by Hanna Howard
“Merrall,” I said, stepping carefully to the bank’s edge and sitting on an outcropping of rock. I left my rucksack on my back, fearful of getting it wet. “Is everything all right? You seem a bit . . . sad.”
Merrall’s eyes flashed toward me, but her defensiveness faltered when she saw I was sincere. She looked away.
“I understand if you don’t want to talk about it,” I said, already half hoping she didn’t. My relationship with Merrall had improved over the last month, but we were still a long way from friends.
Merrall swam closer to my rock and rested her elbows on a mossy boulder. “Sometimes,” she said, without looking at me, “life can be overwhelming, and sometimes it catches up to you. Do you know what I mean?”
I gave a humorless laugh. “Yes.”
Merrall lifted her face to regard me. Her eyes narrowed, and she seemed to deliberate something. Finally, she let out a long breath. “When I was young,” she said, “I lived with my mother on the western coast of the Elder Bay. We had a small cottage in a cove and spent every day in the sea. Life is endless and deep and dazzling in the open water . . . Not like rivers.
“One day I ventured farther than I ever had before and came upon a fishing boat that had caught a seal in its nets. I watched from behind a driftwood log as the fishermen debated what to do with the creature. Most of them wanted to sell its skin, but one young man said they should release it. He fought with his companions, and the argument grew loud and violent. The young man—Brinn, I learned his name was—drew out a knife and cut the seal loose. The creature went free, but one of the fishermen lashed out, slashing Brinn’s face, and hit him hard across the head. Brinn toppled out of the boat, and his companions sailed away, leaving him to die.
“I caught him before he sank too deep and towed him to the surface, then swam him back to the cottage. My mother was still out, but I nursed him back to consciousness and dressed his wounds. By the time Mother returned, he was sitting up and talking again.
“He stayed with us a month. By the time he left, we were in love, but he had no money for marriage, and said he would be back for me after he returned home to claim his inheritance. Three days later, Luminor fell.”
I did not need Merrall to explain further. As a naiad, she would have been in immediate peril.
“My mother and I fled north through the canals and rivers to the resistance camp we heard had formed in the Northern Wilds. But Mother became sick on the journey . . . She only lived for a week after we reached the rebels.”
“I—I’m so sorry, Merrall. What did you do? Once . . . once she was gone?”
“Without Mother, I wanted work—I wanted to be busy. I was assigned to be a spy in Umbraz, and I left with half a hope that Brinn would find me, that his love would drive him to search every corner of the kingdom. But the years passed . . .” She swallowed. “I still have not seen him again.”
At a complete loss for what to say, and feeling words were probably inadequate anyway, I gazed at Merrall for a long moment, then reached for her wet hand. She flinched slightly but did not pull away.
“Sometimes,” she continued in a very tight voice, “certain things make me more aware of the loss of him than I usually am. It has been fifteen years, after all. But that song . . . the song you and the elf sang last night . . .”
My stomach clenched.
“It cut into the old wound, and . . . and it made me remember.”
All I could think to do was to squeeze Merrall’s cold fingers. My mind strayed back up the bank to Linden, and it suddenly seemed stupid to keep my feelings from him when life was so short and full of uncertainty. There was no guarantee any of us would survive the next week—let alone the rest of our lives—and what did it matter if my power kept me from kissing him? He should at least know the truth.
Merrall and I did not speak again, but after another few moments, the naiad hefted herself onto the bank and transformed back into an ordinary-looking—albeit dripping wet—woman. Side by side, we made our way back up the slope.
My head was so full of her story and my own new resolve that it wasn’t until Merrall lurched to seize my arm that I heard the screams.
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We exchanged one horrified look, then started to run, stumbling over loose stones and tree roots and pulling each other up by turns as the cries grew louder, then mixed with the clanging of steel and the twang of bowstrings. My chest felt like it was shrinking, too small to contain my knocking, throbbing heart. I was almost dragging Merrall.
We came over the rise and ran straight into an Umbraz soldier. He bellowed and charged, but Merrall acted quickly. With a flick of her hand, she pulled a sphere of glittering blue water out of thin air and flung it at him. It did not break; instead, it settled on his head like a bizarre water helmet, distorting his features and his voice, even as he opened his mouth to shout again. He clawed at the bubble, his fingernails slipping off its surface as if it were glass, and as he choked and his eyes began to bulge, I realized what would happen next. A bolt of horror shot through me.
“Come on,” said Merrall grimly, pulling me away as she drew her aquamarine stiletto.
Through the trees I could see Yarrow, the Runepiece in his palm glowing white as he fell soldiers like toy dolls. Linden’s dagger was out, and he commanded the legion of crawling vines that swarmed over the ground toward the soldiers’ feet, entangling them and dragging them down. His skin, like Merrall’s, blazed with evidence of his magic. Elegy crouched near him at the base of a tree, as if she was trying to make herself as small as possible.
Iyzabel’s soldiers were everywhere. They outnumbered us twenty to one at least, and I felt dizzy as I tried to comprehend their presence. How had they found us? Had it been our singing the night before? Had Yarrow’s enchantments failed?
It was a moment before I realized the ground beneath me was shuddering.
I turned, and as I saw what was causing the ground to shake, my body seemed to disconnect from my mind. I had expected pursuit, and I knew Iyzabel had many dark creatures at her service, but I had never thought to expect this one. He wasn’t hard to identify; he figured prominently in many children’s tales, and his hundred claw-footed legs were as infamous as the twenty-foot-long, muscular pale body that wound through the tree trunks, as well as his spiky, horned head. According to the stories, he had wings too, and if you were a bad child, he might arrive, flapping and twisting at your window, ready to break the panes with the flat armor on his head and force his snakelike neck inside—at which point he would either devour you or fill your room with cold black flames from his maw.
A Night Wyrm.
I stood with my arms hanging at my sides. How had the soldiers managed to bring him all the way here?
“Kill them all—except the girl! Leave the sunchild!” one of the soldiers bellowed, some distance to my left.
I suddenly realized Merrall was no longer beside me. As I looked wildly around, terror and adrenaline churning in me like boiling water, a roaring sound came from the Night Wyrm’s direction, and then I heard absolutely nothing at all. Some instinct made me throw myself behind a tree trunk, and then the world was black and silver and a brilliant, shocking blue, and I smelled sulfur and charred flesh. My limbs became immobile as a roiling cloud of chill white fog swallowed up the forest, denser than smoke, with billows that burned so cold they were almost hot.
“Linden!” I screamed, choking on the dry, frozen fog.
The white smoke ebbed slightly away, and I flung myself out from behind the tree, sprinting over crunching, icy bracken in the direction I had last seen Linden. Through the thinning fog I could see that every tree within sight was now thick with ice on the side facing the Night Wyrm, and I knew that anyone who had been directly exposed to the beast’s frozen fire died instantly. My heart felt like it might break out of my rib cage, and I screamed a curse at the whirling white smoke that was still too thick to see through. What had happened to my friends? Had they ta
ken shelter before the black fire—
Something collided with my right shoulder, sending me to my knees so quickly I didn’t immediately realize I had fallen. And then heat and pain blazed through my entire arm, and for a moment I was oblivious to everything but the sudden swell of nausea that made both ground and sky seem unfixed. I threw out my left arm to catch myself as I fell forward, and lights popped before my eyes. Every nerve in my right side was agonizingly ablaze.
I heard men shouting somewhere nearby. The Night Wyrm gave a chilling, guttural screech as I lurched to my feet again, trying to ignore my arm, and I managed several more steps before I staggered once more. Another wave of dizzying pain shot through my limb. I forced myself to look down at it.
My stomach heaved.
A thick, black arrow was speared through my upper arm, protruding straight out on each side as if the flesh and muscle were no more substantial than upholstery. Dark, glutinous blood covered the shaft beyond the exit wound, rapidly soaking into my clothes.
My mouth opened—a shudder ran the length of my body—I was going to be sick—
Something red and brighter than flames exploded through the trees just ahead of me, and I looked up. Yarrow was there. He had turned his Runepiece into a long, pale knife—the source of the red light—and he glowed like wrath incarnate as he drew it in a wide, arcing ring around himself, sending a wave of crackling crimson speeding out over the whole forest.
It caught me in the chest. The world trembled, shimmered.
And disappeared.
PART THREE
“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
JOHN 1:5
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I gasped and blinked furiously. I was lying on the ground. The red imprint still glowing on my eyeballs told me no time had passed since I had been in the midst of the frozen trees, but my surroundings had changed entirely. There was no ice, no shouting, no red light. I remained in the forest, but the trees around me were thinner, younger. The air was fresh, and I smelled dirt rather than cold smoke. Birdsong began tenuously somewhere above me, and I saw a field stretching just beyond the trees in the foggy gray light of the afternoon.
As I tried to push myself upright, pain tore through the fibers of my right arm, churning my gut and obscuring my vision again. I had just enough presence of mind to drop back onto my side so I wouldn’t choke on my own vomit when my vision flickered out and my hearing faded.
I was lying on a scratchy surface that smelled of sheep. The right side of my dress clung wet to my skin, and I was shivering. Beneath the numbness spreading like frost through my body, I could feel a dull, pulsing pain in my right arm.
“Light above,” breathed a man’s voice, very near at hand. “There’s no good way to get at it. Bronya, hold her still, won’t you? I’m going to have to break it in half.”
I opened my eyes. Leaping, dim firelight flickered all around, giving the impression I was lying inside a giant lantern. A ceiling of wooden beams gleamed far above me, and blurry faces swam in and out of my sight. I raised my left arm to rub my eyes, but found my fingers gritty with blood and dirt.
“Lie still if you can, sweetheart,” said a woman’s soothing voice. “Roark, can you snap it cleanly without doing more damage?”
“I . . . think so.”
I could feel hands slipping beneath my head, lifting it gently and propping me against something. Fingers found my left hand and closed around it.
“It’s okay, darling,” said the woman’s voice. “It’ll be over in just a minute, and then you’ll be fine. Hold my hand.”
Someone lifted my right arm and the pain redoubled, shooting up and down the limb as if a thousand hot needles swarmed inside it. And then the needles became swords as something thick and inflexible moved inside my arm, between the muscle and the bone. I screamed.
“Shhhh,” breathed the woman, holding me as I tried to jerk away. “Hush, love. You must be brave . . .”
Brave? I was not brave. I tried to tell her, but my tongue felt thick and uncooperative.
The man’s voice was swearing fluently. “Damn it to the bloody Chasm, what’s this thing made of? It won’t break!”
“Could you cut it with something?” “I’d have even less control . . . probably tear something in her arm.”
“Try one more time.”
The foreign thing inside my arm moved again, and I thought I would die from the pain. I screamed again, but the sound got tangled up in a sob. A loud crack echoed around the room, someone gripped my right arm firmly, and the thing inside it began to slide . . .
“Roark, the blood,” said the woman sharply.
Darkness washed over me, and I plunged into blessed oblivion.
I roused after what seemed several long years. I was dry now, and wrapped in warm, clean blankets, lying on the same slightly lumpy surface as before—which I now recognized as hay. I was inside a barn.
I reached to scratch my cheek and discovered my hands and face were clean. All of me seemed to be clean, in fact. The nightgown I was wearing was not mine. My right arm still throbbed, and when I peeled away the cocoon of blankets, I saw that it was bandaged in strips of cloth. Dried blood bloomed over the wrapping like spilled ink.
My stomach growled. How long had I been here?
I sat up so abruptly my head whirled. How long had I been here? And where was here? Some dim gray daylight faintly lit the barn, but now there were short wooden walls on all four sides of my hay-bed—a stall. The scent of farm animals was pungent, and I could hear something grunting and shuffling nearby.
I strained to remember what had happened, but all I could recall was the Night Wyrm and the cold and the arrow in my arm. I tried to push myself up, but I crumpled again almost at once, shaky and panting.
What had happened to Linden and the others? I squeezed my eyes shut, desperate to remember, and came up with a bright red light. I had found myself in a different patch of woods, away from the ice and fog and soldiers, hadn’t I? Yarrow’s work, surely. Had he scattered everyone, or just sent me away to save me?
A horrible, twisting pain bloomed in my chest. I would never forgive Yarrow if he had sacrificed himself and the others just for me. Never.
Trying to steady myself, I put my head in my hands and realized I was burning with fever. The arrow wound must have become infected. But I didn’t have time to be sick. If I didn’t go find my friends now, it might be too late.
Then, I thought, it might be too late anyway.
Tears scalded my cheeks. I tried again to stand, my legs trembling as I scrabbled to pull myself up by the stall wall, but I fell again at once. The sunspot in my chest was empty and darker than the skies of Umbraz.
If the others were dead, I was alone. If they were dead, I had lost all the people I loved.
I wept where I fell, clutching straw in my fists until the dry stems snapped and poked into the skin of my palms. I drifted back into a stupor of sleep, thinking vaguely of my supposed ability to heal myself with sun energy, and wondering why, with so much emotion, I hadn’t already summoned enough sunlight to heal—or burn—the whole world.
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I didn’t realize I had fallen back asleep until I woke again. People were talking nearby, their voices tense. It was the man and the woman—the ones who had removed the arrow from my arm, presumably the ones who owned the barn, the nightgown, and the blankets.
“I’d find it very hard to believe, even if she admitted it,” the woman was saying. “It’s been fourteen years, Roark. It’s just a coincidence.”
“I don’t believe in coincidences,” grunted the man, Roark. “But even if I did, I’d have a hard time thinking this was one.”
The woman was quiet for a moment. “I don’t actually think it’s a coincidence, either,” she said at last. “I’m going to talk to her.”
I suddenly realized that the “her” in question was me.
“Wait
. It’s dangerous, Bronya. I—” His voice faltered. “I don’t want to lose you too.”
Bronya’s voice was gentle when she replied. “I know, my love. But talking to her can’t hurt anything.”
A door creaked on its hinges, and a glow of light spilled into the dark barn. In another moment, my stall door opened and the gold light resolved itself into a lantern held aloft by a short, curvy woman. At first all but her outline was obscured by shadow, but as she stepped into my stall, I could see she was middle-aged and pretty, with a heart-shaped face, smooth umber skin, and thick black hair pinned into a bun at the nape of her neck. She smiled.
“I didn’t know you were awake.”
“I heard you talking,” I said, too weary to pretend otherwise. “And I know your husband thinks I’m dangerous. He’s right.”
I wondered if Iyzabel had been spreading propaganda about me in the month I had been tramping through the woods, and it suddenly occurred to me that this Bronya could, in all likelihood, turn me in for a substantial reward.
“Not you, my dear,” said Bronya. “He doesn’t think you’re dangerous. That is, he knows what you are, of course.”
She looked almost excited—unless it was a trick of the lamplight. I tried to think how I might escape if I learned they were planning to turn me over to Iyzabel, but even the idea of trying to run right now was exhausting.
“Oh, my dear,” Bronya said in a suddenly constricted voice. “Oh, sweet child. Your mother would be so proud of you.”
