There were fewer and fewer prisoners left. Time was running out.
But Alira, sawing as best she could with the blunted stumps of her face shield, could see that she had almost cut the last of the lashings on her cage. Once that was done, she’d be able to push herself free, squeezing past the heavy pole that was set in front of the cage door. She’d let Kora loose. The others too. And they’d burn the strange trees, and whatever magick was in them, to the ground.
She feared she might not have strength enough to stand when she got out, but she shook the worry away. One step at a time.
The whistle of another prisoner shook Alira back to herself. She stopped sawing and slumped back against the bars of her cage. Tiredly, she pulled the face shield back into place around her neck, the straps only half-done before her stomach distracted her by twisting in a dull pain of hunger. She let her hands fall into her lap and sighed in a long, weak tremble. And when she tried to swallow, hoping even for some spit to fill her stomach, her mouth was dry as bleached bone.
Two Bloodborn women were walking down the aisle. She hadn’t seen them come in. Alira shook her head to clear it, to focus and stay alive.
Two. That meant they were taking someone away. She glanced through the bars at the other prisoners huddled in their cages. One of them would scream soon and then not be heard from again.
It might even be her. She looked down at her soiled clothing and found herself smoothing it and thinking of Bela and a kiss that seemed a world away. She thought of that moment more and more. She didn’t know why.
The Bloodborn stopped, and when Alira looked up, they weren’t at her door. They were much farther down, close to the end of the far row of cages, where Alira could barely see.
She heard the Bloodborn lift the locking pole out of the way. She heard the swing of the cage door being raised up and flopped back onto the top of the cage. She heard them pulling a woman out.
Some fought when they were taken. Some wept. Others were limp, as if in their minds they were already dead.
This woman, whoever she was, was one of the limp ones.
Alira wanted to say a prayer for her, but the only thought that truly came into her mind was that she was glad it wasn’t her. That it wasn’t Kora.
The Bloodborn women started toward the darkened corridor at the end of the hall, the doorway from which only Bloodborn ever returned. They came into view now, and Alira saw that they had the prisoner’s arms draped across their shoulders so that they could lead her between them, half-carrying her weight. They were smiling.
The prisoner tried to lift her head, tried to look where she was going, but her strength gave out. Her head fell, her matted hair draping her face out of sight as they turned and bore her out of view.
But Alira had seen her face. She’d seen.
Whéuri.
Mother’s mercy. The older huntress had been here all this time. “Whéuri!” she shouted. The name ripped through her dry throat.
Heads in other cages turned her way. Several shushed her. Kora had come up to her bars, looking confused.
Alira ignored them all. She swung around onto her back to kick at the poles of the cage, desperate to force the partially cut lashings.
The door bounced, absorbing her feeble kicks, refusing to break loose.
Alira spun, flinging dirt, shifting so that she could wedge the strength of her body against a single corner of the door. Her feet bracing against the side bars, she shoved her back against the front. No bounce this time. Just a constant push, straining with what she had left.
She heard one of the remaining cords pop. Then another.
She repositioned, took a deep breath, then slammed herself back into it again.
The last of the lashings snapped and gave way, and she flopped out sideways around the big locking pole, out onto the stone pavement. The impact drove the air out of her lungs, but even as she gasped, she was turning over onto her stomach and crawling to get her feet under her body, to get moving, to get free.
Kora’s cage wasn’t far away. She was crouched at the front of it, her one good hand gripping the bars. Hope in her eyes.
Alira, coughing, shaking a dizziness from the lack of food and movement, stumbled to her. The pole keeping the cage closed was heavy. But, heaving, she got it out.
The shaft of wood clattered to the ground.
Alira blinked at it, wondering if the noise was a problem, knowing she had no strength to muffle the sound if it was.
Kora scrambled out as best she could and embraced her.
“No time,” Alira rasped. Still swallowing against her dry mouth, she pulled Kora toward another cage, and together they freed an older woman whom Alira had known only in passing back in Anjel. She’d known her name once. Maybe even a few days ago. But she couldn’t remember it now. It was hard to think beyond each footfall.
“Open more.” Alira nodded to the older woman. Vayra—that was her name—braced herself on the cages as she started toward the next one that was occupied.
Alira turned to walk away, but Kora’s hand on her elbow stopped her. “Where are you going?” Her voice sounded like sand rubbed on rough bark.
“Whéuri,” Alira managed.
“I could help you—”
Alira glanced at the girl’s limp arm and shook her head. “Free the others.”
“Then what?”
Alira nodded toward the strange trees. “Then burn them, Kora. Burn them and run.”
The girl nodded, hugged her once more, and then hurried to help Vayra. There were so few prisoners left. With the Mother’s luck, Alira thought, the ruined hall would soon be roiling smoke and flame toward the sky.
The trees, whatever they were, would be destroyed. Whether that meant she couldn’t get out this way, she didn’t know. It probably didn’t matter. One thing at a time.
Whéuri.
Still getting her balance, Alira hurried to the other end of the hall. Bracing herself against the doorway, she looked back and saw Kora and Vayra helping a man out of his cage. She smiled, then she ducked into the dark.
*
Alira was lost in the maze of unlit corridors and stairs and rooms when the screams began. She recognized it at once. She’d heard it before. It was Whéuri. It was death.
Using the stone walls to keep herself upright, she hurried through the building, turning for wherever the sound was loudest. To the right. Now left. Now down the stairs and across.
There was a new sound of rushing, running water, mixing with the cries of panic.
Down another set of stairs, and Alira saw light spilling out from an open door ahead. The rumble of the water was louder now. So were the screams.
Alira pulled herself off the wall so she could stand free. She blinked to focus her eyes.
She had no weapon, she suddenly realized. Nothing but her hands.
Good enough, she thought.
She crept up to the doorway. She looked inside.
It was a large chamber, windowless but for the light that came in between holes that gaped like wounds on either side of it. Between them ran a chute—surely the same she’d seen from outside—that was rushing with water flowing through an open gate close to the door. There was a kind of platform there, made of wood, with the gate’s lever on one side and a desk overlooking the lower part of the room at the other, just beside the stairs leading down. The tender—the one she’d seen cutting the trees—was sitting at the desk beside an oil lamp. A handful of small pots were lined up in front of her, with the tiniest, gold-veined saplings growing within them. The woman’s little satchel of seeds was there, too, sitting near her hand on the desk. She had her back to the doorway. She was looking down on Whéuri and the machine below.
The machine.
The rolling waters down the chute were turning a splashing wheel and an axle running to a bewildering assembly of gears and cables and wood. All of it was turning, and all of it, in turn, was spinning two metal rings—one inside the other, flat like the hoops around a barrel, but made of a bright silver like she’d never seen—over the surface of the table on which Whéuri was strapped down. The huntress was bleeding from wounds on her arms and shoulder. Three Bloodborn stood around her. The two at her sides were weaving magick, their mouths awash in blood that was not theirs. The third held an empty crystal in metal blacksmith’s tongs. Full crystals—soulglass, Tukaha had called them—sat on shelves behind her. Hundreds of them.
In the center of the spinning rings, a blue disk was beginning to appear. Glowing. Like the light of another world.
Whéuri pitched and struggled against her bonds, screaming at the sight. The woman with the tongs began lifting the crystal forward. It looked like she was going to bridge the gap between Whéuri’s chest and the blue disk that was glowing brighter and brighter.
Alira, not knowing what else to do, threw the lever beside her forward. The gate over the chute crashed down. The water stopped. The wheel stopped. The rings stopped. The portal snapped shut. Whéuri’s screams choked off into sobs.
Heads turned. But Alira had not stood still. Bouncing off the pads of her feet, as Whéuri had taught her among the tall Furywood trees, she’d already leapt to the desk, had one hand on the leather satchel full of seeds. The tender gasped, trying to turn, to reach, to get up—but the movement only helped Alira pull the woman’s knife free from its sheath at her other hip.
Alira didn’t hesitate. Didn’t think. Her arm shot forward, slicing a red line across the side of the magicker’s neck.
The woman screamed and gurgled at the same time, her hands grasping at the wound even as the blood inside found the path of least resistance and began to spray between her fingers—across Alira, across the desk, across the gentle saplings in their pots. The flame atop the oil lamp sputtered, but it kept its life.
The Bloodborn below made an inhuman scream, a sound that had frozen Alira’s heart when she was younger. But she was too tired and too angry and had seen too much to be scared now.
She held the satchel of seeds over the fire of the lamp. “I’ll burn them,” she said.
“Alira?” Whéuri gasped.
The Bloodborn women hissed, seemingly uncertain what to do. The tender was on the floor. She twitched.
“I’m here,” Alira said. “It’ll be over soon.”
“Over,” Whéuri said. She managed to lift her head. They locked eyes. Alira knew.
“We’ll grow more,” one of the magickers said. And they came for the stairs. There were knives in their hands. The same kind of knife she’d seen burst from the chest of Tukaha that night. Right before she’d thrown her fire into the soulglass and—
Alira lifted the strap of the satchel over her head and let it drop onto her shoulder. In the same moment, she leaned back and kicked the oil lamp out and into the shelves of soulglass below.
Flames splashed out across them, catching fire to the wooden shelves. But the crystals didn’t explode. They simply glinted and flashed, reflecting the light of the flames. Tukaha’s fire had been magick. Char-fire from the hands of an ember. Stronger.
The Bloodborn laughed. High and horrible. The first two of them were nearly up the stairs.
Alira had always wanted to be an evoker. But the few grains of Char she’d been tested with had nearly killed her.
She was certain, then, that this would too.
She swiped the tender’s blade, shining like new, across the first of the saplings, cutting it in two.
Gold flickered in the arc of the cut, tracing the line through the air and into Alira’s hand. The power flashed through her. It was a swirling, golden fire, spilling through her veins, just as the Char had been so many years before.
But there was no pain. It was the opposite of pain. It was life.
The life of the tree. Now hers.
It spilled into tired muscles, and they were strong again. It fired through her aching bones, and they were whole again. It opened her eyes, and she could see again: Whéuri’s anguish, the dead tree, the last feeble heartbeat of the tender at her feet, the magickers almost upon her, and the screaming torment of a hundred voices locked in the crystals below.
“No!”
She swiped her hand at the women on the stairs, and the air in front of her exploded outward at them. They flew back. One crashed into the lever, throwing it open and lifting the gate. The other went over the fast-filling chute of water, crunching against the rock wall behind it.
The great wheel started turning. The machine came to life, and the rings began to spin.
“No,” Whéuri cried out. “Let me die! Let me be with Bryt!”
Alira, angry, swatted at the wheel itself. The flaps that were hitting the water crumpled and splintered away, one after another. The wheel stopped moving.
Then the power was gone.
Alira panted, buckled to her knees, and dry-heaved into the tender’s blood.
“There’s only so much Life in a little tree,” the remaining Bloodborn woman said from below. Her voice lilted in something like a song. “The Stream alone lasts forever.”
Alira shook, weaker than she’d been before. She’d used the magick of the tree—the Life, the Bloodborn called it. But she’d used something of herself too.
Whéuri whimpered.
Something of herself, Alira thought. But not everything.
She pulled herself up to the desk.
The knife was still in her hand.
So was another potted sapling.
Gold flashed. Death. Life.
Alira stood. Across the room, she reached out to the shelves full of soulglass. She closed her fist, and the air closed around the crystals, the wood, the flames. She squeezed. The crystals broke in an eruption of power that she could barely contain.
And so, just before she used the last of her strength to dive for the chute and the running water, she let it all go.