Both on our feet in the same movement, we grabbed the weapons we always kept at hand as we dashed through her rooms and into the hall. Side by side, we ran through the arcade and her private courtyard, taking the shortcut to the walls, her innate speed making up for my longer stride.
A roaring shadow passed over us, an inferno of flame heating the summer air to crackling. Zynda in dragon form, blazing a swath through the summer sky at an enemy I couldn’t see without stopping to scrutinize. Glad she was on top of our defense, and that I could recognize her now, I made a mental note to establish a system for us to warn of friendly dragon approach. It didn’t bear thinking what a dragon bent on destroying us could do.
Shouts over the cacophony of the alarm bells greeted us in the outer yard as Ursula’s protective guard formed around her. Other fighters streamed in from various quarters, some still buckling on weapons. “To the walls,” she commanded crisply.
I turned to her. “You know you should go to—”
She rounded on me with a vicious glare. “Don’t do this now. I’m done with being protected. This is my castle, my realm, and I’m done cowering indoors while you all fight for me.”
I reassessed, taken aback by her vehemence, then nodded and tapped the flat of my broadsword to my forehead. “Elskastholrr,” I told her, and she grinned, a feral baring of teeth.
“Damn straight.”
“Your Majesty!” The current gate commander dashed over. “Permission to close the gates?”
We exchanged a glance. The alarm bells had been ringing only a minute or so. “Do we have people outside still making for the castle?” she asked.
“Yes, but—”
“Gates stay up until they’re all in,” she ordered, turning her back and running for the walls.
We climbed the ladders swiftly, taking in the scene. I couldn’t make much sense of what I saw at first. Smoke rose from the fields and orchards, thick and unnaturally coiling, dimming the air and swarming over people on the road—running either for the safety of town or the castle walls—or over people lying immobile. Zynda the dragon turned on wingtip—which seemed to bring her dangerously close to the ground—her silhouette against the afternoon sun very nearly vertical in the sky, Marskal clearly outlined on her back.
Brant ran up to us, out of breath. “Captain!” For a moment I didn’t know if he meant me or if he’d reverted to the Hawks’ habit of calling Ursula “captain.” In the heat of the fight, it didn’t matter. “Attack by unknown entities.”
“Be more specific,” Ursula snapped, eyes on the scene, also scanning.
Was the smoke…feeding on the people who were down? Clouds of it coalesced around their fallen forms, while other masses seemed more condensed, taking shape. They seemed almost humanoid, except terribly distorted, with missing limbs in places, appendages in others that looked more animal. Or like nothing natural at all.
“Can’t.” Brant replied. “Looks like smoke, but with particles like ash. Drops people where they stand. We can’t pinpoint the source and—”
I swore, viciously, and they both turned to me in expectation. “Ash,” I spat out. “Curse us for worse than fools. Those places are where we scattered the ashes of the unidentified dead.”
When they stared blankly, I clarified. “After Illyria’s defeat, all of the people she converted with her Deyrr magic—we burned them when the pieces kept coming.”
“I remember that,” Ursula said. Brant nodded, though he hadn’t been one of the Hawks then. It had been terrible, soul-crushing duty and my Vervaldr, with the great gift of not recognizing most of the victims as friends and family, had handled the bulk of it.
“Some victims were identified and their ashes taken home to family graveyards.” I waved my broadsword at the unusually fertile fields and orchards this summer. “The rest we spread on the tilled earth, as is traditional in Dasnaria. Stupid and shortsighted.”
Ursula spun to survey the area. Zynda dove and flew so low she could only glide, as a downstroke of her wings would hit ground. “You’re saying that smoke is the undead ash, rising again?”
“The remains are still coming,” I replied grimly. “Even as ash. Unforgivably stupid of me to keep it so near the castle.”
“My people would have done the same,” she replied absently, attention keen on the people fleeing the attacking smoke. Assisted by squads of Ordnung troops, some of the people on the road had unharnessed their horses from the laden wagons, riding full speed for the castle gates. A group of young women in pretty gowns ran, ribbons streaming. One lost her hat and it flew to the road behind her. She started to turn, but a soldier passing her on horseback shouted and pointed at the gates, then charged a cloud of smoke that had descended on the hat. “Ashes to earth, the cycle of life,” Ursula added.
“Only this ash has nothing of life in it,” I observed.
“What of the people down—what does the smoke do?”
“Near as we can tell it suffocates them,” Brant answered. “Before they drop, it seems like they can’t breathe.”
“Does anything stop it?” she asked, her gaze on her fallen people. The soldier who’d charged the cloud of smoke was in trouble, he and the horse spinning as the smoke raked them with claws that should’ve been insubstantial but had them convulsing.
“Nothing so far,” Brant answered. “Weapons pass through it.”
Ursula dug her fingers into the parapet as she leaned over, clearly wishing to leap over it and into the fight. “All advancing on Ordnung. The walls won’t keep it out.”
“No, Your Majesty.”
“Dragon fire might do it,” I said, pointing as Zynda came around. She spouted a blast of flame through a cloud of ash where there weren’t any people. We all leaned forward to watch. The ash disappeared in the flame, but in the wake of her passage, the air eddied with oily black shadows, the ash condensing again into coils, then into humanoid shape—and continued to move toward the castle.
“No good,” Ursula murmured. “Why this, why today?”
“Does it matter?” Brant muttered darkly.
“It might. This is magic. You fight magic with magic. The ash has been there since last autumn. Why did it wake today?”
“It’s midsummer,” Kelleah said. She returned our surprised gazes with imperturbable calm. Of course she would’ve come to the walls, in case anyone needed her healing skills, not knowing we had nothing to fight. Would she be able to help the fallen? We’d have to retrieve them first, risking more of us.
“Midsummer,” Ursula echoed, realization in her voice.
“You call it the Feast of Danu, and Danu is your goddess, not mine,” Kelleah supplied, a pointed reminder.
Ursula had discussed—and quickly dismissed—celebrating the Feast of Danu, but the holiday had fallen out of fashion with the population under Uorsin’s rule. He’d promoted worship of Glorianna and Her church as the primary religion for the Twelve Kingdoms. With so much else to do and really no one to champion the event, any thoughts of celebrating Danu’s Day at midsummer had faded before they’d fully formed.
“But even in Annfwn we observe the longest day of the year,” Kelleah noted. “As it’s a day full of the potent magic of life.”
“Enough to raise the undead,” Ursula murmured, eyes still on the running women. Mounted soldiers had picked up two, but three others still jogged slowly, hampered by their pretty summer gowns. “The question is how do we put them to rest again?”
I measured the distance with her, and the relentless pace of the smoke creatures, many of them congealing into shape now. They’d soon reach the castle. How do you wall out something like that? Unless we could find a way to nullify it, the stuff would slowly suffocate everyone in Ordnung.
“We can’t put them to rest,” I realized. Ursula glanced over at my abrupt tone. “The ash has to be utterly destroyed,” I told her. “Here and everywhere.”
She blanched, swiftly following my meaning, then turned to one of her guard who also ran messages. “Have Shua draft a proclamation, short, as many copies as possible to be distributed throughout Mohraya as quickly as possible, and then beyond. Any ashes of victims of Illyria that have been buried, scattered, sealed in crypts or urns—whatever it might be—should be avoided or kept locked away. Anyone in possession of these remains should notify Ordnung so we can deal with it.”
The guard took off at a dead run and everyone looked at Ursula expectantly for the solution. She looked to me. I had nothing.
“Zynda can magic it away. I’ve seen it,” Jepp said, arriving out of breath with Kral behind her. He met my gaze steadily, tossing me an ironic salute, gaze going to the scene below and eyes widening in incredulity.
“Call them in,” Ursula ordered Brant.
He relayed the message to Dary, once again atop the watchtower, who employed her flags to signal Marskal using the Hawks’ code.
“You can call them in,” Kral drawled, “but your precious sorceress refuses to use the power, remember?”
“She doesn’t like to abuse the power.” Jepp rolled her eyes at him. “Something you could stand to learn, Your Imperial Highness.”
He narrowed his eyes at her, then lifted a shoulder and let it fall, laughing. “Not so much of a danger anymore, as I no longer possess that title. All your fault, hystrix.”
“You too?” I asked, somewhat surprised—mostly at how little my brother, who’d once held ambition above all else, seemed to care.
“As our esteemed elder brother recently took pains to remind me,” Kral replied, gaze icing as he met mine. For a moment we shared a strange camaraderie, both exiled princes, stripped of our titles. And both strangely in this place.
Wind from Zynda’s wings buffeted us, and we all reflexively crouched. Marskal slid down the dragon’s extended leg, landing neatly beside us on the wall. He used a network of ropes that made a sort of harness on her great body.
“Nicely done,” I told him.
He nodded in appreciation. “We’ve been working out the system. Hoping to use similar harnesses with other winged shapeshifter and human-form fighting pairs in battle.”
The dragon became a hummingbird in midair—an astonishing collapse of size—who then zoomed in to hover beside Marskal before transforming into Zynda.
“I notice you didn’t try that form against me,” I noted.
She grinned. “Too easily eaten, even by a mossback.”
“Enough banter,” Ursula ordered crisply. “Zynda—Jepp thinks you can use Tala magic to destroy the ash, which we believe to be the risen remains of Illyria’s undead.”
Zynda’s easy smile vanished as her gaze went to Jepp, contemplating the scout. “Hmm,” was the only sound she made.
“Did your dragon fire work on it?” Jepp asked pointedly.
With an annoyed turn to her mouth, Zynda shook her head. “You saw it didn’t, which is irritating, because dragon fire works on everything. The ash does avoid my magic-nullifying presence though—we noted that much.”
“But goes right back when you’ve passed,” Ursula said.
Zynda acknowledged that glumly.
“Zynda.” Marskal took her by the shoulders, facing her with a serious expression. “You’ve said that you don’t like to use sorcery because it takes creatures out of the cycle of life—but Illyria’s undead are already unnatural. Wouldn’t eliminating that ash be restoring balance?”
She frowned at him, searching his face. “A neat argument,” she finally replied, “and I’m not sure your logic is entirely correct, but you all seem agreed there’s no other way to stop this stuff?”
“No,” I answered, taking charge as Captain of Ordnung’s defense. “And it’s coming this way. It doesn’t matter if we close the gates, the walls won’t keep it out. If you won’t do this, Zynda, then we need to come up with other options fast or everyone here will die.”
“I’d be happier with an enemy I could cleave with my sword,” Kral growled.
“Or take apart with daggers,” Jepp added.
Ursula threw them both an appreciative look. Something settled inside me, a realignment of sorts, that we were all the same side. Hlyti had guided my footsteps to this time and place—and these people—but so too had it brought Kral. Two points of the triangle, bound together.
With a third still out there. For the first time in years and years, I entertained hope that Jenna might also find her way here. If we survived this.
“I’ll do it,” Zynda decided. “Though I’m unprepared, so it will take a bit to build the necessary power to clear an area this big.”
She became a hummingbird again. Jewel bright, she zoomed to the watchtower, where hopefully Dary wouldn’t be too startled.
Ursula shaded her eyes, staring up at the tower that now held two women. “She didn’t wait for instructions,” she complained.
“She knows what to do,” Marskal murmured beside her, mirroring her stance. “Your Majesty,” he added belatedly, then grinned at whatever Ursula muttered under her breath at him.
“She’s used a lot of magic today already,” Ursula noted, a hint of worry in it, “lots of shapeshifting and healing.” She deliberately didn’t look at me. “I hope she’s up to this.”
“She is,” Marskal replied definitely. “Dragon form has launched her into a new level of ability—beyond what any of us might have predicted.”
“Is that so?” Ursula looked over to me at last, raising her brows. “Finally, some good news.”
I smiled back at her.
She and Marskal fell into conversation, discussing countermeasures should Zynda’s effort fail. He summoned several Hawks and they sent them running with messages to secure people in parts of the castle without outside egress.
I scanned the strange battlefield, the fallen on the ground, the prowling smoke creatures. Groups of guards herded people toward town, giving rides to stragglers. A cadre of messengers on fast horses burst from the castle, moving too fast for the smoke monsters to catch them, the dust of their wake quickly settling, unlike the unnatural ash. We could take Ursula out of the castle the same way. I glanced at her, taking in her wide stance on the walls of Ordnung, in her element as she made fast decisions and crisply issued orders.
I’d never pry her out of her castle either.
The only people left on the road were the three young women, who were clearly winded but still struggling up the incline to the castle gates. A cloud of clawed creatures emerged from a copse of trees, advancing on them from the side. All the other troops were engaged elsewhere, leaving them unprotected.
Measuring their relative speeds—the exhausted young ladies in their fancy slippers not meant for such rigor, and the billowing humanoid ash figures—I knew the women would never make it.
I couldn’t stand by and do nothing. With Ursula focused on protecting Ordnung, I stepped back, then shimmied down the nearest ladder and ran.
With any luck, I’d be back before she noticed I’d left.