“Talia!”
I squint up to see Caleb bounding over to me, then haul myself to my feet. I sway on wobbly legs as the warriors emerge back out onto the field from beneath the stands. Their Divhs, at least, had the sense to vacate this plane during the firefight above, and to my intense relief, it doesn’t appear that any of the warriors have been injured. “What were you thinking? Gent can’t just toss you into the air like that and expect Marsh to be able to catch you. He’s not that great with his hands, even if he has two of them—and what in the blightedpath?—!”
Caleb’s words are drowned out as a cheer goes up, and I strain up to see the mighty dragon soar into the coliseum. Tennet is still astride his Divh, who banks sharply, then arrows down to the field, skimming the carcass-strewn dirt for half a breath before angling up again, then finally landing on the dirt, settling into a seated position on his haunches.
Tennet, appearing like a man frozen into a block of ice, topples off to the side. His Divh disappears.
“Lord Tennet!” Caleb and I surge forward at once, reaching Tennet as another commotion erupts overhead and two more Divhs take the field briefly—Szonja and Wrath, who do little more than release their own riders before taking their leave as well. By this time, Tennet is convulsing on the ground, his skin as pale as marble and covered with a sheen of sweat. Nazar and Fortiss reach us moments later, and Fortiss drops to his knees as well.
“Were you connected to his mind while he did that?”
“I…” I blink, scowling down at Tennet. “Not after we got him on Ayne. I wasn’t connected to anyone.” I jerk my gaze back to Fortiss. “Was it hard? To ride like that?”
He shrugs. “Szonja’s neck scales are smaller than the scales on the rest of her body, almost like flaps of skin that adhere to themselves until she doesn’t want them to. When she settled on the side of the First House, she sort of fluffed those scales. It wasn’t difficult to climb up and then tuck my legs under completely and just hold on. But—I wasn’t transferred to my Divh midflight, and I wasn’t trying to hold on during battle.” He stares down at Tennet. “He did well.”
“More than well,” Nazar agrees. He stands with his feet slightly too wide, his hands out at his side, as if he’s afraid he’ll topple. “I had maybe a dozen years with Wrath before I was unbanded. Never once did I attempt to fly on his shoulders. It never occurred to me to ask.”
“Yeah?” I grin at him. “So how did that go?”
He grimaces. “Not all of Wrath’s screaming was due to battle rage. The villagers of Trilion will be finding far too many fluffy under feathers strewn between here and the town.”
“He’s coming around,” Caleb announces, and though there’s no discernible change in Tennet’s waxy face that I can see, a moment later he groans and shakes again, but this time with greater force. His eyes flicker open, and he stares up at the four of us looking down.
“Blood and…stone,” he mutters, his words as reedy as the wind. “Where did the second mess of those skrill go? You saw it, right? The knot of them that shot off to the east?”
I jolt and Fortiss leaps up, his feet hardly seeming to hit the ground before he turns toward the entryway. “Szonja!” he roars as we start running. Our ringing ears are useless until we clear the doors of the coliseum, until the world snaps tight again and our Divhs return.
For just a moment, before the roars of our Divhs shake the sky, we can hear another sound all too clearly—the far-off sounds of screaming.
Chapter 14
Even with our Divhs speeding us to Trilion, the shock attack of the skrill on the town is over before we get there. Our task consists mostly of plowing through fried snake guts, reassuring terrified townspeople, and putting out the last of the fires.
It’s another four hours before we finally make it to the First House, but despite the fact that it’s the middle of the night by now, none of us are destined for bed anytime soon. Instead, Miriam and Dolor, and the lumpy councilor—whose name I’ve finally learned is Balric—stand in the center of the formal receiving chambers of Lord Protector Fortiss, their faces streaked with soot and sweat, their shoulders drooping.
Filling in the space behind them are representatives of eight of the biggest houses—those who can stand, anyway. The rest of the lords and their soldiers remain under heavy guard in Trilion, too sick to be moved even to the privacy of the First House. Between the newly arrived houses and Tennet, Fortiss, and Lemille, only the Eleventh and Eighth Houses aren’t represented.
“The house lords were targeted,” Fortiss says, more to himself than to the group as he continues to process the newestintelligence Miriam has shared. “They didn’t come here to mutiny…they came because they were summoned. Because they thought I summoned them. And then…”
“And then we were attacked.” The Fourth House lord stands with his thumbs tucked into his belt, but only because he’s apparently grown weary of standing with his arms crossed heavily over his barrel chest. “No matter how many times you ask for this accounting, Lord Protector Fortiss, it’s not going to change. That abomination of snakes blasted into Trilion with a sole focus—the Inn of Levengers. It’s where most of the lords were housed, where I should’ve been as well, but I have friends in Trilion, and never enough time to break bread with them. I was in an ale house that should’ve closed down long since—but stayed open out of deference to the friendship I proclaimed—not a hundred paces away from Levengers when the swarm hit. We gaped like village idiots as the snakes rolled up the street, ignoring us completely though there were plenty of souls within. Instead, the lot of them hit the inn. There had to have been a thousand of them, all told. From as short as your thumb to as long as your leg. All of them with wings and pointy teeth and dripping with corrosive oil. Your councilors had the right of it to set them on fire. If those things had kept going…”
I glance at Fortiss. He meets my gaze, and for a breath, we’re just two warriors on the edge of understanding. The world is shifting under our feet, but in this moment...we’re shifting together.
I blow out a steadying breath. By the time we arrived in Trilion, the Levengers Inn had flames leaping from every window, and smoke pouring out the front door. Villagers had swarmed out to drench the buildings and grounds surrounding the inn with water and sand, but the fire that had so appeared to consume the property didn’t burn like any ordinary flame. It seemed constrained to the snakes themselves, a spectral blazethat left little more than a streaky, oily stain on the walls and fixtures of the inn.
It’d be a blighted struggle to clean that mess, but at least the inn itself still stood. The burnt snake carcasses were being hauled to huge piles outside the town, and very few people had been directly attacked—only the lords and their warrior knights who hadn’t managed to barricade themselves safely away. Those unfortunates, however, were still lost in a thrall of pain and horror.
“You knew what they were,” Fortiss says, turning from me to eye the councilors directly. “You knew what they were, and you knew how to kill them. You didn’t think towarnme of this threat?”
“The threats from the Western Realms are a matter of ancient history, embroidered several times over,” Miriam protests, her voice as gray as her skin. “We had no way of knowing that those threats would be summoned up again, and we had no reason to fear that they might come at us unprovoked, especially with Rihad safely imprisoned. To most of the current residents of Trilion, the idea of a monster made of snakes is nothing more than a bedtime story meant to scare children into staying in their rooms at night.”
“The skrill,” humphs a man dressed in Third house blue, Lord Alaric. “We know those stories well, but anywhere east of the Eighth, they’re just stories.”
Miriam nods. “No one would have taken it as a credible threat. Besides that, though we knew what the creatures were that bore down on the inn, we didn’t at first know their target, and we still don’t know why they came. Or how they knew to split apart and distract you and your Divhs from coming to the town’s rescue right away.”
“Not that Divhs could have stopped that horde anyhow,” the Sixth House lord huffs, a tall, hard man as pale as ash. He’dmanaged to bar himself into his room, shuttering the windows and fending off the few thin snakes that had breached his stronghold with both shield and sword. “These things are too small for Divhs to fight. Too small and too fast. We have no defense against enemies like this.”
I consider raising the idea of the weevishes I’d helped train…was that just this morning? But before I can speak, Fortiss interjects. “You say that, and to be sure—we have several good men down. But once our councilors understood what they were, they were able to neutralize them.”
