Then the wall breaks. As one, the snakes surge back toward the Eighth House, back toward the mountains. The rushing, undulating tide of them parts around Fortiss and me, and I realize I’ve collapsed against him, his arms holding me tight but also positioning me so that the crown is clearly visible to any snake with eyes to see. I watch in stunned silence as the flood of snakes completely consumes the Eighth House once more, making it a writhing, sinuous blightscape, and belatedly I remember the horses trapped behind the gates. Had they escaped once we had begun fighting in earnest? Could they see that the gates were open even though they appeared closed?
“What are they doing to the Eighth House?” Fortiss murmurs.
I turn in confusion and see a new silhouette that now stands high in front of the Eighth House, nearly as tall as the manor house itself. I can’t make out what it is at this distance, but Fortiss is right. There’s definitely something there. But for now, I’m happy just to see the black oily mass continue its furious scramble over the Eighth House and up into the mountains, eventually disappearing from view.
Fortiss looks up, then pivots in a half-circle, peering at the eastern sky. “Is it daybreak already?”
We reel around and stare as our battalion of Divhs swoop toward us once again, by air and by land, the Divhs stopping well away, the warriors dismounting and rushing forth. Another company of horsemen rush up but also dismount at some distance. They join the others on foot as the first rays of sunlight streak across the wide plains before the Eighth House.
“Talia!” Caleb’s cry surfaces above the rest, and he breaks out from the crowd, running hard, his ungainly stride pulling right with the strength of his pumping right arm. But he reachesFortiss and me in a few more breaths and practically bowls us over. “Talia, we were fighting—fighting—and we’d no sooner make some gains than we were struck down again. Those things, those smoke warriors, Marsh called them, they just had to split open their snake covering and we were goners. Marsh got hit early, I sent him back. He said, he said…” He shakes his head hard. “The poison made it more difficult for us to communicate. Anyone connected to a Divh, if they got hit with that skrill slime, the things we saw…”
He trails off, and I blink up to see Nazar before me, striding forth unevenly. The entire left side of his robes have been burned away, leaving tattered cloth that looks like it’s been permanently seared into his arm.
“Lady Talia.” He stops and bows to me, but his gaze drops to the crown, and I can feel his attention on it like a living touch. “You have found the winged crown, then. You can command the darkness and the light.”
“Yeah, well, mostly the darkness right now.” I shake my head, forcing a grim smile as his eyebrows wing up. “I only put it on to free Fortiss, not—” I wave my hand ineffectually at the distant Eighth House, the mountains standing tall behind it. “To do all this.”
“Where’s Tennet?” Fortiss asks, and another woman steps out from the crowd. Syril. Blood cakes her face and soot streaks her clothes into an oily black smear.
“He’s back with the healers,” she says. “He doesn’t know the battle has ended yet.”
Fortiss frowns. “Doesn’t know?”
Syril doesn’t respond right away, just looks from me to Fortiss. Caleb casts his gaze down, and Nazar grimaces.
“The way of the warrior is death,” he reminds us all quietly. “It’s up to the Light if it’s the way Tennet follows today.”
Chapter 39
“Everyone—off the plains. We need to get out of sight,” Fortiss announces.
“We’re ready for you.” Syril steps up as Fortiss steps into full lord protector mode, issuing orders for us all to follow her. We take no more than a half-dozen strides before I falter, and Caleb yells something about my back.
Then darkness rushes over me like the skrill, and I’m gone.
I awake to find Tennet staring at me through one bloodshot eye, the rest of his face covered in bandages. Both of us are sprawled on low pallets separated off from the rest of what looks like a dozen sickbeds.
“You just can’t help wanting to crawl into bed with me, can you?” He grins at me.
If I had the energy to throw something at him, I would. Instead, I grimace, and struggle to pull myself into a sitting position. The pain in my right shoulder is intense enough to make my sight go white for a moment, and when I refocus again, Nazar is at my side. One gentle palm is on my left shoulder, another is gripping my right bicep, and he’s staring me keenly in the eyes as I refocus.
“What do you see, Lady Talia?” he asks, and I barely keep from giggling, which I know is not the right reaction at all. Still, this is Nazar, a high priest of the Imperium and a banded warrior to one of the fiercest Divhs I’ve ever met. I stare at him, not truly seeing his face as I try to capture the images assaulting my mind.
“I see the Blessed Plane,” I murmur, and my voice sounds as wrong as the vision feels. “I can see them all—even Gent. I can’t connect to him, hear him. But I can see him with the rest of them. They’re healing, Nazar. They are well.”
I frown over in what I think is Tennet’s direction. “Ayne is injured more than he should be, more than even he expects to be,” I tell him. “He’s submerged in the great lake up to his nostrils.”
Tennet’s response is a short, percussive curse. “Ayne took it into his head that he needed to protect everyone, everywhere, all at once—most especially the fire-breathing Divhs who weren’t prepared for battle. The fire falcon was—young. And stubborn. She wouldn’t band with anyone but Syril, and Syril couldn’t, not yet. When she set herself aflame in self-defense after getting weighed down by skrill, Ayne decided he’d save her.”
He grunts and I can almost picture him flopping back on his blankets. “He’s an idiot.”
But my mind is already wandering down distant shores, searching, searching…but not finding. “So much is lost to me,” I murmur. “I can see, but I can’t connect. And Gent…”
Nazar taps my right shoulder, sending a blinding shot of white-hot pain through me. My gaze sharpens again, and his face snaps back into focus. “You were stung by Rihad’s scorpion, in its first pass before it picked up you and Fortiss.”
“His,” I correct him through the pain. “Zhang.”
He nods, giving me the briefest of smiles. “Scorpions don’t usually leave anything but poison behind when they sting. Butin this case, Zhang did. A pebble the size of your thumb, shaped almost like a talonstone but not of any stone that I can identify. It was more like cement. Fortiss said you’d understand it but offered no other explanation.”
