“Oh, but I’m going to.” Tears of fire coursed down her face. “Whatever happens here, I will die today. I know it. Take my daughter, and I will let them go.”
A small burst of light flared, and a girl—even smaller than my recruits—peered around the nymph’s legs. She was paler than her mother, and fresh jagged scars striped her body.
“Coming here was the only way I could get her out,” the nymph continued. “Not all of us are loyal to him. You are a Rose. You know this.”
She was right. Not every Olden creature wanted the human world destroyed. Posey was proof enough of that. And not even all of the Oldens who did want us dead were loyal to Kilraith, though many were. According to our intelligence efforts, his supporters numbered in the thousands.
“I knew you’d come for them.” The nymph was fading, her voice warped and ragged. She moved her wrist again, and the ring of fire shrunk once more. The recruits were practically climbing on top of each other to dodge the flames.
“I’ll do it,” the nymph whispered. “I’ll use whatever’s left in me to kill them and you.”
“And yourself and your daughter too?” Caralind snapped from behind me.
“Better death than what we faced there. Take her back with you, keep her safe, and I’ll let them go.”
I hesitated. The Warden wouldn’t like yet another Olden refugee sheltering under our roof. But better to take in an orphaned nymph than lose ten recruits.
“Five seconds and they’re dead,” the nymph cried out.
“We have an agreement.” I held out my hand to the nymph child. “She’ll come to no harm with us, and we’ll take care of her as best we can. Release the girls, now.”
The nymph waited until her child was beside me. The poor silent thing looked numb, as if she were walking through a dream. I took her hand in mine—smooth and warm like a sunbaked stone—and her mother, looking blankly at us, grief etched in harsh lines all over her glowing face, blew out a wavering breath. The ring of fire vanished, and the recruits stumbled toward me, weeping and wild. I was aboutto draw the nymph child under the shield of my wing when suddenly a sharp twang pierced the air behind me.
The child’s hand spasmed in mine; her body jerked. She slumped to the floor, her eyes frozen in shock and Caralind’s arrow lodged deep in her chest.
“No!” the nymph howled. With her last breath, she flung a raging fire toward us, an inferno so large I knew it would kill her. It was too swift, too strong. I couldn’t move quickly enough to shepherd the two remaining recruits past me to safety.
As I watched, helpless, the flames engulfed them.
Their deaths were quick, their screams of agony brief. And then they were ashes.
“Mara,move!” Caralind yelled, four recruits clinging to her in utter terror.
My shock, the heat, the ashes coating my lips—for a moment I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. Then I felt the other recruits tugging at me, heard their terrified cries.
I whirled around and helped the girls climb over the shattered door and out into the hallway. “Grab on to me!” I cried, and they obeyed, clinging to my torso, my legs, my slick feathered arms. I flew down the hallway as fast as my wings could carry me. Caralind’s shape sped ahead of me, shimmering in the heat. Death was following us, licking at our tail feathers. A roar of fire and a wrenching explosion of sound chased us out into the courtyard just as the walls began to fall. A cascade of splintering wood and crumbling stone, a final cloudburst of fire and smoke, and we were free.
Across the courtyard, Roses from the other teams were fighting Olden hostiles, the shapes of which I couldn’t make out amid the smoke and Mist. I heard roars, mad laughter, the clang of swords, the lethal zip of arrows.
“We’ve got to get them to Rosewarren,” Caralind was saying, hervoice coming to me as if from a great distance. “We can’t afford to lose eight more recruits. We’ve already lost two.”
I whirled on her. “We wouldn’t have lost two if you hadn’t shot the child!”
Caralind looked at me as if I’d grown a second head. “You didn’t actually trust what that nymph was saying, did you? It was a trap.”
“I’m the commander of this operation, not you. I was making the exchange, and you should have honored that.”
But Caralind wasn’t listening to me. Her gaze had fallen to my torso in confusion.
I looked down.
Petra, my first friend at Rosewarren—auburn-haired, freckled, nine years old—was in my arms, staring up at me, glassy-eyed and frozen with death. Blood stained her chest, and in the middle of that red circle stood a knife, buried deep in flesh and muscle and bone. I knew the knife well. I remembered the weight of it, how my hand had curved around the hilt.
The world tilted under my feet. I staggered back and let her drop to the ground. Her body hit the dirt with a grotesque thud. A couple of the recruits clinging to me screamed. I closed my eyes, opened them again.
Petra was gone. It was the nymph child staring up at me now, just as dead as Petra had been, and just as small. An arrow had killed her instead of a knife, but the result was the same: bloodstained chest, eyes frozen in their final expression of shock and betrayal. I must have scooped her tiny corpse up into my arms as I fled the room upstairs.
I couldn’t look at Caralind. I could feel her eyes on my face and didn’t like to imagine what she saw.
