Wonder Woman: Warbringer

by Leigh Bardugo

  Women were already running toward them, Tek at the lead.

  “What happened?” Tek asked, helping Diana raise Maeve to her feet.

  “Nothing,” said Diana, her panic spiking. “We were just talking and she—”

  “Hell’s hounds,” swore Tek. “She’s burning up with fever.”

  “An infection?” asked Thyra.

  Diana shook her head. “She has no wounds.”

  “Could it be something she ate?” Otrera suggested.

  Tek scoffed. “At the feast? Don’t be absurd. Maeve, were you foraging today? Did you eat anything in the woods? Mushrooms? Berries?”

  Maeve shook her head. Her body convulsed on a thready sob.

  “Let’s get her to bed and try to cool her body down,” said Tek. “Fetch water, ice from the kitchens. Thyra, go get Yijun. She has experience as a field medic. We’ll take Maeve to the palace dormitory.”

  “Maeve lives in the Caminus now,” said Diana. New Amazons spent their first few years in the dormitory connected to the palace before they chose which part of the city they wanted to live in. Diana had visited Maeve’s new lodgings just the other day.

  “If this is a contagion, I want it isolated. The dormitory is empty and easy to quarantine.”

  “A contagion?” said Otrera in horror.

  “Go,” commanded Tek.

  Thyra ran toward town to find the medic, and Diana bolted down to the palace kitchens to fetch a pitcher of ice. When she found Maeve and Tek in the dormitory, Maeve was huddled beneath a thin sheet, quivering. Diana set the pitcher beside the bed and stared helplessly at her friend.

  “What is this?”

  “It’s a fever,” Tek said grimly. “She’s sick.”

  This couldn’t be happening. It wasn’t possible. “Amazons don’t get sick.”

  “Well, she is,” snapped Tek.

  Thyra raced into the room, her golden hair flying. “The medic is coming, but two more alarms were raised in town.”

  “Fevers? Were they at the feast?”

  “I don’t know, but—”

  Suddenly, the whole room seemed to shift. The walls shook, and the floor heaved like a beast waking from a deep sleep. The pitcher of ice tipped and shattered on the tiles. Thyra slammed into the wall, and Diana had to grab the doorjamb to keep from falling.

  The shaking stopped as quickly as it had started. The only signs that anything had happened were the broken pitcher and the lanterns that continued to sway on their hooks.

  “Freyja’s braids!” said Thyra. “What was that?”

  Tek’s expression was bleak. “An earthquake.”

  “Here?” said Thyra disbelievingly.

  “I need to find the queen,” said Tek. “Wait for the medic.” She strode from the room, boots crunching over shards of pitcher and ice.

  Diana unfolded a blanket and tucked it around Maeve. She brushed the red hair back from her friend’s face. Maeve’s skin was too white beneath her freckles, and her eyes moved restlessly beneath her pale lids. Contagion. Quarantine. Earthquake. These words did not belong on Themyscira. What if they’d come with Alia? What if Diana had brought this language of affliction to her people?

  No mortal was to set foot on Themyscira. The law was clear. In Amazon history, only two women had dared to violate it. Kahina had brought a mortal child back from a mission, desperate to save her from death on the battlefield. She’d begged to be allowed to raise the girl on the island, but in the end they’d both been exiled to the World of Man. The second was Nessa, who had tried to secret her mortal lover aboard a ship when she returned to Themyscira.

  As a child, Diana had asked to hear Nessa’s story again and again, wriggling in her bed, anticipating the horrible ending, the image of Nessa standing on the shore, stripped of her armor, as the earth shook and the winds howled, so angered was the island, so angered were the gods. Diana always remembered the final words of the story as told by the poet Evandre:

  One by one, her sisters turned their backs as they must, and though they wept, their salt tears were as nothing to the sea. So Nessa passed from mercy into the mists, and to the lands beyond, where men breathe war as air, and life is as the wingbeat of a moth, barely seen, barely understood before it is gone. What can we say of her suffering, except that it was brief?

  Diana had shuddered at the shrug in those words. She had watched the moths that gathered around the lanterns of her mother’s terrace and tried to fasten her gaze on the blur of their wings. There and gone. That fast. But now it was Evandre’s other words that she recalled with a terrible feeling of recognition: The earth shook and the winds howled, so angered was the island, so angered were the gods. When Diana had rescued Alia, she’d believed the risk she was taking was for herself alone, not for her sisters, not for Maeve.

  Diana squeezed Maeve’s hand. “I’ll be back,” she whispered.

  She hurried out the door and ran across the columned court that connected the dormitory to the palace.

  “Tek!” she called, jogging to catch up with her.

  As Tek turned, another tremor struck. Diana careened into a column, her shoulder striking the stone painfully. Tek barely checked her stride.

  “Go back to your friend,” she said as Diana trailed her up the palace stairs to the queen’s quarters.

  “Tek, what’s causing this?”

  “I don’t know. Something is out of balance.”

  Tek strode into the upper rooms of the royal quarters without hesitation. Hippolyta was at the long table, consulting with one of her runners, a fleet-footed girl named Sabaa.

  Hippolyta looked up as they entered. “I know, Tek,” she said. “I sent for a runner as soon as the first earthquake hit.” She folded the message she’d penned, then sealed it with red wax, marking it with her ring. “Get to Bana-Mighdall as fast as you can, but be cautious. Something is wrong on the island.”

  The runner vanished down the stairs.

  “There have been at least three reports of illness,” said Tek.

  “Are you sure that’s what it is?” Hippolyta asked.

  “I saw one of the victims myself.”

  “Maeve,” Diana added.

  “It may be striking the younger Amazons first,” said Hippolyta.

  “Not all of them,” muttered Tek, casting a sidelong look at Diana.

  But Hippolyta’s gaze was focused on the western sea. She sighed and said, “We’ll have to consult the Oracle.”

  Diana’s stomach clenched. The Oracle. There would be no hiding then.

  Tek nodded, a look of resignation on her face. Visiting the Oracle was no small decision. It required a sacrifice, and if the Oracle found an Amazon’s tribute wanting, she could inflict any number of punishments.

  “I’ll light the signal fires to gather the Council,” Tek said, and was gone without another word.

  It was all happening too quickly. Diana followed Hippolyta into her chambers. “Mother—”

  “If they ride hard, the Council should be here within the hour,” said Hippolyta. Some members of the Council lived at the Epheseum or Bana-Mighdall, but others preferred the more isolated parts of the island and would have to be summoned by the fires.

  Hippolyta shucked off the comfortable riding clothes and silver circlet she’d worn at the arena, and emerged from her dressing room a moment later in silks the deep purple of late plums, her right shoulder covered by a golden spaulder and scales of gleaming mail. The armor was purely ornamental, the type of thing worn for affairs of state. Or emergency Council meetings.

  “Help me bind my hair?” Hippolyta said. She seated herself before the large looking glass and selected a golden circlet studded with heavy chunks of raw amethyst from a velvet-lined case.

  It seemed bizarre to Diana to stand there plaiting her mother’s ebony hair into braids when the world around them might be falling apart, but a queen never appeared as anything less than a queen to her people.

  Diana summoned her courage. She needed to tell her moth
er about Alia. She couldn’t let her go into a Council meeting without that knowledge. Maybe it isn’t Alia. It could be a disturbance in the World of Man. Something. Anything. But Diana did not really believe that. When the Council consulted the Oracle, Alia would be discovered and Diana would be exiled. Her mother would look weak, indulgent. Not everyone loved Hippolyta as Tek did, and not everyone believed that a queen should rule the Amazons at all.

  “Mother, today, during the race—”

  Hippolyta met Diana’s eyes in the mirror and clasped her hand. “We’ll talk about it later. But there is no shame in the loss.”

  That wasn’t remotely true, but Diana said, “It’s not that.”

  Hippolyta set two more amethysts in her ears. “Diana, you cannot afford more losses like that. I didn’t think you would win—”

  “You didn’t?” Diana hated the hurt that spread through her, the surprise she couldn’t keep from her voice.

  “Of course not. You’re still young. You are not yet as strong as the others or as experienced. I hoped you might place or at least—”

  “Or at least not humiliate you?”

  Hippolyta lifted a brow. “It takes more than the loss of a little race to bring low a queen, Diana. But you were not ready, and it will mean you must work even harder to prove yourself in the future.”

  Her mother’s assessment of her chances was the same as her measured embrace on the platform, just as practical, just as painful.

  “I was ready,” Diana said stubbornly.

  Hippolyta’s look was so gentle, so loving, and so full of pity that Diana wanted to scream. “The results speak for themselves. Your time will come.”

  But it wouldn’t. Not if she was never given the opportunity. Not if even her mother didn’t think she could win a damned footrace. And Alia. Alia.

  “Mother,” Diana tried again.

  But Hippolyta was sweeping out of her chambers. Lamplight sparked off the gold in her armor. The earth shook, but somehow her steps did not falter, as if her very stride declared, “I am a queen and an Amazon; you are wise to tremble.”

  In the mirror’s glass, Diana saw herself reflected—a dark-haired girl in disheveled clothes, her blue eyes troubled, teeth worrying her lower lip like some hand-wringing actor in a tragedy. She squared her shoulders, set her jaw. Diana might not be queen, but the Council members weren’t the only ones who could petition the Oracle. I am a princess of Themyscira, she told the girl in the mirror. I’ll find my own answers.

  Diana hurried to her room to change clothes and fill a traveling pack with a blanket, rope, lantern and flint, and the rolled bindings she used for her hands when sparring—they would do for bandages in a pinch. Four hours had passed since Diana had left Alia in the cave. The girl must be terrified. Hera’s crown, what if she tries to climb down? Diana winced at the thought. Alia had all the substance of a bag of kindling. If she tried to get out of the cave, she’d only end up hurting herself. But there was no time to return to the cliffs. If Diana was going to fix this, she needed to speak to the Oracle before the Council did.

  She opened a green enamel box that she kept by her bed, then hesitated. She had never been to see the Oracle, but Diana knew she was dangerous. She could see deep into an Amazon’s heart and far into the future. In the smoke from her ritual fire, she tracked thousands of lives over thousands of years, watching the way the currents moved and what could be done to alter their courses. Access to her predictions always came with a steep cost. The most essential thing was to approach with an offering that would please her, something personal, essential to the supplicant.

  The green enamel box held Diana’s most cherished objects. She shoved the whole thing into her pack and ran down the stairs. She’d been pocketing food throughout the feast, but she stopped at the kitchen for a skin full of hot mulled wine. Though the kitchens were always a tangle of clatter and chaos, today the staff worked with grim determination and strange smells rose in billows of steam from the cook pots.

  “Willow bark,” said one of the cooks as Diana peeked beneath a lid. “We’re extracting salicylic acid to help bring the fevers down.” She handed over the goatskin. “You tell Maeve we hope she feels better soon.”

  All Diana said was “Thank you.” She didn’t want to add to her list of lies for the day.

  The city streets were full of bustle and clamor as people ran back and forth with food, medicine, and supplies to shore up buildings damaged by the quakes. Diana pulled up her hood. She knew she should be at the center of it all, helping, but if her suspicions about Alia were right, then the only solution was to get her off the island as quickly as she could.

  A glance at the harbor told her that stealing a boat would be close to impossible. The wind had risen to a full gale, and the sky had gone the color of slate. The docks were crawling with Amazons trying to secure the fleet before the storm descended in full force.

  Diana took the eastern road out of the city, the most direct path to the Oracle’s temple. It was bordered by groves of olive trees, and once she’d entered their shelter, she broke into a run, setting the fastest pace she dared.

  Soon she left the olives behind, traversing vineyards and tidy rows of peach trees clustered with fruit, then passed into the low hills that bordered the marsh at the center of the island.

  The closer Diana drew to the marsh, the more her unease grew. The marsh lay in the shadow of Mount Ptolema and was the only place on the island that existed in a state of near-permanent shade. She had never ventured inside. There were stories of Amazons entering its depths to visit the Oracle and emerging weeping or completely mad. When Clarissa had sought an audience at the temple, she’d returned to the city gibbering and shaking, the blood vessels in both of her eyes broken, her nails bitten down to ragged stumps. She’d never spoken of what she’d seen, but to this day, Clarissa—a hardened soldier who liked to ride into battle armed with nothing but an axe and her courage—still slept with a lit lantern beside her bed.

  Diana shivered as she entered the shadows of the marsh trees, draped in veils of moss like funeral-goers, the gnarled masses of their exposed roots reflecting sinister shapes in the murky waters. She could hear no sounds of the approaching storm, no familiar birdsong, not even the wind. The marsh had its own black music: the lap and splash of the water as something with a ridged back broke its surface and vanished with the flick of a long tail, the scuttle of insects, whispers that rose and fell without reason. Diana heard her name spoken, a chill breath at her ear. But when she turned, heart pounding, no one was there. She glimpsed something with long, hairy legs skittering over a nearby branch and quickened her steps.

  Diana kept heading what she hoped was due east, farther into the marsh as the gloom deepened. She was sure now that something was following her, maybe several things. She could hear the rustle of their creeping legs above her. To her left, she could see the glint of what might be shiny black eyes between drooping swags of gray lace moss.

  There is nothing to be afraid of here, she told herself, and she could almost hear the swamp’s low, gurgling laugh.

  With a shudder, she pushed through a curtain of vines bound together by milky clusters of cobwebs and stopped. She had imagined the Oracle’s temple would be like the domed buildings in her history books, but now she was confronted with a dense thicket of tree roots, a woven barricade of branches that stretched as high and wide as a fortress wall. It was hard to tell if it had been constructed or if it had simply grown up out of the swamp. At its center was an opening, a gaping mouth of darkness deeper and blacker than any starless sky. From it emanated a low, discordant hum, the hungry murmur of a hive, a hornet’s nest ready to crack open.

  Diana gathered her courage, adjusted her pack, and stepped onto a path of wet black stones that led to the entry, leaping from one to the next across water the dull gray of a clouded mirror, her sandals slipping over their glossy backs.

  The air near the entrance felt strangely thick. It lay heavy against her skin, da
mp and unpleasantly warm, wet as an animal’s lolling tongue. She lit the lantern hanging from her pack, took a shallow breath, and stepped inside.

  Instantly, the lamp went out. Diana heard whispering behind her and turned to see the roots knotting closed over the mouth of the tunnel. She lunged for the entrance, but it was too late. She was alone in the dark.

  Her heart set a jackrabbit pace in her chest. Over the vibrating insect hum, she could hear the vines and roots shifting around her, and she was suddenly sure they would simply close in, trapping her in the tangled wall forever.

  She forced herself to shuffle forward, hands held out before her. Her mother wouldn’t be afraid of a few branches. Tek would probably give those roots one withering look and they’d literally wither.

  The hum grew louder and more human, a sighing, keening sound that rose and fell like a child’s weeping. I’m not afraid. I am an Amazon and have nothing to fear from this island. But this place felt older than the island. It felt older than everything.

  Gradually, she realized the tunnel was sloping upward and that she could see the dim shapes of her hands, the woven-root texture of the walls. Somewhere up ahead, there was light.

  The tunnel gave way to a round room, its ceiling open to the sky. It had been late afternoon when Diana set out, but the sky she was looking at now was black and full of stars. She panicked, wondering if she’d somehow lost time in the tunnel, and then she realized that the constellations above her were all wrong. Whatever sky she was seeing, it was not her own.

  The bramble walls held torches alight with silver flames that gave no heat, and a moat of clear water ringed the room’s perimeter. At its center, on a perfectly flat circle of stone, a cloaked woman sat beside a bronze brazier hanging from a tripod by a delicate chain. In it, a proper fire burned vibrant orange, sending a plume of smoke into the star-strewn sky.

  The woman rose and her hood fell back, revealing coppery hair, freckled skin.