The Shadow Queen

by C. J. Redwine

  Looking up, he met his former headmaster’s gaze, expecting to see pity. Instead, he saw the same rigid expectations he’d always seen. That Kol would be the cadet—the Eldrian—Master Eiler had trained him to be.

  Once upon a time, those expectations had felt like a noose around Kol’s neck. Today, they were a road map for a journey Kol had never thought he’d have to take.

  He straightened his spine and gave Brig one last squeeze. Stepping forward, he took the lit torch from Master Eiler with a steady hand and waded into the frigid water.

  “From the Sky Father, life was granted.” His breath hitched, and he cleared his throat. Raised his voice. Tried his best to do justice to the funeral chant. To his family. “And to the Sky Father, life returns. We thank him for your journey here.”

  His voice broke, and he blinked his eyes rapidly before continuing. “And we send you on your next journey with honor, with respect, and with love.”

  His choked on the last word, and he had to work just to breathe as the crowd behind him repeated, “With honor, with respect, and with love.”

  When their voices faded, Kol moved to his brother’s pyre. His chest ached sharply as he thrust the torch into the straw that cushioned his brother’s body. The fire caught and ate greedily at the tinder.

  Moving to his mother’s pyre, Kol laid his hand on her raft and tried to speak. He wanted to tell her that nothing would be the same without her. The words wouldn’t come. Instead, he simply whispered “I love you best, and I’ll miss you forever” as he lit her straw and turned away.

  Firelight from his mother’s pyre glinted against his father’s golden shroud as Kol laid his palm against the wooden planks and took a deep breath. “I know I disappointed you.” The words left a bitter taste in Kol’s mouth. “And we never understood each other. But now I have the weight of Eldr on my shoulders, and I don’t know how you did it all those years. All I can do is promise you that I will do my best. I won’t disappoint you again.”

  His father’s straw caught fire, and then members of the royal council were there beside him, pushing the pyres out into the lake until the current caught the rafts and sent them on their slow, stately journey toward the afterlife.

  Master Eiler waded into the water. “The sun will be setting soon. It’s time for the coronation. Eldr must see that they still have a king.”

  Kol nodded. It was the best he could manage. He was about to become king of a nation on her deathbed. Defending his people from the ogre invasion was now his problem and his alone. He faced the castle and clenched his fists. He would figure out how to lead his people. How to protect them. He would become the kind of ruler he could be proud of, or he would die trying.

  Two hours after he’d been crowned king and had met with the royal council to discuss the ogre war, Kol was ready to leave for the war front to assess the situation himself. All that remained was to tell Brig good-bye.

  She stood in the middle of his room, watching him with tear-filled eyes. Kol crossed the distance between them and pulled her into his arms. “It’s time.”

  “Please, Kol. I’ve already lost everyone else. Don’t go.”

  He swallowed the sharp edge of grief that ached in his throat and said, “Brig, I’m the king now. The war is my responsibility. How can I figure out how to beat the ogres if I’ve never seen what they’re capable of doing?”

  Her voice rose. “You’ve seen what they’re capable of doing! We lost everyone because of them. It doesn’t matter if you go to the war front or if you stay here. No one can stop the ogres. Their skin is hard as a rock and immune to our fire, to our catapults—they’re three times our size, and no weapon we use against them does anything more than slow them down.” She glared at him. “You might die.”

  He had no answer for that, so he simply held her and wished he could turn back time to a week ago before he’d pulled his epic prank on Master Eiler, before his parents had taken Rag on a tour of the war front, before everything became so complicated. So impossible.

  “What are we going to do?” Brig’s voice was little more than a whisper.

  Kol stepped back and lifted her chin so he could look into her eyes. “You are going to stay here and manage the castle for me with Master Eiler and the royal council. I’m going to assess the ogre situation and come up with a solution. And together, we’re going to show our people how to face pain and fear with honor and strength.”

  “You sound like father,” Brig said, a shaky smile flitting across her face.

  Kol had to swallow hard against the sudden tightness in his throat. “Who would’ve guessed I’d ever be capable of that?”

  It took nearly a full day for Kol, Trugg, Jyn, and two members of the royal council to reach the war front by flying in their dragon forms. The craggy mountains and lush forests that surrounded Tryllenvreng, the capital of Eldr, slowly gave way to rivers that cut through the rocky hillside like ribbons. Eldrians fleeing the southern half of the kingdom for the safety of the refugee shelters in Tryllenvreng camped along the riverbank in clumps. Kol’s human heart ached for them as he flew past. He understood now what it meant to have those you loved ripped away from you.

  The land began to bear battle scars as Kol and his friends closed in on the war front. The evidence of a recent fight could be seen in shattered boulders, in trees ripped up at the roots, and in an entire hillside caved in as if an enormous creature had ripped the land to pieces.

  Tearing his gaze away from the wreckage, Kol signaled the others to follow him to the highest hilltop in the area. Night was falling, and soon they’d be able to fly over the armies and assess the situation undetected.

  Kol alighted on the hilltop, shook out his wings, and folded them back as the others came to rest around him, their talons digging into the rocky soil. Below him, the Eldrian army was positioned with the strongest flyers in the center, archer and catapult support just behind them, and secondary flyers hidden from the approaching army on both the left and right flanks. The third wave of flyers were hidden behind the archer and catapult support to provide either another wave of attack or defensive cover for the forward soldiers in the event of a retreat.

  Kol had a feeling all the army had been doing was retreating, giving up Eldr in bits and pieces.

  As he studied the army’s position, there was a cry of warning, and then a pack of ogres swarmed over the rocky hills to the south. The ogres were immense thick-chested brutes—wide as four large oak trees side by side and double the height of the average Draconi—with no necks, round black eyes, and tough gray skin that matched the rocks they were scaling with incredible speed.

  Immediately, the first wave of flyers rose into the air, and the catapults began pelting the incoming ogres with boulders coated in pitch and flame. A few of the ogres went down, crushed beneath the weight of the boulders, but for every creature who fell, another three took its place.

  The ogres formed a V and stopped as if waiting for the arrival of the Eldrians. From his vantage point on the hilltop, Kol saw something in the middle of the V begin to glow like a brilliant blue sapphire. He squinted against the glare of the dying sun, and a pit of ice formed in his stomach.

  What kind of weapon glowed like that? The ogres in Kol’s history books—the ones who’d roamed Eldr and the southern kingdom of Vallé de Lumé in vicious packs centuries ago before a witch sealed them away in a prison deep beneath the southern mountains—had always used brute strength and violence to crush their opponents. Not weapons that glowed. Not formations that spoke of organization and strategy.

  He wanted to scream at the flyers to get back, but it was already too late.

  The flyers dove at the assembled ogres, fire spewing from their mouths—a cover for the poison-tipped arrows the archers sent just beneath the Draconi. A few of the arrows struck ogres in the eyes, but the rest glanced off the beasts’ rock-hard skin and fell harmlessly to the ground.

  The flyers banked a perfect turn, preparing for a second assault, when the ogres
on the outside of the V dropped to the ground, revealing the creature who stood in the center. It may have once been an ogre but was now it was something far worse. Its round black eyes were lit with sapphire flames from within. Its massive bulk was covered with so much knotted muscle, it resembled an enormous gray rock bound by gnarled tree roots. And in its hands was a ball of crackling blue light the size of a small horse.

  What kind of monstrosity was this?

  Kol’s hearts thundered in his chest, and his stomach plummeted as he dug his talons into the unforgiving ground and forced himself to stay hidden. To stay safe because Eldr needed her king, even though her king had no idea how to save her.

  The creature stretched to its full height, casting a long shadow over the ogres crouched below it. Kol lashed the ground with his tail, scattered bits of rock and dirt. His army was already struggling to contain the ogre onslaught. How were they supposed to fight a monster like this? How was he supposed to fight it? The kingship he’d accepted at last night’s coronation ceremony felt too heavy to bear as his flyers banked, preparing to sweep the ogre lines again.

  The creature drew its arm back and flung the sizzling blue light directly into the flyers as they completed their turn. It wrapped around the Draconi like chains of lightning and then exploded into a brilliant blue mist. When it dissipated, all that was left of the entire squadron were a few bloody scales that slowly drifted to the ground. Kol felt sick, his dragon’s fire burning miserably in his chest.

  Magic.

  The ogres, released from their mountain prison by the dark enchantress who had ensnared the southern kingdom of Vallé de Lumé the previous winter had somehow found a way to tap into her power and use it for themselves in their quest to once again dominate the lands they’d been cast out of so many lifetimes ago.

  There was nothing Kol could do to stop them. Not without magic of his own. The realization was a blow Kol didn’t know how to absorb. Focusing on the grief and desperation in his human heart, Kol released his dragon. His wings receded, his fangs drew back, and as his red-gold scales softened into his human skin again, he turned to find the others had shed their dragons too and were busy pulling clothing out of the travel bags Jyn had volunteered to carry for the group.

  Jyn tossed Kol some trousers and a shirt. “How did ogres get the use of magic?” She sounded shaken.

  “A better question would be how do we stop them?” the councilwoman asked as she shrugged into a shirt.

  “We can’t stop them.” Kol was grateful his voice didn’t reveal the panic that wanted to steal his breath and paralyze his thoughts.

  He’d promised to protect Eldr. How was he going to do that when his enemy was unstoppable?

  “If we had magic of our own, it would be different,” the councilman said.

  “You’re right.” Kol looked at the councilman while his thoughts raced. “The only way to turn the tide of this war is if we have magic of our own capable of defeating the weapon we just saw. And I only know of one kingdom with that kind of magic—”

  “You aren’t seriously suggesting that we go to Morcant for aid, are you?” Jyn asked, her hands on her hips. “Have you forgotten what those magic wielders—those mardushkas—do to Draconi? For centuries, they’ve captured us with their cursed magic, forcing us to sniff out gems and veins of gold like dogs on leashes. There’s a reason we have a law forbidding Eldrians from setting foot on Morcantian soil.”

  “We aren’t going to Morcant for aid.” Kol’s hearts pounded as a plan just as bold and risky as any of his pranks took shape in his mind. “Negotiations work best when you have enough leverage to come to the table as an equal. Ravenspire is suffering from massive food shortages caused by a blight on their crops. There are reports of tremendous unrest and violence among the peasants.”

  “That’s correct,” the councilwoman said.

  “Ravenspire’s queen doesn’t have enough resources to feed her people and stop the unrest. We, however, have an entire mountain full of treasure—enough to buy food from the merchants in Súndraille for the next ten years. We have the solution to her problem, and the queen of Ravenspire—”

  “Is a mardushka from Morcant and married into her throne,” the councilwoman finished, her eyes gleaming.

  Kol shouldered his bag. “Let’s go back to the castle. Master Eiler and the rest of the royal council need to know what we’re up against and what I plan to do about it. I leave for Ravenspire in the morning.”

  “Why you? Let us go in your place,” Trugg said.

  Kol shook his head. “Queen Irina doesn’t meet with ambassadors. She leaves all that to her castle steward, and I can’t afford to be turned down. If I arrive at her castle, she’ll have no choice but to receive me.” He looked at the council members. “I need the council to keep the country running while I’m gone. Send a courier if there’s an emergency, and I need to return. I should be able to cross the mountain border into Ravenspire in two days if I fly hard. After that, I’ll be on foot—I don’t dare anger Queen Irina by violating the treaty that prohibits Eldrians from using their dragon form within Ravenspire. I’ll be easy for a courier to catch. Trugg and Jyn, I know asking you to leave Eldr in her time of need is a sacrifice—”

  “We’re with you, remember?” Trugg wrapped a hefty arm around the back of Kol’s neck and squeezed. “To the sky and back.”

  “To the sky and back,” Jyn repeated.

  Kol pushed his grief, his fear that he would fail and all Eldr would pay for it, into the corner of his thoughts and focused on what he would say to the queen of Ravenspire to get her to agree to use her magic to save Eldr from certain destruction.

  She was his last hope.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  FIVE

  LORELAI’S PULSE KICKED hard against her skin, and her breathing quickened as she crouched in an evergreen that bordered the southern wall around the northeast garrison, gripping the branch beneath her with gloved hands. Sasha perched above her, her bright black eyes fixed on the garrison.

  It had been two days since Lorelai had seen the desperate mother kill her children to spare them death by starvation. Two days, and the horror was as fresh as the day it had happened.

  Today’s robbery wouldn’t make that right—nothing could—but it was a step in the right direction.

  The tree shook as Leo climbed up to join her. His curly black hair was hidden beneath a cap, and he carried their stash of burlap sacks rolled into a pack on his back.

  “All set on the plan?” he asked quietly as they watched the garrison’s patrol—a pair of guards in full uniform—march inside the western perimeter of the wall.

  “Of course I’m all set on the plan. It’s my plan.” It would take the patrol fourteen minutes to complete the circuit around the inside of the wall. Fourteen minutes for Lorelai to get into place and be ready to create a distraction worthy of diverting the attention of every soldier inside the garrison to her.

  “It’s a terrible plan,” Leo said, his hands clenching and unclenching within his gloves.

  “You didn’t think so yesterday when you and Gabril were putting your end of it together.”

  Thirteen minutes. She scanned the garrison for movement. The plan would work if the only soldiers out in the frigid weather were those required to be on patrol. Close to the northern corner of the wall—the spot where Gabril waited, along with the handful of trusted peasants from the surrounding villages who’d been invited to bring a wagon and load it down with supplies for their respective towns—a stocky structure housed the storehouse of food. The kitchens and the dining hall were close by, but the armory was on the southern side of the garrison, and the barracks were to the west. No one should be near the storehouse in the middle of the afternoon.

  Lorelai was going to make sure of it.

  “It’s a terrible plan because you’re taking mos
t of the risk.” Leo’s voice was edged with worry. “If I’m seen carrying food from the storehouse to the wall, I can just scale the wall. By the time the soldiers get out of the gate, we’ll have disappeared into the forest.”

  “I can scale walls too. I’ll be fine.”

  “You can’t scale walls if you get caught.” He turned to her, and the mischief that usually lit his eyes was replaced by the kind of unrelenting fierceness Lorelai usually saw in Gabril. “If this works, every soldier in the barracks will be after you. If they catch you—”

  “If they catch me, I have a weapon they can’t take from me. That’s why I’m better suited for this distraction than you are.”

  “No.” He glared at her. “No magic. I know I’m always the one pushing you to practice so we can get rid of Irina one day, but you can’t do magic here, Lorelai. This place is Irina’s down to the last grain of dirt on the ground. She’ll have bespelled it so she can keep an eye on her soldiers, or she’ll have spies throughout the ranks, or . . . I don’t know. Something. And if you use magic, she’ll know that we’re alive, and she’ll know exactly where to find us.”

  “I’m not going to use magic. My weapon is Sasha.” She smiled at him. “Remember how you wanted a name for us? Something that would give people hope?”

  He gave her a tiny smile in return. “I finally convinced you to call us the Fearsome Threesome, didn’t I?”

  She snorted. “No. But I’ve been thinking about what that poor woman said.”

  “‘There is no help left in Ravenspire. Not for the likes of us.’” Leo nodded. “I’ve been thinking about it too.”

  “I want people to know that they haven’t been forgotten. That their problems matter, and that we are doing something about it.” She met his gaze. “I think we should call ourselves the Heirs.”

  A slow smile spread across Leo’s face. “I like it. But you know that if we make a name for ourselves as the Heirs, Irina is eventually going to hear about us and come looking.”