Felling Kingdoms (Book 5)

by Jenna Van Vleet

  “Barbaric!”

  “How would you propose?”

  Lael raised his hands. “This is not a debate of how we should but should we. At this point we prolong it for our selfish wishes, but we know there is no way around this.”

  “The Ring of Rebirth,” Cordis said quietly. “I will do it.”

  The Council held its breath and looked at Lael.

  “The Ring…had one use. It fell apart shortly after it was used.”

  “Can Mage Malain create a new pattern to mimic the old?” Penny whispered.

  “He is a Water mage.” Lael shook his head. “The Ring used a Spirit pattern.”

  Cordis wilted, his one hope lost.

  “We will vote. All in favor of…killing the Head Mage.”

  Lael raised his hand first, his head lowered. Slowly Lewis, Galloway, Adelaide, Markus and Penny raised their hands. To the great surprise of the Council, Cordis raised his hand, burying his face in his other.

  “Let the records show a six to four vote in favor of ending the Head Mage’s life.”

  Mikelle scribbled furiously in her book.

  “Oh, Cordis,” Aisling whispered and extended her hand across the table to grip his.

  “He would not want to live like this, Aisling,” Cordis replied, tears streaking his worn face. “I cannot let my boy suffer.”

  “You are stronger than I,” she breathed, tears in her eyes.

  “We must move to the selection of another Head Mage,” Lael slid in.

  “Has Gabriel named a successor?” Galloway asked.

  “He has. Mikelle.”

  Mikelle’s pen made a sharp line across the page and skittered across the table. Her head snapped up after several long heartbeats. “Is he cognizant?”

  “Quite so.”

  “He’s out of his mind. I cannot be Head Mage.”

  “That is why we vote. Your loyalty and honesty has made quite an impact on him.”

  “I cannot sit the Seat after him.”

  “Let us discuss it,” Lael said with a waved hand. “Please submit nominations. We will start with Galloway.”

  Lael sat back down, but they heard a scuffle in the hall. Something heavy fell. The door burst open suddenly, and the tall Gaelsin from the tunnels stepped in. He looked far different from the man that could hardly walk two days ago. He stood straight with his golden hair washed, his handsome face shaved, and his muscular body clad in a short pale green coat that shimmered in the sunlight.

  Lael’s heart caught in his throat, for behind him stepped Pike Bronwen, his yellow shirt splattered with blood and his bearded face grinning. ‘Oh stars.’

  “I am Dorian Lark,” the golden-haired man grinned. “Pleased to meet you.”

  The room exploded in a dozen patterns.

  The Council stood amidst falling plaster and choking air, and time seemed to slow. Patterns flung from those that could retaliate. Aisling fell back in her chair, her eyes wide as Cordis jumped to his feet screaming her name. He crumpled a moment later, his neck whipped around morbidly.

  Lewis slumped forward on the table a second after he stood, blocking the attack that came for Penny. Her chair exploded in a shower of splinters as she ducked. Adelaide caught the attack in the face and chest, falling over the side of her chair screaming with a dozen spikes protruding from her body. Penny stood with a green pattern in her hands and threw it forward, but she was flung back in a spray of blood as soon as it fueled.

  Dagan was on his feet instantly and dashing behind a pillar. He ripped the tiles from under the Arch Mages, causing a momentary distraction as Markus flung rods of air at them. Markus caught a pattern in the center of his chest, throwing him across the table. He laid bleeding and gasping, his beautiful gray coat becoming dark brown rapidly. Dagan suddenly found himself wrapped to the pillar with thorny vines that constricted. He screamed amidst the sound of cracking bone and fell silent, slumping in his binds.

  Galloway stood before Challis flinging Lannon-seep-patterns, trying to pull the water out of the Arch Mages, but an attack came from his side, slamming into his hip. Bone broke in a sickening crunch, and he was thrown over the table. Challis screamed angrily, a berg-blast in each hand. Mikelle grabbed the woman and pulled her back, but there was no place to run.

  It happened in seconds, but it seemed as though the whole scene played out slow minutes before Lael. It sped up the moment he took the strike in the left shoulder. Pain ripped up him, pain like he never fathomed, and he looked down. His arm was almost completely torn from his shoulder. A deep gash cut all the way through him breaking the collar bone in half.

  He fell back as shock set in, enveloped in the pulverized plaster that sprinkled around him. He could no longer feel his arm, but the warm sensation of blood bloomed in his clothes.

  Mikelle fell back against the wall, gripping with both arms a horrid gash in her gut. She screamed, “SHAUN!” and slumped to her side silently.

  Challis ran to the wall, bracing herself with a good arm. The other hung bloodied by her side. Dorian marched forward, banishing her patterns with ease. He grabbed her arm and jerked her face to his. “Your kingdom is next,” he whispered through the cacophony of screaming. “Pike, let us be goin’.”

  Pike stepped over Lael and surveyed the carnage with a satisfied expression. His eyes became white, and he grabbed Challis’s other arm. With a weave of black strings, they vanished. Her scream of protest suddenly cut off.

  Lael had a moment of clarity, knowing the castle would dissolve into chaos without a single leader and would fall by sunset. Blackness took him.

  Chapter 18

  Shaun’s head shot up at the sound of the explosion, and he threw up a hand to stall his sparring partners. He held his breath as he turned his attention and patterns to the Lodge. A moment later heard Mikelle scream his name.

  He tore off the roof of the training ground and raced straight towards the Lodge. Throwing patterns before him, he ran across solid air, hair and clothes whipping around him.

  The Council Hall was built on the west side of the Lodge. Its windows faced inside the castle, and he knew where they were just by the screaming. His keen ears picked it up with amplified patterns.

  He tucked his legs up and ducked his head as he jumped through one of the beautiful stain-glass windows, pushing the air around him to prevent the shards from cutting. He landed solidly on the table in the center, and immediately a hundreds sensations shocked his senses.

  Blood, plaster, smoke, and cooking meat assaulted his sense of smell. Moaning, gasping, crying, screaming, and gurgling raped his ears. He spun, his rotating pattern searching out Mikelle, all the while recognizing the bodies and faces he around him.

  “Shaun,” he heard a breathless whisper only his ears could pick up. His head snapped to Mikelle, launching off the table. Her hands clamped down on her stomach as her breaths came in slow gasps.

  Panicked, he put threw together an amplifier-pattern and shot it out to the castle. “Every healer needs to come to t’ Council Hall immediately. RUN!” He wrapped a condensing-pattern around Mikelle as he spoke, holding her wound closed and keeping her hands clamped over it. “Don’t move,” he whispered. Blood pressed against the solidified air as it filled the spaces. It would stay within as long as he fueled the pattern.

  He went to Lael beside him. The left shoulder had nearly been severed from his torso, and he was surrounded by a bloody halo, but he lived. Shaun sealed the wound with another condensing-pattern and went to Markus on the table with a terrible chest gash. The man was unconscious and bathed in blood, but Shaun wrapped a pattern around him too.

  “Aisling,” someone whispered, and he looked across the room to a man on the floor he recognized as Gabriel’s father. “Oh, stars, Aisling!”

  Two men ran in and stopped suddenly, surveying the carnage. One turned to retch while the other found his bearing and ran to a woman on the floor.

  Shaun tried to drown out the sounds of a man and a woman screaming behind
him. The woman had wood impaled all over her, and the man had distorted hips and legs. A woman ran in, followed by several more in mantles. Shaun recognized the healer’s sign, and he almost breathed a sigh of relief.

  Afton rushed in with them, not pausing for a moment.

  “Here!” he called to her, and she rushed around the table. “Please, it’s Mikelle.”

  “I have to heal t’ose wit’ t’ worst damage.”

  “I know,” he said and grabbed her arm, dragging her to his slumped love. He pulled Mikelle to her back, her wound staying closed. Afton twined her hands over her.

  “Bloody stars,” she breathed.

  “You can heal her?”

  Afton made no reply and flicked her hands back and forth, laying patterns he could not see. Slowly, the wound closed.

  The room filled with mantled Mages. A Councilman strapped to a pillar came down in pieces. His body was bent in horrible ways. An Earth Mage stood over the screaming woman, pulling wood from her body. Two others held her down and flicked their hands over her. The man beside her had fallen unconscious, and three were deliberating about his bone structure that apparently pulverized from the hips to the ankles. Another four knelt around Lael with blank faces, trying to decide how to repair him.

  “Afton, we will need you on this one,” a man nodded to her.

  “Of course,” she replied, quickly stitching Mikelle shut.

  “How bad is it?” he whispered to her, holding Mikelle’s head.

  “T’ey cut clean down to her spine. I’m repairing her gut,” she said distractedly.

  The Mages working on Lael suddenly stopped their mending. A man straddled him and gave chest compressions while a woman pulled his head back and breathed into his lungs.

  “Can anyone beat a heart?” the man shouted. Shaun stood and pulled the woman off Lael, slipping a pattern into his lungs to breathe for him. A slender slip of a girl rushed up and opened and closed her hand, beating the heart slowly.

  “Are you holding the wound closed?”

  Shaun looked down to the man. “Aye, mate.”

  “We’ll need you to stay with him a while longer. This is going to take a mite bit longer than I thought to mend.”

  “Do not rush. With t’ Head Mage down, t’is man holds Jaden.”

  The man nodded knowingly.

  “Oh, stars, she is dead.”

  Shaun had brushed over the bodies that did not move when he entered, but now that dozens of healers gathered, he was able to scan the room better. He noticed far too many of them did not move.

  “What is she called?” he asked.

  “This is Penny Lannon,” a man replied.

  Someone suddenly screamed in horror, and Shaun saw a woman turn over a man on the table. “Lewis! Oh stars! He’s dead!”

  The room fell silent for a moment as faces turned and gaped. Even Afton paused to lower her head. The Mages returned to their work, but the sounds of muffled crying could be heard amidst the instructions and orders.

  “Aisling!” Cordis shouted again. He laid on his back surrounded by several Mages. One held his head steady. “Stars, someone tell me if she lives!”

  Shaun, kept the breath-pattern flowing smoothly through Lael and stepped around the chaos. He passed Penny and Lewis. He slowly stood before a woman on her back thrown from an upturned chair. Dust had settled on her twisted-up hair and opened eyes.

  “By my lady,” he whispered in a curse.

  He turned to Cordis. The man lay unmoving, but his eyes flitted back and forth through the room. Tears streamed from the sides. He met Shaun’s eyes. Shaun took a knee and picked up Cordis’s limp hand.

  “Aisling is dead,” he whispered.

  “No,” Cordis breathed. “Are you sure. Did you check her heartbeat? Check again, stars, Shaun, check again please!”

  Shaun thinned his lips and controlled his emotions as best as he could. “She is dead.”

  “How?” Cordis wept, losing control of his strength.

  “T’ere is no outside damage. I don’t know.”

  Someone arrived with a stretcher, and the Mages moved around Cordis to lift him.

  “I’m so sorry, Cordis,” Shaun whispered and set Cordis’s hand on the stretcher.

  “Shaun,” Afton called. Shaun was by her side in a moment. “She is stable. She lost a great deal of blood t’ough, and I don’t know how her body will handle the shock. Stretcher over here, please! You can released t’ pattern around her.”

  Shaun stooped to Mikelle’s face and brushed it gently with a hand. “Will she walk?”

  “She is better off t’an two others in here. Time will tell.”

  Mages came to lift Mikelle onto a stretcher, and Afton took Shaun’s sleeve before he could follow. “I need you here,” she reminded as she knelt beside Lael. “T’is…is very bad.”

  “Can you put t’ blood back in him?”

  She shook her head. “Bacteria, coagulation. It is waste.” She held her hands over the tip of the wound buried in his chest. “Stars, his lung.” Her hands flew, pushing and pulling, and slowly Shaun’s breath-pattern filled more space. She hunched over him for what felt like an hour. People moved slowly around her, lending healing where she directed. The healers carried the remaining Council out, dead or alive, stable or unconscious, to the infirmary where they could work in cleaner conditions.

  Afton leaned back to adjust her position. The shoulder was slowly coming together one thread of muscle at a time. The collarbone had already been reformed. Shaun could feel the inner workings of the shoulder, and it made him cringe.

  “Where….” A man stood in the center of the room slowly rotating. “Where is Queen Challis?”

  The room became tense. “She was not here?”

  “I saw her in the castle.”

  “I sidestepped her here.”

  “Was…was she obliterated?”

  “Stars, Kylex, no. There is not enough blood for that.”

  “Did she escape?”

  The Mages broke in a frantic search, looking through every nearby room for the woman.

  “I arrived moments after it started. She was not here,” Shaun offered.

  “She was taken? We don’t even know who did this!”

  Shaun cleared his throat. “Has anyone checked t’ dungeons recently? Because we should have an Arch Mage in t’em.”

  “All the Council has been destroyed!” a man challenged. “Arch Mages, Castrofax, and now this! There is no recovering from this.”

  Shaun held his hands up. “If you let yourselves be lost to t’is, t’ Arch Mages already won. T’ey intended to break us here, but I will not give t’em t’ satisfaction.” He stepped up and gripped the man by the shoulders. “Permit yourself a moment of panic, t’en remember you are a Mage of Jaden. We are unbreachable.”

  The room fell deathly silent.

  Finally, the man nodded in acquiescence.

  “Good man.” Shaun clapped his shoulders and turned back to the Secondhand.

  “Mage Shaun?” someone asked after a moment. He turned with raised brows. “What do we do now?”

  Shaun did not hesitate. “Prepare t’ bodies for burial. We can only assume t’ Arch Mages left wit’ Queen Challis, but we need more sentries t’rough t’ castle regardless. A sweep needs to be performed of t’ castle. I want a sidesteppin’ team in Viorica to report t’ outcome. If t’ey took t’ Queen, I warrant t’ey plan to take Cinibar. I will discuss t’is wit’ t’ Head Mage, and address t’ castle later.

  “In t’ meanwhile, return to your quarters and kiss your loved ones extra hard tonight.”

  The Mages nodded and followed his orders. Shaun turned back to Lael, breathing into the man’s chest.

  “I never knew you were t’ leader type,” Afton said quietly.

  “I spent years raisin’ a resistance against t’ King while you were inside Anarma drinkin’ tea.”

  She paused. “My life is far from glamorous. You forget I control Void.”

  Shau
n did not know what that meant, so he remained standing.

  Afton finally leaned back. “I cannot work anymore. He requires more attention, but I have no more energy to give.”

  The shoulder remained open, but the main damage was healed. “What color is he?”

  The woman beating the heart looked up. “White.”

  “How white?” Afton asked.

  “Head-Mage-cloak white.”

  She nodded. “Get him to t’ infirmary. I will rest and continue work in an hour.”

  Mages loaded the Secondhand on a stretcher. Shaun and the petite heart-beater followed at a distance.

  The attack had sustained quite a crowd, and the halls were flanked with on-looking Mages desperate for answers. Some gasped when they saw Lael, others stoically silent. Others saw the two patterns keeping him alive, and they broke into teary eyed panic. Shaun had a lot of damage to repair.

  The infirmary was awash with Mages performing a task. A man somewhere screamed in pain, but for the most part it was quiet. Solemn faces moved with purpose around each other like a morbid death dance.

  “I need an Air Mage to breathe for t’is man,” Shaun said as he caught a passing woman’s arm.

  “Of course, Mage Shaun.”

  He hardly knew anyone in the castle, especially Jaden Mages. But after his Classing, everyone knew him. It occurred to him that he was the highest Classed Mage in the castle. Like it or not, leadership fell to him. His shoulders were heavy, but it was a weight he could carry.

  He followed Lael into a room where they transferred him to a bed. Afton trailed wearily from behind.

  “I need someone to close t’is for me,” she said to a man within the room. “Councilman Galloway’s legs and pelvis were pulverized, and I need to rebuild his bones.” She flinched as a cry of pain rang through the building. “Excuse me.” She slipped out, and a minute later the screaming cut off mid-cry.

  “Mage Shaun, I can take over the breath,” a man said as he stepped in. Shaun transferred the pattern and patted the man’s shoulder in thanks.

  He wound his way through the hall searching for Mikelle. He found her in a quiet part of the floor. A woman sat beside her attentively washing blood from her body. She was stripped but modestly covered.