“Calista.”
“I’m Meartha. Do yourself a favor, girl. Turn around and go back where you came from. Forget about me.”
“Can’t do that,” Calista said, closing her jacket and tightening it around her shoulders with a shiver. “I’ve been having dreams about this place. They won’t stop until I get what I came for. If there’s another way I can pay you…” She shrugged. “I’m a pretty good thief. Just tell me what you lost and where to go, and I’ll get it for you.”
Meartha shook her head. “Not necessary. What sort of design are you interested in?”
Calista described exactly what she wanted. Meartha’s eyes narrowed as Calista spoke, until they took on a look of alarm.
“Gods,” Meartha said, lifting a hand to her mouth. A flock of tiny birds decorated her wrist, having flown from a forest painted along her forearm.
“What’s wrong?” Calista said.
“I dreamed about a design similar to the one you just described. I sketched it out, but I haven’t sold any versions of it yet. Do you wish to see it?”
Calista nodded eagerly. When Meartha revealed the sketches, Calista gazed at them in silence for several seconds before gently setting them aside.
“When do we begin?” she asked.
Meartha smiled. “How about now?”
It was a strikingly intimate session. Meartha took her time crafting the design, a process that felt like a lit match burning off the topmost layer of Calista’s skin. She had to bite back whimpers.
Meartha had her talk about her childhood and how she had come to be in Jasparta. Calista told her a version of her story that did not involve the Forge or any sort of top-secret mission. In the version she recounted, which felt truer the more she elaborated on it, Calista was a young girl who had found a second father in the baker back in Peleros—she named him “Altirian” in this version—and had followed him and her brother—“Lunos” instead of Lance—to Jasparta to start a new life. She had decided this after the death of her mother and sister, which took place at the hands of burglars who had broken into their home while Calista was off doing her own bit of thievery and Lance was out with friends for the night.
That was how she came to be here, she told Meartha, ending the story rather abruptly. Meartha only nodded as she worked the wand across Calista’s skin like a paintbrush with bristles made of fire.
“I hope you are a better thief than you are a liar,” the woman said.
Calista flushed with a shameful feeling. “Why do you say that?”
“In fact, I’m sure you are,” Meartha said, “or you wouldn’t have gotten this far. The baker trained you well. That part rang true, at least. I could tell by the affection in your voice.”
Calista turned her face away and studied sketches Meartha had stuck to the walls, some only half-finished. Her life felt like one of those drawings—gray and incomplete, suggesting a fabulous design that would probably never come to fruition. The metal band around her neck didn’t help her cynicism.
“When I was your age,” Meartha said, and Calista looked over to find the woman blowing a different color into the wand’s tip before resuming, “I stole and begged and sold services I’m not proud of. When the other girls spent what they had on needles to take them away from the pain, I invested in needles that could create beauty despite the pain. I left the streets and started my own business.
“This collar might take away my ability to phase, and someday the men who forged it might take away my shop, maybe even my life. But the pain will only make me stronger—it’ll make my soul more beautiful. That’s something they can’t touch. Pain is my slave, not the other way around. When I understood that, I became free.”
Tears had risen in Meartha’s eyes. Calista wanted to respond, but the wand’s searing touch made her grimace and clench her teeth. The woman was close enough that Calista could smell the fragrant oils in her hair and pick out individual gray strands. Part of her wished Meartha had been her mother, and the two of them had started this parlor together.
“Do you think I could be an artist like you someday?” Calista said.
Meartha gave her a hopeful smile. “You can be many things, Cali—except one.”
“What’s that?”
Meartha winked at her. “A customer. Keep your sword. This design is my gift to you.”
“But—”
“I just want one thing.” Meartha looked serious suddenly. “A promise.”
Calista sat up. “Sure. What is it?”
“That thing around your neck…” She tapped the wand against Calista’s collar. “Take it off someday. I can wear one, but I earned the right to feel that pain. I’ve made many mistakes, committed countless sins. You can’t say the same.”
“I can,” Calista said with a penetrating stare at Meartha’s eyes that promised she would never lie to the woman again. “I’ve sinned, too.”
“Just do it for me.”
“Okay. Thank you, Meartha.”
“They say a snake can’t have feathers,” Meartha said, tracing a line across Calista’s tattooed shoulder, “but I can tell you’re going to fly. This will be the only time I ever draw this design. That’s my promise to you. That way, we each have one to keep.”
Meartha remained true to her word. A week later, Calista returned to the tattoo parlor to find the windows dark, the back door hanging open, and the entire place empty. A symbol burned into the door’s frame assured Calista that her new friend had left willingly, and had not been arrested or kidnapped. The symbol was a single feather, white as snow. Meartha had drawn it using her wand. Calista rose on her toes and kissed it.
SHE SHOOK Lance awake in the dark. He instantly knew that it was she; otherwise he might have gone for his weapon. They had always been close that way, like twins.
“Cali? What’s wrong? What is it?”
Calista lit a candle and held it out. A light sheen of sweat covered her forehead, cold against the flame’s warmth. She hadn’t been sure about this, but her secret had become too explosive to contain.
“Look,” she said.
She lifted her shirt over her right arm and shoulder, keeping her chest covered. The shivering candlelight made the designs shift gently on her skin like leaves on water.
“I’ll be damned,” Lance said, sitting up.
He took Calista’s arm and studied the tattoo.
“Aren’t they incredible?” Calista said.
Lance grinned excitedly. “Did it hurt?”
“Only when Meartha was drawing it.”
“Meartha? What… who… Where did you get this?”
She told Lance about the parlor with the pink light in the window, the promises she and Meartha had exchanged, and the disappearance of her nightmares ever since that night.
“You have to keep it hidden,” Lance said. “They’ll use it to mark you.”
“I know.” Calista pulled her arm back into her shirt. “I’ll be careful.”
“You better be. We’re getting close. Artemis is having a creeper sent to us.”
“Another prototype?”
Lance shook his head. His gaze became vacant, and then he smiled mischievously and cracked his knuckles with a series of loud pops.
“This one’s the real deal,” he said, looking at her. “The one that’ll set us free.”
CHAPTER 45
Emma had a dream about her brother—a nightmare, actually.
She was walking behind him down a dark street in Theus, calling his name and begging him to turn around. But Milo couldn’t hear her, or worse, he was ignoring her.
A freezing wind swept over them, making her shiver. Milo didn’t seem to mind the chill. He walked with determination along pavement that Emma noticed was dusty and cracked, as if the city had been abandoned for decades. When she tried running to catch up to him, her legs inched forward as if against a powerful current.
“Milo, wait.”
She couldn’t see his face, couldn’t tell if her brother wer
e smiling, frowning, or wearing his typical, serious look. All she could see was the back of his head, shrinking as the distance between them grew.
Suddenly, Milo saw something that made him break into a full-on sprint. Emma looked ahead. A Fountain of Joy sat in a small park, its radiant blue energy shooting into the air and raining down in frothing, sparkling streams.
Again, she tried to run after her brother, and again her legs were useless. She might as well have tried running in a pool of molasses. All she could do was stand there and call his name, watching helplessly as he climbed over the side of the bowl and fell in with a bright splash of blue.
Emma arrived at the fountain in time to see Milo’s hand shoot out of the mist—except the hand was that of a skeleton, every bit of flesh eaten away.
“Milo.”
She awoke with a start. Immediately, she went for her Araband, intent on warning her brother—only Emma never reached the device. She swooned and fell back onto the mattress. Another dream had taken hold of her tired mind, except this wasn’t a dream at all.
It wasn’t a dream or a nightmare, but something else entirely. Something that took her far away from her dorm in Theus Academy.
No longer carrying a physical presence, Emma became a being of pure sight, a pair of disembodied eyes in a terrifying place, bearing witness to something that made ripples of fear pass through her consciousness.
Iolus stood in a cavern, overlooking the passage of glowing, red things. Something roared in the background—a river, judging by the gushing nature of the sound. Emma couldn’t swivel around to look; all she could do was watch Iolus as he watched something else moving below his feet. The lights made shadows dart across his face. The glowing things moved past him, and Iolus seemed to be counting them.
A hidden cave… red light… rushing water… a river underground… Then it made sense—Iolus was transporting crystals using an underground river. But transporting them where, exactly?
When Emma awoke this time, she tossed away her blankets and jumped out of bed. Not wanting to wake Lily, she plucked the Araband off her desk and headed for the girls’ bathroom to call Milo and Uncle Manny.
Trouble.
The word tumbled through her head, over and over again, as repetitive and sinister as the blood crystals from her vision.
Iolus was bringing trouble. Lots of trouble.
And Milo…
Milo was headed straight for it.
CHAPTER 46
A blizzard pounded Ankhar’s Northern Frontier.
Emmanuel steered the small jet through the storm, his positioning system telling him he was right above Crystal Bark. Before landing, he rotated the jet in every direction to scan for signs of atypical magical emissions.
There, in the distance—a bluish thread of light was shooting straight up from the forest to pierce the clouds. It was a spell generator, which meant the storm was manmade.
As he lowered the jet into Crystal Bark, he noticed details that worried him. There were no lights on in any of the buildings. Sections of the stone wall surrounding the town had been patched with wooden boards, themselves reinforced by tilted beams. Worst of all, the town lay unprotected by any sort of magical barrier. Why hadn’t the Forge mustered any magicians to protect the place?
He circled the outskirts of the village for more intel. Powerful gusts of wind slammed the craft, tilting it almost sideways. The turrets might be enough to destroy a few elementals, but there was only so much energy left in the fuel crystals. The important thing was to have enough to get home.
At the southernmost tip of Crystal Bark, a group of townspeople had gathered by the wall. It was too dark to see what they were doing, or if they noticed his jet hovering overhead. He turned on the flood lamps and washed the crowd with light.
They looked up at him, squinting against the bright beams, caught in the act of propping wooden beams against the wall to reinforce it.
Was Pris among them?
Suddenly, their attention swung away from his craft and focused on the section of wall in front of them. The snow that had piled atop the rim had begun to shake loose. Emmanuel couldn’t hear it, but he could tell from the dropped flurries that something was pounding the wall from the other side.
He turned off the lamps, flew over the wall, and spun the craft. Massive pale figures flexed against the darker texture of the stone; a trio of ice elementals, slamming their fists into the wall. They would knock it over within minutes.
“Drop turrets,” Emmanuel said.
The operating system obeyed. The jet vibrated as turrets scissored out of its underbelly and locked into place. Emmanuel gripped the controls, stretching his thumbs over the red buttons.
“Target view on.”
The jet disappeared around him. This included the dashboard and the ceiling—everything but his chair and the controls in his hand. Emmanuel now had a 360-degree view of the snow-blurred landscape.
“Turn on the flood lamps.”
Light splashed over the elementals, spinning them around.
“Target assist.”
The TA program initiated, drawing a green outline over each elemental. A cluster of parallel lines depicted the spread of the turret’s lasers. He aimed at the elemental in the middle.
“Switch to flames.”
The trajectory lines became a misty blur that fanned out ahead of him. Emmanuel grinned like a kid as he dug his thumbs into the buttons and wrapped the elementals in flames.
“WHO ARE YOU?” the woman shouted at him.
Emmanuel jumped out of the jet and landed in a foot of snow. He wasn’t surprised that she was having trouble recognizing him. Tonight, he had no need for his sunglasses, and as much as he hated messing up his hair, the storm had forced him to pull on a hat with a ridiculous pair of flaps over the ears. Sure was warm, though.
Now that the pounding had stopped, the villagers broke into a jog toward the nearest building. The woman stayed behind and warily approached Emmanuel with a sword leveled at her side. She wore leather armor, her arms and legs bare in the freezing wind, her blonde hair cropped short around her ears—and yet she displayed not a hint of discomfort at the cold. A normal Sargonaut would have found these conditions unbearable.
But Pris Walksprite was no normal Sargonaut.
“Who are you?” she asked again.
Emmanuel pulled off his hat and smoothed back his hair. “You could just thank me, you know.”
She lowered the sword, blinking in surprise.
“Emmanuel.”
“I know what you’re thinking. It’s been a hundred and thirty years since we last saw each other, and my hairstyle hasn’t changed at all.” He replaced the hat and slipped his hand into a pocket of his coat. “I’ve got something that’ll help—”
Pris cut him off. “Before you do that…”
She sheathed her sword and ran to a pile of thick wooden beams as long as fully matured tree trunks. In a display of strength even another Sargonaut would have marveled at, she lifted one onto her right shoulder and squatted to pick up another using only one hand. They were Ankharin Oak, which meant each beam weighed at least a thousand pounds.
Carrying both beams on her shoulders as if they were no more than twigs, she jogged to the section of wall that had been weakened by the elementals and propped them against the stone. On her way back, she motioned for Emmanuel to follow her inside one of the buildings.
“Hold on,” he told her.
He reached into his coat and pulled out a quarterstaff covered by a velvet slip at one end. He yanked off the slip to reveal a brilliant blue-white crystal, already charged.
“Step aside.”
Pris obeyed, and Emmanuel leveled the staff at the wall. He summoned a memory that was thousands of years old, the trigger he always used to conjure this shield spell.
A blue beam shot out of the crystal and hit the wall. It spread like melted glass across the surface, then sprang over the buildings, sealing this part of the village unde
r its protective dome. The barrier cut off the storm, and the outside quickly turned white from the snow thickening on its surface. All around them, the wind. The feeling now was of being inside a giant, empty egg.
“The storm should power the shield overnight,” he told Pris, putting away the staff. “I used an old memory to trigger it. One of me and you back in the good old days, when I taught you to fly that levathon, remember?”
Without snow and wind, it was easier to speak, easier to see her face soften briefly with the memory of an emotion that matched his own.
“That was centuries ago,” she said stiffly. “We were teenagers.”
Had he made her uncomfortable?
Emmanuel smiled. “I remember it like it was yesterday. Sargos and Valcyona disappeared, and you actually thought my father had eloped with your mother in some other realm. You were such a romantic.”
“And you were such a—” She raised her hands, which had been made into fists, then dropped them as if they were useless against the memory. “We’re not talking about this. Not now, not ever. And your hat looks stupid.”
“And you look beautiful. Come back with me to the academy.”
She raised her brows in an incredulous look.
“Emmanuel, that ship has sailed—”
He cut her off. “I’m not asking you to do it for me. A war is coming unlike any we’ve ever faced. The Champions must join forces again. It’s time.”
She shook her head and turned toward the house into which the other villagers had fled for protection. “I’m done with war, Emmanuel.”
“You used to call me Manny, you know.”
She flashed an angry set of eyes at him. “That was before you became someone else and abandoned us.”
“Things have changed. Max and Zandra—they’re dead.”
“I know that. I haven’t been living in a cave the past year.”
“Agreed, and yet clearly you’ve been out in the frontier for far too long. Max and Zandra brought their children, Milo and Emma, to this realm. Demigods both.”
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