They were nearing Rayden’s tree when the first blast roared down the street, echoing off the buildings behind them. Rina ducked instinctively, although the troops were still out of range. Barely.
Another blast came; someone up ahead, turning to look, stumbled and fell. Rina held her breath until the man scrambled to his feet and kept going. Another blast, and another. One sent bits of the building they were passing flying.
“Cutting it a bit close there,” she said to Tark.
“Have to give them something they think they can hit,” he said with a reckless grin that nearly stopped her heart, it was so like the Tark of old. “Lure them on.”
She understood; if he could keep them focused on that they were less likely to think of other things. Like traps. But it still made her a bit nervous, dancing on the very edge of being within reach of their weapons. Especially when nothing they had except Tark’s long gun could penetrate armor from that distance. She was good enough at hand to hand, but preferred to avoid it with armored troops at these odds, if she could.
In the moment they came even with it, the base of Rayden’s tree went up in flames like an oiled torch.
“Rayden!” She broke into a run, Tark at her heels. Somehow she knew the boy would wait for his hero, wouldn’t leave without him. Because she knew the feeling.
“I can’t see him,” she said. Maintaining silence was pointless now, so she yelled the boy’s name. The answer came, fear sounding in the young voice for the first time. And then she saw him, about halfway up, through the rising smoke. He must have been climbing down when the blast hit.
The flames were searing. They couldn’t get close enough to the trunk of the tree, and the fire was moving steadily upward. She tried to think of something, anything to do—
“Hold on,” Tark shouted as he slung his long gun off his shoulder. “Stay where you are, you’re going to have to ride it down!”
He raised the big weapon, aimed it at the flaming base of the tree. He fired a rapid burst. The tree creaked. He fired again. It began to lean, and Rina realized he was cutting the tree down from this side, controlling which way it would fall.
Rina glanced down the street. The Coalition force was advancing. A few seconds more, and they would be within range.
The tree shuddered, then gave and began a long arc downward. She could see Rayden clinging to the trunk above the fire. And she suddenly realized he was too close, that the flames would likely flare and engulf him when the tree hit.
Tark realized it in the same instant. Dropping the long gun, he ran forward, into the flames.
“Jump!” he shouted to the boy.
Rayden never hesitated. He flung himself out and down, into Tark’s arms. Tark staggered back under the force of it. He managed to control it enough to get clear of the flaming branches. He went to his knees but not down. Rayden quickly scrambled free and stood on his own.
The Coalition opened fire.
Rina lifted the long gun she had grabbed up when Tark dropped it. It was nearly as long as she was tall. And heavy. She barely managed to fire it toward the advancing line. She had the satisfaction of seeing them halt, but the recoil nearly knocked her down.
Tark regained his feet. Grabbed the weapon from her with an oath. Yanked her back out of the line of fire behind the next building.
“What in Hades did you think you were doing?”
“Shooting back?” she suggested, irked at his tone.
“You were right in their line of fire!”
“You were the one who was unarmed and in their line of fire!”
“You still shouldn’t have—”
“Why in Hades not?”
“Because I love you!”
Rina was ready to fire another retort, but his words took the wind right out of her. In that instant she realized the absurdity of it—here they were, massively outnumbered, under fire, and he chose this moment to say it.
“I swore I’d have those words from you face-to-face, Bright Tarkson, but bedamned you chose a fine moment.”
He was looking sheepish now.
“Seems appropriate, actually,” she said.
“It does,” he agreed.
“I love you, too.”
For a moment nothing less than awed wonder flashed in his deep blue gaze. “More fool you, you’ve made that clear.”
It was all the time they had for such things. He took up the long gun once more. Stepped out from the protected corner. Snapped it to his shoulder and fired a long burst. One of the armored men actually went down, two more stumbled. They dodged behind the corner of a building as the enemy returned fire. The ground shook with the explosions, and chunks of the buildings and even the street flew around them.
They dodged from building to building, pausing only to fire back as they worked their way up the street. He was making sure they kept following, she knew. They passed the treatment clinic that had been evacuated in the first wave. This was the building Rina knew was the goal. They had to get them past that. They kept moving, faster now, Tark firing back every few yards, luring them on. She added her own disrupter, more for show than anything, since they were beyond her range.
A hundred yards beyond the clinic Tark stopped. They took cover behind a pile of rubble from the first wave. He rose above the pile, facing back down the street. He fired again, and again. The blasts from the Coalition came nearer and nearer, one peppering them with stinging bits of rock.
The armored men passed the clinic.
“Got you,” Tark whispered.
He looked over his shoulder. The others were well out of range now, most of them running, as planned. They would head for cover now, their job done.
The Coalition was squarely in the cannon’s field of fire now.
But so were they.
“This way!” Rayden shouted. He dashed between two buildings. Tark grabbed Rina’s arm and propelled her into a run. A couple of blocks down, the boy cut to the right. Then left, then right again.
“There’s a shortcut,” he said as he zigzagged through the narrow back streets, “near the school.”
They followed. The boy never hesitated. He led them to a thick grove of trees.
“See?” he said. “This is the back end of the park.”
Rina swiftly called up an image of the map she had studied for so long. “Then we’re clear,” she said.
Tark nodded. She pulled the flare gun out again, this time loading it with a fully powered round. She fired it, upward this time, and the shell burst into a huge blossom of green flame.
The fusion cannons opened up before it had faded away.
The trap had been sprung.
Chapter 53
EVEN FROM THE ground, the explosion on the mother ship was clearly visible as a huge ball of flame and smoke. The massive ship careened sideways, and for a moment Shaina thought it might actually come down. She didn’t want that—who knew what or who it might take out. After a tense few moments it steadied, although it was listing now, severely.
The small band of fighters gathered around her, cheering, chanting “Silverbrake!” as the debris from the mother ship rained down around them. They had taken to that after she had led the entire force safely through the tunnel. The screen, oddly, was gone. Perhaps unneeded now that Mordred was dead. Or perhaps it somehow had known they needed access to save the Graymist’s beloved Arellia. In light of everything, it didn’t seem that odd a thought.
“You are indeed your father’s daughter,” one of them cried out. She felt a renewed surge of adrenaline. The way the once-uncertain fighters had rallied to her had been proof of their love and respect for her father. And the knowledge did not irk her now, as it might have just days ago. That was past now, vanished with the first firing of the flashbow.
But now they were cheerin
g her, and she couldn’t deny it made her blood race even faster. She watched the big ship. Her stunt had crippled it, forced it to leave the rest of the fighters airborne and low on fuel as it retreated.
“That was brilliant!” Crim exclaimed. “Insane, but brilliant.”
Shaina gave the grizzled man a grin. “Not my idea. King Darian did it to them, years ago. And then my father, with one of their own fighters full of old liquid fuel. Neither one knew of the other.”
“They both did it? Each without knowing?”
She nodded. “I’ve heard the story so many times, it was my first thought.”
The mother ship was in the distance now, the fighters clinging to her skirts like frightened children. They would all be in disarray now, without the mother ship to guide them. If she’d learned nothing else in this battle, it was that the Coalition did not encourage independent thinking. It was why independent thinking, like the trick with the nitron torpedo, worked. Then, and now. It seemed very fitting.
“In the future,” Crim said solemnly, “Arellia would do well to be as Trios, to remember rather than pretend this never happened.”
“Yes.”
“And thanks to Trios, we still have a future.”
“You will—”
She broke off suddenly as a tearing pain shot through her. It was so sharp it nearly doubled her over. So sharp she looked down at herself, expecting to see blood from some injury unnoticed until now. She found nothing.
It came again, weaker this time. And this time she knew.
Lyon.
Shaina ran, heedless of the danger, of the fact that she could barely breathe for the tightness in her chest. She took wild chances, leapt over deep gullies where she could have broken a leg or worse, dodged stiff branches and let others whip at her, risked a horrific fall on a narrow trail at the edge of a steep drop-off.
She encountered one of Tark’s scouts, who had just taken a position on high ground. Without ceremony she commandeered his airspeeder, telling him he could retrieve it at the pass. The nimble vehicle made short work of the rest of the trip.
It was oddly quiet—no sound of fighting. Dread built in her. Silence did not seem a good sign, not in a battle like this. Was it another lull, the Coalition troops demanding unconditional surrender? Or worse, was it over, was the wrenching pain and grim certainty of disaster not just for Lyon, but for all of them?
She cleared the last grove of trees. She saw the cluster of men, huddled, over a shape on the ground. Her entire body wanted to scream, but with the stubbornness that had gotten her into so much trouble over the years, she held it back. She threw herself off the speeder and ran toward them.
Kateri was there, and tried to stop her. She heard, as a distant buzz, the low voices of the gathered fighters.
“—seen anything like it.”
“That entire platoon, by himself.”
“And looked like the king himself doing it.”
She wrenched free, barreled through the gathered group. Knelt beside him.
He was so bloody she could not at first tell where the worst wound was. When she saw the gaping rip in his side, the steady pulse of blood draining, she knew. Her heart denied the assessment of her mind.
At first she thought him already gone, but she knew she would have sensed it, would have known if he’d passed from this world, from this life. Then he opened his eyes. Those bright blue eyes that were his Graymist legacy, through his mother, from this world. They were dimmer, dark with pain and ebbing life force.
“Shay.”
It was so quiet, so weak, that hope curled up and vanished within her.
“Don’t try to talk, Lyon,” she urged, touching his cheek.
“I must. Must tell you—” He stopped, and she nearly cried out herself at the rasp of his voice and the rattle of his breath. “I wish we had awakened sooner,” he finally got out. Another rattling breath. “You. You are the real treasure.”
He knew. She heard it in her mind, not in those words, but in the growing faintness of the contact. He knew he was dying.
She grabbed his bloodied hands in a fierce grip. “No. Don’t do this.”
“Shay . . .”
Desperately, as if they could hold him, she said the words she had never gotten to say before, amid the chaos that had erupted around them.
“I love you.”
“Yes. Almost as much as I love you.” Urgency came into his voice. “Quickly. You must . . . we must bond.”
“What?”
He pulled his hands free, and Shaina realized with a gut-level shock that she could have stopped him, he was so weak. “Bond with me. Now.”
He tugged at his ring. The signet that symbolized the royal family of Trios.
“What are you saying?”
“Please, Shay. You must have all rights due my bonded mate.”
His gaze compelled her. It was as if he were pouring the last of his strength into convincing her. The royal family had the power to conduct bonding ceremonies, she knew that, but she somehow doubted one had ever conducted his own. Not that that would stop her Lyon.
He smiled at her then, as if he’d heard her very thoughts. As perhaps he had. “We have never played by all the rules, have we?”
He looked over her shoulder, and she instinctively turned. Kateri stood there, tears streaming down her hitherto steadfast face.
“Will you . . . witness?” Lyon asked weakly.
“It would be my deepest honor,” the woman said, and knelt beside them. Shay tried to quell the trembling, but it was seizing her now, and she didn’t know how long she could hold it back.
Lyon reached for her hands, first one, then the other, as if the effort to take both at once was too much. He began to recite the ancient words, the pledges, the sacred oath that would bind them. The words that would make her forever a part of the royal family of Trios, that would bind that noble lineage and the Silverbrake line into eternity. She could no longer doubt the rightness of it, but the truth of what was happening now, why it was now, was tearing her apart.
She spoke the vows from the depths of a heart that had only so recently awakened, forced the words past the mind that was crushingly, almost cripplingly angry that it had come to this end when it should be only the beginning.
The declarations made, the bonding complete, he slid the bulky ring onto her hand, having to use her index finger because of the ring’s size. She leaned down, kissed him gently, then more intensely, as if that could hold him. Already he seemed cold, and the tears she’d been fighting broke through, too much even for she who never cried.
“My fierce Shay, don’t cry. Better now than before the meadow.”
She choked back a sob. She was unused to crying, and realized now why she had ever fought it. It hurt too much. Too much to bear.
“I love you,” she said yet again.
“And I . . . you.” His eyes fluttered closed.
He was slipping away. She could feel it, could feel the distance growing between them. She threw herself over him, as if she could somehow protect him that way. In that moment she bitterly thought she knew why her father had never told her who she really was, because he’d known she wasn’t up to the task. She had had only to keep Lyon safe, and she had failed completely. He was dying, and she could do nothing. Nothing but hold him as his life ebbed away.
Something was pressing hard against her ribs. She tried to ignore it. No pain could match the pain she was feeling as his breathing grew more labored, slower.
A thought niggled around the edge of her mind, trying to break through the cloud of anguish. She brushed it aside—nothing else mattered anymore. It might never again, for the rest of her life. A life full of endless days without him.
She wondered if a chosen flashbow warrior ever turned it down.
<
br /> Then again, obviously the choosing wasn’t always right. Had anyone else ever failed at the job, or would she be the first in history?
It didn’t matter. Nothing did. Not now. But again it tickled, tormented, a fleeting memory of words spoken in an old man’s voice. . . .
. . . the power to heal.
The orb. That was what was pushing against her ribs. She clawed at his jacket, digging for the inside pocket where he had secreted it. The garment was soaked with his blood, seemed reluctant to surrender the small crystal sphere, but at last she had it free.
Uncertain what to do now, she placed the orb on his chest. Watched it.
Nothing happened.
It would only work for a true child of Graymist, the old man had said. Perhaps he needed to hold it. She tried to rouse him, but he was too far away now. She placed his hands on the orb, hoping somehow he might, even unconsciously, have enough life left to hold it.
His hands fell away.
The labored breathing stopped.
He was gone.
Chapter 54
“RINA, YOU’RE CLEAR? And Tark? Safe?”
Silence. Dax put the fighter into a pivot, to look once more to the east. The Coalition troops were still in chaos.
“We are.” At last her voice echoed in his ear through the earpiece, and relief shot through him.
“I’m watching the eastern quarter. I can practically feel the cannon fire from here. They’re falling like a swarm of drunken zipbugs. Give Tark my congratulations.”
“With pleasure.”
It was a common phrase, but something in her voice told him he had been right in his assessment of how things stood between them. It gladdened his heart, to know she had at last found what he had found. She certainly deserved it more than he ever had.
“He’s a good man, Rina.”
“Yes.”
“He’ll love life on Trios.”
“I hope so. But wherever he is, I will be.”
He felt an odd sensation, some combination of satisfaction tinged with loss. They were well launched now, both his girls and Dare’s son. They had found their way, their path, and he wasn’t sure where he would fit in their lives now. But they would work it out.
Rebel Prince Page 37
