“Thank you, Master Savar,” I said quietly, as I moved back to the other door. “But you haven’t failed me. Your plan would never have worked.”
His grey eyes sparked with something akin to understanding, as if he knew my answer before he even voiced his question.
“Why is that?” His silver eyebrow quirked the barest of inches.
“I am dangerous. The longer I stay here, facing any kind of threat… The clearer that will become.”
The journey back to the border was uneventful, made almost intolerable as I had been forced to say goodbye to Cale and Rose back at the Academy and I had no idea when I would have a chance to see them again. They deposited me in the clearing and then melted back into the trees, and I walked to the border, trying to hold my head up high. Teddy, Quick and Sweet were waiting for me, which meant that they had learned I was coming somehow.
“What happened to your face?” Sweet asked without preemption.
“People have been throwing rocks at me all day.”
“Well I don’t think things are about to get any easier. We’re to take you to Castle Nest East for your Throne Test. Everyone is already waiting.”
I mounted another horse and we travelled not toward where I knew to be the entrance to Castle Nest, but instead over the eastern crest of the hill that it sat at the base of. Below us stretched a wing of Castle Nest, which I hadn’t yet seen. In the center of it was a huge arena, and judging by the noise that floated up to us, everyone really was waiting. The arena was a dark stone monstrosity. Flagless flagpoles spiked along the top in a menacing greeting, and the surroundings had been completely cleared of any evidence that there was a synfee empire beyond its sparse valley—despite the fact that it sounded as if the entire synfee civilisation had amassed within its curved walls. I followed Teddy down the hill and along a barely-there path, which navigated the rare thicket of shrubbery, thin stream or sapling nest, to a guarded outer building attached to the arena, where we were admitted.
“Lady Beatrice.” Grenlow spotted me first and strode forward. “Are you ready? What happened to your face?”
“It looks better that way,” Ayleth stated with unblemished boredom.
I gritted my teeth, taking in Dain, Ashen, Isolde, Cereen and Rohan, who all stood about the room in various poses of lazy respite. They didn’t look too worried, so I decided I’d try not to be either.
“Don’t worry about it, I’m sure it looks worse than it is,” I muttered.
“Are you hurt anywhere else?” Isolde asked.
I thought about that, and then lifted my shirt. There was a mottle of three or four purple and blue bruises scattered across my stomach, spreading up to the right side of my ribcage. I poked one of them and then held in a wince.
“Still looks worse than it is, I’ll be fine.”
Isolde looked doubtful, and then she shrugged, waving her hand in my direction. “Let’s get on with it then.”
Grenlow produced a large syringe and then held his hand out to me. I stared at the syringe, and then to his hand, and tried to stop myself from taking a step backwards in cowardice.
Ashen spoke up. “It’s a tracing device, girl. Without it, the mirrors won’t work, and we won’t be able to monitor your progress.”
“What mirrors?” I asked, hesitantly giving Grenlow my arm.
The needle pierced my skin, and I grimaced.
“You’re in the famous mirrored arena, Lady Queen,” Dain said. “Did they not teach you anything at that Academy?”
“I wasn’t there for long.”
“The mirrors display your progress throughout the test, no matter where you are, as long as you have the tracking device activated,” Ashen explained, sounding nowhere near as surprised or offended as Dain had.
“Won’t I be in the arena?”
“Not necessarily.”
I swallowed, pushing back whatever panic threatened at the edges of my mind at that statement, and then shook out the sudden numbness in my arm.
“You have five minutes,” Grenlow said, stepping back.
I nodded, and then thought of something else. “Is there anything I’m going to need?”
“You’re only permitted what you already possess,” Isolde said, not unkindly.
Just then, a man barreled into the room from the door connecting us to the arena. His face was red with excitement, and he rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet.
“Lady Queen!” he exclaimed, rushing over to me and clasping my hand. “My name is Alth, the beastkeeper, it’ll be my beasts that you be fighting out there.” He seemed pleased of that.
“I’m fighting beasts?” A dumbstruck sort of dread crept into my words.
Nearby, one of the advisors groaned. “Alth, you really couldn’t wait?”
He coloured even further, muttered an apology and then slipped out of the room. I stared after him, my mouth hanging open, and then turned on Grenlow. “What kind of beasts?”
“You know I can’t tell you that, Lady. You had better get ready; your tracking device will turn on any second now.”
He took my arm, which had begun to tingle with feeling again, and walked me to the door. Ashen leaned against the wall, and reached out to clasp my shoulder just as I reached the door. There was a sudden outpouring of thunderous noise from above, leading me to guess that the tracking device was now working.
“Good luck, girl,” he muttered, before pulling the door open.
Grenlow released me and the door slammed closed behind me. I had only a moment to blink at the vast wall of shimmering mirrors behind me, each displaying my own horrified face back to me, before a terrible, grating screech penetrated the air. I ducked behind a large boulder and glanced again at the mirrored wall. It stretched all the way up to the first row of seats, high above me, and I assumed that it ringed the entire arena. Further up, I could see another halo of mirrors above the very last row of seats, an image of my own crouching, pathetic self, repeated over and over again. Seeing my fear replicated over and over only served to frighten me further. Above that, I could see nothing but sky. I swallowed back a gulp and turned to face the rock, peeking over the top to whatever beast Alth had in store for me. There were three of them, and they stalked on bent, reptilian legs around the arena, which had been cultivated into a flat, contained wilderness. They had short arms, clawed hands, and grotesquely large heads, with razor-sharp teeth poking forth from ugly underbites.
“Not everything in the Synfee Empire is beautiful,” I muttered, surprising myself when a scatter of laughter spread about the arena.
They can hear me too?
I stared at the closest beast, wondering how Alth would feel if I used my fire elemental to turn it into a barbeque, and then had to abandon all thought, as it lifted its head, sniffed the air, and let out another terrible scream, charging toward where I hid. I yelped, dashed to the side of the boulder, and half-turned as it came skidding out into the space I had just occupied, a huge cloud of rocks flying into the mirrored wall. I lashed out with my wind elemental, opening my connection without really meaning to, but knowing on some primal level that it would make my power easier to control. The gust I summoned was like nothing I had ever managed before. Maybe it had everything to do with killing Nareon, or maybe it was just me… desperate, afraid, and more than a little dangerous.
The creature screamed again and flew back into the wall, shattering three of the mirrors. I watched in fascination as the broken shards reassembled and smoothed back into an unblemished surface before a single one had even fallen out of the frame. The creature rolled back onto its feet, stumbled into the boulder and then shook itself back into awareness. I lashed out again, this time throwing my arms out, as if to propel the power my mind directed. It caught the creature as he ran at me again, and flung him back more viciously this time, driving him along the wall of mirrors, which all rippled as they broke, and then smoothed back into perfection.
I heard the audience shout out and then something hard sl
ammed into my side. I hit the ground, landing painfully on my arm, and saw the scaly head of one of the creatures bent over me, jaws wide as it made a lunge for my leg. I scrambled frantically backwards, the world around me darkening as the wind began to tug at my shirt. I tried to keep a hold of my fear, quite aware of the danger of tearing the entire arena up from its roots, or burning us all to the ground.
The creature snapped at me again, and I struck at it, trying to concentrate all of my power on just that one snapping mess of brown scales before me. I hadn’t directed any elemental in particular, but a nearby tree began to shift, and I watched in amazement as a branch the size of my torso snaked out and caught the creature around the neck, snapping it back and trapping it against the tree’s trunk. It screamed terribly, and I turned and ran, seeing the first creature up ahead, lying on the ground, unmoving.
I couldn’t see the third creature anywhere, and so I slowed down, beginning to move with more caution now. There was a steady roaring in my ears, and everywhere I looked, I could see my face staring back at me, dried blood coating one half of it, my violet eyes wide and lost.
Perhaps it is a permanent expression.
I started to creep toward the middle of the arena, wanting to get away from the mirrors, and had to quickly duck behind another tree as I caught sight of the third creature. It was guarding something, crouched half over it, and all I could make out was a faint, golden glimmer. The creature was looking the other way, and so I skipped closer again, ducking behind another tree.
How did they get the arena to look like a forest so quickly? Or is it reserved specifically for occasions such as these?
I slipped back into my connection, feeling the life surrounding me, and tried to find something close to the creature. There was a small ring around where it crouched, completely devoid of branches, or even roots that I could have used to bind it. Professor Hectarte had said that my bender abilities were strong, but the one time I’d tried to use them, I had smashed a chair into the wall, so I wasn’t too confident that I could utilise that ability in particular.
And then another notion occurred to me. Something so utterly absurd, I thought that it might just work.
Chapter Nine
Burning Lashes, Battering Ashes
The people were chanting, impatient for me to attack the creature, or maybe for the creature to attack me. I didn’t care which. I stepped out from behind the tree and dropped my glamor. The hunger rolled over me in a crippling wave of force, and I tried to push it away as a snarl ripped from my throat. The creature turned and straightened, answering my involuntary sound with a terrible, screaming cry. It took a few steps in my direction, and I narrowed my eyes, using my connection to find its energy source, and then trying to force as much compulsion as I could into my voice.
“Stop.”
It paused, trembling on the verge of another step, and then to my complete surprise, it stopped. I approached it carefully, holding its yellow eyes with mine, and then I pointed to the nearest tree.
“Go.”
It slunk away, scaly tail dragging through the dirt, and I immediately ordered the tree to contain it. Branches wound about its torso and neck, holding it firmly. Judging as best I could from the creature’s convoluted screams, I assumed that it was more frustrated than hurt; it was contained so tightly that it was unable to even struggle. I felt the pressure of the sudden increase of noise from above, but I focused instead on the tone of their shouting, figuring that if I couldn’t make out what they were shouting, I could at least deduce clues from the way in which they shouted it.
Alarm, I concluded, just as a strange, buzzing sound filled the arena. They’re trying to warn me.
I spun toward the sound, just in time to see a swarm of what appeared to be bees surrounding the body of the first creature that I had fought. They converged upon it, the buzzing sound rising to a teeth-jarring pitch, and when they lifted from the unfortunate beast again, there was nothing left but a skeleton. There were chunks of meat still hanging from a few of the rib bones, and a pool of blood spreading across the ground. Whatever the reptilian creatures had been, they were nothing compared to this.
I tripped over something as I stumbled backward. It was a stump, and when I reached out to steady myself, my hand collided with something cool and smooth. I grabbed it, remembering the flash of gold, and continued to crawl backwards in the dirt as the cloud of bees moved onto the next creature, who was now yowling. I ordered the tree to release him, and ducked behind another tree, almost yelping myself as the bees smothered it. It fought: short arms flashing through the air, claws catching at the bees. I looked down at the instrument in my hand; it was a crown.
“Useless,” I muttered, racking my brain desperately as the creature ceased struggling and tumbled to the ground, half of the flesh from its face already having been eaten away.
I had read somewhere that smoke was supposed to calm bees, but I didn’t know if that extended to large swarms of flesh-eating bees. It still would have been worth a try, but with so many people near, I still didn’t dare use my fire elemental. Killing bees was one thing. Burning the apparently famed mirrored arena—and hundreds of synfees along with it—to the ground… well, that was another matter. Instead, I focused on my wind elemental, and tried to construct a concentrated circle, like a mini-tornado. It sprang into life only feet from me, tearing at the plants, and pulling me forward, so that I had to grab onto a tree branch to keep myself steady.
“Easy,” I muttered, my eyes narrowing as I tried to move it toward the swarm.
The smaller I tried to make it, the more energy it took, and I felt the hair rise on my arms, the burn in my throat start to spread down my chest. Suddenly, I could feel the thudding of hundreds of heartbeats. I could taste the life that flowed through their veins, not as rich with power as Nareon’s had been, but heady all the same. My vision flickered, darkening, and I took my eyes from the whirlwind for just a second, long enough to decipher that it was the world around me that had changed, and not that ugly death ability that occasionally stirred within me. As with every instance of my Force surpassing my control, the sunlight had filtered into a looming grey doom, and the smell of sulfur permeated the air.
There was a crack of lightning somewhere in the distance, and I swore under my breath, pushing the whirlwind forward desperately, unable to help how it swelled in size. The bees were pulled into the concentrated wind, and I once again tried to tighten it, my breath ragged now. It seemed to tremble and then, thankfully, it shrank enough that I no longer had to hold onto the tree, and no longer felt that it would rip up the ground. The bees buzzed angrily, the sound once again rising to a fever pitch that had my outstretched arms trembling.
I had no idea what to do now but to keep them trapped within my whirlwind. The problem was, the amount of energy needed to contain the size of it, and stop it from picking up momentum, was draining me at an exponential rate. And so I did what I had done with the wolves, guessing that my crowd wouldn’t know the difference. I closed my eyes and found the mass of energy contained within the whirlwind, and I lashed out with the death ability, as calmly as I possibly could. I felt—rather than saw—half of the swarm drop to the ground, and then I lashed out again, figuring that the rate at which they moved caused me to miss those that hadn’t died the first time. The remainder was halved again, and I had to lash out three more times before the last bee had dropped to the ground.
Stopping the whirlwind was harder. I had to draw it back into me, rather than release my hold on it, which meant that it also inched closer to me. After several long moments of struggling, I finally succeeded in pulling it back, and I snapped as though I had been on one end of a rubber band, and it, the other. I fell forward, my knees jarring painfully in the dirt, and my torso heaving forward, so that I had to thrust my arms out to break the fall. Nearby, the one remaining creature still screamed.
I drew in painful breath after painful breath and finally managed to pull my glamor back into
place, though it hurt to do so.
Please be over, I thought desperately.
Of course, there was no such luck. The next animal sound was a loud bird’s cry, and it was close above me. So close that before I even managed to look up, a giant wing had beaten me over the back of the head, and I had gone flying back into the dirt. The crown was yanked from my hand, and when I finally regained my feet, it was only to stare after the largest hawk I had ever seen, as it flew over the western side of the arena with the crown. Dumbfounded, I stumbled a few steps after it, and then stopped, wondering what the hell I was supposed to do now.
Just as I was about to scream at the screaming audience that I couldn’t fly, a section of the mirrored wall folded in upon itself, and I found myself looking down a bare tunnel, leading out to the other side of the arena. I took off at a run, barely even considering the impossibility of the task ahead of me, knowing only that robbing a giants hawk’s nest had to be less dangerous than fighting a swarm of flesh-eating bees.
I passed through the tunnel and out onto the other side, surprised at the line of people that stretched as far through the streets of Castle Nest as I could see, lining a path for me. They shouted to me as I ran, and after a while, I slowed, unable to shake the feeling that this was a part of the test. Almost as soon as I did, a woman separated herself from the parade of people and stepped into my path. I stopped walking, wanting to reach for my knife.
“Lady Queen,” she said, tears beginning to fall from her eyes.
Some of the bloodlust drained out of me, and when she fell to her knees, I quickly scooped her back up again.
“What is it?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”
“My farms, soldiers… in the night… so many of them. They raided the house, my daughters were raped… my fields set to the torch, my warehouses ransacked.”
She fell against me, and I hesitantly put my arms around her, at a loss for what to say. This was obviously part of the test, but what exactly were they testing me for?
The Soulstoy Inheritance Page 10
