Zhang! I fling my arms around Fortiss, winding my hands into his cloak as I tie it around us, unable to protect him any other way.
I crouch down, keeping his sagging body beneath me as Zhang races low toward us across the stony basin. Rihad’s great scorpion lashes out at us—and strikes me full in the back, his tail raking along my spine. I gasp, falter, but everything is moving in slow motion. I can’t get Fortiss to safety, I can’t do anything but clutch him tightly—and he barely breathes. I’ve faced down warriors and skrill and centuries of lies. But it’s Fortiss’s stillness now that terrifies me. If I die here—if he does—I’ll lose more than the fight. I’ll have failed the man who’s the truest possible future of the Protectorate…and my future too.
Add to that, my back is onfire. Have I been stung by Zhang’s scorpion tail? Is his venom even now working its way through my blood stream?
I can’t move, I can’t think.
Moments later—too fast, toofast!—another scream assaults us, and Zhang swoops down again. This time, aided by my complete inability to move, he grabs us in his talons and soars up—up—then flings us over the Unlit Pass and back into the battle at the base of the Eighth House.
I have soared through the sky so many times, fully expecting to land roughly, happily in the palm of my glorious Divh, that it takes me a few moments to realize I haven’t been caught. I strain to hold onto Fortiss, but there’s no way I would accomplish itwithout his knotted cloak. We plummet to the ground, closer—closer?—
At the last minute, I’m hauled up by my shoulders, mercifully spared another piercing as my own cloak is yanked upright. I jerk involuntarily as Szonja swoops down, down. She drops us roughly to the ground, both of us somersaulting to a stop, tumbling end over end. Our tangled cloaks keep Fortiss and me together—and by extension, the crown—until we slow to a sprawled stop.
I blink my eyes open and realize something is still terribly wrong. The sky is filled with Divhs shooting fire in front of the Eighth House; the ground is overrun with Divhs stamping, trampling, and clearing great hordes of snakes with a sweep of mighty paws. But Gent isn’t here.
He isn’there.
I roll myself up to my feet, pulling what’s left of Fortiss’s cloak with me while he remains collapsed on the ground. With one hand still wrapped in that cloak, I slam my palms to my ears, which are ringing with the roars and shouts of the Divhs and their riders. They’re all crying out—some in battle lust, some in fear, and some trying to reach me—but I can’t hear Gent anymore, can’t pick out his words in any of the screeching assault.
I’ve lost my connection to him.
“Gent!” I try again, dropping one fist to my heart, and lifting my left arm high, but there’s nothing. I may as well be shouting into a storm.
“Talia.” Fortiss’s shout isn’t panicked, isn’t particularly strained, but it pulls me around all the same, my eyes wild, my mind racing. Then I stop, my arm still punched aloft in the sky like a scarecrow off its crossbar, grief and loss swamping me in waves.
My Divh may not hear me anymore, but that doesn’t mean I’m not connecting.
A wall of snakes easily eight feet high surrounds Fortiss and me in a perfect circle—but they’re not surging forward to bite us with their razor teeth or smear their poison into our skin. They’ve stopped, sort of, an undulating mass that has lost all forward motion and is swaying, staring…their shining obsidian eyes fixed solely on me.
“Talia,” Fortiss says again, and now his voice is almost absurdly calm, his manner one of exaggerated care. He rolls himself up to his feet and takes a long, measured step toward me, never mind the combined hiss of approximately a million snakes and the sudden updraft of their winged cousins to hover above us in the sky. “Something important happened on the other side of the wall, Talia, something I have no memory of. You need to tell me what it was.”
“What are they doing?” I ask, or try to ask, but the words are like glue in my mouth.
“Look at me, Talia. I don’t want to touch you, but I need to see your eyes. Don’t drop your arm, don’t do anything but turn to me. Everything is right and good.”
He says that, but I don’t know that I believe him. I don’t know that anything will be right and good ever again—except he’s safe. He’s alive. I hold on to that though everything else feels like it’s fallen to ruin.
“What are they doing?” I ask again, and I shift minutely in Fortiss’s direction, only to set off a sea of hisses. Something else is wrong too, but I can’t quite place it. I can’t focus on anything other than Fortiss to the right of me, still not in full view, and the wall of snakes writhing less than a few horse length’s away, wrapped in a tight circle around us.
“Shift again…again…good. You’re doing this exactly right, Talia. Shift again. Hello, there.” His eyes lock on mine as hegives me a reassuring smile, and I drink in the sight of him—his angular face, his full lips, his dark eyes. His hair is no longer caked with cement, but blows across his forehead in a stiff breeze, wavy light curls against moon-bright skin.
Moon bright…
“There’s no more fire in the sky,” I say shakily. “The Divhs have stopped fighting.”
“Everybody has stopped fighting,” he agrees good naturedly, almost as if we’re talking about what we might have for breakfast tomorrow. “They faltered once we hit the ground, and when your arm went up, everything stopped. Szonja says the smoke warriors—her words, not mine—exploded into mist, and all the snakes on the ground and in the air turned away from the battle and headed for you.”
“Not me.” I want to deny this, but I’m afraid to so much as shake my head. The undulating wall of snakes is starting to speed up its rhythm, their hisses rising in volume.
Fortiss doesn’t move either, but his gaze is steady and supportive as I raise my eyes to meet his again. “I think we can assume you,” he counters. “About two-thirds of our battle party disappeared too. Those warriors who were riding those Divhs left with them.”
“Left,” I echo, but my eyes slide past Fortiss, onto the snakes surrounding us. Have they edged forward? Are they going to overrun us?
“Returned to the Blessed Plane,” he confirms, causing me to jerk my gaze back to him. “All the ones banded to you at the close of the melee. Gent, too, Talia. Szonja says he’s not hurt, not physically. But he’s no longer with us.”
Not hurt. Not physically. I want to throw up. “He’s not here.”
Without my intense attention on it, my arm falters, and the snakes convulse forward, tightening their circle around us.
