I stagger, and Demetrios reels me back by my elbow. “He goads you into another foolish attack, Anjeni.”
“No. He spoke truth. He’ll kill us all on his own power if he gets the chance.”
My solemnity strikes a chord. Demetrios aids me to the cliff’s edge, where the Helenai and their allies line the ridge that overlooks the canyon. Only a handful of my spark-bearers are proficient enough with the superlatives to influence the enemy camp afar. Nearest to me, Ineri strains amid a cluster of warriors.
She spots my approach from the corner of her eyes. The bodies between us fall away to cut me a path.
“Goddess, their magicians steal back control of the sparks almost as soon as I can grasp them. The conflict is dying, and we have accomplished so little against an army so great.”
The enemy fires yet burn like pinpricks in the darkness. Flares spring up but die out just as quickly. Somewhere down there, Agoros found safety enough to project into our encampment. He is out and away from his army, that must mean, with however many magicians and foot soldiers he could rally around him.
If he comes against us on his own power, he has no need for the warring host he has left behind.
“Anjeni!” Demetrios grabs my shoulder, but he’s too late to stop me.
The eighth superlative of magic is that it amplifies all discernible sparks. Unite and intensify power from afar.
Before my eyes, at my command, the pinpoints of light explode. They splatter outward to create an ocean of fire. A hush falls around me as some ten thousand enemy soldiers perish in one furious attack. My beast of magic roars into the darkness, and yet I push for more power, for more destruction, until the shaking of my limbs renews and the burning flames jitter in my vision. The fire resembles a lava plain. Its brightness illuminates ant-like figures that flee the enormous blaze. The eighth superlative falters on my fingertips.
And then I lose my hold upon it. The massive blaze winks out as swiftly as it ignited.
My knees strike rock. I catch myself on my palms, blinking in surprise, staring at the earth upon which I’ve unwittingly collapsed. Static rings in my ears, blocking all other sound.
Demetrios kneels beside me, but he does not touch me. In shock, I turn to view him. He regards me with apprehension. All others have backed away, giving me wide berth. Many lie in prone worship, oblivious to my tattered state or the exchange of power that just occurred. My mouth moves to utter a warning: another presence wicked away my attack. Agoros yet comes to destroy.
But I cannot form a single word.
Panic rises as my vision fades. I grasp at Demetrios, and he catches me before I can crumple to the ground.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Music floats upon the night. I awaken to the dimness of my tent and the sounds of merriment afar. My pulse quickens in my veins and I sit bolt upright.
“Goddess? What’s wrong?”
The low fire casts Ineri in pale orange light, illuminating her alert expression.
“What time is it? How long have I slept?”
She untangles her legs and rises. “It is fourth watch. Dima instructed me—”
I tear from my bedding before she can finish her sentence. Ineri cries out a warning that I disregard. Instead, I summon my spark to quench the meager flames at the center of my tent. “Put out the fire. Put out all the fires in the encampment.”
Darkness floods the enclosure, but I have already stumbled to the exit, with Ineri close behind me.
“Goddess—”
“Agoros yet lives,” I say. The larger fire outside my tent lies low. The warriors who sleep around it lift their heads in groggy confusion as I intrude upon their space. The embers go black on my command—the third superlative, which diminishes an unconnected spark.
Through the trees, other areas dance with light and song. The star-strewn sky overhead fades with the first signs of a coming dawn.
Ineri has already darted to Etricos’s tent. I follow her, entering on her heels as she announces that I am awake. Etricos stands from behind his table. Demetrios casts off the covers from his bed in the corner.
“Anjeni, you should not be up,” Etricos says.
I extinguish the fire in their tent but leave a small oil lamp on the table burning. Its yellow flame throws us all into deep shadows. “Agoros may be upon us at any moment.”
Etricos stiffens. “He lives?”
“Yes,” I say, with all certainty. When my magic failed upon the cliff, the fiery plains should have burned until their fuel was spent. Their immediate extinction came at the hands of a powerful magician as a threat from afar: whatever I might set ablaze, he could snuff.
The destruction of the Bulokai army occurred before second watch. Agoros has had most of the night to skulk across the scrubby plains and up the Red Cliffs.
Etricos, thankfully, accepts my assertion without further question. “Ineri, gather the other spark-bearers. Send out a call to extinguish all fires and ready for an attack.”
Ineri darts into the night. Etricos threads his sword through his belt and follows, but when I move behind him, Demetrios catches my elbow.
“Have you eaten?”
Is he serious right now? I goggle up at him, but he meets my incredulous stare with flat resolve.
“I told Ineri to feed you the moment you woke up. You need your strength.” He presses a pair of wafers into my hand, the thin, hard bread that the Helenai warriors carry as provisions.
“I can’t—”
“Eat,” he says, in a tone that tells me I’m not going anywhere until I comply.
I break off a piece and put it in my mouth. “Agoros might come at any time,” I say around it.
“Then eat quickly,” Demetrios replies. He straps his sword and his knives in place. “We need you to be strong. Cosi instructed for everyone to remain on guard tonight, but the other tribes ignored his counsel and celebrated your victory instead. Their strength will be spent. Are you rested, Anjeni?”
The tremors that wracked my body last night have all but subsided, with only the faintest sense at the back of my mind that they yet linger. “Yes. You?”
He nods, his hand firm upon my elbow. “We watched over you in shifts. Before you collapsed, you looked at me with such alarm. I thought you were dying.”
“I tried to tell you that Agoros was still out there.”
He nods and guides me from the tent. The Helenai warriors have dispersed to other areas of the encampment. Commotion disrupts the music that dances upon the night breeze, revelers incensed at having their celebrations curtailed.
I exercise a third superlative on each of the blazes I can see, snuffing out their flames into darkness. More protests sound from the shadows. From further up the cliff, a shriek carries on the wind.
I whirl. A pillar of flames shoots into the air and explodes, rocketing fireballs back down into our midst. I deflect them into the trees. They crash in a spray of sparks, a dozen hungry infernos amid shouts and screams of terror.
“Let the forest burn,” Demetrios says before I can summon the superlative that will quench the flames. He drags me into a run toward the source. “Save your energy for Agoros himself.”
Bodies stream the opposite direction as we run. The revelers, unprepared, flee into the darkness of the woods as their encampment ignites. To my horror, warriors of the Bulokai follow them, weapons raised and battle cries upon their lips. Whatever army I may have destroyed, Agoros mustered enough of a remnants to mount a formidable attack. Ahead of me, Demetrios hews down those who block our path, his deadly sword precise.
I spy Ria and Aitana working to quell the blazes that have erupted and pause to call out to them. “Search out the enemy magicians! Go!”
They exchange a glance, but I can’t linger to see whether they will obey. Demetrios backtracks two steps and grabs me by the wrist to urge me onward.
Fires blaze against the fading stars, erupting through the trees to lick the sky. Embers shimmer around us as we emerge from
the forest to the cliff’s edge, where inky blackness swathes the plains below. A rim of daylight glimmers on the far horizon. Smoke and the scent of charred wood fill my nostrils.
“Over there!” Demetrios points further up the cliff, where shadows stalk against a flickering backdrop.
I wrench at the flames behind them, but another presence tugs the spark in the opposite direction. The battle of wills lasts only a split-second before I drop my attempt. “He’s there,” I say, and I dart up the incline.
Silhouettes emerge from the darkness, their weapons raised. Demetrios whirls into their midst, his deadly thrusts rebuffing the attack. “Go,” he shouts.
I press up the hill. A spark flares in the night, an enemy magician lurking along my path. Before I can snatch it away, the spark rebounds, consuming the man in flames as he shrieks in agony. Through the trees I glimpse Ineri ducking back into shadows in search of her next prey.
At the highest point of the cliff, an enormous, livid fire rages. It bathes me in vibrant white light as heat ripples the air. I move closer to the tree line, where searing flames consume the upper branches.
A ring of magicians surrounds a central figure, feeding their power to him. Agoros sees me coming. An arc of white-hot fire lashes toward me, but I catch it and fling it back upon his minions. The force of my reaction picks off two men and tosses them into the inferno.
Shock zips through me. They cannot defend themselves because their master controls their spark. This application of the eighth superlative creates a strong central figure but renders those who donate their power vulnerable to attack.
And Agoros knows it. His hard expression does not flinch at the loss of two magicians.
The blistering heat intensifies. It drowns out the frenzied noise of the encampment behind me. Agoros and I face, he in his cage of underlings and I on my own. When he speaks, his voice carries as though we stand alone in a silent room.
“The goddess of the Helenai looks so much smaller in the flesh.”
I lift my chin. “As does the tyrant king of the Bulokai.”
A sneer crosses his face. “I’ve come as promised to rain death upon you and your people.”
Flames rush the space between us. I force them into the air to dissipate, still processing the best way to fight this fiend and his borrowed strength.
Agoros laughs. “No counter-attack? You must know you can’t defeat me. I labored for this power, clawed my way into its depths, faced my own mortality before it would recognize me as its master. No upstart child can fathom its true capabilities.”
Another wall of flames rips across the earth. I halt it with a superlative, but I cannot wrest full control of it away from the madman.
I am not strong enough. Agoros, like me, is a volcano among rivers.
A cry rips from my throat. I strain against the onslaught of power. To my left, something flits through the wall of white flames. A magician in the ring pitches to one side, and the strength of the magical attack falters in my favor. The blaze hurtles as a ball into the sky, casting the forest and the plains below in mock-daylight for a scant few seconds.
The fallen magician has a knife through his neck. A second knife—from my right this time—picks off another. Agoros screams and lashes fire toward the unseen attackers, only for yet another knife to fly from the left into his midst.
Magic bursts from the Bulokai formation, a fifth intermediate that cuts like an expanding circular blade through the air. I warp the radial attack but fail to deflect it. As I duck my head, it rakes across my arm and neck and slams me into the ground.
The beast within howls. I fling myself aside to dodge a third intermediate. Movement in my periphery catches my attention.
Through the flames, Etricos leaps, sword drawn, and cuts down one of the remaining magicians. Agoros spins, a spell on his fingertips. Demetrios ducks in from the opposite direction as white-hot power sends his brother airborne.
Dread envelops me. A warning cry wrenches from my throat. Demetrios fells another magician, but Agoros turns upon him. I lunge from the ground, my hands moving to protect against the tyrant’s attack even as it forms. The magic curves and stabs the chest of one more Bulokai minion. The inferno around Agoros diminishes from white-blue to orange-red.
Even so, he hurtles Demetrios toward the cliff’s edge in a fiery burst. I shriek, my feet pounding across the charred earth. A swipe of my wrist fells the last two magicians. Agoros whirls as I barrel into him. We land hard, and I rake my fingernails down his face.
His outrage multiplies. “You think you’re a match for me, little girl?” He shoves me away in another explosion.
Stars dance before my eyes. My hair sticks to the side of my face, where sweat and bloodied flesh mingle. Power flares around me, and my focus narrows.
Control. I must control it.
Everything and nothing converged into one universal whole.
Agoros and I both crouch upon the ground, our eyes fixed upon one another as we wrest for command of the maelstrom around us.
He bares his teeth in a snarl. “Submit. You must submit. You will submit!”
But I am stubborn, defiant, refusing to cooperate. For once in my life, this is my strength instead of my weakness. Without his minions to siphon power from, Agoros and I are close enough to equal.
Two savage volcanos carving destruction in our paths.
But only one of us is willing to die for victory.
I scream. The beast within me screams. The universe itself screams, and the hateful eyes of Agoros bulge. Blazing whiteness overspreads us both, so vivid that my head might shatter.
All is white. A million stars collide, and I evaporate into the radiant aftermath.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Birds chirp. Their sickening joy drags me from my blissful nothingness. My eyelids refuse to open even a crack.
But I have eyelids, which means that I’m probably not dead.
A groan tightens in my throat. There is scuffling, and then someone grips my hand. Cool fingers cradle the left side of my face.
“Anjeni? Are you awake?”
Oh, how I love the sound of his voice. It’s worth the effort to pry my eyes open just to glimpse him.
“Don’t move,” Demetrios says, and he strokes my cheek. I squeeze his other hand in mine. He looks terrible—haggard and exhausted, with at least three days of growth on his chin and a bloodied scab across his forehead.
It’s a burn mark. It glistens with a salve that smells of heavy herbs. They should have bandaged it, at least.
I try to speak, but my lingering fatigue weighs too heavy on me. Demetrios raises my knuckles to his lips and kisses them. His thumb rubs my cheekbone as his fingers thread into my hair.
I close my eyes and revel in the intimate touch. Sleep reclaims me in a gentle wave.
He is still beside me when I wake again. My eyes flutter open, and I look upon the circular vent above, where smoke curls out to a cloud-tufted sky. A sigh escapes my lungs. The world seems a tranquil place.
“What time is it?” I ask, my voice in a croak.
“Afternoon,” he replies. He holds a cup near my mouth. “Can you sit up to drink?”
Rather than allow me my own attempt, he braces my back with his free arm and lifts me upright. The liquid—a watery, vinegary mix—slides down my throat and invigorates my limbs. I try to take the cup from him, but my right arm moves stiffly. Bandages envelop it all the way down to my fingers.
I stare in wonder at the linen strips.
“The burns should heal,” Demetrios says.
“Burns?” I echo, catching on the plural. “Where else?”
His mouth tightens in a frank line. Gently he touches my neck from my collarbone up to my ear. Only I can’t feel his fingers through the bandages there. Panic wells within me. Demetrios intercepts my hand before I can explore the area.
“They will heal, Anjeni,” he says, his voice firm. “Ineri comes twice a day to change your dressing and apply the burn
ointment. Baba sent a whole crock of it with us after all the accidents on Cosi’s raids, and you have first priority.”
His words fail to allay my anxiety. “How long have I slept?”
“Almost a week, love.”
“And the others? Etricos? Aitana?”
“Alive and injured, both of them.”
“Ria?” I ask.
He shakes his head, a carefully controlled movement.
Tears spring to my eyes. I squash my instinctive grief in pursuit of further information. “What of my other spark-bearers?”
Demetrios settles nearer to me. “The younger ones—those who could not work the superlatives—retreated into the forest. They fought off the wave of foot soldiers that Agoros brought with him and survived. The others…” He fixes me with a steady gaze and decides on a blunt response. “We lost seven spark-bearers to the attack.”
My breath catches. With the fury that Agoros brought, seven is so few, but it is too many. These were my students. “And how many others?” I ask on a whisper.
He leans in and kisses my cheek. I tighten my grip on his hand before he can withdraw. “How many others died, Demetrios?”
Reluctance colors his voice. “Hundreds. Among the Helenai, a third of our warriors. Among our allies, more than two-thirds. Those who fled to the woods escaped the blazes that swept through the camp.”
A sob works up my throat. Demetrios leans close again and whispers fervent words.
“Agoros is dead and the Bulokai scattered. Our sacrifice was not in vain.”
He wipes my tears and gently takes me into his arms, so that I can cry my sorrow upon his shoulder.
Agoros brought death, as he promised he would. I am lucky not to be numbered among the fallen, but I don’t deserve such luck when I failed to protect so many.
The Bulokai encampment is a patchwork of black against the scrubby plains. Etricos has pilfered from its ruins anything that survived my monstrous attack. He rides daily with the most able-bodied warriors to hunt down any remnants of the enemy, but by now they have fled this part of the land.
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