Ride the Storm

by Karen Chance

I stared at Nimue, at the beauty hidden behind a mask of blood, at the eyes gone wild, at the face set on snarl. It was easier to see the woman within now, to glimpse the iron usually covered by velvet, the warrior instead of the queen. And the vicious pride that matched anything Aeslinn could boast.

  I thought I had my answer.

  Which was why, the next time Aeslinn sent a blast back at her, laden with cutting sand and smothering earth, I didn’t oppose him. Instead, I helped, adding whatever small effect I had to the strength of his assault. And maybe I was more powerful than I’d thought, or maybe he was just overcompensating for my previous efforts. But for whatever reason, the blow landed.

  And it landed hard.

  I heard Nimue scream, saw the shock register, saw her personal shields dissolve in tatters. And saw her look up at the only other protection available to her, which was also the only thing keeping out the inferno. It was barely a flicker of her eyes, but it was enough to tell me that I’d been right.

  Because if she was going down, she was taking Aeslinn with her.

  He realized it the same moment I did, but he was halfway across the arena and the shield’s source was on her arm. He dove for it anyway, and with his speed, he might have made it. I’ll never know if throwing everything I had left at him was enough to slow him down, or if Nimue was just that fast.

  I only know he missed.

  And suddenly, the world was fire.

  It burned through the towering stands that rose around us on every side. It blew through the air in flaming bits scattered through choking clouds of smoke. It roared in the howl of the winds that were released when our protection dropped. And it sizzled in the avalanche of spells that threatened to melt the very sand underneath my feet.

  Instead, they knocked me backward, throwing me the length of the arena, like a blow from a giant’s club. The body I was using hit the stands, felt the searing heat, saw a mass of flaming wood towering precariously overhead. And then saw it come crashing down in a cascade of fire, like a flaming waterfall, as I screamed and screamed and—

  The world shifted and slurred, with the fire running together in long blurred lines across my vision. Ones that swiftly changed from orange-red to blue-black, and from intense heat to freezing rain. I realized that I was tearing through the sky, my body racked with pain, like it was still on fire even with a torrent bucketing down around me.

  I had a second to understand that I was back inside my own skin, and that the rain felt like a massive deluge because I was speeding through it, my thighs clamped around something that looked a lot like a broom. And that there was a witch behind me, throwing curses at the fey running below, a wand in either hand, and laughing despite the speed of the ground rushing by underneath. And then something hit us, blowing us out of the sky and sending us crashing into the ground.

  The impact was enough to stun me and possibly more. For a moment, I couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, couldn’t move. There was a roaring in my ears, a numbness in my limbs, and a feeling like my chest might just explode.

  Because I also couldn’t breathe.

  And then my body convulsed and flipped to the side, allowing me to gasp in air like a beached fish. And to realize that we’d landed in the great field in front of the arena, which was now mostly churned-up mud. And charred grass from the world’s biggest bonfire raging a few dozen yards away.

  It wasn’t nearly far enough.

  The heat was scorching, hitting my face and then my palm when I raised it to shield my eyes from the sparks flying everywhere. Including upward, where I watched in disbelief as what looked like a fiery gash opened up in the heavens. Red and livid against the haze of firelight and vast blue blackness, it looked like a great wound towering above us, one that my mother’s spell was trying hard to close.

  Trying, and failing.

  Because Aeslinn’s device was still intact.

  We’d tried to slam the door, but we hadn’t been fast enough, and now Ares had a foot in it. Or a hand, because that was what my mind insisted I was seeing. A giant hand, ripping through the fabric of space and time, forcing his way into our world.

  “Options,” I whispered, but this time, my power didn’t respond. Maybe because of the lead weight that seemed to be dragging on me, as Ares’ power tamped down whatever remained of mine. Or maybe because there was nothing to show.

  Billy Joe emerged from my skin, where I guessed he’d possessed my body while I was away. I hadn’t noticed, since for once he’d been silent. And still was, staring upward in disbelief for a moment, before looking at me, his eyes huge. “He’s coming through.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Cassie! What the hell?”

  “We lost.”

  “What? You can’t just— Do something!”

  He was staring at me, like a child expecting Mommy to fix this. And suddenly, I was angry. Suddenly, I was furious. “I did. It wasn’t enough.”

  “Then do something else! Don’t just lie there and say we lost. You’re Pythia!”

  “So are they!” I gestured outward. I didn’t see the others; my eyes were too bleary with rain and blowing ash, and I doubted they were stupid enough to be out in the open anyway. But their power was here, slow and sluggish, spreading across the ground like fog.

  And useless, just like mine.

  Because of course it was. Ares might not know he had half the Pythias who ever lived here, but he knew he had at least one. And one is all it takes.

  So he wasn’t taking any chances, wasn’t risking having one of us flit back in time and get more, wasn’t going to let us do anything. And God, he was powerful! He wasn’t even here, was still struggling to push open a door that was trying its best to close on top of him, was still battling my mother’s spell. Yet my power was all but useless.

  I suddenly remembered something she’d said once, to the demon council. Reminding them how she’d fought whole demon armies to a standstill in her day, and how Ares was every bit as powerful now as she had been then. And about how, if he came back, we would have no way to stand against him.

  And here I was, seeing the truth of it.

  I stared upward, the tears on my face mixing with the rain, and despaired. How had we ever thought we could do anything? Small and puny, weak and frightened. How had we ever thought—

  And then someone grabbed me.

  I was jerked up out of the mud, not by the Svarestri soldier I’d been expecting, maybe because most of them had stopped fighting and were also just standing there, looking upward in awe. But by someone else. Someone familiar. Someone with burning green eyes staring at me out of a blackened face.

  Someone I’d never thought I’d see again.

  “Pritkin?”

  He grabbed my shoulders, but instead of hugging me, he pushed me backward. “Go!”

  “What?”

  “You’ve got to get out of here! Now!”

  “Why?” I looked around, and realized that we were about to be trampled. Not by Svarestri, but by witches, a great mass of them tearing out of the fiery arena and headed this way. Some were on foot, their shields gone, their bodies blackened by smoke and ash. Some were on brooms, laden with two or three passengers each, some with the ends on fire. Still more had enchanted whatever they could find, like the burnt remains of the stadium benches, to carry their wounded, because they wouldn’t leave them behind.

  And I realized that while I’d been lying in the mud feeling sorry for myself, they’d been rescuing their sisters from an inferno.

  One Pritkin was heading back into.

  “Wait!” I grabbed his arm.

  It was hot to the touch—too hot. But not as much as it was about to be. Ares’ arrival had caused the arena to flame up, like gas poured onto a fire. It was almost incandescent from this close, a searing ball of heat and light, like a small sun. Too bright to even look at head-on
—and impossible to survive.

  Especially with water shields that would evaporate in seconds.

  “Let go!” Pritkin was trying to pry my hands off, but it didn’t go as planned.

  “Why?” I challenged him. “So you can die for nothing? We failed—”

  “We didn’t fail!”

  “What are you talking about?” I yelled. “How is that not—” I cut off, choking on a blast of smoke and flying ash. But still hanging on.

  “We didn’t fail!” Strong hands gripped my biceps, shaking me. “The shield is down, Aeslinn and his creatures have fled, the witches are clear or getting clear—”

  “But the device is still in there!”

  “Yes, and unprotected! His men pulled Aeslinn out before he could reengage the shield. The device is vulnerable, if I go now!”

  He tried to push me off, but it didn’t work. “So why not take it out before? Why wait to evacuate everyone?”

  Nothing.

  “Pritkin!”

  He tried to pry off my hands, and he wasn’t kidding this time, but I’d let my fingers break before I let go. He stared at me, hair and face almost black, eyes reflecting the flames that burned behind him. And thought about lying.

  But he sucked at it; he always had, at least with me. And then I was shaking him, shouting, “Tell me!”

  “It’s absorbed too much power,” he admitted. “Destroying it will release all that, all at once. The explosion . . . could level half the city. Now do you understand? You have to get away, to the river or beyond, to be safe.”

  I stared at him. Everything was coming too hard and too fast. I couldn’t keep up anymore, couldn’t think. Couldn’t process what he was telling me, except I guessed part of me had. Because my nails sank into his skin, hurting him, but I didn’t care. I was suddenly screaming and thrashing, and actually pulling him backward, this man who had sixty pounds on me and most of it muscle.

  Until he did something that ended up with him behind me, too fast for me to counter even if I’d been thinking straight, and got an arm around my throat. I could feel his chest against my back as I fought, could feel his too-rapid breathing, could hear his voice in my ear, telling me things I didn’t care about because I only cared about one thing.

  And he wasn’t coming with me.

  “Listen to me—”

  “No!”

  “You must! I have to—”

  “No. Please.” It was a mewling cry, raw and humiliating any other time. But not now.

  “Listen to me. If I can return to you, I will. I swear it. Nothing else—” He cut off, abruptly, and the arms tightened. “But I have to do this. There’s no time to explain, but there’s no one else who can. I have to go. You have to let me go.”

  I just shook my head, my hands gripping his forearms, feeling like the world was shattering around me. I didn’t care. He was going to have to pry me off. He was going to have to—

  “Listen.” It was gentler this time, and he somehow turned me around, made me look up at him. I was crying now, great ugly sobs that racked my body and tore at my mind, but I didn’t even try to hide them.

  “I can’t,” I said brokenly. “Please don’t . . . I can’t. . . .”

  A filthy hand pushed the muddy hair out of my face. “I don’t believe that. I don’t believe there’s anything you can’t do.” He finally did something other than fight me, and the kiss tasted of smoke and ash and spent magic. “I think you might be the strongest person I know.”

  I shook my head. I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t, that he was wrong, that he’d always been wrong about me. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t seem to say anything, even when he pulled away. And I felt something inside break and shatter and splinter. I collapsed, falling to my knees, staring at the ground because I couldn’t watch him walk away.

  And then stagger and fall, hitting the ground unconscious a few yards in front of me.

  I looked up, shocked and horrified, expecting to see a Svarestri looming over us. But instead—

  “Rosier,” I breathed.

  “Damn boy.” The demon was holding his hand. “Jaw like a rock.”

  And then he shoved something into my hand.

  I looked down to see a scrap of parchment. It looked like it had been torn out of a book, with careful, cramped medieval writing in the center, and a manic scrawl along the edges. I stared at it, utterly confused. “What is this?”

  “The spell.”

  I looked up. “What?”

  “The countercurse. I rewrote it in the common tongue. Emrys can put it on himself. When the soul arrives, have him read it.”

  He actually started to stride away, before I got my shit together and grabbed his leg. “What? Why? Rosier—”

  “I have the same abilities he does,” he told me testily. “I’m the one who passed them on to him! And whatever else they did to me, the demon council can’t block fey magic.”

  “That doesn’t explain this.” I held up the paper. “What’s going on?”

  Unlike his son, he didn’t try to lie to me. “I don’t have enough strength to come back.”

  “What?”

  “I came on this journey to benefit me,” he said abruptly as I stared at him. “I told myself it was for the good of my people, but that’s a lie. I wanted to prove everyone wrong, to show them I was my father’s son, after all. Not bothering to think that I was someone’s father, too.

  “I never acted like it. I never had a father; I had a taskmaster who was never satisfied with anything I did or was. I hated him, but I’ve treated Emrys . . .” His jaw clenched. “Pritkin. I’ve treated Pritkin just the same. All his life. I can’t change that, but I can do this.”

  “Rosier . . .”

  “Immortal she named him. Let me be!”

  He jerked away, and strode into the fire before I could stop him.

  Chapter Fifty-nine

  I just stayed there, on my knees, staring into the fire until it seared my retinas, I didn’t know why. And then a passing witch jostled me, and slowly, sluggishly, I came back to life. In the middle of a scene of carnage and chaos, unsure where to go or how to get there.

  “Here!” A witch, a dishwater blonde all of three feet high, poked me. “Get him on here!”

  I looked around to see that she was pulling a wonky contraption behind her, consisting of a broom on one side and a bunch of blackened sticks on the other, with a few bench seats in between. It formed a slightly lopsided, floating gurney already piled high with moaning bodies. It didn’t look likely to take another, but Pritkin was out cold, and I couldn’t carry him.

  “Help me,” I said breathlessly, and together we somehow maneuvered a hundred and eighty pounds of muscle onto the pile. It left the crazy contraption barely a couple of inches off the ground, but it was still mobile. More than me.

  “Think you ought to get on, too,” the witch said, eyeing me as I stumbled along behind.

  “If I do, it’ll drag the ground.”

  “Won’t matter as fast as we’ll be going,” she said, hazel eyes flashing. “Now get on!”

  I nodded, and started looking for a free spot, only to stop abruptly.

  Not because of the crack that suddenly resounded across the battlefield, like a hundred cannons going off. And not because of the wound in the sky, which abruptly widened, drowning the plain in crimson light. Not even because of the ground underneath us, which had begun to undulate constantly now, rippling outward from the arena like water after someone tossed in a stone.

  But because of something I couldn’t see, flowing over my skin like a cold wind, raising goose pimples despite the heat. It was like nothing I’d ever felt. Like twining fingers with twenty different hands all at once. Like being pulled into a woven tapestry, where every person was a thread, a color, a knot wound into the others.

  I looked up,
to where Ares’ head and shoulders had just appeared in the sky. It was an impossible sight, one that should have had me staring in awe or shivering in fear. But instead, I was shivering in something else.

  Something that was part of me but not me, and not the other Pythias I could feel as if they were clustered all around me. But something that joined us because it shared us. The creature Apollo had unwittingly created all those centuries ago, when he shaved off some of his power, had become something else, something more. Something that threaded through all of us, combining our strength into one last stand, with everything it had and everything we had, its partners and its lovers.

  And in that moment, I knew Agnes had been wrong when she told Rhea it didn’t feel as we did, that it wasn’t human as we were. And maybe it didn’t and maybe it wasn’t, but it felt something. A genuine, overflowing love and compassion for the world it had adopted, and for the people it had worked through.

  All of them.

  And suddenly, the sky bloomed with Pythias.

  Portals opened everywhere, like the one Gertie had shown me once: blue skies, gray skies, sea and stone and forest, against red. Strands of power reached out, like the lassos the Pythias had put on a boiling column of light to save me. Because one strand couldn’t stop a force of pure energy, but three could.

  Or, I thought, staring upward, dozens.

  Something tore through the cacophony all around us, through the crash of lightning and the din of battle, through the crackle and hiss of fire meeting rain, through the yells and curses and the rumble of the ground beneath us. Something that sounded very much like a scream. It boomed across the landscape like thunder, shuddered the ground under my feet, sent shivers up my spine.

  And then had me ducking back down into the mud, in terror and awe, as great Ares roared, tearing at the leashes that had ensnared him, snapping some, but unable to escape others, looking for all the world like an animal being held down by ropes.

  Or no, I realized suddenly. Not held down. Held back. Because the new arrivals were trying to force him back into the gash. While the other Pythias, the ones who had followed me here, the ones who were borrowing what little power I had left, were doing something, too. And then the power shivering through me, through all of us, roared back at the crazed god.