Fighting my way up the tips of his fingers, I peer out from my vantage point in time to see him lifting me up, up…and onto the back of Zhang.
“Gent!” I gasp, but he happily turns away and continues smashing skrill as Rihad’s scorpion…no,myscorpion swoops down to where Fortiss and Rihad are squaring off.
What are you doing?I demand, but Zhang doesn’t speak to me, just fills my mind with images of the battle far below. Unlike any other Divh I’ve ever experienced, he can see perfectly, and my eyes snap wide to see Fortiss and Rihad fighting hand to hand. Zhang replays the battle to this point, the images punching through my mind. It started with swords, but Fortiss quickly dropped his to pile bodily into the former lord protector. He isn’t trying to kill Rihad, I realize, just take his crown from him.
“No!” I scream into the wind, but of course Fortiss can’t hear me, and my mind may be too addled to convey my fear coherently to him. But even if he’s able to snag the crown from Rihad—he can’t put it on. He can’t.
Let me down, let me help!
Zhang swoops around in another great arc and shows me a new image, him skewering Rihad with his vicious tail, but I know that won’t work. Divhs were never intended to kill humans, not intentionally, but only at the behest of their connected warrior. Rihad created the path for them to do that, but that was never their intention. And I, by the Light, don’t wish anyone dead. The soldiers of the Imperium—whoever among them still live—can’t take those images home to their leader. No.
But still, Zhang has given me an idea.
I lean close into his shiny carapace—so different from the gleaming hide of my beautiful Gent, but no less magnificent—and force my mind to concentrate. I conjure up an image as clear as I know how, the two of us soaring through the sky, angling down, distracting Rihad just enough that he breaks away from Fortiss, perhaps glances up. Over and over, I push this image toZhang, and the scorpion’s harsh, chittering scream is as close to an approval as I think I’m going to get.
He makes the arc just as I imagined it, then we’re banking sharply towards the skrill-covered field, and the two warriors in gold and black battling at its edge.
Zhang lets loose with his loudest, boldest scream yet, and Rihad looks up as his Divh swoops low, his face alighting with pure joy?—
While Fortiss rips the crown from Rihad’s head—and jams it on his own.
“No!” I scream desperately…but it’s too late.
In the blink of an eye, the sky snaps tight, but there are no new Divhs nor skrill that are called into this battle. On the far edge of the field, the Sahktar explode into a fell wind of death that sweeps across the field, clearing a swath of Divhs and warriors in its wake. But while dozens fall to the earth, so too do the Sahktar disappear, leaving the horizon clear of their monstrous forms. Divhs scream, fire shoots across the sky, and Zhang swoops out across the battlefield, pivoting around to show me the view on the ground.
Which is how I know the exact moment that a mighty swarm of skrill collapse on top of Rihad, biting and swarming, and he drops to the ground and doesn’t get up again.
Several strides away now, Fortiss lifts his left arm high and curls his right arm into his heart, and I feel the pull of energy—so strong I can’t possibly ignore it. I urge Zhang to take me down—down—until the scorpion is skimming the ground, deftly performing a barrel roll to send me tumbling toward Fortiss in a mad somersault. Somehow, I gain my feet without plowing into a wall of skrill, and stagger to a stop.
As Fortiss turns toward me, I lift my left arm as well, curl my right hand to my heart, and our gazes connect across the writhing field.
All the Divhs above and below suddenly vanish from the Fated Plane.
All the skrill disappear a moment later.
For a long, blessed moment, utter silence blankets the battlefield…and then the roar of warriors, Imperial soldiers, and villagers alike soars high.
Across the field, Fortiss turns, our gazes meeting as a bolt of pure, wild energy arcs between us. Even amid this chaos and victory, surrounded by hundreds of souls, it feels like we’re the only two people truly seeing each other.
For all we have potentially lost—we’ve gained this.
We’ve gained this.
Chapter 49
The moment shatters a second later, as Fortiss and I move in one timing, both of us adopting a solitary focus—the soldiers of the Imperial delegation.
As we move toward them, he yanks his crown off his head and hands it to me, and I pull mine off as well, stowing the powerful circlets in my pouch. These two extraordinary symbols of power have done their job, but they can’t fall into the hands of the Imperium, now or ever. Nor can they be lost or hidden away again, to be used as weapons against our own people.
There is so much we have yet to do…but first we need to assure our safety, maybe even for another five hundred years.
Of the original thirty Imperial soldiers, only twenty remain, most of them wounded and all of them overwhelmed by the riotous attack they just endured. With both word and mental force, Fortiss commandeers guards and random villagers alike to swarm around these men, instructing his recruits to take on the mantle of healers and helpers. Anyone with a tunic of yellow and black is pressed into the cause. Only after that detail is secured does he start moving through the soldiers, helping them to stand, recapturing their horses.
I watch from the sidelines, allowing him to take the lead, and feeling my pride in him brim over. He was meant to rule, while I was meant to fight. I know that now more than ever. I have no interest in making a stand on a stage I care nothing about. Instead, I turn my attention to the horses, realizing with some surprise that none of them appear to have gone missing, despite the chaos of these past hours. Here, as at the Eighth House, no horses died in the skrill attack, a detail that makes me smile, if a little grimly. For all their efficacy in killing warriors and villagers alike, the skrill didn’t harm the horses.
I stumble a little as that truth strikes home. There’s only one reason for that, of course.
Because the skrill weren’t asked to harm them.
