Dray bounces on his toes and nods eagerly. “She’s right. Could be worth a try. We need all the help we can get in fighting the demons. And hasn’t Briony shown her capabilities? It would be fucking stupid to want her dead. And if there are others like her, Beaufort–”
“There’s more,” Beaufort says, interrupting us all, and we all turn our eyes his way. He looks uncomfortable in a way I’venever seen Beaufort Lincoln look before. He looks like he has the whole weight of the realm upon his shoulders. “It’s far more complicated than us against the demons.”
“What do you mean?” I say, not following his words at all.
“The demons,” he says. “They were created by shadow weavers.”
I stare at him and for several minutes his words make no sense in my head – no sense at all. The demons? The creatures that have been threatening our realm, that have penetrated beyond our borders and killed innocent people, who the shadow weavers have always protected us against, have always fought back against?
“How? How could those creatures be created by shadow weavers? That makes no sense,” I say.
“It does,” Fox says. “It makes all the sense in the world.”
“What?” I say, shaking my head. “But they’re a constant threat to our realm. They’re killing people all the time. Why would the shadow weavers have created them? And if they did, why can they not control them?”
“Because,” Beaufort says, “I assume the demons are no longer under our control.”
Fox nods. “Creating creatures like that requires dark magic, Briony. Truly evil, black, dark magic.”
“But why create them in the first place?” I insist, because I still don’t understand.
“To create a threat,” Fox says.
Thorne stares at him and I can see he finds it as incredible as I do.
“To create a threat?” he repeats.
“Yes,” Fox says. “A common enemy, something to distract the people from their mundane lives and their difficult struggles. A reason for the shadow weavers to fight. To show that they are more worthy than the rest. That they should be treasured aboveall others. To create the whole system that we know – a system that benefits those families who have always been shadow weavers, who have it in their blood.”
“Lynette Smyte,” I say. “Lynette Smyte has no powers. She cannot shadow weave. And yet she didn’t seem worried about it at all. She told me that people knew and that she would be staying in Onyx Quarter, that there was no chance that she would be sent to Iron or Granite or Slate.”
“Because she knew that there wasn’t,” Beaufort says. “You always suspected the system was fixed, Briony. And you were right.”
“Shit!” I mutter, glancing back to Blaze, who’s now on his feet and stretching out his wide wings. “Shit.”
My eyes widen. “And Henny … Henny tried to warn me. She said I should be careful.”
“Seems she knew more than we did.”
“I always had my suspicions, but I didn’t think it ran this deeply,” Fox says.
“Yes,” I say. “That it ran so deeply it ran all the way up to the Empress herself. And now, she’s altered the magic in the barrier to keep us out of the realm?”
“I think so, yes,” Beaufort answers.
“She’s not keeping us out,” I say with determination. I’m not spending a moment longer in this stars-awful place. I’m definitely not exposing poor Blaze to any more of it. We’re going home – even if I’m not sure where home is anymore. “Maybe if we tried to open it with our own magic,” I suggest.
Next, we all stride towards the wall together, the dragon watching behind us, little clouds of smoke floating from his nostrils. I let the light run from my fingers and the others do the same with their shadows. Together, our magic shoots towards the wall.
And for a moment I think it’s going to work. For a moment I think our magic is going to slice right through that border. But I’m wrong. Our magic bounces off the wall as if it is a shield and shoots straight back at us, the lot of us having to duck before we’re hit by our own magic.
“Shit and double shit,” Dray mutters, shooting several fireballs in a row directly at the wall.
It achieves nothing though. The flames fizzle against the shield and wither away.
“The dragon,” Fox suggests.
I turn to Blaze. “What do you think, boy?” I say. “You think you can get through that?”
