by Melissa Grey
Rows of cots lined the room. Two Avicen healers walked among them, checking on their occupants. They were so still. Like corpses. If not for the rise and fall of their chests, Echo would have thought they were dead. The skin she could see was covered in veins, black and swollen, just like the Ala’s. Some were barely affected; others were so deeply lined with black veins that their features were obscured.
Altair walked between the rows, peering at each Avicen with an inscrutable look on his face. “The ones closest to the kuçedra suffered the worst, though even those with minor injuries have worsened despite our care.” His voice was carefully modulated. It gave away nothing of his feelings. He could have been reading the nutritional information off the side of a cereal box. But when he turned to Echo, his orange eyes were full of something she’d never thought she’d see. Not in him.
Helplessness.
“We don’t know what to do,” Altair continued. “We don’t know how to help them, or even if we can. The best we’ve been able to do is make sure they’re comfortable. The human victims were taken to Lenox Hill Hospital. According to the reports we’ve picked up on the radio, the hospital has them in quarantine, but so far none of their treatments has proved effective in either curing the infection or slowing its progress. Not that they would. This…disease”—he spat out the word as if it were poison—“is magical in origin. They’re as lost as we are. More so, I would wager. All we know is that those who came into direct contact with the kuçedra were affected.”
Echo drew closer to the cot nearest the door. The Avicen lying on the crisp white sheets was a member of the Council of Elders. He was nearly as old as the Ala and had been in charge of food distribution in the Nest. Charon was his name, if memory served. Echo had seen him around the Nest and at the Agora. He had pale feathers, the color of cream. Not quite as white as Ivy’s. One of his arms was covered in a network of dark veins; the other was untouched. The veins snaked up the length of his arm and across his collarbone: the contagion was spreading through his bloodstream. His body was putting up a fight, but the infection was winning. Beneath his closed lids, his eyes tracked with frantic movements, as though he was dreaming. Perhaps having a nightmare. Echo knew his eyes were the brilliant blue of sapphires. Eyes like his were hard to forget. The kuçedra was a beast of shadow and suffering. The things Charon must have been seeing, trapped in a paralyzed body….
“Do you think they’ll get any worse?” Echo asked. She reached for Charon’s hand, but one of the healers grabbed her wrist before she could touch him. The healer’s hands were protected by latex gloves.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said the healer. Her pale yellow eyes, the same color as her hair-feathers, were bloodshot, as if she hadn’t had a moment’s rest since the attack. “We don’t understand how or why the infection is spreading like it is, and we’re taking every precaution to make sure it doesn’t leave this room.”
Echo drew her hand back. She could offer the wounded no comfort.
Altair stood beside her, looking down at Charon. “He was the only other council member who survived save the Ala and myself.” A thin line formed between his furrowed brows as he laid a gentle hand on the sheets beside Charon. This was a side of the general Echo had never glimpsed before. It unnerved her. She felt as though she were seeing him without his armor. “To be honest,” he continued, “we don’t know what will happen to them or even if they’re in pain.” The hand on the cot balled into a fist, as if he needed to stop himself from trying to touch those horrible, blackened veins. “One cannot help but wonder if death would be a kindness.”
Death. A dark thought occurred to Echo, darker still because it hadn’t occurred earlier.
“What did you do with…” She couldn’t finish the question.
“Our dead?” Altair offered. His voice was once again dispassionate, as if he were discussing the price of a quart of milk. But then, he’d had far more practice desensitizing himself to the horrors of war than she. “Mage fire. The same way we used to clean up our dead after battles.”
“Mage fire?” Echo had come across it in the Ala’s books, but she’d never heard of anyone able to produce it. At least, not anyone she knew.
“The skill has gone out of fashion,” Altair said. “But I’ve made sure there have always been those among us who know the old arts.”
Arts. As if burning bodies so that nothing but unidentifiable ash remained was a thing of beauty. Echo suppressed a shudder.
“I can’t do anything for them.” She shook her head. “For the…survivors.” If they could be called that. The medicinal scent of healing herbs and the stuffiness of the room overwhelmed her. She wrapped her arms around herself. She was cold, despite the warmth of the room. It was the kind of cold that settled into the bones, taking root deep in one’s soul. “I don’t know what you expect me to do.”
Altair’s gaze cut to her. The ferocity of it made her breath catch. This was the Altair she knew, the one who instilled the fear of god in his recruits, whose legendary bravery in battle had earned him the respect and the loyalty of his fellow soldiers. Was that what she was now? A soldier in a war that had begun thousands of years before her birth? Was she Altair’s soldier? She had the sneaking suspicion he meant to mold her into something more than that.
“I expect you to do what we all must in times such as these,” he said, deep baritone voice rumbling through the silent room. “I expect you to fight.”
Echo looked away. She couldn’t maintain contact with that steady, steely gaze. Her eyes roamed over the cots with their crisp white sheets and deathly still occupants. One of the healers looked up from where he was tending to an Avicen. In one hand, he held the washcloth he’d been using to wipe the unconscious Avicen’s brow. From his other hand dangled a string of wooden beads, each one a different hue, almost all of them jewel tones. Back at the Nest, Echo had seen some Avicen wearing similar items, either as bracelets or necklaces. They weren’t particularly popular, but she knew what they were: prayer beads. Each colorful bead was meant to represent a god from the Avicen pantheon, and the wearer often strung the beads himself, selecting the gods whose blessings he desired. On the healer’s strand, there was a bead Echo had never seen before. The prayer beads were always a single color. One color, one deity. But this one was divided down the middle into two colors: black and white. Echo’s gaze locked with the healer’s, and he touched the two-toned bead with a gentle finger before returning to his ministrations.
Suspicion snaked through Echo’s gut. She didn’t want to ask, but she had to know. “What’s that?” She kept her voice quiet, even though she knew sound wouldn’t wake the afflicted. They were too deep in poisoned slumber for that.
The Avicen nurse seemed taken aback, as if he hadn’t expected her to acknowledge his presence.
“It’s for the firebird,” he said, a slight quaver in his voice. He peered at her, his expression inscrutable. “It’s for you.”
Echo’s stomach dropped. “Me?”
The Avicen nodded slowly. “Yes. You.”
“Why?”
The nurse moved away from the Avicen he’d been tending and took a few slow steps toward Echo. “We heard what you did. When the Drakharin attacked our forces in the Black Forest. You targeted their leader.” His eyes skittered to Altair, no doubt remembering that Echo had also attacked the Avicen leader. But it seemed as though that detail was growing easier to ignore in the wake of the Nest attack. The Avicen needed a hero, and Echo could be molded into one so long as she cooperated with them in their darkest hour. How quickly the tide of public opinion changed.
Our forces. He made it sound like Echo was part of the our. All she’d ever wanted was to feel like she was one of the Avicen, but now that she did, it didn’t feel the way she’d imagined. There was expectation in the nurse’s voice. Hope. A desperate kind of hope that Echo feared she’d only disappoint. When Echo said nothing in return, the healer ducked his head and went back to his work, taking vit
al signs and making patients comfortable.
Oriflamme, she thought. French. From the Latin, aurea flamma, “golden flame.” The word was originally meant to signify the battle standard of the kings of France, but it could also denote something more than that. A greater ideal. A symbol—or perhaps even a person—that armies would follow into battle. A point around which to rally. To fight. To die.
Echo felt Altair’s presence as he approached behind her. “You’re powerful, Echo.” Altair almost never used her name. Usually, she was the human girl or simply that one. Depending on how rotten his mood was, the wretch. Occasionally just you there. “More than even you realize, I believe. I saw you in the Black Forest. I told them of your power.” Echo turned to look at him. He raised a hand to his temple, where a scar disappeared beneath his brown-and-white hair-feathers. The wound had healed, but the scar was still relatively recent. The skin was smooth, like a burn. “By the gods, I felt it.”
The admission was the closest thing to a compliment she was likely to ever receive from him.
“You are capable of more than you know,” said Altair. “And if you’ll follow my instruction, I will help bring it out of you.”
Within that plea—for that, despite his pride, was what it was, a reticent admission of her power—was everything Echo had ever wanted from him, from the Avicen in general. Acceptance. An invitation to become a part of the flock. A statement that she belonged, that she had a place among them. She just never imagined it would come from Altair. His had been the loudest voice on the Council of Elders when a vote had been called to determine if the lost, lonely human girl would be welcomed among them or left to her own devices. An orphan, for all intents and purposes. A wretch.
“You’ve never wanted me around, and now you’re asking me to join you in this fight.” A thought slid through her mind—something about gift horses and staring at their mouths—but she had to push. Pushing was what she did. “That must kill you.”
He glared at her. But then one corner of his mouth lifted in a joyless smirk. “It does.” He ran a hand through his hair-feathers. He looked tired. Not the kind of tired a good night’s sleep would fix, but the kind that wore you down, slowly and steadily. “But you’re a part of this”—he gestured at the makeshift infirmary, at the victims of the kuçedra’s toxin, at the great wide world beyond Avalon’s walls, which was changing with the shifting of cosmic forces too massive to be understood—“whether I like it or not. I saw you summon that fire. I know what power you possess. I know the magnitude of the weapon at your disposal. But I also know that a sword is only as good as the person who wields it. Even the best fighter needs to practice. I can offer you instruction, but you have to be willing to accept my help.” He offered her another joyless half smile. “And I trust accepting my help is no easier for you than accepting yours is for me, but the world is changing, and we either change with it or we perish.”
With that, he left her in the ballroom turned infirmary. The healers ignored her as she stood in the middle of the aisle between the cots, pondering Altair’s words. She couldn’t help but think that she was the sword and Altair wanted to be the person who wielded her. In the span of a few months, she had gone from unfortunate stray to a weapon of mass destruction. War was on the horizon, and the firebird had to play its part. Echo had a very strong feeling that, just as Excalibur had been created on an isle of magic and mystery, Avalon was where she would be forged into a weapon.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Caius did not sleep. He dozed only when necessity demanded he rest. Relaxing enough to slip into a full slumber was an untenable notion, when he was sharing a roof with the raggedy remainder of the Avicen military. They, like the rest of their kind, had been decimated by the attack on the Nest, but their smaller numbers did not make them any less deadly. Caius lacked his own army to call upon. The forces of the Drakharin answered to the Dragon Prince, a title he could no longer rightfully claim. He was alone—Dorian was being held in another room to prevent them from colluding, as Altair had pointedly phrased it—and should the tides of fate turn against him, he was but one man against the dozens of Warhawks who had survived the attack or been away from the Nest when it occurred. He had every intention of assuring that did not happen.
His room had no window, but even through the thick walls of Avalon Castle, he could hear the trill of birdsong in the gardens surrounding the stone edifice. Compared with the silence the Drakharin maintained around Wyvern’s Keep—it was a strict bird-free zone—it was almost a cacophony of sound. Without the benefit of the sun’s arc through the sky, birdsong was the only way Caius had of telling time. When a nightingale heralded the end of the day, he knew the sun, hidden from him by stone and concrete, had set.
For hours, Caius paced the length of his modest room, his boots wearing tracks through the layer of dust caked into the ancient rug. He’d dozed with his boots on. He didn’t trust the quiet peace of Avalon. Not with the kuçedra on the loose. Not when his sister was probably still plotting his capture (at best) and his death (at worst). He wouldn’t be caught with bare feet in an emergency. He had slightly more dignity than that.
A knock at the door halted his circuit of the room.
Caius’s hands twitched uselessly at his sides. What he wouldn’t give to have his long knives back. He felt naked without them.
His visitor didn’t bother waiting for Caius’s response. The door swung open, and Altair filled the frame like he was in a doll’s castle. The white feathers on the crown of his head nearly brushed the top of the doorframe, and his shoulders were practically as wide as the door itself.
“Good evening,” Caius chirped. Echo’s sarcasm was contagious. The greeting summoned a frown on the general’s face, marring its stern, angular perfection. Good, Caius thought. He couldn’t fight Altair—not when he was at the mercy of the Avicen’s generosity—but he could annoy him. Centuries of animosity needed an outlet, even when he knew it was petty to antagonize Altair. This was the man who had sent Rose on her doomed mission to find the firebird with little regard for her life. Who had imprisoned Echo for daring to defy him. Who had cut Dorian’s eye out of its socket for nothing but the sick thrill of it. Caius was rather proud of the fact that he stopped himself at an insincere greeting.
Altair wasted no time on pleasantries. “Before we proceed, I need to ask you one thing.”
Caius arched a questioning eyebrow and let his silence speak for him.
“Why in the name of all the gods should I trust you?” asked Altair.
A broken half laugh escaped Caius. Altair’s stern face only grew sterner. Trust? Between them? Honestly. Honestly.
Caius spread his arms wide. “How can I possibly answer that? I’ve killed more of your people than I can count and you’ve done the same to mine.”
Altair crossed his arms. “Try. Or you don’t leave this room. I will keep you alive because the firebird seems to care about your continued existence, but I am under no obligation to let you come and go as you please. You know the location of your sanctuary. I cannot let you leave unless I feel confident that you and I are not at odds.” Something that was not quite a smile but not quite a smirk graced Altair’s lips. “For now, at least.”
The firebird. The way the general spoke of Echo as if she were a thing and not a person grated on Caius. But it also provided him with an opportunity. Altair had showed his hand, whether or not he had intended to.
“You might not trust that I mean you no harm,” Caius said. Gods, he didn’t even trust that he meant Altair no harm. “But you can believe, beyond any doubt, that I would never do anything to hurt her.”
The her required no specification. Echo’s presence hung between them like a bartering chip, passed back and forth as they played this dangerous game.
And now, Caius knew, it was his turn to reveal his hand. A facsimile of trust would never be established without Caius giving Altair something meaty to sink his teeth into. “Echo is not merely my ally,” said Caius. “She
is my friend. And where she goes, I go.”
The silence thickened. Altair seemed to mull Caius’s proclamation over, as if testing it for holes or weaknesses. Revealing the depth of his feelings for Echo was a gamble, but it was one Caius was willing to take. If Altair thought he had something to hold over Caius’s head when it suited him, then he was more likely to bring this conversation to an end.
“Very well,” Altair said in slow, measured tones. He stepped aside, gesturing for Caius to walk through the door. “Then I believe you have an appointment with the Dragon Prince. The sooner we can confirm that she isn’t responsible for the attack on the Nest and see about instituting a cease-fire, the sooner we can start hunting down the monster that is.”
—
After a quick stop to retrieve Dorian from his room at the opposite end of the wing in which Caius was also housed, they departed the castle under the cover of darkness. Altair and two of his Warhawks—the angry one and the purply one, as Caius had taken to calling them in his head—shadowed their every move. For this to work, Caius needed privacy and a place from which to access the in-between, both of which they found a short distance from the castle, shielded from sight by a copse of trees. The island’s wards prevented travel through the in-between, but what Caius had planned was more like cracking open a door without walking through it. The seam between land and river would have been the optimal place for their needs, but Altair wanted Caius to work the spell where no one would see the two Drakharin.
Now, Caius and Dorian stood in a circle of mushrooms—a fairy ring, the humans called it. Like entwined tree branches, the circle formed a natural doorway to the in-between. Circles, especially those formed through acts of nature, had their own energy about them, but only if one knew how to harness it.
