Next to Kordas, Jonaton apported canister after canister into the thrashing trees, his mouth set in a grim line, his hair plastered to his head with sweat. Dragonfly wings no longer attached to an insect fluttered wildly in clouds. A little farther down on the wall, someone had gotten hold of a small catapult—the gods only knew where and how he had—and was sending cracked casks of brandy into the trees, while Hakkon put fire arrows into them as soon as they hit. On his other side, a Healer tended a lucky bastard who’d only gotten lashed by a tree and not pulled down into the monster to be torn to pieces. “Only” meant that his arm had been flayed in a wide line down to the bone from his shoulder to his wrist, and the Healer sewed him up with careful stitches. He wasn’t screaming, because he had passed out.
Kordas was in a state of deliberate not thinking, because if he thought about any of this, he knew he would fall to pieces. Strategy was useless, plans impossible. No help was coming. All that he—all that any of them—could do was hold the line and buy more time. Not for themselves, but for their future, hiding underground. He hadn’t said this, of course. What was the point? He didn’t want to shame anyone who couldn’t bear this any longer and deserted the walls for that hoped-for safety in the hertasi warrens. He didn’t want to put anyone in the unbearable position of disobeying orders or dying—probably horribly.
Don’t think about it. Just aim, and fire. Aim, and fire.
“Kordas,” Rose said calmly into his ear, as he aimed for one of the canisters and exploded it.
“Rose, if you Dolls can get out, or get down into the underground with Isla, you should,” he replied, sending another Spitter bolt into a canister, and shouting to be heard over the din—although to his abused ears, his own voice sounded muffled. “You didn’t come with us to get slaughtered by a monster.”
“Irrelevant,” said Rose, over the explosions, the thunder, the screams. “Pebble wants you. It’s just below us.”
He wanted to curse. He wanted to weep. He did not want to be pulled away from this completely doomed fight on the wall, because every moment they held back the Red Forest was another moment when more people could escape into the underground and maybe live another day.
“Please, Kordas. This is important.”
He repressed the urge to do—or say—something unforgivable. Instead he looked down, behind him. Sure enough, there was the Earth Elemental, pressed up against the wall like an anxious puppy. Kordas looked back at the Red Forest; he’d blown a big enough hole in it that it was struggling to grow back. He thrust the Spitter into Rose’s hands. “You know what to do,” he told her, not wondering whether she could even use the damned thing. “Aim for the dot. Try not to miss.” So what if she wasted bolts? It wasn’t as if they had a reason to hoard ammunition right now.
“Kordas—we Dolls can’t participate in warfare. We’re restricted.”
Kordas stepped back, and touched his forehead to Rose’s. “Rose . . . this isn’t warfare now. It’s a rescue.” He pressed his pistol pouches to Rose’s hands and left.
He sprinted down the stairs, and he hadn’t even gotten halfway down before he saw that Pebble was vibrating. With fear? Anger? It’s just a child, he reminded himself, bit his tongue before he snapped at it, and put his hand on the warm rock of its side. It’s probably terrified. It probably wants to run, but it’s afraid that I’ll be angry if it does.
“Pebble, if you can escape, you need to escape, now,” he said, as calmly as he could, although his voice broke a little. “Don’t worry about us. I know you can go underground. Go somewhere safe. Go back to your Mama—”
“Nooooooooo!” the Elemental wailed. “Not go! Help! I help! Say how! Mama come!”
Kordas did not comment on the absurdity of that last statement. Even if Pebble’s mother was inclined to help humans, who had done very little for her but kidnap and torture her child, she must be hundreds of leagues away. How was a notoriously slow, gargantuan Deep Earth Elemental going to get here before they were all dead? Impossible, of course.
But Pebble could do one thing . . .
“Can you give us power?” he asked. Not that he expected that Pebble would be able to produce enough magical energy to save them—but maybe Pebble could buy them a little more time. More time for all the noncombatants to get underground.
“Feed stone, feed you?” Pebble asked anxiously. “Like bad bads took?”
“Yes,” he replied, assuming that Pebble meant the Heartstone. “Can you do that?”
Pebble said nothing . . .
But in the next heartbeat, he felt power surging into him through the ley-lines and from the Heartstone. He jolted against the wall. This was power of a sort he had never experienced in his entire life. It was the sweetest of tastes, the most refreshing of waters, the contentment of a still lake. It was the high and low pitches of the same instrument, factoring their frequencies, and simply passing through him, cleansing along the way.
This was like the power he’d felt in the Chamber of the Beast, where a wounded Pebble had been lying, healing itself, and emitting vast amounts of magical energy doing so. But it wasn’t the same, any more than water from a cesspool was like water from a pure, clear spring. And it wasn’t the same, because Pebble was giving this to him and all the other mages, rather than being drained of it by Imperial spells, through what was left of the Heartstone. Freely given, tuned to their abilities as Masters, literally rock-steady power. He practically felt his hair stand on end, and up on the wall, he heard Jonaton’s wordless exclamation of shock and surprise.
“Hey! Hey—nice! Yeah, let’s have more of that! More of that!”
And up beyond the wall—the Veil began to glow, a pale blue light that rippled like the surface of a Gate coming into lock.
He ran back up the stairs to see Jonaton standing as still as a statue, arms spread above his head, also haloed in a faint blue light. What—
“Kordas!” Jonaton shouted, not turning his head. “Get back to the front gate. I’ve got the Veil! We can hold the thing off back here!”
As if to affirm that claim, a whipping branch soared up into view, hit the Veil, and—disintegrated.
He can’t hold alone! Not for long—
But it appeared that he could. Or at least, he would die trying.
“Saver!” shouted Pebble. “Gate! Gate! Gate!”
He didn’t stop to think. He just moved.
At least by this point, the animals still remaining above ground were all in hiding, probably huddled together in the center of the Vale, not running about in a panic. He should be able to sprint—
Just as he thought that, a Doll came running up to him, pulling a panicking horse along by main strength—the horse wasn’t bridled or saddled, in fact, all it had was a hackamore, but that was all he had ever needed. He tapped into his levitation abilities, vaulted onto the gelding’s back from the lower stairs, grabbed the reins, and gave it a smack on its heavily sweating rump. It took off at a barely controlled gallop, carrying him around a tightly packed mob of mixed animals, cutting directly across picturesque, winding paths, veering around little groves and homes among the trees, and ending him up at the front gate.
He leapt off the back of the poor beast and it immediately ran away. He didn’t blame it. The cacophony was worse here than it was at the rear; he sprinted up the stairs, taking them two at a time, past stationed Dolls to where Delia, Sai, and the loading team stood. The Veil glowed here, too; Sai stood in a pose nearly identical to Jonaton’s, as the tree branches thrashed just out of touching range of the Veil.
Delia was still hard at work, mouth set in a grim line, exploding canisters as fast as she could Fetch them into the Forest. Sai glanced at Kordas, then turned his attention back to the trees. “Pebble?” he asked brusquely.
“Pebble,” Kordas confirmed. “How long can you hold?”
“Until I drop,” Sai confirmed. “And then—it won’t matter how much power Pebble feeds us, because we won’t have the strength to use it. But this has bought us some time.”
“Ye—” Kordas began.
He stopped speaking as a high-pitched whistling sound—like nothing he had ever heard before—made him whip his head around to the left.
Just in time to see a ball of fire a hundred times bigger than anything he could produce hurtling out of the sky to land in the midst of the trees.
The sound it made when it hit wasn’t as loud as the thunder accompanying the weather mages’ lightning, nor as loud as the canisters exploding, but it was more than enough to make everyone on the wall wince and instinctively drop behind the parapet.
The Veil flickered a moment, but Sai and the rest popped back up and went back to work reinforcing it. “What in the hell was that?” Sai shouted.
“Damn if I know!” Kordas shouted back, taking over from Delia in shooting the canisters so she could concentrate on Fetching them. “Whatever it is, it’s on our si—”
And another fireball came arcing into the Forest on his right, with similar results.
It was difficult to tell for sure, between the POOMs of the canisters and the crash of thunder, but he thought he heard more of those fireballs hitting somewhere out of sight, to the left, the right, and the rear. But were they making a difference?
He felt a tiny, tiny bit of hope creep into his heart. Where that fireball had hit in front of them, there were trees actually engulfed in fire, there was a hole among them showing the bare earth and rocks, and nothing was throwing snow on the fires. Of course, that could be because by this time the ground had been branched free of snow. But—wait! The trees nearest the ones engulfed were trying to beat the flames out. And getting set on fire themselves for their trouble.
It was a good thing those fireballs were taking long, leisurely arcs to get where they were going, because he heard another one coming in that sounded—well, too close—and he had just enough time to scream “Duck!” at the top of his lungs and grab Delia’s shoulder and throw her beneath the parapet when the incoming fireball landed right in front of the closed gate.
The wall shook under them, and even though he managed to clap his hands over his ears at the last minute, once again, he was deafened.
Fortunately the reinforced Veil deflected most of the flames away, but when he cautiously looked back up again, the ends of Sai’s eyebrows had little wisps of smoke coming up from them, and his face was distinctly redder. He hadn’t ducked. He hadn’t fallen, either. They are my heroes, I swear, Kordas thought.
He had grown so accustomed to the waves of rage coming from the forest that at first he didn’t notice when they intensified. But when Delia abruptly put both fists to her temples and dropped to her knees, and the exhausted Healer that stumbled over to her did the same, a moment later he got hit in the face by the brutal anger, and nearly went to his knees, himself. He fought the alien emotion back, clinging to the parapet, and surveyed the battlefield, his eyes burning and watering with the effort—and from the smoke that billowed over the wall from the burning trees.
That gave him a little more hope—until a gust of wind blew the smoke away, and he saw that the trees had closed in all the holes that had been blown in the forest, and the smoke was because they had stopped burning and were only smoldering.
Wait—
“Kordas,” Rose said in his ear. Well, actually shouted it in his ear, because mostly all he could hear was a ringing sound. If we live through this, the Healers are going to be treating us all so we don’t go permanently deaf.
Speaking of Healers—the one he’d last seen crouched next to Delia was supporting the girl as she sagged with exhaustion, sobbing silently, the tears pouring down her face leaving tracks in the soot. It was clear Delia had wrung herself dry of energy. Nothing I can do to help there—
Sai still stood defiantly, valiantly, pouring magic into the Veil. Kordas tried not to look for signs of exhaustion on the old man’s face.
“Kordas!” Rose shouted again. “The Forest has pulled back from the rest of the wall and is regrouping. Everyone but a couple of mages is on their way here.”
Wait, what? Hope rose again. Were they actually holding their own? Could they possibly win?
Before that thought had done more than merely flash through his mind, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Sai sway slightly. He moved to help, but Rose was faster than he was, and caught the old man before he fell.
He didn’t even think about it; he invoked full mage-sight, connected himself fully to the ley-lines feeding from what was left of the Heartstone, and took Sai’s place in reinforcing the Veil.
This moment is all there is, he said in his mind, and “heard” it replied to by the other mages holding the Veil up. “This moment is all there is.” He felt himself drop into the kind of half-trance that really big mage-work required, the sort of thing that needed a dozen mages if not more. This was something he’d done maybe three times in his life. He ceased to be Kordas, and became one strand of the greater web. All emotions repressed, to prevent rattling the others, he became one with the whole. Not absent emotions, not as such, but they were cast into the background and made invisible, so he could concentrate on what needed to be done, this moment. And this moment was all there was.
He closed his eyes. He didn’t need outer sight, he needed inner sight right now. He called it up, established his strongest shields, and opened his vision to the world around him.
And . . . this was, in every way possible, nothing like the land he had come from. There, back in the Duchy, everything magical was orderly, tamed. The ley-lines pulsed with their many-colored energies in regulated waves. Elementals were few—and now he knew why, given the terrible use that the Emperor had made of the vrondi and little Pebble. There were concentrations of magic, like spires of power, in places where Imperial mages lived and worked. Like Heartstones, but turned inward, denying their power to the greater world instead of sharing it with the world. In that lost world, he and the mages he sheltered had to slink around in the shadows, and do their work as undetectably as they could, between the lines of the web that others could read from. The magic of the Empire was so regulated that he and his had spent as much time hiding their tracks as they did actually working.
Not here . . .
Out here there were ley-lines, of course, but they did not pulse with the measured regularity of a heartbeat. They flowed like wild, unfettered rivers, intoxicating and dangerous, the colors of their magic braiding and unbraiding as they flowed. Tributaries flowed in and out of them, mainly with the surface levels of the land, but also deep into the ground and even into the sky. The tributaries had their own flares and prominences, flinging out power with a rhythm of their own. But the ley-lines were the least of the things he saw.
Because the land was full to bursting with chaotic life. Not just material life; immaterial as well. The water, the air, the earth, were full of things he had never seen before; there were magical beings everywhere, some material, most not. Some he recognized as Elementals he had studied, even if he had never personally seen them. Some were—well, there just was nothing in his experience to compare them to. Some he couldn’t even “look” at directly: it was as if they twisted in and out of the reality he knew. Some were so incomprehensible he felt his mind trying to grasp them and failing utterly. Some were clouds of infinitesimally small motes that radiated power all out of proportion to their tiny size. And high in the sky above were creatures like skeins of light, undulating across the heavens with little to no regard for the clumsy creatures of earth.
His “view” encompassed all the degrees of the compass as well as up and down, since he was not limited to his physical eyes. He sensed Pebble behind him, valiantly radiating power as hard as it ever could. And in front of him, the Forest, and Sai had been right: this ravening thing had once been an Earth Elemental itself; not one of the Deep Earth Elementals, like Pebble and Pebble’s mother, but one of the sort that slumbered amid the landscape until awakened, in the guise of a rock outcropping, or a hill, or a gigantic boulder. And it had, indeed, been caught in a Change-Circle in the aftermath of that long-ago war. Once, it might have been at least as intelligent as Pebble, but when its body was mingled with the tree-grove it had slept near, between the pain and the scrambling effect of the pure chaos of the Circle, what intelligence it had was lost. Now what was left was agony and instinct, and not much else. It hated, fiercely, but intellectually dimly—some part of it knew that it had once been greater than it was now. It was full of rage for the same reason. It lived to destroy, because destruction permitted feeding, and the pleasure of feeding was what eased its pain for a little while.
And—to his surprise, he realized that they had hurt it, back when they first encountered it.
They were nowhere near killing it, then or now, but they had hurt it, and that angered it more than anything it had ever encountered in all the centuries since its creation.
And it was very, very hungry. They were the teasers of the best food source it had ever encountered since its violent and agonizing birth, when it had been torn apart and mingled with insensate wood. And they had dared to fight it, to hurt it, and then to escape from its clutches, and presumably take that good food with them.
So driven by rage, hate, and hunger, it had roused from its winter hibernation and come looking for them.
But the Forest was by no means the most powerful thing within the sphere of his comprehension now. There was something greater.
At first, She—for it was a female entity—was merely a light-filled shadow in his mind nearly as vast as the sky. The great Air creatures flowed and danced around Her, in tribute to Her beauty and power. But as he became more aware of Her, She became more aware of him, and for one brief moment, showed Herself to him in all Her strength.
Vast as the night, and as full of incandescence as the night is full of stars, She regarded him with eyes without whites or pupils, only an infinite starfield. He could not tell what She thought of him, but a tiny, still-thinking part of him recognized from Silvermoon’s tales what She might be.
This was the Star-Eyed. And She had taken notice of him.
So when the wall began to shake under his boots, for a few heartbeats, he didn’t even sense it, so frozen was he in the deep regard of Her gaze.
:: Have hope, Kordas. You are beloved. All will be well. ::
But then the shaking increased, and the enchantment on him—if it was such a thing—snapped, as he was nearly knocked to his knees.
Maybe it was because some deep part of him, a part of him seared with pain and memories, knew this shaking, and recognized the shaking for what it meant. He shook himself free of mage-sight, and looked out over the thrashing trees of the Forest, the arcing fireballs, the lightning strikes, and the occasional exploding canister, and saw—
The raw, red, fiery surface of the Great Deep Elemental that was Pebble’s “Mama,” thrusting her way out of the earth. As she shoved her way to the surface, the forest around her caught fire, circling her in a halo of flames. He remembered this creature all too well; unlike Pebble, she was not featureless rock. And she was anything but small.
Two sets of glowing, yellow-white claws splayed out on the surface of the earth on either side of her. He could not begin to measure the size of those knife-like talons, but they were at least three times the height of the enormous trees now aflame on either side of the erupted earth through which she had thrust her body. Chest, neck, and head rose above them, to a dizzying height. The pointed head was mostly jaws. Weirdly, it looked like a bird’s head and stabbing beak—or perhaps the narrow head of a lizard. Her head, neck, chest, and forelegs glowed red mottled with black, and molten rock jetted back and forth underneath, as if he was seeing fast-pumping arterial flow in translucent blood vessels. White-hot eyes glared from the glowing red of that head, throwing beams of light—but they were not glaring at Kordas, nor at the Vale.
The creature stared at the Red Forest. But not with the same malevolence he had felt from her when she had come to rescue Pebble. Fierce, yes. Malevolent, no. No, the way she stared at the Forest looked more like revulsion.
And he heard her voice in his mind for the first time, a mental impression of white-hot bronze, dignity, and immense age. But with that voice in his mind, came a real, physical voice, like an enormous brass gong or bell.
“This is abomination.”
She contemplated the Red Forest for several heart-stopping moments more.
“THIS SHALL BE CLEANSED.”
But she didn’t move. Why didn’t she move?
Wait, if she moves—she might wreck this entire area, the way she destroyed the Capital. And she doesn’t want to do that.
As if she understood what he was thinking, she raised her head skyward and let out a challenging roar. It sounded like an avalanche. Molten rock spattered from the roar, falling as lava bombs over the Red Forest, igniting trees.
Kordas was out of the Veil trance, but was still tuned to ambience enough to sense the Forest wavering. Half of it wanted to keep on attacking the humans in their cursed protections, and get to the food. Half of it wanted to go after this new—likely delicious—challenger. He felt the Forest’s hunger . . . and Pebble’s mother was a giant, radiating source of magical energy. They were both Earth Elementals; the Forest knew instinctively that if it fought and vanquished her, it could absorb all of her. Then it could turn back and obliterate the ants that were resisting it now.
“Help Mama!” Pebble cried from behind him, still fiercely radiating magic. “Push! Push!”
Wait, what?
“Push! Push!” Pebble insisted. All Pebble could do was supply power; it didn’t know how to apply power. And Kordas didn’t know what it wanted.
“For fuck’s sake, Kordas!” An exhausted Jonaton stumbled up the stairs behind him. “Are you dazed or stupid? The cute rock means push the Veil!”
Bloody hells . . . Hitting himself in the head could wait until later. He was the freshest, most rested mage on the wall, since he hadn’t been using his powers nearly as much as the rest. He’d been shooting canisters while they’d been reinforcing the Veil or igniting the apple brandy.
But how?
Chances are Pebble understands magic instinctively, though it is limited in what it knows how to do. But I have those skills that it doesn’t. So he did what Pebble wanted. He pushed.
He felt Jonaton, exhausted but grimly determined, join him in the moment. Then Ceri. Then Venidel. Then, from underground, to his delight, was Isla, her power joining his power like hand joining hand, and with the power came belief in himself that he sorely lacked at the moment. Then, in a ragged chorus of there is only this moment, all of the rest of the mages still standing were united.
As obedient to their will as if they had erected it themselves, the Veil began to expand.
Almost immediately, it contacted the Forest.
The Forest made no sound, but it certainly reacted immediately. It pulled away from the Veil, bunching itself up more. Kordas was looked to within the trance as their leader, regardless of rank, and he gladly assumed control of them all. He shoved harder, Pebble feeding him so much power that he became lost in it, lost to everything except the inexorable advance of the Veil and the slow retreat of the Forest and the sweet song of magic in his veins. It felt good. Even though on the outside, everyone was scorched, bloodied, soaked, and unsteady, in the trance, they were winning.
The Forest resisted for a dozen furlongs. Then, abruptly, it stopped retreating. It held for a dozen breaths. Kordas and the others scraped up a little more strength, and pushed.
Then, suddenly, the “head” of the Forest that had been facing them became the “tail.” In a reversal that almost put Kordas on his face, the Forest threw itself in the opposite direction from the Veil and the puny humans inside it.
Toward Pebble’s mother.
She screamed another challenge at the Forest. Still silent, it charged her. It was actually undulating up off of the ground, and looked for all the world like it meant to whipcrack her with its collective body.
“Help Mama!” Pebble cried, and Kordas allowed the Veil to snap back in place where it began, and became the conduit for Pebble’s power, since poor Pebble didn’t seem to know how to actually direct power, only how to make it.
He had to feed the mother now. This is going to hurt . . . He already skirted ruin by even tasting a Heartstone, and now he dared to channel it to—a major Elemental? How could connecting with something that massive, that strong, not hurt? To her, the mages were scarcely worth thinking about, surely. And she was an Elemental. They were not known for subtlety.
Comes down to it, Kordas thought, nobody’s going to remember me for my subtlety, either. So let’s do it. Clean, open-ended, and direct, please accept our handshake.
He braced himself for the fire, and reached out to her.
He found himself embraced by the gentlest of touches. A touch so gentle, it was child’s play to make a solid magical connection with her—and trivial to open himself up, to become a kind of human ley-line, and feed her not only Pebble’s magic but all of the magic of the ley-lines that fed the remnant Heartstone.
The Elemental sang a paean of triumph, and braced herself for the impact of the Forest.
On the walls, those who had been fending off lashing branches, launching kegs of brandy, and doing their best to add to the fiery mayhem slumped against the stone parapet, minds gone dull with exhaustion. Those mages who could do no more joined them, watching the battle with awe, dread, and a touch of hope. Only the weather mages were still in play, continuing to lash at the Forest with lightning conjured out of the clouds.
Mother was giving off enough heat that what came from the sky now—at least directly overhead—was actual rain. Superheated steam rose from her in clouds, and the mages got the bright idea to send it straight down the Forest’s throat, with a wind.
The Forest definitely did not like that. And it fought back, the rearmost trees moving in coordinated waves now, to create a counter-wind.
Despite the fact that the branches burst into flames as soon as they touched Mother’s surface, the trees kept thrashing at her, tearing bits away from her body. Kordas felt her pain as if it was his own.
And fear closed his throat as he realized that they could still lose.
Then the fireballs started again; they rained down on the rear of the Forest, disrupting the trees back there, and then began stitching a line of destruction right up the middle. The weather mages saw what was happening and directed their lightning strikes to follow up the same pathway.
Kordas felt Mother’s eruption of pure glee. Then he saw it for himself.
They had cut the Forest in half. And the fireballs began falling on the right-hand half, while the lightning kept the division open, and Mother reached upward with all her appendages and fell on the left half. For an instant her entire body liquefied and splashed yellow-hot stone and metals a furlong wide on each side of her. Heedless of the rocks still being torn out of her, Mother reformed and slashed and burned with her titanic, white-hot talons, while fireball after fireball punched more holes in the other half of the rage-quickened Forest.
He sensed, rather than saw, the moment of victory. When the Forest ceased to be able to protect itself, to think, if that word really applied to the monstrosity, and all the trees thrashed in uncoordinated chaos and the pain of approaching death.
“Open door!” cried Pebble, and the guards didn’t even pause to question Kordas; they unbarred gates slashed deeply and scorched black, and Pebble elongated and sprouted what must have been a hundred stubby little legs, and flowed down to its mother like a millipede.
“You may rest,” he heard in his mind, and he did not question the order, or the source. Apparently they all heard Mother give the word, because Jonaton slid down the inside of the parapet to slump bonelessly onto the top of the wall, and Kordas did the same. A little away from him, Sai pulled his knees up to his chest and rested his face on them for a moment.
Within the wall, all was quiet. Outside the wall, there was nothing but the sound of splintering wood.
Finally Sai turned his head toward Kordas, in clear exhaustion and pain.
“Am I missing—an eyebrow?” he groaned.
“Not—entirely,” Kordas replied. “Trim the burned bits off and no one will notice.”
“Good,” Sai said, and put his face back between his knees.
Someone came and put hands over both of Kordas’s ears, and after a while he realized he was hearing normally again. Which was a relief; he had not entirely been certain that a Healer could do anything about the damage. Some time after that, he sensed Isla approaching up the stairs—he was acutely sensitive to all the mages in the Vale right now, and probably would be for a little while longer, until the connections faded. He raised his head and blinked blearily at her.
She was carrying a pail and a cup. She dipped the latter in the former and shoved it toward him; he took it, and noted absently that it was sticky. She didn’t have to order him to drink; he was parched, probably had been for some time, and had shoved that aside along with every other nagging physical problem.
He gulped the contents down. It was some sort of herbal concoction, with a touch of salt, but at least half honey. Under most circumstances he would have gagged; now he wanted a second cup, and got it.
A little more revived, he saw that other people and Dolls were moving along the wall with pails or pitchers and cups, making sure everyone up here drank their fill.
He wanted to know—and dreaded to hear—how many people, how much they had lost. But he had to know.
“Not as many as you’re afraid to hear,” Isla said, anticipating him. “Not more than two hundred; probably closer to one hundred than two. No one we actually know.”
But they are still my people. They trusted me, and I led them here to die.
“There are a couple of the weaker or older mages who are going to be touch-and-go for a little, but the Healers seem confident they’ll pull through,” Isla continued. “We lost very little stock. There is no damage inside the Veil, and the only property damage is the spare barges down by the river. That monster ate them.”
He nodded wearily, too tired to speak.
“The Hawkbrothers came down out of the woods; they want to talk to you,” she continued.
Well, I want to talk to them, he thought with a ghost of anger. I thought they said we didn’t need to worry about the Forest.
Rose and Isla helped him to his feet and steadied him down the stairs to the still-open gate. He glanced at the spot where he’d last seen Mother savaging the Forest. She and Pebble were both down there; the raw, burning spots where great chunks had been torn out of her hide were healing, and the two of them seemed to be—grazing.
Good. I hope they devour every speck of that thing so it can’t regrow.
But he didn’t waste much time on that, because the Hawkbrothers, led by Silvermoon, were waiting for him. And “sheepish” did not even begin to describe the looks on their faces. Also “chagrin,” “regret,” and “how-could-we-have-been-that-stupid.”
That cooled his anger a little.
Sheer weariness kept the rest of it in check.
Silvermoon spread his arms wide. “There are no words for our regret,” he said. “When last we surveyed the Red Forest, it was mostly asleep. We reckoned it would stay that way. We are—” He shook his head. “Sorry is inadequate.”
Anger made him want to lash out, but diplomacy won. Besides, if that damned thing had been tracking them all this time, if they had remained in that wintering spot, they’d all be dead. “I . . . assume you were watching us to see if we were as good as our word.” The words came out flat, but Silvermoon did not seem to take offense.
“Wouldn’t you?” the Hawkbrother asked, wryly.
He couldn’t argue with that.
“I would like to say that we were making sure that you would not encounter anything you couldn’t handle,” Silvermoon continued, “but I would be lying, because we didn’t even consider that would be the case. And after all, we left you with everything you could need. And when that infant Earth Elemental turned up and began helping you, well . . .” He shrugged. “You had more than you’d need, and we watched you to see how you would treat it.”
“Its name is Pebble, and it’s the one I freed when I fled our Capital.” He’d given the brief version of the story to Silvermoon during one of their evenings of talking and sharing information.
Silvermoon nodded. “So this would be its mother.” He glanced at the wall, where the top curve of Mother’s neck was just visible. “I have never, ever, ever, in all my studies, encountered someone who earned the loyalty of a Great Elemental. Not any of them.” Now Silvermoon fixed him with a penetrating gaze, as if he would like very much to read Kordas’s mind.
“Right now, I am a weary man, but I have another duty to do. Two, actually,” as an idea somehow escaped from the depths of his consciousness and presented itself eagerly to him. “You’re welcome to come with me while I speak with Mother.”
“Ah. No, thank you,” Silvermoon temporized. “I think it’s best if she only sees people she knows. Ah . . . good luck. I’ll see you at dusk in the negotiation room.”
And he backed up a little, clearing Kordas’s way to go down to Pebble and Mother.
Somehow, that was the funniest thing Kordas had seen in a long time, and he choked back laughter as he made his way down to the blasted plain.
Well, when you’re dealing with the likes of us, you do want to be careful about the impressions you make.
Silvermoon called after him, clearly meant to be heard by everyone around, “Well fought, King Valdemar.”