The Endless Skies

by Shannon Price

  “The last one. And a woman,” he says, slowly and in our language. Every syllable hurts more than the next.

  He motions to one of his men, and they undo the bonds at my wrists. Marchess inclines his head to the arena behind him, where the cheers rain down like thunder and the sound of shouts has become too familiar, too close to my heart. “Perhaps you are as weak as Ellian. My predecessors were right to keep her here. What could I make you do after a few weeks of poison, hmm?”

  I have had enough of the humans, enough of their city and their cruelty. Enough of their lies and their noise and the way they poison the sky with smoke and fire. So I choose my first words to this human carefully.

  “I will fight you,” I say. “I will fight you until I die.”

  The human shakes his head. “A stubborn breed. Very well. You’ll get the same fate as the others.” In one smooth movement, he punches me right in the stomach. The move catches me off guard, and I double over, gasping for air, as the soldiers roll me into a holding cell. I get up and onto my knees just as the gate goes down, closing off my only chance at escape. My chest heaves as I try not to vomit or cry. I only succeed at the first.

  Tears flood my vision as I stare at my hands on the packed earth of the holding cell. The heavy footfalls of the crowd above send dust into my hair, and refuse from prior occupants of the cell clogs my senses. Yet none of that is as horrible as the absence of my bag with the cure and my people’s future inside.

  I failed.

  We all have—but worse yet is that I had held the flower in my hand. I had felt the earth where it grew. I had enough of it to save the prince and every single sick child, but I came here instead. No wonder Ellian pushed for me to go through Ramsgate. I was stupid to trust her and to let my heart convince me it was worth it to try and find the others.

  Without the cure, I have nothing. But I still have to fight.

  I pull up the dress Ellian loaned me and lift it over my head then toss it to the ground in rage. I’ve never been prouder to be back in my ivory and blue. I touch each of my remaining knives to ground myself, and then unsheathe my sword.

  The gate lifts. With a shout, I run toward my fate.

  36

  CALLEN

  In the stands above us, General Marchess must be laughing. He knew exactly what he was doing when he chose our opponents.

  The stallion was first, released kicking and bucking with all his strength. They’d fitted him with a crude armor, which was more of a shock than anything else. After a few charges, Ox got the noble beast in the eye. Next, they loosed a pair of black bears—starved by the looks of them and wearing poorly fitted helmets as well. Sethran and I charged them together as Ox took a defensive position.

  With a battle cry, I’d run forward, looking for a sign, any sign, of Knowledge, but the glassy black that met me was the only confirmation I needed. The bear turned enough that my swing to its paw met its mark. Ox took his shot and made it. Without hesitation, we turned. The other bear charged, too quickly for us to attack. I slid my axe to the side and rolled out of the way, finding my axe once more. Dust rose in the air. The bear turned for Sethran alone, but our commander was ready. When the animal swung, he flattened himself against the ground, then twisted to get the bear from below.

  As the animal fell, I felt a pang of hope mixed with dread. Without an ocean to have us fight in, I knew what was next.

  The lioness is hardy and huge. Unlike the bears, she has been properly fed, and she fights. Her armor is the best of them all. Still not perfect, but the plates interlock correctly, and her helm is secure. General Marchess said he studied us. Somehow he found a lioness without Knowledge, in lands beyond where Leonodai have ever been.

  Dents in the metal mark where our aim was true, but not enough to puncture it. The lioness’s wild eyes thrash from side to side. There is no soul there. Nothing. It’s as crazed as the humans around us, and just as lost.

  Still, something in me hesitates. We continue to dodge as best we can, to the enormous entertainment of the humans who throw rotted food and horse dung down onto us. I am better than this. We are better. I find myself wishing for more aid, but when the gate clangs open and I see what the humans have sent forth, I curse the skies, wishing anew that I’d asked for anything else.

  Rowan’s hair has been cut to her shoulders, but I’d know my girl anywhere. Her head is raised and proud, the gold in her eyes catching in the light as she takes in the crowd above us.

  Then she looks at me. She turns, taking in our enemy on the other side of the arena. Ox and Sethran both call to her to warn her of the danger, but her name falls from my lips as a strangled cry. Eyes on the lioness as it circles the arena, I run over to Rowan. She meets me halfway, curling into my embrace like she needs it as much as I do.

  The feeling of her hugging me back is a stronger magic than anything I’ve found since the Heliana.

  “How the skies did you survive that landslide?” I ask.

  “Luck,” she says, pushing me back to keep her attention on the lioness.

  “Leonodai don’t believe in luck.”

  “This one is starting to,” she counters. “Skies, is that … armor?”

  “Supposed to be.”

  The lioness is dazed for a moment, taking in a new contender. Then it charges. Ox throws himself forward, shield raised, as a distraction to throw the lioness off. Rowan, fresh in the fight, lets out a battle cry as she makes a large arc on the opposite side, adding to the chaos. While the animal roars at Ox’s charge, she lands a hit across its nose, blood spraying in the gash’s wake.

  The lioness charges again, growing and shrieking unnaturally, and I ready my axe for another go. Rowan throws a knife, but it bounces off the armor. The lioness backs up and for a moment is distracted by the other felled animals.

  We take the moment to regroup. Ox reaches for Rowan, and she squeezes his hand in return, but she addresses Sethran. “Commander. What’s the plan?”

  Sethran shakes his head. “We have to survive, even if that means killing her.”

  Rowan stares hard at the lioness. “I know, but we could do it in an honorable way.”

  The three of us turn to her. Our commander shifts on his feet. “What do you mean?”

  “A fast death. One with dignity,” Rowan replies. “And then, we stop fighting ourselves. Seth, there isn’t a way out of this.”

  Ox shakes his head in disbelief. “You’re giving up?”

  She shakes her head. “I’m accepting the truth. We can’t last forever.”

  Hearing the truth from Rowan hits harder than it did when I was saying the same to myself. We tried. We made it this far. But she is right. We can fight our best for hours, but eventually, we’ll fall.

  “Think of how you want to go to the Endless Skies,” she says, voice trembling. “I want to go on my own terms. What say you?”

  It’s a moment I wouldn’t have the words to fully capture, even if I had all the time in the world. And time is something we don’t have. The crowd grows ever more restless around us.

  “Let’s do what we must,” says Sethran.

  “Yes, sir,” we reply together.

  The lioness waits on the far right of the arena, sides heaving as foam and saliva drip from her jaws. One of the soldiers guarding the arena’s edge reaches down with a pole with a flame burning on the end of it. He shoves the fire into the lioness’s hide, and she roars in pain. The sound slices into my chest.

  As the lioness starts to charge, Rowan and Sethran run to the right together, coming up on her blind spot, where blood seeps from the wound on her nose, but the animal aims at me. I count down the seconds, waiting for the precise moment to dodge …

  Swinging my axe to the side, I let the momentum carry me out of the animal’s path just as she stops short, pivoting to face Rowan and Sethran. In a flash, Ox appears on the opposite side and sinks an arrow behind the lioness’s right foreleg. The animal collapses with a thunderous sound. She kicks out feebly, blood tric
kling from the wound. Rowan wordlessly tosses one of her knives to Sethran, who catches it by the handle. In a swift, smooth motion, he kneels beside the dying beast and takes the killing blow at her throat.

  We’ve won, but it doesn’t feel like it. Rowan drifts toward the lioness, kneeling beside Sethran. She cradles the animal’s enormous, proud head in her arms. As Rowan presses her face into the animal’s fur, our commander puts his hand on her shoulder. Above us, the crowd’s mood has turned like a tide going out. They’ve never seen anything like this. They’re curious, shouting to one another and trying to understand.

  I take a place on Rowan’s other side, while Ox bows his head. My chest tightens at the sound of Ro’s crying. When I look to Sethran for answers, I find a shine in his eyes, too.

  We did our best. It just wasn’t enough.

  “Stand,” our commander says quietly.

  The four of us get up together. Taking a step back, Sethran drives his sword into the ground, and I follow suit to drop my axe. Then he raises his gaze as the clouds above us shift, covering the arena in patchy light. We are Leonodai, not humans. We are different, and we’ll make sure they remember us.

  Rowan’s hand searches for mine, and I take it.

  The crowd’s din fades from my ears. I look up and realize it’s not my imagination. The humans’ eyes are on us, quieted by confusion and unexpectedness. Some boo at the stillness.

  Seconds pass like seasons.

  Then a horn sounds, and a gate rises on the opposite side of the carnage.

  General Marchess stalks toward us, clapping slowly. The spectators immediately start to cheer, their eagerness for spectacle seeming to draw the very air from the arena. This man has promised them so much, I think. He’s their hope, not completely unlike how Tabrol is ours.

  “Well,” says General Marchess. “You surprise me. But you haven’t proved anything except that you don’t like to kill your own.”

  He raises a hand, and a dozen soldiers swarm the lowest level of the stands, brandishing guns that are different from those I’ve seen before. The townsfolk cry out in surprise, their shouts rippling from one end of the arena to the next. The guns the soldiers carry are longer, but the humans hold them to their eyes for aim like Leonodai archers do with their bows. Excellent, I think bleakly. A longer range.

  Marchess raises and lowers his hand. A gunshot fires in response, and I flinch, reaching for Rowan, but none of us fall to our deaths. At our feet, the lioness’s body shakes as it takes the bullet. Rowan lets out a horrified gasp and, in the next breath, draws one of her knives and throws it. Marchess screams.

  “Bitch,” he spits, drawing the knife out of the same hand that gave the order to shoot the lioness. “Even death is too good for your kind.”

  Rowan looks at me.

  “I love you,” I whisper.

  We wait for the shots.

  Instead, there’s a loud grunt from above. One of the soldiers falls into the arena like a discarded doll. Two more collapse in quick succession as Marchess’s head swivels in confusion, and the crowd screams as they dive for cover. The other soldiers look around in bewilderment as another pair of arrows find their marks. I’d know the blue of the fletching anywhere.

  A Leonodai shout cuts through the air as a pair of warriors bursts from one of the arena’s stairwells. The archer moves with unmatched speed, taking out the soldiers beyond a sword’s reach while the other shoves past fleeing spectators to the front of the stands. The figure leaps down into the arena, throwing back the hood of her cloak as she does.

  “Io!” Sethran cries in a mixture of relief and amazement. “Skies alive.”

  Warrior Io smiles and cocks her head toward the holding cell that we came from. “Let’s save the talk for after we save your skins, yeah?”

  A bullet cuts the air between us, and Io ducks. “This way!” she yells. I lurch forward, grabbing my axe as the others retrieve their own weapons. Marchess barks orders, clutching his bleeding hand to his chest, but his words are lost as the fleeing crowds jostle frantically past the soldiers.

  Io runs straight for an iron and its teeth lift out of the ground as we get closer. She slides beneath the creaking metal. As the rest of us follow, she looses two knives toward the arena in quick succession. The soldiers who meant to attack us from behind don’t even have the chance to aim, let alone fire. Their bodies slump to the ground.

  Now on the other side of the gate, I see another warrior at the winch that powers the gate. Once we’re through, he lets it go, and it falls with a resounding thud.

  “Jai!” I call, my blood pounding with adrenaline and relief.

  “Nice to see you, Callen,” he replies, picking up his pace to match the rest of us as we blindly follow Io forward. In the moment, I can’t recall who else was on his team, but he must not have been their only archer. Sentinel Renna gave different kinds of teams to different commanders, I realize. All the better the odds that at least one team would succeed.

  I don’t know much about Io, other than that she terrifies most first-years and revels in her reputation. “Please tell me Io knows where she’s going,” I say between breaths.

  “We got into the city, didn’t we?” he replies. “Same way back out.”

  We follow Io’s lead as she makes a break for an open street ahead. Flashes of light reflect off a river on the other side of the city wall. Rowan looks over her shoulder at me. There’s relief in her eyes, but pain, too. I know why she is hurting.

  Despite our new numbers, we are running scared. The prince’s death is days away, and we still don’t have the cure. If we escape, the best we’d have to hope for is a chance to defend our city as she fell. We’ve faced death once today, and something tells me that from here on out, death is never going to be far from us.

  37

  ROWAN

  Io turns down an empty alleyway with a dead end. The sound of water calls from the other side of the city wall. In the ground, a square metal drainage hole reveals the steady rush of the river below us. Jai and Io lift the grate up, with Seth adding his strength once he puts together what’s going on.

  “What about the rest of your team?” Seth asks.

  “They have orders to run in the opposite direction from here as a distraction,” Io says. “This river stretches to the north until it turns some half mile beyond. The current is against us, but we’ll have to make do. Now let’s move.”

  Sethran ushers me forward, and before I lose my nerve, I leap into the waters.

  My boot catches on the slick rock and mildew beyond the grate, and the motion tilts me off-balance. I smack into the river shoulder-first. The cold envelops me, slamming my body sideways and forward into the dark. My head goes all the way under, but I right myself enough to feel river stones beneath me. Then the ground drops out from under me, and I’m falling into the deceptively strong current as it tries to pull me the opposite way.

  All Leonodai are used to swimming in the rivers back home, but swimming for fun meant I’d only wear the lightest of clothes. I know the very first thing I should do is kick off my boots, but we have days of travel until we reach the Heliana—but I can’t drown before then.

  Feebly, I start to take them off when an arm loops around me and someone’s cheek presses awkwardly into mine as they pull me with them.

  “Hang on, this way,” Callen says. He alternates kicking and treading water with practiced strokes, but the current is strong and he’s weighed down by armor.

  “Callen—” I start, shifting so I can use my own free arm to keep us upright. Callen maneuvers me around in such a way that I’m behind him, one arm around his shoulders, but it makes things worse. I kick free, trying to keep close.

  “Shoes,” I gasp desperately, but like me, Callen seems to know we’d need them.

  His hand finds mine, and pulls me to our right. “No. Almost there.”

  Blessedly, the current slows as the river curves away from the city. Callen and I swim toward the shore where Io is already
climbing out of the water. She looks back, walking over to help Ox, Seth, and Jai from the river.

  We reach the muddy riverbank. I gasp for air as he crawls to his knees next to me. His chest rises and falls with labored breaths. I run my hand through the unfamiliar length of my hair, grateful to be alive.

  “Everyone all right?” Io asks, eliciting weak nods from the others.

  I look back at Ramsgate, trying to imagine how long it would take to get back to Ellian’s cottage. The city would be on high alert for us. Ellian may be on her way back already, and she would keep Isla from guiding me back to where the panacea grows. Feebly, I look up and down the river. Not a single boat travels these waters. Another lie.

  “What do we do now?” Callen asks.

  The two commanders share a glance. “We haven’t seen any of the cure,” Io says, bunching up the front of her uniform to squeeze out some water. “Have you?”

  Seth shakes his head. “We were searching the area to the southwest of the city before we were captured,” he replies. “We only found one, and the human had already used it. No idea where he got it from.”

  “Then we keep looking,” Io says.

  “The humans will be all over here in minutes,” Seth counters. “We should look, but we need to hide first.”

  I close my eyes, wishing I could drown out the sound of their voices. The truth catches in my throat like cloth on a dagger. Tearing. Dragging.

  I could lie, but I shouldn’t. What’s more is that I don’t want to. I’ll think more clearly having been honest, and the Heliana needs all her fighters thinking clearly.…

  Everything from my undergarments to the leather bindings of my vambrace is saturated with water, and we don’t exactly have the luxury of being able to lay out to dry. I reach down to wring out my own clothes, buying myself time, when there’s an itch at my chest. I scratch at it, not thinking, until it continues to bother me. My fingers pull at my underthings, and then I remember—Isla’s present.