Chapter Twenty-Four

I SEE, AS though I’m observing if distantly as someone else, an arrow, soaked with my blood, tearing clean through my skin. I hear my flesh skewer open. Smoke stings my eyes and I struggle to regain control of my wings. I hear Mama shouting as she yanks the Energies at whoever shot at me, her voice cracked and terrified. I don’t look down at my wound. I don’t even know where I’ve been hit.

I look up at Evelyn as I careen to the ground. Her lips are moving soundlessly as she sends streams of water at my burning friends while she runs toward me. Mom and Jax are tending to fallen dragons. Zaylam is among them.

I roll over and wretch.

Lerian is galloping toward me, my name on her lips, coughing though she is with the smoke rising thickly through the entire Plains.

Almost all the Lunavads are on fire. I send a weak rush of wet wind Lerian’s way, clearing the air around her and pushing smoke away from her lungs. The effort of bending the Energies keeps me pinned to the hard, hot ground. A pair of thick roots tears out of the ground and lifts me away, planting me under my Mom before smacking three oncoming soldiers aside. I try dimly to figure out whose roots saved me, but the pain is getting too much.

“Sadie!” Mom screams above the chaos, focused only on me. Her eyes are vivid in the haze, desperate. Her hands run all over my body, tears streaking tracks through the ash and blood on her face.

“Mom,” I groan, but stop when I realize how much my mouth tastes like vomit.

“Chew on this.” She shows something minty in my mouth, and I don’t question her, even as she ducks under the cascading roots that are wrenching themselves near apart to keep us safe. I try to turn my head again to see who is protecting us, but Mom puts a firm hand on my forehead to stop me from moving. She’s craning her neck every which way for a better view, her fingers testing the area around the arrow in me. She takes a deep breath and looks at me sternly.

“Sadie, I need to take this arrow out of you. It’s not going to be—”

She tightens her fist over the arrow and yanks. A sick squelching sound shoots through my veins as pain, worse than actually getting shot to begin with, wracks my entire body.

“Pleasant,” she says grimly when I finally stop screaming.

“A little warning next time,” I pant as she sutures my side with a prominently veined, wrinkled hand, the Energies contorting to help her around me.

“Anticipation makes it worse.” Her voice is casual, but her brown eyes are pure agony.

“No point in telling you to get yourself somewhere safe, is there?” she asks me. I just stare up at her face, streaked with my blood.

“One day, you two will listen to your mother and me,” she mutters as she pulls me up, half carrying me through the air, toward Jax and Aora and Kashat. We converge with Mama, surrounding Lerian, Aon, and Evelyn, away from the flailing bodies of the dragons Semad, Archa, Kamid. And Zaylam.

I scream her name but Mom won’t let me go. Her hand grazes my still bloodied side, and I gasp with the renewed pain.

“She’ll be all right, Sadie, the burns aren’t—”

“Zay!”

She’s just lying there, sprawled all wrong.

“She can’t hear you, Sade, but the burns aren’t deep—”

“She’ll suffocate!”

“I twisted the Energies around her face, all of their faces, she’ll be fine—”

I stop struggling and stare at Mom’s blood and soot-streaked face as her viselike grip on me tightens.

“Then why are you keeping me from her?”

“You just got shot, Sadie. If you—” I’m struggling again, and she shoves my back into Banion’s trunk as a spell from a Mach soldier burns into the Energies where I was just hovering. “If you’re going to insist on staying and fighting, I need to know you’re—” She and I nod at each other before sending a strong blast of Energies-twisting wind around the other side of Banion’s trunk at two advancing Mach soldiers. “—protected.”

I turn my eyes back across the Plains to Zaylam’s resting form. I squint through the haze. Her underbelly is rising, falling. Too weakly for my liking, but significantly. Jorbam’s trunk is scorch free. Thanks to her. I swallow vomit, nod, and shake my hands out.

“Do we have a plan?”

Gimla shrieks a warning above us and we speed up to him, combining our wing winds to quell flames heading toward a younger Lunavad sapling.

“I need your other mother—we can freeze everything!”

Relief floods through me. A plan. Maybe with a plan, the rest of my life won’t look like flames and smell like flesh.

My eyes water and Mom tugs me down. “Try to stay low—the smoke goes up.”

“Faye!”

Mama. We fly in the direction of her voice below us, and I almost choke when a wall of smoke clears and reveals her. She’s surrounded by three Mach soldiers, hovering protectively above Aon.

“What are you doing back?” Mom shouts at him as she and I both pick a soldier to get away from them.

“Now’s not a great time to scold me!” my little brother calls, and my laughter ignites the pain in my side but gives my spell the extra push I need to make the soldier I’m facing turn back. Away from Aon. He will not die like Blaze. I won’t allow it.

Mom doesn’t laugh. She spins to round on Aon, not seeing the Mach soldier she’s facing take advantage and pull his fingers back to yank the Energies into a spell at her. Before I can even call to her, the soldier drops down, unconscious.

Evelyn steps out of the smoke behind him, her forehead streaked with a thin gash of blood, her face set, steely.

“Thank you.” Mom’s voice is shocked, humbled. Numb.

Evelyn’s eyes meet mine. “You don’t leave people to die.”

She holds my eyes for a moment longer and then, without warning, she speeds off, away. Back toward the breach in the barrier.

“Told you it was a bad time to scold me,” Aon is saying as Mom scoops him behind her. I pull her into my arms, put my forehead against hers.

“I love you.”

And I take off after Evelyn.

Mom’s face is stricken, but she can’t object. She spins to send a gust of water at the nearest trees, at the nearest fire-wielding Hands.

I don’t look back.

When I catch up with her, Evelyn glances at me between sword swipes—someone must have passed her the weapon in the chaos—and her eyes linger too long on my bloodied side.

Then the Energies tug strangely around us. Not like a spell, not like something deliberate. It feels like a Dream, the way the Energies twist around someone when we Dream. But who could be sleeping right now?

The Commander of the Mach steps out from the smoke and raises his sword to meet Evelyn’s neck. Fast. The feeling of that Energy twisting intensifies. I ignore it and shout Evelyn’s name so she’ll pay attention to Reve. Their swords lock just above her forehead, her fleshy and powerful arms trembling but holding.

That sensation of Energy tugging redoubles, and I realize with a jolt that I’ve felt it each time Reve has been near me. Now; when he tried to invade the Underland; when Iema was bleeding in the snow.

“I was hoping you wouldn’t choose the wrong side to fight for, Your Majesty.” His lips curl menacingly.

I almost fall out of the air. Her Majesty?

Lerian’s eyes flash as she whips her face, gashed and bloodied, away from the scene.

“You got something you want to tell me about your friend over there?” she shouts.

“I have no idea,” I yell back. Her Majesty?

A few whistled notes rise above the fray, from the spot where I’d left my family. Its distinct pattern, lilting up on the last note, signals us all to rush toward it. Like young ones entering a racing game.

Lerian jerks her head toward the noise, and I tug on Evelyn’s arm, encouraging her to run with us. Toward my growns. Toward their plans to unlease a freeze spell on the Plains.

I lose my breath halfway there, and Lerian practically tosses me onto her back. She glares over her shoulder when I struggle, and she only lets go of me when we’ve joined a circle made up of Zeel, my growns, Jax, Aon, Kashat, a few others whose names I don’t know.

Mama lets loose the whistle signal again, and on the last note, we lock hands. With the next breath, each of us who can twist the Energies send everything buried inside of us, locked in our bones, out into the Plains. We unhinge ourselves momentarily from the primary Energies flying through us, and we send them out into the world.

An azure thread goes out from our joined, bloodied hands and weaves its way out from our bodies, stilling almost everything and everyone it touches.

We are freezing the Plains, as Mama and Mom did to that clearing the night we raided the weapons caravan.

The night I met the woman fighting for us nearby.

A small gap of silence, of stillness, rises around us.

I look back to where we left Evelyn, to where I thought she was following us.

Reve is only slowed by the spell, his sword in slow motion, midswing, slowed in time with the rest of his body. Some small fires near us stop flickering, their growth halted by the freeze. But the azure thread flails and stops the freeze, too weak, too small; the Plains are enormous, and the rest of it is still at full speed, smoking, crackling sickeningly, full of agonized yells, of the nauseating scent of burning flesh, of vomit, of decay.

We need to freeze flame and force all across the Plains, not just the part immediately surrounding us. We need more power.

Evelyn, disentangling herself finally from her now slowed sword fight, runs toward us. Her entire body is shaking with the effort, but she holds a gentle, trembling hand out to my bloodied side.

When her skin touches mine, three explosions occur at once.