Hope nodded, her knuckles whitened at how strongly she held the hilt of her favorite daggers.
“The Cardinal Queen might sit on my throne, but she can’t be in full force or spirits. She bled a lot, possibly over the centuries of her curse, to birth this many sangins. And a bleeding, harmed or still-recovering Queen might be less unbeatable than a full-strength one.”
What Hope didn’t admit out loud was that she knew beating the Cardinal Queen was still virtually impossible. Even her five red-Cardinal sisters hadn’t beaten her. They had only succeeded inrestrainingher.Temporarily.
But whereas before Hope had been willing to go on a suicide mission with a zero percent chance of kicking such a powerful goddess out of the Organ House, she now held a minuscule possibility of pulling this off. Especially if the Cardinal Queen had indeed been as hurt as Hope calculated, based on the number of sangins floating above the Radel Sea.
Many questions needed to be answered, but those would have to wait.
With a sharp inhale, she unsheathed one of her sharpest, thinnest daggers from the belt on her right thigh and caressed the blade with her other hand. “If these sangins are our most imminent enemies, we might as well go greet them,” Hope said. She left the room without another glance back, fully aware of the night scent and the steps of the others following her to battle on the upper platform of the navia.
The pale sun rose gradually as if it weren’t the brightest witness of this encounter between beings and blood-born creatures.
The moment Hope and Ciaran stepped onto the platform of the navia, the pressure of time was obvious. There wasn’t a second to lose. Not as the sangins would reach them in approximately less than five minutes, and the navia was still in the middle of the sea. Being in contained floating vehicles that functioned better at night put the passengers—all courtrades, panom, and human—of the fifteen navias at a great disadvantage.
Hope walked towards the rail of the metallic platform, the cool bars welcoming under her fingers as she peered over. They were too far from the shore of the East Petal to reach it before the sangins reached them.
Ciaran followed, his hands finishing an array of complex movements, dozens of swirls of pure black shadows heading towards every courtrade under his command.
“Would your courtrades be able to create blocks of shadows around each navia? Impenetrable, massive bubbles of solid darkness?” Hope asked. They had little time, and the options, despite the magic aboard, were more limited than she would have wished for.
The corners of his lips tugged upwards. “Precisely what I instructed them to do five seconds ago.”
Hope looked at the navias behind their leading one, and indeed, blocks of shadows were fast rising around the vehicles, building gigantic spheres around the moon-shaped navias, protecting them—shielding them.
She had seen those blocks before, in the underwater net of vessels that balanced Thyrian territories, and she knew they didn’t last forever. If the creatures attacked it repeatedly, with enough force, they would end up perforating the solid shadows. Hopefully, they would last long enough for the courtrades to reach safety.
“No shadow block on our navia?” She lifted an eyebrow, trying to contain a smile as she said, “Feeling tired, Ciaran?”
“Me? Always.” He chuckled lowly, biting the metal ring on his lower lip as his metallic hand stroked her forearm. “I was hoping the panoms aboard, along with you and I, we can make this thing reach the shore before they reach us. Unless you are too lazy?”
Hope grinned, despite the close army of sangins flying towards them. “I’m such a lazy woman.” She glanced around one last time. “Fifteen small targets are more difficult to chase than one big one, Ciaran. We need to split your fleet.”
“Good point, my beauty. On it.” His hands sent swirls of darkness towards the other navias, and the now shielded vehicles allowed his messages before dispersing in different directions.
“Is this the greatest, most altruistic plan of the Darkness Commander and the Organ Mandor? Ensuring a memorable death for themselves and their closest friends, yet allowing the rest of the courtrade army to be safe and sound? Because fuck that, assholes,” Lenna spat, her arms on her hips as she demanded answers.
“We must reach the shore as soon as we can, so we can jump out of the navia and moure somewhere far from here.” The Llunal-driven magic of the navias didn’t allow transporting themselves using panom methods, so they would only be able to moure to travel across space once they were on land.
“Somewhere safe and sangins-free, please,” Sasha added. Her black curls were a mess in the wind, and Brendon pushed a strand behind her ear.
Lenna tapped her foot. “Is there much more to debate, or can we get the hell out of here?”
Hope lifted her closed fists to the air, ready to open them and Give as much wind as she could gather to propel the navia to the land of Thyria. Jake, who kept avoiding eye contact, Ayla, whocouldn’t make eye contact, and Lenna, who made particularly pissed-off and impatient eye contact, also had their hands ready to wield.
“We have around one minute and twenty seconds until the sangins reach us, based on their current speed andourcurrent speed. We can do this,” Hope said. She didn’t miss the way Lenna’s eyebrows shot to the sky or how Ayla gasped.
Jake, however, looked impassable, but his hands didn’t wait to slice the air in front of him in vertical lines, his silver gaze fixed on the flying creatures in the sky. One by one, flying creatures started falling, their winged bodies cut in half as his hands Harmed, Harmed, Harmed. It wouldn’t be enough to stop all the sangins in time, and Hope wasn’t sure Jake was not simply Harming out of self-satisfaction, nevertheless, it was helpful.
Without further ado, Hope opened her own hands, concentrating on using the Giving power of the North Petal, as if she was pulling the petal from the panom mark at the back of her neck.
On another occasion, she had Given for over thirty hours with minimal stops to reach a desired destination that was far away.
This time though, what she needed to do was the opposite.
She needed speed to reach a short distance. Alotof speed. It was a sprint, not a marathon. So, Hope intensified her magic, concentrating it on that single Giving petal, until it pulsated strongly on the Cardinal-red mark of her skin, until the wind emanating from her hands was as strong as a small tornado, pushing the navia closer and closer.
She couldn’t take her focus away from her target—the land. Yet, not being aware of the movements and actions of the sangins could be a fatal mistake. Had they separated into fifteen small groups? Had they, too, increased speed?
