Chapter Thirteen
Both on ourfeet in the same movement, we grabbed the weapons we always kept at hand as we dashed through her rooms and into the hall. Side by side, we ran through the arcade and her private courtyard, taking the shortcut to the walls, her innate speed making up for my longer stride.
A roaring shadow passed over us, an inferno of flame heating the summer air to crackling. Zyndain dragon form, blazing a swath through the summer sky at an enemy I couldn’t see without stopping to scrutinize. Glad she was on top of our defense, and that I could recognize her now, I made a mental note to establish a system for us to warn of friendly dragon approach. It didn’t bear thinking what a dragon bent on destroying us could do.
Shouts over the cacophony of the alarm bells greetedus in the outer yard as Ursula’s protective guard formed around her. Other fighters streamed in from various quarters, some still buckling on weapons. “To the walls,” she commanded crisply.
I turned to her. “You know you should go to—”
She rounded on me with a vicious glare. “Don’t do this now. I’m done with being protected. This ismycastle,myrealm, and I’m done cowering indoors while youall fight for me.”
I reassessed, taken aback by her vehemence, then nodded and tapped the flat of my broadsword to my forehead. “Elskastholrr,” I told her, and she grinned, a feral baring of teeth.
“Damn straight.”
“Your Majesty!” The current gate commander dashed over. “Permission to close the gates?”
We exchanged a glance. The alarm bells had been ringing only a minute or so. “Do we havepeople outside still making for the castle?” she asked.
“Yes, but—”
“Gates stay up until they’re all in,” she ordered, turning her back and running for the walls.
We climbed the ladders swiftly, taking in the scene. I couldn’t make much sense of what I saw at first. Smoke rose from the fields and orchards, thick and unnaturally coiling, dimming the air and swarming over people on the road—runningeither for the safety of town or the castle walls—or over people lying immobile. Zynda the dragon turned on wingtip—which seemed to bring her dangerously close to the ground—her silhouette against the afternoon sun very nearly vertical in the sky, Marskal clearly outlined on her back.
Brant ran up to us, out of breath. “Captain!” For a moment I didn’t know if he meant me or if he’d reverted tothe Hawks’ habit of calling Ursula “captain.” In the heat of the fight, it didn’t matter. “Attack by unknown entities.”
“Be more specific,” Ursula snapped, eyes on the scene, also scanning.
Was the smoke…feeding on the people who were down? Clouds of it coalesced around their fallen forms, while other masses seemed more condensed, taking shape. They seemed almost humanoid, except terribly distorted,with missing limbs in places, appendages in others that looked more animal. Or like nothing natural at all.
“Can’t.” Brant replied. “Looks like smoke, but with particles like ash. Drops people where they stand. We can’t pinpoint the source and—”
I swore, viciously, and they both turned to me in expectation. “Ash,” I spat out. “Curse us for worse than fools. Those places are where we scatteredthe ashes of the unidentified dead.”
When they stared blankly, I clarified. “After Illyria’s defeat, all of the people she converted with her Deyrr magic—we burned them when the pieces kept coming.”
“I remember that,” Ursula said. Brant nodded, though he hadn’t been one of the Hawks then. It had been terrible, soul-crushing duty and my Vervaldr, with the great gift of not recognizing most ofthe victims as friends and family, had handled the bulk of it.
“Some victims were identified and their ashes taken home to family graveyards.” I waved my broadsword at the unusually fertile fields and orchards this summer. “The rest we spread on the tilled earth, as is traditional in Dasnaria. Stupid and shortsighted.”
Ursula spun to survey the area. Zynda dove and flew so low she could onlyglide, as a downstroke of her wings would hit ground. “You’re saying that smoke is the undead ash, rising again?”
“The remains are still coming,” I replied grimly. “Even as ash. Unforgivably stupid of me to keep it so near the castle.”
“My people would have done the same,” she replied absently, attention keen on the people fleeing the attacking smoke. Assisted by squads of Ordnung troops, someof the people on the road had unharnessed their horses from the laden wagons, riding full speed for the castle gates. A group of young women in pretty gowns ran, ribbons streaming. One lost her hat and it flew to the road behind her. She started to turn, but a soldier passing her on horseback shouted and pointed at the gates, then charged a cloud of smoke that had descended on the hat. “Ashes toearth, the cycle of life,” Ursula added.
“Only this ash has nothing of life in it,” I observed.
“What of the people down—what does the smoke do?”
“Near as we can tell it suffocates them,” Brant answered. “Before they drop, it seems like they can’t breathe.”
“Does anything stop it?” she asked, her gaze on her fallen people. The soldier who’d charged the cloud of smoke was in trouble, he andthe horse spinning as the smoke raked them with claws that should’ve been insubstantial but had them convulsing.
“Nothing so far,” Brant answered. “Weapons pass through it.”
Ursula dug her fingers into the parapet as she leaned over, clearly wishing to leap over it and into the fight. “All advancing on Ordnung. The walls won’t keep it out.”
