyebrows creeping up as Judicus made his own small bow and I scrambled to follow suit.

She smiled, and it was not a smile I liked the look of.

“You know the rules, then, foreigner or you never would have demanded the honor.”

“I do,” Judicus said and there was something about his voice that worried me.

“And your companion?”

“Is only here to watch.”

“Are you sure?” she sounded almost as if she were taunting him. “She has blood to offer, too, I think.”

Blood? No, I didn’t like this.

I took a step forward, but Judicus flung a hand up, his eyes meeting mine. He shook his head and mouthed the words, “One day.”

I swallowed and stopped. He was going to let them do ... something ... to him and all because he cared about their citizens. All because he wanted them to be safe and the Creatures of Sydonon were only a day behind us. It was heroic. And it made me furious at the same time.

The lady drew a long, slender knife from her boot and leaned over the table.

“Place your hand on the table and speak the words,” she said, and there was hunger in those words only matched by the hunger in her eyes and in the eyes of Lord Panziar beside us.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Judicus spread his hand wide on the table, leaning forward so there was less than an arm’s length between his face and the lady’s.

“I invoke the honor,” he intoned and like lighting striking, her hand shot out and she buried the slender knife through his palm between the first finger and the thumb right through to the table, pinning him.

My hand shot up, covering my mouth.

Judicus’s head turned, and he met my eyes again and there was no uncertainty there.

“Calm,” he mouthed to me.

Even that warning was barely enough to keep me settled. I felt my blood speeding in my body and my breathing racing to catch up. Keep it together, Sersha, keep it together.

I almost reached for Kazmerev but I hesitated. He was right. If we insulted them they wouldn’t listen and then how many innocent people might die?

Already, Judicus was speaking, his words coming out of him like a flood.

“Enemies march on your lands. You have just one day to remove everyone in King’s Hold and get them somewhere safe. It won’t be enough time. You must leave now. Stone creatures, powered by magic, are crawling across the ground as we speak. We got out in front of them only because we could fly. They can’t be stopped. I don’t know if they can be destroyed. They are living stone and they will crush all that stands before them.”

He stopped for a breath and the lady spoke.

“I won’t interrupt you. You buy your chance to speak with your words. But you come to me as a strange bird migrating from somewhere else. You come as the chick of egg-stealers claiming to want to line my nest. Why would I believe you?”

“I am Judicus Franzer Irault,” Judicus said, taking in another long breath and I thought that maybe I saw in him echoes of a man who had been the undoing of a ruler. “My father is known to you. He toppled a king for what he believed. He did not lie. I come to you as his son. You know exactly who I am. There is no guessing here.”

She barked a laugh. “A madman is your proof? We did not mourn the chaos in Calicarn, but that does not mean we wish to nurture it here.”

“Your politics are your own,” Judicus said. “And I care not what they are. I am here with this grim warning. Chaos is nipping at our heels. Great rock creatures, larger than horses. They pour up the mountainside like a backward avalanche and if you don’t flee, you will be crushed under them. Maybe you will even if you flee. I do not know how fast you can move, only that you must move now. Now! Before it is too late.”

“And where did these stone creatures come from?” She sat in her chair, crooking one knee over an arm, entirely at her mocking ease. Her light tone stood in stark contrast to his emotion-laced passion.

The first drip of Judicus’s blood fell from the table and splashed on the stone of the floor.

I gritted my teeth. If these rulers weren’t listening, we needed to move on. Or we would be crushed here, too. Maybe we could warn the next city. Or the next.

Those bees in the hives of my mind were buzzing more furiously.

“From a tear in the earth,” Judicus said. “From a broken plinth in the foothills below.”

“And who set all this in motion?” she asked, quirking her mouth.

“I fear that I had a hand in it,” Judicus said.

She tapped the table, looking at him with disdain. “You?”

“Please. For the sake of your people.” His words were edged with terrible sadness. “Please.”

“I don’t listen to madmen,” the lady said, looking at her fingernails as if she barely cared about what he was saying. “I have a people to defend and a trust to guard. I am not – ”

Her words cut off as the doors opened and a man in black stumbled in, a carcarnet around his neck, just like ours. My breath caught in my throat. We hadn’t been fast enough.

He pushed past the guards on either side of him and pushed past Lord Panziar who objected with a growled, “Hold, now!”

He threw his hand on the table, drew his own dagger, plunged it through the flesh, and then ripped his hood from his head before any of us could gasp.

It was Kentinius.

I felt something like a stone sinking in my stomach.

Judicus, on the other hand, ran a hand through his hair like he was just too tired for this.

“Now, I speak,” Kentinius said.

“That’s not how it works. You ask for the honor and you claim it, but it must be granted by the Great Lady,” Lord Panziar growled.

Kentinius didn’t answer. He reached in a satchel thrown over his shoulder and brought out something that looked like a large jar. He slammed it on the table.

Perhaps it was opaque to the naked eye, like the plinths had been, but to my eye the jar was transparent and inside it was swimming with phoenix souls. They screamed and screamed until my ears ached from the sound.

I bit down on my tongue so I wouldn’t cry out. My eyes were fixed on the jar. They wouldn’t pull away. My hands were sweaty and that cold feeling in my heart was growing colder even as my heart raced faster and faster.

Enough.

I needed my friend and we needed to run.

I reached within for Kazmerev. He would know what to do. He always did.

I found nothing.

I was too far on edge. I needed to relax.

Sucking in a breath, I closed my eyes and tried again.

Nothing.

Panicked, I grabbed for the necklace just as rough hands grabbed me from behind and my wrists were thrust into hard metal.

My eyes sprang open, and to my surprise, Lord Panziar was right in front of me, breathing hard.

“Anyone who tries to interrupt the ritual must be bound until it is complete,” he said in a low voice. “So must anyone who tries to remove the carcarnet. That’s you.”

But the carcarnet kept Kazmerev away!

I fought his grip, struggling to get to my knives but he only held me tighter. The metal was locked around my wrists. It didn’t matter. I could still get this collar off. I reached up toward it and the cuffs jerked down, pulling me with them enough to rip at the muscled in my shoulders.

“None of that, now,” Lord Panziar whispered and I watched in horror as he flicked the chain in his hands that extended to my cuffs.

I stole a glance at Judicus but he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at Kentinus. I clanked my wrists together to get his attention, but he didn’t notice. He was fixed on the face of his enemy.

“By now these traitors will have come to you with wild stories of moving stone and a need to flee,” Kentinius was saying. He must have flown on the back of a Stryxex to get here as quickly as us. “They are squawking gulls. Their cries are as endless and meaningless as the words of the wind. But they are not wrong that these creatures come. I was sent as an ambassador of the newly crowned Grand Hadri with a request to capture Judicus Franzer Irault and his companions. They evaded my grasp and washed up here on your shores. But not before they let loose a hurricane of trouble, for they awakened an ancient magic that comes up these mountains toward your hold. Surely, you noticed they knew too much about this disaster and yet had no way to stop it. Would anyone but a guilty man be so certain?”

“And what makes you any different from him?” the lady asked, tapping her fingers on the table. None of them were looking in my direction. There was no one to warn, no one to plead with.

“I will give you this opalesnascant,” Kentinius said with a smile, tapping the jar. I flinched when his finger struck it. “It opens and sends out a shield for every man, woman, and child within your gates. When the creatures come, it will turn them back to Calicarn, without any of you lifting a hand. Look at the letter tied to the opalesnascent and you will see for yourself.”

The lady extracted the letter from a small leather cylinder tied around the jar and began to read.

I fought with renewed energy against my bonds, but Lord Panziar threw an efficient punch at my gut, doubling me over and making me see stars. I grunted with the pain of it and a hand wrapped around my mouth, blocking any other sound I could possibly muster.

Someone needed to tell them what that was. Someone needed to tell them he was lying. That jar was full of the extracted souls of living things. I didn’t know what it would do, but I knew it was no protection.

But I couldn’t free myself even a little, I couldn’t even straighten from my agonized collapse or pull myself free of Panziar’s grip on my mouth, and not a single eye looked at me except the guard beside me and the very effective Lord Panziar.

Even Judicus was too fixed on the task at hand.

“Would you risk your people to unknown tinctures?” my leader asked in a low voice. “Would you trust something that might harm them?

“It seems like a reasonable offer,” the lady said, scratching her chin as she looked from one of them to the other. “This letter is authentic, sealed with the seal of the Grand Hadri and signed by a full counselor to the crown. I do not doubt this ropeworker’s words. But why would you be so generous? What would you have of us?”

“Not much,” Kentinus said with a gracious tilt of his head. “Just these two troublemakers. We in Calicarn, wish to tidy up our own messes, as I’m sure you can understand.”

“Mmm,” the lady said, reading the letter once more. “I’ve a mind to grant you what you wish, but only once we see for certain that your opalesnascent does as you have promised.”

“And until then?” Kentinus asked and he looked so calm you’d think this was the exact outcome he had wanted all along.

“Until then, you can open it for us and apply your help to our people. These two will be held for you. I think the raven cages will do until you’re ready for them, don’t you think?”

And now, for the first time since he’d arrived, Kentinus smiled and ripped the dagger from his hand.

“Bound in words and blades,” he said.

And around us, the ritual words were repeated.

I felt my heart fall as Judicus’s shoulders sank, and with them, my hopes.

He looked back at me at the same moment that the guards rushed him, ripped the dagger from his hand, and shoved his wrists in cuffs – just like mine. And the carcarnet must hold his ropework back just like it held Kazmerev back because judging by the fury in his eyes he would fight them all if only he could.

Our gazes held in shared horror, and this time when his lips moved his eyes were full of shame.

“Forgive me,” he mouthed. “Forgive me.”

***

We’ve left Sersha in a tough place! Read more of her story in Episode Five: “Darkest Hope.”

Behind the Scenes:

USA Today bestselling author, Sarah K. L. Wilson loves happy endings, stories that push things just a little further than you expect, heroes who actually act heroic, selfless acts of bravery, and second chances. She writes young adult fantasy because fantasy is her home and apparently her internal monologue is stuck in the late teens

Sarah would like to thank Melissa Wright & Eugenia Kollia for their incredible work in beta reading and proofreading this book. Without their big hearts and passion for stories, this book would not be the same.

Sarah has the deepest regard for the talent of her phenomenal artist Luciano Fleitas who created the gorgeous cover art that accompanies this book. Without his work, it would be so much harder to show off this story the way it deserves!

Thanks also to the Noble Order of Female Fantasy Authors who keep me sane – sort of. And for my beloved husband, Cale and sons Neville and Leif who are endlessly patient as I talk to them about bookish passions.

And a HUGE THANK YOU to my patrons, Mike Burgess, Jennifer Wood and Carly Salsbury for their support. I couldn’t do this without readers like you!

Visit Sarah’s website for more information:

www.sarahklwilson.com

OTHER BOOK SERIES BY SARAH K. L. WILSON

Stolen Mayfly Bride (2021)

When a fae trickster meets a caged human seer, his thoughts are how to turn this to his advantage, until she starts to slip into his dreams and changes everything. Romantic, dreamy & sweet – this stand-alone short novel is for romantic fantasy lovers.

Bluebeard’s Secret Series (2021)

When Izolda is stolen away as the wife of a mysterious Wittenbrand she thinks only of saving her family – certainly not about his fifteen previous wives or their mysterious deaths, certainly not about the insanity of this upside-down fae world, and certainly not about whether she might be falling in love despite herself. If you loved Alice in Wonderland but wished it was a fairytale romance, this book might be for you.

Empire of War & Wings Series (2020)

When an evil prince arrives on her doorstep, Aella discovers a rage-powered magic inside herself. It’s the perfect weapon to beat back the injustices of her empire – but can she control this magic when it manifests as an angry swarm of bees?

Tangled Fae Series (2020)

Twisted Fae have invaded her world and stolen her sister. Can she save her village and her family by learning to fight and bargain like the fae?

Bridge of Legends Series (2019)

He is possessed by ancient magic. She can smell spiritual residues.

Together they seem unstoppable, but is their love doomed?

And if you liked this episodic story, you’ll certainly like her other episodic fiction:

Dragon Tide Series (2019)

Can Seleska and her baby dragon bring magic back to the world?

Dragon Chameleon Series (2018)

He’s a trickster with the most unique dragon out there. Together, they’ll have to be heroes.

Dragon School Series (2018)

A disabled teen, a telepathic dragon, a bond that will save the world.

Reviews are always welcome! If you liked this book, please tell someone!