“Where are Mary and Grant?”I panted.
“Grant’s already on the road south, took four horses.He will fetch our weapons and gear,” Benedict replied, craning to keep watch behind us then motioning me to move.We edged into the shelter a cloister.“You lost Mary?”
As if in answer to his question, Mereish voices cut the night in sharp, coordinating shouts.I could not catch all their words over the chaos, but I heard a warning cry of, “Ghiseau!”
Figures scattered from our path as Ben and I rounded the hall, the chapel, and passed through the gardens.The snow was a chaos of footprints, but I needed no trail.I knew where Mary was now.I could hear her screaming and swearing.
We rounded the kitchens just as a soldier wrestled Mary to theground.Another soldier fought a Stormsinger’s mask over Mary’s mouth, momentarily drowning her shouts.She struck him on the head, a fist to the temple, but the soldier holding her down flipped her over and ground her face into the snow.
I lunged, but three more enemies leveled muskets into our path.Ben struck one.I raised my pistol in return, and time slowed.
I pulled the trigger.The shot took a soldier square in the chest, and I swung the butt of my weapon into the face of the man next to him.They both toppled.A third swerved past me and, on impulse, I reached out and grabbed the glistening Magni talisman at his throat.The talisman broke free, and Ben began to laugh.
The soldier screamed as he drove his sword through his own stomach.Still smiling, Benedict strode around him, surveying Mary’s remaining assailants.
The one with the mask froze, turning his eyes slowly up.He was clearly fighting Benedict’s influence, but not well enough—either he did not have a talisman, or not all of them were created equal.He spasmed, falling back, and Mary shook the mask loose.
She screamed a single note, thick with rage.Tatters of wind raced away from her, and the last guard spasmed, gasping without sound.When I grabbed his hair and jerked him off her, he toppled with blood-shot eyes and a terror-stricken face.
Mary rolled over, face scraped raw and covered with mud and snow, tears and blood.She coughed and raised both arms, one hand reaching for me, the other for Ben.Together, we pulled her to her feet.
“What did you do?”Ben asked, glancing at the blood-shot man before he grabbed a fallen pistol and set to reloading it, grimacing as he utilized his bad arm.
“Told the air to leave his lungs,” she managed, blinking back tears and stooping to grab the sword of a dead soldier.She rubbed her face with a sleeve and pointed towards the main building—and a side door standing open.Figures flitted through the night, but thechaos was ebbing.It left us in a fragment of stillness, but it would not last long.
“We can try to escape through the Oruse,” she said.“It’s outside the walls.”
“Will Adalia let us past?”I asked.
“I will manage her,” Tane’s lower voice replied.
Ben shrugged and tossed a musket to me.“Then lead the way, witch.”
TWENTY-NINE
The Dark Observatory
MARY
The halls of the monastery were eerily silent, save for a cluster of soldiers, who appeared to be running from something rather than after it.We crushed into a side passageway as they streaked past, then descended into the tunnel to the Oruse.
I led the way, though it took all my will to focus.Tane was the only thing keeping me on my feet between pain and a head full of the taste, thefeel, of Quelling the air in the soldier’s lungs.But as we reached the stairs Tane began to glow, separating from my body and preceding us up the stairs.
I immediately stumbled, the injuries I’d taken from the soldiers suddenly manifesting in a dozen ways.I managed to snag Samuel’s arm before I fell, but my stolen sword hit the stairs and clattered back down into the tunnel.
“Tane!”Samuel braced me and shouted after the ghisting—half rebuke, half question.
She ignored him, standing at the top of the stairs and peering into Adalia’s shrine, her chin thrust forward like a hound catching a scent.I had just enough time to resent her neglect, then fear its cause, before Adalia Day stalked from the chamber with a spear in hand.Aside from the shaft, the head of the spear was wooden too, hardened and polished, and reflected her own ghisten glow.
She cast one look between Tane and me, her gaze flickering to the gently glowing tether of ghisten flesh between us.Then she hurled the spear at Tane.
Tane buckled around the projectile, her ethereal flesh dissembling into a churning mass of smoke.The spear clattered across the floor, but the damage was done.I buckled too, an explosion of pain rippling through my chest and out to the crown of my skull, the tips of my fingers and toes.
You brought them here.Adalia’s words were only audible to Tane and I, but they still reverberated in my ears, in my bones, chased by the agony of Tane’s spectral wound.
Sam’s arm cinched, holding me up.He shouted something, presumably to Benedict, since the Magni appeared at our sides a second later with my sword in his good hand.
I had no choice but to go with them, stumbling to the far side of the stairs.
