“Our people are on the cusp of greatness!” she shouted at him. “How could you?” Tears streaked from her eyes, a sudden rush of hate in her voice. “How could you do this to me?”
A torrent of wind whipped against them both, and Llanara’s shield of white flickered for an instant, dashing them to the ground. The crowd screamed but kept their distance, as though some force repelled them from the center of the square.
He called upon ipek’a to give himself the strength to stand, watching Llanara rise as Corenna pressed forward, hobbled with blood streaking down her leg.
“Monster!” Corenna yelled, a raging whirlwind pouring out from her hands, breaking against the renewed strength of Llanara’s shield. “Spirit-cursed madwoman.”
Llanara’s eyes narrowed, and once more a black aura surrounded her.
This time he was ready. He drew upon the gift of the Mountain, the fire held deep within its heart.
Fire bellowed from his hands as Corenna maintained her onslaught of wind, and Llanara howled, turning toward the pillars of flame he channeled into where she stood. No sooner had her gaze settled on him than he felt Llanara’s cloud of blackness closing in, ethereal claws seeming to reach inside him, tearing the Mountain’s gift from his grasp. His flame sputtered out as Llanara’s white shield flickered again, letting Corenna knock her to the ground.
With a wordless snarl, Llanara’s eyes went red and she turned the gift of fire toward Corenna, meeting a barrier of earth conjured from nothing as Corenna’s eyes hardened to wield the power of stone. Llanara maintained her attack, a stream of fire threatening to break through Corenna’s defense as it melted stone into liquid, licking around the edges in a roar of primal energy.
Corenna fell back a step as Llanara crawled to her knees. Hatred creased Llanara’s face as she rose, surrounded by the gift of his stolen fire. He saw another flicker, a guttering light as the white shield around her diminished.
He leapt.
He remembered the triumphant roar, the pride of the ipek’a female trumpeting her kill to all who could hear, the thrill of the hunt, the terror inspired by every blood-red feather. And he remembered the fury of the protector enraged, fearless before the enemies of her pack.
He crashed through the earthen shield, through the billowing flame, feeling his skin crack and blister as it scorched his body. The pain seared conscious thought from his mind, leaving only instinct. Hunger. Rage.
He came down with the full force of ipek’a’s scything claws, shearing through the remnants of Llanara’s shield as he snapped her spine in a sickening crunch.
They tumbled onto the ground before the greatfire, entwined together in a mockery of everything they once had shared.
The madness across the square guttered out in an instant.
Llanara met his eyes with a look of fear, lying beside him on the cold stone. Ragged breath escaped her lungs.
“No …” she whispered. “Vekis … said … ascension.”
Hatred simmered, just beneath a boil. She’d done this to his people. Dead men and women lay broken in the snow, victims of each other’s hand as much as the fair-skins’, brought on by her madness. The woman he once had loved.
“Now … nothing to stop him,” Llanara said. “Our people …”
Light seemed to go out of her eyes. She died, and in an instant, all the fury that had passed through the crowd returned in a surging mass of hate and screams.
62
SARINE
A Greenbelt
Gardens District, New Sarresant
Stay outside their range,” the brigade-colonel’s aide ordered. Or, more properly, with the golden light, an order given by High Commander Erris d’Arrent. Strange to consider she’d never met the woman in person; in her eyes, it was hard to think of the High Commander as anything but a gruff, balding veteran in a sergeant’s uniform.
The aide continued. “Stay back, but let them see you fortify. Make sure they know you’ll be a thorn in their side when they attack.”
“Sir, are you certain?” Brigade-Colonel Vassail said. “It’s difficult to see what’s going on out there, but I think they’re on the move. My scouts report artillery being brought up from the Basilica.”
“They’re redeploying into Southgate, preparing for an assault across the monument grounds. Just stay in position to threaten the approach and get scouts posted to watch their reserve.”
“Sir, yes, sir.”
The golden light faded, leaving the sergeant sputtering and shaking his head. Vassail had already moved on to deliver orders farther down the line.
Sarine held her place next to a company of musketmen, interleaved with the dismounted cavalry she’d come to understand was the original composition of Vassail’s brigade. They’d picked up the remains of other units broken or otherwise without direction in the fighting. Out of uniform she felt alone in a sea of blue coats, made worse by the stares and whispers she drew from the men and women when she passed by.
Without her Green to stop it, the men would long since have fallen to the Yellow emanating in waves from the north, and west. Somehow the soldiers seemed to know she held their emotions in her hands: fear, pride, resolve, faith in their commanders. The kaas she felt pulling in the distance were stoking the flames of fear, and she pushed against them, keeping Vassail’s soldiers in place, for now.
She needed to go, to find Axerian, to face d’Agarre with him. But abandoning these soldiers meant consigning them to the madness, the same bloodlust that had turned the beauty of the Gardens into a dying ground.
“How is it you go without a winter coat, without gloves?” Acherre asked, a few paces away at the point between one company and the next.
She looked toward the lieutenant, finding warmth behind the question. “I must have forgotten them before I went out,” she said, drawing a laugh from Acherre and uneasy looks from the men around her.
“If it’s a binder’s trick, I’ve no doubt high command would pay well for the secret,” Acherre said. “Or is it related to …?”
She left the question unasked, but it was clear enough she meant the kaas’s powers.
“More so, yes,” she said.
“When this is all over, you’ll have to let me stand you a few rounds of drinks. Let me pry into some of your secrets.”
Acherre smiled, a welcome invitation among a host of mistrust.
Before she could reply, the western field of Yellow vanished. It struck like a blow, a sudden release of pressure she’d been leaning on since they crossed into the Gardens. The northern Yellow intensified in response, leaking to fill a void, somehow grown stronger in the absence of the second field. It was as though one of the kaas-mages had run dry, their stores bled out, leaving them drained, or dead. And the other had responded. A tide of fear and rage pushed against her Green, though Zi still held it away from Vassail’s soldiers.
“Brigade-Colonel,” she called out, “something has changed. One of the fields of Yellow is gone. I don’t know what—”
Her words died as a great cry sounded from the west. Acherre’s eyes went wide, and she barked an order that rang hollow in Sarine’s ears. Climb over. Move, boys, on the double!
All around her, Vassail’s brigade leapt to the other side of the barricade they’d constructed atop the greenbelt, leaving their backs to the Gandsmen massing at the district edge, facing down a horde of screaming tribesfolk pouring from the western Gardens.
63
ARAK’JUR
The Greatfire
Gardens District, New Sarresant
The warriors of four tribes surged around him, as though he were a stone set in a running stream. Howls of fervor drowned his words, and they rushed eastward, hefting muskets, spears, bare fists when they had no other weapon. Llanara had died, and where he’d expected her death to mean an end to madness, it had instead redoubled, seizing hold of his people, driving them to rage.
“Arak’Jur!” Corenna screamed over the din of the crowd. She hobbled towar
d the steps, clutching her hip where ice from Llanara had speared her skin. “What can we do?”
“Ce qui se passe ici?”
What passes here? in the fair-skin tongue, though it took a moment to register it had come from the strange woman, Marie, who had somehow managed to stay close at hand. A glance revealed her eyes once more gone gold, shining light pouring from her sockets.
Raw despair clenched his gut like a fist. Llanara was dead, and somehow his people had gone mad for it. He’d failed to save them.
“Où sommes nous?” Marie asked. Where are we? Then more, something about a garden.
“It’s done,” he tried to say in the fair-skins’ tongue, unsure how much of his meaning came through, though he gestured to Llanara’s broken body—spine snapped, legs and torso at a twisted angle—to emphasize his words. “And yet my people are broken for it.”
“Arak’Jur …” Corenna said.
“Vous êtes des guerriers, non?” Marie asked, her voice cold as steel. “Vous devez vous battre. Aidez moi. Aidez moi à saver notre peuple.”
He understood no better than one word in four. Warriors, and fighting. Help. Help to save our people.
The golden light faded from Marie’s eyes, and in an instant frenzy took her, wide-eyed rage as she turned and ran alongside the rest of the warriors.
He stepped back, shocked at her sudden transformation.
But she was right, whether he’d understood the strange words or no. Resolve hardened in his gut.
“We follow,” he said to Corenna. “We find the source of this madness, and until then we protect our people. If you can move?”
She nodded, determination shining in her eyes.
They ran, as fast as Corenna’s hip allowed, down streets caked with ash and blood and snow.
Chaos poured over the stone paths, war cries taken up in every throat save his and Corenna’s as she hobbled forward at his side. Booms sounded in the distance, as though the cannon fire were thunder and his people’s shouts the rain. They surged forward, some few of his people halting to fight among themselves, not waiting to sight an enemy to begin their killing, but the bulk of them pressed on, and he kept with them.
They emerged onto a broad field of grass, cut short and even, running a span half the size of the Sinari village. A barricade of makeshift wood had been assembled near the center, where a company of blue-coated soldiers scrambled over, taking up positions to fire their guns at the tribes racing across the green.
He needed to find the source of his people’s madness. Another man or woman with Llanara’s power, perhaps the man called Reyne d’Agarre. But first he was a guardian. First he would protect his tribe.
He howled, called on mareh’et, and charged.
Musket shot streaked through the air, and men and women died. Gurgling screams, bodies propelled into the snow by their own momentum, trampled over by fellows too eager to reach their enemy. A shot took him in the leg, a grazing wound that stung like a wolf’s claws. Not enough to slow a guardian. He raced across the field, until he saw the whites and pupils of the soldiers’ eyes, dilated by fear and shock and rage.
Another shot struck him, this time in the shoulder. He was close now, close enough to see the woman who’d fired it, leveling a shortened carbine over top of their barricade. Mareh’et would not be stopped by such a wound, and neither would he. Some of the tribe’s warriors carried muskets, firing back into the soldiers’ line, but most had closed the gap, screaming as they assaulted the barricade. He screamed along with them, a mix of frustration, pain, and rage, and leapt over their mêlée, coming down at the center of the enemy line.
He took a soldier through the gut with a slashing claw, spilling entrails into the snow. A man kneeling to fire a musket into his people took a savage cut to the face, his jaw breaking like dried wood. Two men hefted their muskets, swinging at him as he struck, and he tore their limbs from their torsos as easily as he might have torn their weapons from their grasp.
Grief carried through the fury of battle. This was vulgar, even profane. But it was his place. The fair-skins meant to kill his people; he could do no more than fight against them, to save as many as he could.
Three women charged him, identical copies of a short-haired blond soldier, each wielding a saber, shouting curses in unison, and moving faster than any other soldier in their line.
The fair-skins’ magic. He knew enough to recognize it, if not enough to know what it could do.
One of the copies darted forward, sending a saber cut at his head. He ducked it, striking as a second copy lunged. His fist passed through the leg of the first, finding only air where he should have struck flesh, and he dodged away from the second, meeting the third with a crash as mareh’et’s ethereal claw parried an overhand chop from her blade. The images shimmered, resetting to project outward from the one he’d revealed as real, two new illusions mimicking her appearance, but with attacks and movements all their own.
He roared, drawing on una’re, and struck again, this time guessing correctly on the first attack. The leftmost copy parried his blow with a clang, and he sent the Great Bear’s lightning into her sword, a hissing surge sending smoke trails up her arm, though she didn’t drop the weapon. Another blink, and the images collapsed, resetting again.
A blue haze sprang up around him. A prison of light.
The triplicate soldier frowned, seeming as surprised by its appearance as he was.
Another woman stood beside the soldier, this one dressed in a linen shirt rather than their blue uniform, with strange blue and gold tattoos on her hands.
“Arrêtez!” the un-uniformed woman shouted in the fair-skin tongue. “C’est de la folie; son travail. Je peux l’arrêter. Nous devons cesser de combattre.”
Even as she spoke the words, another voice seemed to translate in his mind. Stop. This is madness; it’s his work. I can stop it. We have to stop fighting.
The voice seemed to merge with the young woman’s, as though she spoke the tribes’ tongue with the same native ease as any tribesman. A trick he’d seen only once before: the day Reyne d’Agarre came to the Sinari village.
“Who are you?” he said, not bothering with the fair-skins’ tongue, momentary surprise threatened by the rage of realizing this young woman must have some part of the power that had corrupted his people.
She gave no answer, only closed her eyes, suddenly enveloped by an aura of blue sparks.
A song played in his mind. A deep sadness; a sound he’d heard before, in the presence of the spirits.
The aura around the young woman changed to green, and violence died around them, replaced by stillness, and peace. More blooms of green light sprang up across the Gardens, and the fighting calmed where they spread, soldiers and tribesfolk alike stuttering to a halt where they had charged, lowering weapons, staring at each other in surprise, colored by the shock of what they’d done before.
“Sarine, qu’avez-vous fait?” the triplicate soldier asked, her voice touched with awe.
“I set wardings, to push back his Yellow. This is Reyne d’Agarre’s influence. The tribesfolk were under the sway of his magic. We shouldn’t be fighting them. They’re not the enemy; d’Agarre is.”
Once again he heard her speak the tribes’ tongue, though the soldier seemed to nod, as though the young woman had spoken the fair-skins’ tongue as well. And whatever she’d done, the fighting had stopped. His people had frozen mid-charge, as though her green aura swept his people’s madness away.
“Honored stranger,” he said to her, though her form was blurred through her prison of light. “I am Arak’Jur, guardian of the Sinari. Release me, and I will lead my people away from your city.”
The girl and the soldier turned to him, but before either could speak another soldier’s eyes glowed with golden light. A man, though the light behind his eyes was the same as it had been with the woman, Marie.
“Rapport,” the soldier said. “Ce qui passe ici?”
“High Commander,” the
girl said, “the tribes attacked us, but I held off d’Agarre’s Yellow.” She eyed him through the light prison. “This man is—”
“Vous,” the soldier whose eyes had gone gold said to him. You. Then, “La femme en blanc est mort, non? Avez-vous été trompé quant à la source de la folie?”
He couldn’t follow the rest. But the girl spoke a moment later, seeming to speak both the tribes’ tongue and the fair-skins’ at once.
“This is our High Commander,” the girl said, gesturing to the soldier with golden eyes. “Erris d’Arrent. I’m called Sarine. She asks whether you were mistaken as to the source of the madness, now that the woman in white is dead. But I can answer it. It wasn’t a woman, or if it was, she wasn’t alone. It’s d’Agarre. He’s still out there, pushing to the north.”
So, the golden-eyed soldier spoke with the same voice as the women, Erris, and Marie, while the girl, Sarine, spoke two tongues at once. A strange thing, fair-skin magic.
By now he could see the mass of his people through the haze of the light-prison, forming groups away from the soldiers’ barricade. For now the violence had quelled. But the tribes were alone, surrounded by fair-skin soldiers in the midst of their city.
“You’ve removed it,” he said, eyeing the girl, Sarine. “Whatever the influence of this man, Reyne d’Agarre, my people are free of its hold, and we mean to depart.”
The girl translated his words for the soldier with golden eyes.
“Non,” the High Commander said when she was done. “Demandez s’il examinera une offre d’alliance. Sa force pour défendre la ville, il a attaqué.”
Sarine looked between them, and translated again. “She asks whether you will consider an offer of alliance, to help defend the city you attacked.” The High Commander spoke again, and Sarine paused, swallowing before continuing to translate. “She says this is the price of peace. If you want to leave without reprisal, she demands your tribes fight to defend the city from the Gand army you let inside our barrier.”
A moment of cold silence hung between them. It was a just offer, if he could trust the woman who made it. Better by far if they could leave the city without further violence, but more than the tribes’ blood was on their hands for Llanara’s madness. These soldiers’ fight against the fair-skins in red was none of his concern, yet he recognized in the High Commander the same urge that drove him to protect his people.
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