The small girls were still playing on the floor. At the sight of my knife, they froze. I put my index finger over my lips to quiet them and beckoned them to my room. It would be easier to protect everyone if I kept them all in one place. And that meant keeping them in the sick room.
Four sets of owlish eyes stared at me as they crowded together into the corner beside my bed. I swallowed. I must not fail them.
There was a cry from the common room and an explosion of splintering wood and shouts crashed across my hearing. I raised the kitchen knife and squared my stance.
Feet thundered as Mally’s screams echoed through the halls. And then there was so much noise it was hard to pick out one sound from the next. Feet were on the stairs, in the common room, in the kitchen, in the hall. Battlecries rang out and screams of terror and pain. The clang of metal on metal and sickening crashes and thumps.
My heart was in my throat and the point of my knife wavered as my stomach did flip flops.
My cousin Fon’s voice was loud in the kitchen – but his words were unintelligible and ended abruptly.
The raiders were right outside the door.
I swallowed, sweat breaking out on my forehead. I glanced behind me a second time. Four small children clutched each other, silent tears tracking down their faces. One knife was in my hands. It wasn’t enough. I couldn’t keep them safe on my own.
I heard the girl’s door down the hall open with a crash as it hit the wall inside. Then my aunt and uncle’s. Something rattled our door handle and then with a splintering pop, the door flew inward, smashing against the wall.
I gritted my teeth, knife raised, as the raider flowed into the room like a living shadow.
If I’d had a voice, I would have been screaming defiance. Or maybe just screaming.
I’d never seen a man like this before. He was deathly pale, their skin sallow in a way that suggested illness. A dark cloak flapped around him and his swords were perfectly straight with no curve to them at all. Worse, his face was masked by cloth drawn over mouth and nose so that I was left wondering at what manner of face might lie beneath the swaths of cloth. Only his yellow eyes showed above the mask.
My mouth was drier than good firewood, and my thoughts skittered across my mind like water on a hot pan, but I kept the knife up. I would slash and hack until there was nothing left of me.
Behind me, one of the girls’ sobs became audible.
The man tilted his head to the side. When he spoke, the words sounded like ripping cloth.
“Akenash atrenna. Akenash Ai’sletta. Akenash.”
If I’d had a voice, I would have warned him away. I would have spoken words of bravado and courage.
Since I had none, I could merely stare at him, mutely, my eyes speaking for me.
Don’t give an inch Sersha. Don’t let him know you are afraid.
I gritted my teeth.
He strode forward, hands so quick they made lightning look sluggish. He lifted me up by the front of the dress before I could gasp, his other hand batting away my clumsy knife attack.
Behind me, one of my small cousins screamed like a bird driven from a perch with the throw of a stone.
“Ai’sletta!” the raider repeated. “Ka.”
I was trembling all over as he shook me and to my horror, two more men stepped into the room, one of them reaching for my little cousin Lis as she sobbed, frozen in place by terror. She was just six.
I flexed my knife hand, trying again to fight back, but the raider struck a blow so hard that my knife flew from my hand, clattering to the floor.
I’d lost before I’d started. And so had my little cousins.
Tears welled up in my eyes as they screamed.
My breath felt like it was ripping my chest apart.
And then something that looked like a dark purple rope skittered past us. It reached up, branching, one branch shooting toward the raider reaching for Lis, the other toward the neck of the one holding me. The ropes twisted sinuously up, wrapping themselves around my attacker and the other raider.
Foreign words poured from their mouths, but now they sounded more like pleas than threats. The ropes flexed, shaking the raiders so hard that I was thrown free. I fell to the ground. Clawing my way back up in time to see three men motionless on the floor. The ropes were slithering back to a point behind me. I spun to find my patient pushed up on one arm, eyes drooping, and face pale.
He said something in a language I didn’t know and when I stared at him blankly, he shifted to something I could understand.
“Help me up. I cannot stand on my own.”
I wanted to object that he was too injured, but his green eyes flashed, and he nodded slightly toward my small cousins.
“Don’t risk children when you have a rope worker of Vetara in your midst.”
Hastily, I scrambled to his side and helped him stand. He really couldn’t stand on his own. He could barely stand with my arm under him. I wavered under the weight, stumbling forward as he shuffled beside me, head lolling forward and dark hair falling to half-cover his eyes. We wobbled into the empty hall, my gaze flicking over each broken door.
I looked over my shoulder to my huddled cousins, sobbing in the corner. They needed an adult with them. But I’d seen how Judicus had killed those raiders with the black ropes – magic? – and I knew he might be the only hope to drive these raiders back. Without his help, our town was no match against trained warriors, and we would just die together when the next men came through the broken door. My cousin’s best hope was in Judicus and I could not help huddled back there with them.
I signed to them to hide and wait for help and then turned back to my charge.
We shuffled into the chaos of the kitchen. Bowls and spoons had been flung around the room as if the person hurrying through had just been trying to create chaos and nothing more. Someone had spilled the pea soup across the hearth and they were already darkening where they came close the flames. It would take all day to clean this mess.
Underneath the wreck of the table lay my cousin Fon. I clasped a hand over my mouth and looked away, blinking back dry tears at what I’d seen in his glassy eyes. He would never take that job as an apprentice at the academy.
“Nice place you have here,” Judicus muttered. “I can see why you’re so keen to keep it intact.”
Maybe it was a good thing I was voiceless right now. It kept me from snapping at him. I drew in a long, shuddering breath. I needed to hold myself together. I needed to get Judicus to where he could help.
Mally cried out in the common room, a panicked sound to her voice and Judicus seemed to focus on the sound, leaning toward it. I steered him in that direction, stumbling a little under his weight. He wasn’t a large man. But he wasn’t carrying any of his own weight, he’d put it all on my shoulders.
We shoved through the door and I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from crying out, too. My aunt Danna lay motionless next to the door, her cast iron pan wedged in the wreckage of the inn door. Someone in the rooms above us was screaming hysterically.
But it was Mally I was worried for. She was wedged in the back corner of the common room, swinging her frying pan wildly as a group of raiders surrounded her, swords drawn. One of them lunged just enough to taunt her, laughing when she swung her pan toward him.
Fear gripped my heart with icy hands. I had to keep blinking to push the tears away so I could see.
Judicus muttered something grim sounding and then he spread his palm and dark ropes poured from it onto the ground, spreading out like roots, clawing across the floor, over Aunt Danna, over a raider slumped on the floor a few steps from where she lay, and up the legs and backs of the men surrounding Mally.
Mally shrank further back, her face growing pale as a raider lunged forward. One of the ropes coiled swiftly around his neck and he was yanked back toward us with a jerk. The rope shook him like a cloth doll, but even as my mouth fell open at the sight, four more ropes were twisting around the remaining raiders, tightening around their n
ecks so that they choked, flailing against the pull.
It shook them worse than a ship in a grand storm and then dropped them, broken and limp, to the floor.
Mally let out a shuddering breath and dropped her pan, racing to her mother.
“Mama?”
“The door,” Judicus said, his voice weak and thready. “Take me out to the street. There will be more. They’re coming for the Ai’sletta just as I am. They must be stopped.”
I wanted to ask what the Ai’sletta was. I wanted to ask why they were all here in our little town all of a sudden. No one had ever been here before searching for an ai’sletta. What had changed about that now?
But I couldn’t ask my questions, so I bit my lip and supported him with an arm around his waist as we stumbled forward.
“Mally?”
I let out a shuddering breath at Aunt Danna’s voice. She was alive.
“Go find your little sisters.” Her voice was shaky. “They’re with Sersha. Go on now, I’ll be right as rain in a moment.”
Her voice sounded strained, but she was speaking. I glanced back at Mally who met my eyes with grim judgment. But if I hadn’t left the girls in the back there would have been no one to save her life. There was no time to feel gratitude for what had been saved. A crash from the floor above reminded me of that. This wasn’t over. Not even close.
We lurched out the door into the madness beyond.
Chapter Nine
The Hog’s Head Inn was in the center of town. Stumbling out the door gave us an immediate ability to see just how bad things were. The bell tower had been knocked over, and the bell had a big crack running up its side.
Across the street, Tyndale’s forge was lost in flame along with the bakery to one side of it. Old Ferris was trying to put out the fire on the roof of the fishmonger on the other side of it, but the wind was whipping up the flames like a goodwife with a bowl of batter. It spun and whirled, spreading as fast as he could throw water across the blaze.
There were bodies in the street. I didn’t want to look at them. I didn’t want to know whose they were. I shuddered remembering Fon laid out on the kitchen floor. I didn’t want to see anyone else like that.
We’d barely taken a step out of the door when a roar met my ears.
Uncle Llynd charged out from an alley, Gandy on one side of him and Tyndale on the other, his blacksmith’s hammer raised high. Behind them, a scattered group of townsfolk followed, roaring with them.
They plunged across the street to where a knot of raiders emerged from Jensen’s house, his teenage daughter caught between them.
I’d watched roosters attack before and this collision looked like that. A sudden screeching roar, movements so fast you couldn’t catch them all, a flurry of fury and terror. A weapon flew through the air – one of the too-straight swords – and a bellow cut of abruptly.
It was over faster than I thought possible, poor Nella sobbing on her knees, and those who had tried to steal her from us lying around her in heaps.
Not all the heaps on the ground were raiders, though. One was Carsden from the docks. The flower of blood on his jerkin was proof he’d been heart-stabbed.
My uncle looked winded, his eyes wide and nostrils flaring like a frightened horse. There was blood on one side of his head, and he’d lost his knife.
With a long battle cry, a knot of raiders sprinted out from behind the stable, swords out, their eyes fixed on my uncle and the other men from our town. Tyndale raised his hammer and Gandry the cudgel he held, but their eyes were wide with the understanding that they were too few for this fight. Twenty raiders thundered toward them – all armed with their straight swords, all screaming defiance at the cluster of village men with their mismatched weapons and wide eyes.
“Here we go, then. Get ready to catch me,” Judicus whispered, winking at me, and then the black ropes poured out of his hand again, rolling over the ground, twisting as they went as if the rope was weaving itself from shadow and light and nothing else at all. It slid toward the raiders noiselessly, wrapping up their bodies as they ran and jerking them backward like a child might jerk a toy dog on a string.
One by one they screamed and fell, gagging and thrashing against the bonds. One of them cried out, “Vetara!” and ran in terror. He was the only one to survive the encounter.
As the last one of the raiders collapsed to the ground, Judicus fell heavily against me, his eyes fluttering shut, and face etched with exhaustion. His ropes dissolved to nothing. My feet shuffled as I tried to hold up his weight, sliding in the mud.
He was heavy for someone so thin and his pale face looked young, vulnerable.
And yet the power he had wielded – the ropes pouring from his hands – was impressive.
“Rope Worker,” Gandy gasped and there was a murmur from the men around him.
“We need to find the rest,” Tyndale gasped, his huge muscles shaking as he spoke. How hard must he have fought to be shaking now? I’d seen him hammer all day with those twenty-pound hammers and never seen him shake.
A long horn blast made them all freeze. And then a second.
“Two for retreat,” my uncle gasped. “They’ve heard about the rope worker.”
How did he know that?
“I hope they haven’t heard he’s collapsed,” Gandy muttered. “Maybe it’s him they came for.”
I bit my lip.
It wasn’t Judicus that they were looking for. They were looking for the same thing he was looking for – the Ai’sletta – whatever or whoever that was.
I just hoped it wasn’t a phoenix.
Chapter Ten
By the time the fires were put out, the lone raider who had survived in the upper floor of the inn dispatched, and the dead collected, it was nearly sunset.
There had been far too many dead.
Those of us still living huddled in the common room of the Hog’s Head Inn as the village head man of our town – Old Canvers – tried to form some kind of plan. The inn had stone walls, making it the sturdiest building in the town now that the forge was burned down. It shouldn’t have held everyone in town. It should have been far too small. We were all trying not to think about that.
The raiders – though they had retreated – were still on the shore. We could see their fires between our homes and buildings. And that meant they would return soon and what would we do then?
“We could flee,” Old Ferris suggested. “Take what horses are left and head into the hills.”
There were murmurs of agreement. It was the most popular suggestion among the seventy or so people who remained alive.
I reached into my pocket nervously and my hand hit the medallion. I felt my cheeks growing hot. This couldn’t be the ai’sletta that they wanted ... could it? What if I had it all along? What if I could have prevented this?
My heart hammered in my chest.
But no, I was panicking for no reason. Judicus had said this medallion would help find the ai’sletta, not that it was the thing he was searching for. I was too tired. It was addling my mind.
“Five,” Uncle Llynd said and then paused until everyone looked at him before he continued. “That’s all the horse we have. Five. And even if we use them as pack horses, they’ll barely carry enough supplies to get this many people to the next town down the coast. And that’s if we aren’t followed.”
Despairing looks flashed across our faces as we looked from one to another. There wasn’t a person left who wasn’t soot-marked. Not a single set of shoulders not drooping. We’d fought the fires until they were low enough not to spread again. We’d dragged the dead to the edge of town. There hadn’t been time yet to dig enough graves. But we would have to finish that, too.
To one side of the inn, Tyndale clutched Mally to him, her cheeks streaked with tracks of tears. He’d lost everything in that fire. His entire future. There would be no wedding now.
Aunt Danna’s head was wrapped with a long white bandage, her frizzled hair sticking out around its swaths. Her
jaw was set grimly, and she kept stealing small glances at the bar where Fon should be ready to pour drinks for customers.
“All the children are in the rooms upstairs sleeping,” she said firmly, swiping a tear from her cheek.
The sound of little feet tapping out hurried rhythms belied those words, but no one bothered to correct her. We’d dug so many graves our hands were raw and bleeding from it and I wasn’t the only one with eyes stinging at today’s memories when she said the word “children.”
“And there is food enough in the inn. We can fill the empty casks in the cellar with water if we’re quick about it. We can hold up in here.”
“And what?” Old Ferris asked. “Sleep in the common room and hope that the raiders just decide they’ll wander off now?”
“They’re looking for something,” Aunt Danna said with a defiant glint in her eye. “This ai’sletta they kept screaming about. We’ll give it to them.”
I made a squeaking sound in the back of my throat and she turned eyes of pity on me.
“I know you’ve worked hard to keep him alive, niece, but he’s a stranger to us. It’s not worth seeing our own people suffer and die just to protect a stranger.”
I made fierce signs with my hands. No. No.
But if I’d had a voice, I would remind her that it was his magic that saved them all. His magic that drove the raiders back.
“Might not be a good idea to give up the one person who was able to defeat them,” Old Canvers said stubbornly.
“He’s collapsed now,” Aunt Danna said. “That used up the last of his power. He won’t be helping us now. And even if he was strong, how do we know he’s our friend. We’ll give him to the raiders. It’s our best bad choice.”
If I could speak, I’d tell them it didn’t matter because he wasn’t the ai’sletta. And I was pretty sure my phoenix was. But he was dead now, too.
But they didn’t call me voiceless for no reason. Even if I could speak, I wasn’t sure anyone would listen.
“This is talk for adults. And you have work to do,” Aunt Danna said briskly. “Fon,” she started to say, and then a look of devastation passed over her and she turned to Gandy instead. “Gandy. See to filling the casks with water. Take Tyndale with you. Mally, we have hungry mouths here. A carrot soup will do well enough. Sersha, tend our wounded guest. If we’re going to trade him, then we need him alive. Go on now, all of you.”
Phoenix Heart: Episode 1: Ashes Page 4
