Chapter Twenty-Three

Eadric knew something was amiss from the moment he and Nicole punched out of the ground outside of South Yard. He couldn’t quite put a finger on it, but something in him had flattened its ears, raised its haunches, and it wasn’t from the pungent stink of fish and salt overwhelming his nostrils.

Then his eyes narrowed.

“Is it just me,” he said to Nicole slowly, wincing as his voice rattled along the rainbow of crates stacked beyond, “or are those pebbles floating?”

Before the Elite could reply, a hulking man clad in a swirling white robe rounded a corner and strode toward them, his ice-blond ponytail swinging by his waist and the largest greatsword Eadric had ever seen in his life strapped to his back.

Eadric spun around and all but shoved Nicole back into the hole. “Retreat!”

A peculiar, weightless sensation enveloped him. Eadric’s eyes widened as his toes left the ground and his body tipped forward like an unbalanced ocean buoy. Nicole flailed behind him, rising faster than a balloon. His fingers scrabbled at the sides of the tunnel they had emerged from, just barely managing to latch onto a handhold at the last second. He grappled for Nicole’s ankle with his other hand a heartbeat before she slipped away.

“Air barrier,” he gasped. Something hard bumped against his knee. When he released Nicole, she floated upward for a moment and then bounced against the invisible dome she had conjured.

BANG!

A greatsword slammed into the barrier, startling an embarrassing yell out of both of them. An impassive, black diamond stare pinned them from above. Eadric only had two seconds to take in the man’s vicious, clean-shaven face before the greatsword lifted into the air again, blinding sunlight glinting off the edge of the massive blade.

BANG!

The man drove the blade into the barrier hard enough for the impact to rattle Eadric’s bones.

Beads of perspiration glistened across Nicole’s brow. “Captain . . .”

Eadric gripped his affinity stone as the sword rose yet again. “On my signal, drop the barrier and roll.” He zeroed in on those lightless black eyes, all the while watching the sword’s falling arc from the corner of his eye.

The sky flashed white and Nicole hurled herself to the left, the blade cutting right through the air without the barrier’s interference and missing Nicole’s neck by an inch, cleaving through the earth down to the hilt. Eadric yanked at his lightning like a rope, wrapping it around the great­sword just as he and Nicole began floating out of the hole.

The man let out a pained grunt and fell to his knees as the electricity conducted through the blade and into his body. Gravity restored as Eadric let him fry.

Nicole landed neatly beside Eadric, and for a heartbeat, the two of them simply watched the man spasm at their feet.

Then they glanced at each other wordlessly and took off, sprinting farther into the grid of shipping containers, zig-zagging through aisles and past a lone crane, sticking close to the shadows in case any more nasty surprises awaited them up ahead—although, Eadric thought, the more attention we draw, the safer Asterin and Gino will be.

Once Eadric felt positive no one was tailing them—the yard appeared deserted—he motioned to Nicole and they took shelter in an unlocked shipping container. Neither of them had light affinities, so Eadric conjured lightning to his palm, raising his arm above his head as skittish bolts of electricity crackled down to his elbow, casting their surroundings in a ring of bluish-white.

Piles upon piles of crates swam out of the darkness, stacked in pyramids dangerously high. Eadric found a lone box in the corner and pried it open with the flat of his sword to reveal stacks of stationery—sheets of parchment, Vürstivale cards, envelopes, quills, ink, and more.

“I was kind of hoping for harpoons or something,” he muttered. “Then maybe we could have shot the bastard down from afar.” He scowled. “What kind of affinity was he wielding? Air?”

“Not quite,” Nicole replied, examining the crate’s contents over his shoulder. “Air-wielders influence the state of gaseous substances in focused areas only, increasing pressure or density, pulling the oxygen from your lungs, that sort of thing. It was closer to a wind affinity.”

“But he wasn’t riding on wind gusts or anything. You need to actually summon wind to wield it. He didn’t do that. He was just . . . floating.” Eadric shook his head. “This was something else. Something more.”

Nicole paused. “Have you heard of the Asceae?”

“The Asceae clan?” said Eadric. From what he knew, while Eyvindré clan, like the Jikuli or the Rianmar, occupied territories spanning nearly half of the continent, the Asceae mostly kept to themselves along the Fatalian Passen—the deadly mountain range crisscrossing the shared border between Oprehvar and Cyeji.

Nicole nodded. “I heard a rumor that, as the distant offspring of earth-wielding Voltero lineage, they practice a special magical technique that allows them to manipulate gravity.”

Eadric hummed thoughtfully and rifled through the crate. “Gravity, huh?” He fished out some parchment and began tearing it into strips. “Maybe we can use that to our advantage.”

Nicole raised a questioning eyebrow.

Eadric pointed his index finger into the air and summoned a tiny bolt of lightning to the tip. He aimed it at the parchment strip. It scorched completely. “Lightning particles move too quickly to be affected by gravity, but only if he doesn’t see me conjuring it, which takes at least a few seconds. Even if I managed to get a hit, we would need to trap him. Larger masses equal stronger gravitational pull, right? So if we could pin him underneath an object with a mass too large for him to affect its gravity . . .”

“What sort of object are we talking about?” Nicole asked.

Eadric cursed when he accidentally incinerated a third parchment strip. “A shipping container, maybe—except we wouldn’t be able to lift that ourselves, either.”

Nicole smirked. “Unless you’re a wind-wielder.” She squinted as he continued struggling with the parchment. “What are you even trying to do?”

“Light the damn thing,” he growled. “Where’s a fire-wielder when you need one?”

“Dead, for starters,” Nicole said bluntly.

Eadric winced. “Right.” He turned back to the crate for more parchment. “Maybe if you created some sort of air bubble around the edge of the strip to help it catch aflame . . .” He sniffed smoke and glanced up to find a triumphant Nicole holding a burning sheaf of parchment in her fist. His jaw dropped. “How did you—have you been hiding a fire-affinity from us this whole time?”

She snorted and tossed a small object into the air. “Nope.” He caught it one-handed. “Sometimes, Captain, you just tend to overthink simple solutions.”

Eadric scoffed and opened his fist. “Me, overthink things?” He glanced downward. “I have no idea what you’re—”

It turned out to be a small bundle of matches.

They chose an intersection of four wide lanes that all ended in dead ends but for two. Eadric’s job was simple—lead the Asceaen hireling as far away as possible until Nicole’s signal.

He marked the crane’s location in his mind, noting the containers in the vicinity by their vibrant logos—Westerling Shipping Services, Fine Fellow Faux Furs, Xenithur Overseas & Co. And then, armed with his sword, the matches, and pockets stuffed with parchment, he set off into the yard.

At the end of the lane to his left, Eadric crumpled up a piece of parchment and stuffed it into the corner of a shipping container between two slats of metal to keep it from blowing away. Then he struck a match and waited for the parchment to catch before hurrying off to his next target.

Moving in a calculated path, Eadric repeated the procedure again and again until he ran out of parchment. By now, the Asceaen must have either noticed the smoke or spotted some parchment detritus—unless Eadric had actually managed to fry the brute dead the first time around, which seemed unlikely since he hadn’t had enough time to conjure up more than a small charge of electricity.

Sure enough, when he retraced his steps and peeked around the corner, he caught a glimpse of a white robe flapping around the far corner.

Slipping in and out of the shadows, Eadric trailed the hireling from a distance. Relief coursed through him as the man sniffed out the parchment trail like a well-trained hunting dog, leading Eadric through his own self-designed maze.

His pulse quickened as the hireling paused in front of the aisle that would lead him to Nicole, but thankfully he continued on a moment later.

Eadric took three steps out into the open when the man suddenly doubled back. Those malicious black eyes zeroed in on Eadric before he so much as had a chance to retreat. Between one heartbeat and the next, the shift in air pressure made his entire body sag. Even the most minuscule of movements took tremendous effort. Straining forward, Eadric managed to lift his left knee, followed by his foot. Gravity sucked him down like quicksand. As he let his foot fall, the hireling strolled toward him, both of his gloved hands still raised.

With two more steps and a final grunt of effort, Eadric made it around the corner, nearly crashing face-first into the ground when the weight suddenly lifted. He can’t affect what he can’t see, he realized.

Darting right, he sprinted past a block of crates and immediately took another right at the next junction, all too aware of Nicole’s location straight ahead. Returning to where the Asceaen had first spotted him, Eadric veered left twice, cursing himself when the man materialized two rows ahead. Once more, gravity slammed into him with the force of a mountain. Visual limit, visual limit, he thought desperately, his eyes snagging on a shipping container door mere feet away. Fighting the crushing weight, he lifted his hand with a groan, his fingers just managing to close on the steel bar. He swung it open with all his strength and threw himself into the darkness.

Scrabbling blindly over wooden crates as the door clanked shut behind him, he found the opposite wall of the container and crouched down, his right hand clenching his skystone and his left crackling with white-hot electricity. He pressed his palm into the wall. “Come on, come on,” he whispered as the metal began to liquefy, dripping to the floor and hardening.

The thump of heavy boots approached, mockingly loud—a predator taunting its prey. The door cracked open and Eadric didn’t hesitate. He brought his right fist down, striking the container with a blast of lightning. The electricity conducted along the metal roof and into the door handle. Eadric dove through his makeshift hole even before he heard the bodily thud signaling his success, the still-searing edges of the hole singeing his shoulders.

“Hurry up, Nicole,” he hissed beneath his breath, already running. No sooner were the words out of his mouth when the sea wind weaving through the yard picked up. As in, truly picked up. It shrieked past him, guiding his path and nearly tearing his cloak from his shoulders. He felt like a stray leaf caught in a hurricane. Down the aisles he stumbled, the trademark bear of Fine Fellow Faux Furs growling down at him.

Eadric scarcely had more than a moment to catch his breath before the hireling appeared at the other end of the aisle, trapping him between the concrete wall at Eadric’s back and the man himself.

Befitting the grand splendor of an Immortal with his floating white robes unfurled like swans’ wings, the hireling rose above the crates and glided closer. The violent wind did nothing to deter him. Like a master watchmaker, his fingers tinkered with gravity, adjusting it to his tastes.

Shit, Eadric thought. He raised his hands in surrender, thoroughly defeated and driven beyond exhaustion. While the hireling continued floating, it seemed as though Eadric’s boots had taken root in the earth.

This time, he would not be able to escape. All he could do was await his demise.

Eadric watched the hireling descend, white robes rustling back into place. He couldn’t help but gulp as the man reached across his back and unsheathed his greatsword in a single, effortless movement, drawing out the silvery shiiink of steel. Now that Eadric could get a proper eyeful of the blade’s full length—an obscene four feet from hilt to tip—his own sheathed sword felt about as useful as a large knitting needle.

“Wait,” Eadric blurted. The Asceaen halted in front of him and raised an eyebrow. With his gossamer hair, brutal build, and fearsomely cold gaze, he even looked like an Immortal. “I have traveling papers sanctioned and signed by the Queen of Axaria.”

That gaze didn’t waver. “No papers can save you from death.”

Eadric thrust a hand into his jacket and practically shook a rumpled stack of parchment in the hireling’s face. “Please, just take a look, Mister . . . ?”

His lips quirked into a shark’s smile. “Rivaille.”

Rivaille straightened the papers and read the two words that Eadric had scribbled earlier at the top in all capitals.

LOOK DOWN.

Confusion wrinkled the hireling’s brow. He turned his gaze down, and in his distraction Eadric managed to charge up for a second and electrocute him. At such close range, it was enough of a shock for gravity to revert back to normal for about three seconds. But three seconds was all he needed to dash forward, past Rivaille, as fast and as far as he could, the buffeting winds giving him an extra shove forward.

As soon as Rivaille recovered, he thrust out his hands. Gravity mowed Eadric’s entire body into the ground. But by then it was already too late because, of course, the instructions on the note were only meant to prevent Rivaille from looking up.

A large rectangular shadow swallowed the hireling as the shipping container Nicole had propelled off the concrete wall with a mighty blast of wind plummeted directly onto his head. His eyes widened, arms shooting up to brace it with his magic, but whatever his control of gravity, it couldn’t withstand the container’s weight. Metal smashed into the earth with a deafening crash . . . squashing Rivaille flat beneath it.

Silence fell.

And then, from atop the concrete wall, Nicole began to laugh.

Eadric had never heard the Elite emit such a sound. It was a stilted but loud a-ha-ha-ha, as if she had read it in a book syllable for syllable and adopted it as her own. He gaped at her. “This is funny to you?”

She nearly toppled over the lip of the wall, clutching her stomach. “Did you see his face?”

BOOM.

The explosion resounded across the bay. They whirled around to see a column of ice erupting into the sky like an off-course comet of blue frost.

“Asterin,” Eadric said, his stomach sinking. Something had gone terribly, terribly wrong.

Nicole leapt off the wall, summoning a gale to cushion her landing, and together they raced for the quay bridging the two yards. “Weren’t there supposed to be three hirelings in total?” the Elite called to him as they ran.

Dread coiled in Eadric’s stomach. Only now did he realize that they had crossed paths with just one single hireling. And no magical knives had been involved.

If there were two more people like Rivaille hunting Asterin and Gino with said knives . . .

He ran faster.