Copper Ravens

by Jennifer Allis Provost

  I glanced at my brother, and he nodded. Great. We’d been captured, drugged, interrogated, beaten, and then I find out that we’d also been followed by orcs and iron warriors, for who knows how long, and they had been on Old Stoney’s payroll. Could my day get any better?

  “Interesting words, Farthing Greymalkin, coming from one of stone who surrounds himself with iron warriors,” Micah observed.

  “We of earth and stone have always been stronger!” Old Stoney shouted, indicating the warriors before him. Their feet were held fast by fingers of living stone, thus keeping them in place when Micah would have flung them away. “We ruled the Elemental court for centuries! Nearly a millennium, until you of metal betrayed us!”

  “Fool, there was no betrayal,” Micah countered. “Those of stone had been challenged countless times for the right to rule us all. You merely despair now, because, the last time, you lost.”

  “And you now ally yourself with his children!” the granite madman continued.

  “Wait!” I shouted. Surprisingly, Old Stoney paid attention to me this time. “What about his children? What about my father?”

  His face split like a fissure carved out by a river long since dry. “He was our greatest rival, for all that he fell before us.”

  “Our?” I demanded, but Max got it right away.

  “Ferra,” he ground out. “You and Ferra killed my father?”

  “We did him one better,” Stoney said. “You recall when iron warriors attacked your prison, boy?” Max, too shocked to be offended, nodded. “That was your father’s feeble attempt to rescue you. We captured him ourselves and turned him over to the human magistrates.”

  And, just like that, we were all struck dumb. Now we knew that Dad hadn’t died when he’d stopped meeting with Max, and that he’d tried to rescue Max from the Institute, which meant that he had been alive just a few years ago. Thanks to Old Stoney, this was the first new information we’d had about my father in more than a decade.

  Thanks to Old Stoney, we now knew that he and Ferra had betrayed my father and turned him over to an enemy even worse than the two of them combined. Who knows what the Peacekeepers had done to him since then.

  “Disappointed that you allied yourself with a loser?” Mom said, her voice dead calm. “It must pain you, Greymalkin, to have betrayed your kind, only to watch Ferra falter and die.” Mom crossed her arms and raised her chin, her eyes glazed as if she was about to take on Old Stoney hand-to-hand. “Pity you weren’t there to watch her rust. It was a fitting end for one like her.”

  “Mom,” I warned.

  “Mom?” Stoney sneered. “Baudoin’s whore, here in the flesh?” He laughed, but Mom didn’t so much as flinch.

  “Don’t you dare talk about my mother that way!” I shouted. As Stoney opened his mouth for one of those “who do you think you are” retorts, the warriors before him melted. And when I say melted I mean melted, as if they were butter left out on a hot day. The pain behind my eyes told me that I was the one responsible, and that I was about to faint.

  “Sara,” Micah began, catching me about the waist. I shook my head in reply; I wanted his focus to remain on Old Stoney, not shift to me.

  “You’ve no one left to hide behind,” Mom observed. “So, Greymalkin, why don’t you tell me everything you know about my Beau, and I’ll consider letting you live.”

  Instead of speaking, Old Stoney grinned. Later, I understood that melted metal is similar to magma, the even hotter, liquid rock that flows beneath the earth’s surface, the stuff that’s called lava once it erupts from volcanoes. I would also understand that my reducing the iron warriors to their liquid states had given Stoney an idea, and that he was a diabolical man, more than a bit crazy, and that he had gone into this meeting knowing that he wasn’t coming out alive.

  Old Stoney raised his arms, and stone caps grew over the pools of cooling metal, far out of our reach. Stoney cackled, chilling my blood despite the great geysers of lava bursting from his feet. Max shouted something about not being able to reach the metal below the bedrock, and I felt Micah’s influence tug at the sword in my hand, saw his armor rattle against his limbs. Then Micah grabbed my shoulders and threw me behind him amidst a gale of oppressive heat and impossible loudness. I passed out before I hit the ground.

  25

  Black ash rained around me, like a dusting of dry, dirty snow. I brushed it away from my face, coughed a bit, then took a few deep breaths. I explored the ground with my fingertips, feeling for my sword; when I found it, the hilt didn’t seem right. Sluggishly, I realized that it was the sword Micah had fashioned from the iron manacles, not the beautiful weapon Ash had made especially for me.

  Micah. My last memory was of him shoving me away, and then…

  I struggled to a sitting position, shaking off more cinders in the process, and took in the scene around me. There was Sadie, lying on her side, but alive and breathing. Behind her, Max was helping Mom to her feet. Before us lay cooling puddles of iron and lava, belching great billowing clouds of steam, and beyond that was Old Stoney’s body, his chest cleaved in two by a mass of white metal. By a mass of silver.

  Where is Micah?

  “Micah?” No answer. “Micah? Micah Micah Micah Micah MICAH!”

  I remembered him standing on my left side, shoving me behind him and shouting. Now, all I could see was ash, blanketing the ground, no shapes that resembled bodies. I crawled forward, feeling with my hands, my feet, searching for any sign of him. At last, after far too long, I came upon a small heap of stones mixed in with the ash. I pushed the topmost layer aside, and found a hand.

  Gods, it could have been a corpse for how cold it was; the skin had already gone bluish. Still, I knew it was Micah, my Micah, and as I dug him out, my skin and nails tearing against the stones and cinders, I knew he wasn’t dead. He could not be dead. He was not allowed to be dead. When I unearthed his face, eyes closed and mouth slack, my heart almost stopped.

  “Silverkin!” I shrieked. If anyone knew how to help him, it would be the silverkin. Shep always knew what to do.

  “Sara.” I looked at the hand on my shoulder, unsure why it was there, and followed the attached arm up to Max’s face. His eyes were sad, resigned. “He’s gone. Let him rest.”

  “Not gone,” I said, holding Micah’s cold cheek against my neck. “He promised me he would be okay. He promised me we would leave together.”

  “Sara—”

  “Silverkin!” And then they were there, crowding around Micah and me like a diminutive cavalry. “Shep!” I called, finding their leader amongst the masses. “Shep, I don’t know how he’s hurt. Can you tell me?”

  “He’s sacrificed himself for you,” answered a gravelly voice. I turned and saw the crone hobble toward us through the clouds of steam. “He had nothing left, no weapons he could use against so great a foe, so he used his silver in your defense.”

  Her gray head nodded toward Micah’s chest; I looked and saw that his armor had melted away, leaving behind a bare expanse of skin. Then I looked to Old Stoney’s corpse, and the mass of silver that had killed him. I was awed by Micah’s sacrifice.

  “How do I help him?” I demanded, my tears mixing with the ash and stinging my eyes.

  “Oh, but if I told you, you’d surely owe me,” the crone sneered.

  “I’ll owe you!” I shrieked. “I’ll owe you anything! Just tell me how to save him!” Perhaps it was only the ash in my eyes, but I thought I caught a satisfied smile on the crone’s lips.

  “If he cannot manage to replenish his silver, and quickly,” she continued, “our Lord Silverstrand will not be able to heal himself, and he will surely die.”

  “Then how do we replenish him?” Before the crone could reply, the silverkin began molding themselves into a flat surface, the base for a silver cairn. I remembered when Oriana had been rescued from the Iron Court, and how she had been bound in golden chains, and gold had been piled upon her to replace the element she’d lost.

  If it work
ed with Oriana, it would work with Micah.

  It had to.

  He was not allowed to die.

  Methodically, I removed what was left of the iron armor from Micah’s body, then I helped the silverkin move him onto the silver platform. Without a moment’s hesitation, I lay down beside him as the silverkin fitted themselves together above us, like a tiny metal igloo. Dimly, I heard Sadie bawling, Max and Mom yelling for me to stay away, that I’d suffocate beneath all the silver. Honestly, I didn’t care. Micah needed me, so I was staying.

  I don’t know how long we were under the silver cairn, hours or days or maybe even years, before Micah twitched. I’d fallen asleep against his chest, my cheek against his throat, one hand laced into his while my other arm pillowed his head. Images floated behind my eyes, like a greatest hits episode of our short time together. The first time Micah had kissed me, both in a dream and in the flesh. The time I had been sick, and he’d brought me tea and toast in bed. The first time I’d felt his tongue against my mark.

  But then, the twitch.

  I held myself still, not quite believing that he’d moved, not breathing for fear I’d miss the next sign of life. Then, he twitched again.

  Carefully, I pulled myself up to look at his face, cast in a muted silver glow. His eyes flickered behind his lids; I hoped he was having a good dream, like I’d been, and not reliving his last few waking moments.

  “Micah,” I murmured, the silver cairn creating an odd echo. “Micah, please be all right. Please.” A tear splashed onto his cheek; as I wiped it away, he turned toward my hand.

  “Micah!” I kissed him, then held him close, then kissed him again.

  “Sara?” he croaked, his silver eyes slowly opening. “What…” He got a look at our silver ceiling, and began again. “Where are we?”

  “You used all of your silver to kill Stoney. The silverkin had to heal you.” He looked again to the cairn, recognition lighting in his eyes.

  “And you stayed with me?”

  “I did.” Micah brought my face directly before his, so close our noses touched.

  “Sara, you might not have survived this,” he whispered, his hand trembling as he stroked my hair. “Love, never put yourself in danger for me.”

  “Why not? You do it for me all the time.”

  Micah couldn’t really argue with that fact. “My copper girl,” he murmured, caressing my cheek. “My copper girl, who means more to me than my life.”

  After a few more moments of cuddling, Micah placed his hand flat against the roof of the cairn, which was evidently the signal for the silverkin to disperse. We blinked as we sat up, joints creaking, bathed in the bright sunlight. As we stretched the kinks from our bones, something on Micah’s arm caught my eye.

  “What’s this?” I asked, grabbing his wrist. There was a band of copper around his left wrist, spiraling up his arm like a ribbon.

  “And here,” Micah murmured, indicating my right wrist, which now bore a similar ribbon of silver. Somehow, during the healing process, we’d gotten marks of each other’s metal. “We are truly joined, my Sara.”

  I couldn’t help it, I laughed. Maybe I was a bit hysterical, being that Micah had nearly died, and his healing had involved both of us being buried alive under a mountain of metal, and we’d received permanent jewelry as a parting gift. Yeah, only a bit hysterical.

  “Better than rings, huh?” I teased.

  “But you will still give her one.” I turned and saw Mom, smiling, along with a worried Sadie and a pissed Max; the crone was nowhere in sight, thank the gods. Of course my family had waited here for us, though I wished they hadn’t. If this venture hadn’t worked out, I’d have hated for them to be burdened with two bodies.

  “I will, Maeve,” Micah murmured, gathering me against him. “On that, you have my word.”

  26

  Our return to the Whispering Dell was, thankfully, uneventful. I was concerned about leaving Old Stoney’s body out in the open, but Micah and Max both assured me that scavengers would be by to collect the metals and stone; Micah hadn’t even wanted the silver that had come from his own mark, claiming it was tainted. At least, if he was rebuilt into a shop, or maybe into an outhouse, Old Stoney would finally be doing something useful.

  Micah’s recovery was slower that I would have liked, but some things, like healing, can’t be rushed. Why they can’t be rushed no one could adequately explain to me, but as long as he got stronger every day, I held off my complaints. Since Micah still needed close contact with his metal in order to complete his healing, our bed had been transformed from the heavenly feather and down confection I so loved into a solid silver couch. It was the most uncomfortable thing I’d ever experienced, more like a torture device disguised as modern art that any sort of bed, far worse than even a corset could be.

  And every night I gladly laid myself down on that metal monstrosity, because it meant I was lying next to Micah.

  As much as I complained about the slow healing process, it only took six days of sleeping on metal before Micah proclaimed that his silver was fully restored. We then started taking daily walks, ranging a bit further each day until Micah could walk to the orchards and back without tiring. Then he started getting frisky again, chasing me around the orchards, leaping out from behind trees to capture me, weaving flower crowns as apologies for knocking me to the ground. It was as sure a sign as any that my Micah was going to be okay.

  One morning, after a late-night swim in the Clear Pool, I awoke alone. We’d gone back to sleeping in the real bed, which was so deep and luxurious that I slept late more often than not. On this morning, not only had Micah risen first, the silverkin were waiting for me.

  “What’s up?” I asked Shep. He chirruped and waved his hands, then quickly ushered me downstairs. I found my family lounging around the atrium, wearing their Sunday best along with a few smug grins. When I asked what was going on, they refused to answer and practically ordered me to have breakfast with Micah. Being that I was sore, sleepy, and starving, I took their advice.

  My pajama-clad self shuffled into the dining hall, where a lavish meal was set out on the long table. At the head of the table stood Micah, resplendently attired in the silver coat and black breeches he’d worn for our audience with the Gold Queen. He’d taken to wearing his sword again, and the sight of him made my mouth water almost as much as the food did.

  “What’s all this for?” I asked.

  Instead of answering, Micah pushed three copper pennies, each now brightly polished, toward me. “Make me a ring.” I stared at the pennies for a few moments, wondering why he had such a dire need for jewelry before we’d even had breakfast, when I all but lost my breath. “Today?”

  “Unless you’ve changed your mind,” he replied. I took that last step toward him and wrapped my arms around his neck.

  “No. Today is perfect.”

  And it was. We went to the chapel where Mom and Dad had been married, which, like so many other religious institutions, had been converted to a Hall of Records. Micah had thought to glamour the lot of us (unfortunately, he did not make Max into Maxine again), so the drones just passed obliviously overhead.

  After we’d spoken to the Peacekeeper on duty, a stiff little man called Corporal Rawson, and filled out the required forms, the ceremony got underway. My official paperwork said that I, Sara Evans, was marrying Mike Silver, but I didn’t care what a few scraps of paper said. All I cared about was the man waiting for me at the end of the aisle.

  “You ready?” Max asked. In Dad’s absence, he’d agreed to walk me down the aisle, though Sadie had balked when I’d asked her to be my flower girl.

  “Yeah,” I replied, tucking my fingers into his elbow.

  “Nervous?”

  “Nah. I can handle this.” With that, Max squeezed my fingers and led me to Micah.

  The Peacekeeper droned on for a bit, mostly about our duty to our government, but I hardly heard him. I don’t think Micah was paying much attention either, since when i
t came time for the vows, he had to be prompted.

  “Have you written your own vows?” the Peacekeeper repeated. Micah blinked, then he nodded.

  “I have.” Micah took my hands. “My Sara, my love. You are my reason for waking, for breathing, for being. From the first moment I saw you, you have intrigued me, infuriated me, enthralled me. You are mine, my Sara, for now and always.” He caressed my cheek, and then he pressed his lips to mine. “Always.”

  “Ahem.” Micah and I parted, and looked toward a slightly peeved Corporal Rawson. “The kiss comes after her vows.”

  “My apologies,” Micah said, stepping back from me. “Please. Continue.”

  Rawson huffed a bit, then he turned to me. “Your vows, please.”

  I looked at Micah, searching his guise of Mike Silver, wondering what I could possibly say that would explain how I felt. Then I saw the glint in his silver eyes, and I realized that I didn’t need to explain anything. Micah had always known that I loved him, and that I always would.

  “I love you,” I murmured, lacing my fingers with his. “I’m yours.”

  Rawson cleared his throat again; these were not Peacekeeper-approved vows. Rather than berate us for not being properly prepared, he decided to hurry us along. “The rings?”

  With that, I squeezed my hand around the pennies. A moment later, I slipped a copper band that mimicked an oak leaf onto his finger. Micah smiled, then took my breath away as he produced a silver ring shaped like two twisted silver vines, crowned with a deep green emerald. If we ever get this elemental royalty business sorted out, Micah and I have a definite future in jewelry design.

  “May I kiss her now?” Micah asked, once the ring was on my finger.

  “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” intoned Corporal Rawson, while Sadie cried and Mom beamed. Even Max looked happy. “You may kiss the bride.”

  Micah swept me into his arms. “Bride,” he murmured as he kissed me. “My bride.”