“Close the shutter!” Ivy cried. “I hate the sounds of war.”
Rose glanced over her shoulder. Ivy had been sitting on the floor, clutching her boys and crying since the first horn of battle had been blown. “Ash has gone out there!”
“Ash is a grown woman and can do as she pleases. My children are just babies and they are coughing from the smoke. Close the shutter!”
“Close the shutter, Rowan,” Rose said softly to her daughter, who was the one who had opened it in the first place. But Rowan did not respond.
“Please,” Rose said to her, dropping her voice. “Your aunt is worried about her boys.”
Rowan lifted her hand and extended it toward the sea. “Look. Both of you!”
Rose peered out and gasped. Ivy leapt to her feet and joined them. A monster, glittering in the summer sun, was rising from the sea.
“Mama?” Eadric said, his voice shaking.
“No!” Ivy cried. “No, not a dragon! They don’t exist anymore.” She descended into hysterical crying, pulled her boys with her under the table as though that could protect them.
Rose’s stomach was hollow. Now the tower seemed the very worst place for them to be. It may have been made of stone, but it was the highest point of the city. If the creature was determined to attack Seacaster, it would come here first.
“Rowan, get under the table with Ivy and the boys,” Rose said.
“No,” Rowan said, striding to the corner where her belongings were and seizing her bow. “Help me out the window.”
“What? No!”
“Help me out the window, Mama. I can kill it.”
“You’re a child!”
Rowan’s mouth tightened, her nostrils flaring. Rose remembered that expression from her babyhood, the expression that came just before a tantrum. But Rowan simply brushed roughly past Rose, hanging the bow and quiver over her shoulder, and seized a chair.
“We need that!” Ivy said.
Rowan roughly shoved the chair in front of the window and climbed onto it. Rose, terror clawing at her heart, tried to pull Rowan back down. With strength and force unnatural in one so young, Rowan flung Rose’s hands off her. She bent to look Rose right in the eyes, and Rose became aware that her daughter’s eyes were different now. Harder. Older.
“I must protect my family,” she said in a low, hissing voice. “I can kill the dragon. I must kill it.” Then she pushed herself through the window with her back against the sill, took hold of the brickwork outside, and pulled herself up and out.
Rose threw herself under the table with Ivy, putting her arms around her sister. “Hush, all will be well,” she said. The city was on fire, their children and sisters were in mortal danger. “All will be well,” she said again, although it couldn’t possibly be true.
Willow took her time. Swords were waiting for them on the docks, but the wolfskins went first with their flaming torches, then the raiders armed with spears and axes began to hack their way through the crowd. Willow was last to leave her ship, unused to the heavy mail whose weight lay across her shoulders, Hakon pushing her in the middle of the back. Smoke and bodies and shouting and confusion. Grithbani was in her hand and she refused to let the noise and blood distract her. Her instincts were homing in on Bluebell as easily as if she could see her. Maava was showing her the way. To the north. Bluebell was not among this mob; she was approaching from the east.
Hakon cleared a path for her, his mighty arms slashing and slicing. He was terrifying, a machine of death, hacking through heathens as they screamed for their mothers and for mercy. Many deliberately sidestepped him, some jumped in the water rather than face him. Willow could see they were outnumbered. She could foretell that Hakon’s army would not be taking Seacaster—which made it all the more important that she take Bluebell.
Then, for a moment, the crowd cleared and she saw her sister, and her sister saw her. Charged recognition passed between them, and Willow plowed ahead. Bluebell shouted an order to somebody nearby and stood, waiting, the Widowsmith raised, an overturned rowboat on fire behind her so that she was outlined in orange flames, as Willow had seen her countless times in her mind’s eye.
Willow’s knees turned to water. Her hand felt moist on the hilt of Grithbani.
Hakon stepped aside. “Maava be with you,” he said, and with this one simple phrase, Willow felt once again Maava’s will rushing unfettered toward her. The surge of strength and faith in her body made her tall, powerful, and she ran at Bluebell with a guttural roar and the blessings of angels.
Bluebell deflected the first blow, but was unprepared for the speed of the second, twisting around awkwardly to block it. Willow was pleased to see her sister almost lose her footing, and even more pleased to see the expression of shock on what was visible of her face under her helm.
Willow drove at her again, received a shield bash in the face for her trouble, and stumbled onto her backside, heart thudding. But then a huge shadow passed over them, and a rumbling, sucking, drawing of mighty breath split the air. Bluebell’s eyes went skyward, and Willow glanced up, too, and her heart leapt with joy when she saw it.
An angel had come. Glittering white wings spread across the heavens, spewing fire down on the heathens battling for Seacaster.
The dragon made one pass over the armies, indiscriminately breathing fire down upon the city.
“Ash!” came the cry, and Ash took her horrified eyes off the dragon’s glittering wings long enough to see her father hobbling toward her.
“No, stay back!” she called, with a sweep of her arm. But a moment later the dragon arrowed straight for him, opened its jaws, and a long stream of flame shook down from the sky.
The last Ash saw, Athelrick lifted his shield and crouched. Then smoke and flame obscured her view. When it cleared, Athelrick lay on the ground shouting with pain. His shield was cinders on the stone, and his hands were two black smoking stumps.
Ash began to hurry toward him, but the dragon came to circle around her: once, twice, three times, as though saying, See what I will do if you do not give me your blood.
“I’m sorry, Father,” she said under her breath, stopping in her tracks. She turned and put her face up to the sky. “All right, Unweder!” she called, her voice very small and thin against the roar of battle. “You win! Leave the city alone and I will meet you on the field outside to—”
Unsatisfied with this offer, the dragon shot off over the crooked streets of fishermen’s houses, spewing down orange-bright fire. The heat made the air shimmer.
“What would you have me do?” she cried.
His voice was inside her head. You will come back to the coasts of Almissia with me. You will give me a dish of your blood, every morning, and protect me with your elemental army. Vow you will do this, and I will leave the city be. Disagree, and I will burn the tower where your sisters and niece are. As if to emphasize the threat, the dragon flew up toward the tower and circled it closely, the tip of its wing scraping across the stone. Ash could hear the terrified screams of the gathered citizens in the square. Then she noticed that Rowan sat in the window of the tower, her bow and arrow trained on Unweder.
“Rowan, you can’t!” she called out.
Rowan loosed an arrow. It pinged harmlessly off the dragon’s hide. Unweder lazily flapped away from the tower and then turned, Rowan clearly in his path, arrowing down.
Every morning. For the rest of her life. Living with Unweder again.
And she knew she could never agree to his terms; but neither could she disagree and let Unweder destroy everyone she loved.
There was only one way to end this, and that was to end the supply of blood magic that so effortlessly sustained his unnaturally extended life in all its forms.
Ash strode to where her father lay and pulled his sword from its sheath. “You want blood, Unweder?” she cried, and willed the air elementals to make her voice boom on the wind. “Come, then. Let us be done with this.”
Athelrick tried to stand, but slipped and fell on his front with a shout of pain and distress. “Ash? Do not do this!”
Ash poised the tip of the blade over the hollow of her throat. Instantly, the dragon changed its path. Unweder’s voice in her head shrieked, Wait!
The dragon landed, took two cumbersome steps toward her. She had thought facing death she would be frightened, but all she felt was bone-deep sadness for her loss of the world and all the beautiful people in it. Ash gripped the sword in two hands, ready to plunge it into her throat.
Bluebell abandoned Willow, on her arse on the ground looking stunned and shredded with exhaustion, and ran toward the staircase where the dragon was circling. Father was there. She had left him there, all but crippled, unable to defend himself. All the armies were in disarray, some running toward the sea away from the flaming city. She ran up the stairs, feeling the weight of her armor keenly. The dragon had plunged toward the ground, and as Bluebell ascended, it came into view. Father lay on his back over the stairs. She couldn’t make sense of what had happened to his hands. He was pale and streaked with soot.
The dragon moved forward, but was too large and unwieldy in the cramped space. So with a strange shifting jolt of shadow and light, it transformed into a man in black.
Unweder.
With the dragon no longer crowding the view, she could see Ash before him, a sword awkwardly pointed toward her own neck.
“Ash, wait!” she cried, charging toward Unweder. If she killed him, then all Ash’s problems would go away.
Then an arrow came whistling out of the sky, and Bluebell ducked and held up her shield. But it was Unweder who took the arrow, falling backward, bent at the knees like a ghastly puppet, blood bubbling from his chest. The arrow had struck him squarely in the heart.
Ash let out a cry: half a shout and half a sob. She dropped the sword and crumpled to the ground next to Unweder’s body.
Bluebell ran to Athelrick. Panting, she fell to her knees. “Father, Father. My king,” Bluebell cried, wanting to grasp his hands in hers. Never again. She would never hold those hands again. “You will be all right. I will fix you.”
“You can’t fix this, Bluebell,” Athelrick said. Then he smiled through his pain and shock. “My granddaughter,” he said. “Up on the tower.”
Bluebell lifted her eyes to see Rowan standing on the peak of the tower roof, her bow held aloft in victory.
Ash knelt over Unweder. There was yet a dull light in his eyes, but it faded fast. She had thought she might feel a sense of loss; he had been her companion so long. But she felt nothing but relief.
Bluebell strode over, placed her foot on his face. “Don’t watch him die,” she said. “He deserves our scorn, not our pity.”
“There is no pity in my heart, Bluebell,” she said. “Perhaps I have become hard.”
“Perhaps you have simply become free.”
Then the air around Ash began to buzz. As Unweder’s life left him, a wave of energy was rising off him. At first only Ash could sense it, but then Bluebell was flung off him, and Ash could see a crimson-tinged fog of warm air around him.
As it expanded and touched her skin, she recognized this energy. It was her own blood magic, returning to her. Ash braced herself.
Then a hot wave crashed over her, knocking her on her back, tearing at her clothes and whistling into her ears, her nostrils, her gasping mouth, even the tiny pores on her skin. And as this energy entered her body, she felt every nerve and fiber swell with it, tingle and burn, then settle again but now pulsing with power. The wave was over as fast as it had come, and Bluebell was there, holding out her hand, helping Ash to her feet.
“Go to Father,” Bluebell said. “I have to take care of Willow.”
As Ash moved off toward the duke’s gate with Athelrick, Bluebell turned to see Willow advancing on her, the trollblade in her hand.
“Come, sister,” Willow cried and turned her wrist to flourish her sword. “I shall send you to the Blacklands!”
Bluebell wasn’t in the mood for speeches about Maava, and no matter how good Willow was as a swordsman, she wasn’t Bluebell’s match, magic sword or not. Bluebell dashed down the steps, on the attack. Over, under, side. Willow blocked, but not fast enough. Bluebell caught her across the thigh and she staggered, cursed.
You could kill her.
Bluebell took a step back, held the death blow.
Just kill her.
A flash at the corner of her vision. Bluebell turned to see Hakon from between burning buildings, back where she had been standing moments before.
The hot slice of the sword on her exposed left shoulder. Bluebell rounded on Willow, angry, went hard after her. Over, under, side. Willow’s other thigh opened up.
“Maava blesses me for my suffering,” Willow said.
Bluebell knew she had to finish this quickly. “Drop the sword and don’t make me kill you,” she said.
Willow gathered herself, pressed forward, struck low from weariness, slashing across Bluebell’s foot. Hot pain. Bluebell struggled to right herself. The stairs were uneven, steep. A flash of rage across her heart. Hakon’s footsteps came fast, his ax held high.
Bluebell lifted her shield, caught Hakon’s ax but exposed her middle. Willow lurched forward. With one swift movement, Bluebell brought her shield, with Hakon’s ax still embedded in it, down on Willow’s head.
Willow fell, striking her head on the ground. The trollblade clattered out of her hand. Hakon reached for it, but Bluebell reached for it, too, smacking him across the head with her shield. He sprawled flat on the ground, eyelids flickering.
Then the trollblade shot into the air. Bluebell leapt back and Willow cried out in triumph, “Maava be praised!”
But the sword spun in the air, then shot off toward the duke’s gate. Bluebell turned to see Ash, her hands outstretched, a look of uncanny focus on her face.
“No!” Willow cried, struggling to her feet and stumbling past Bluebell on the stairs, falling on her backside.
Ash caught the sword, and Bluebell let go of a breath. If she trusted anyone with Grithbani, it was Ash.
Bluebell returned her attention to Willow and brought the Widowsmith down, stopped it half an inch above Willow’s head. Her sister looked up, pupils shrunk to pinpoints.
“Don’t make me kill you, sister,” Bluebell said.
Willow remained silent.
Bluebell could see her pulse flicking at her throat. Hakon was rousing. She didn’t have much time. She dropped her shield. Reached out her free hand to help Willow to her feet. “I don’t want your blood on my conscience. The trollblade will be destroyed. Come back to Blickstow.”
Willow’s hand came up. Her white fingers closed around Bluebell’s.
And she pulled with all her might, sending Bluebell pitching down the stairs.
Bluebell felt the first three thumps to her body, then everything went gray.