I stumble backward. When I glance up, I see the Premier’s horse silhouetted against the top of the hill, his figure turned in our direction. The heat from the flames distort the air around him, framing him in a halo of gold. He knows now that we have his weapon.
Red falters in exhaustion, then collapses to the ground. I’m at his side in a second. As the other soldiers step cautiously forward, I pull his head into my arms and hold him there. His eyes are closed. When I look up again to where the Premier had been, he’s gone.
The strange link between Red and me pulses like a living thing. And as I stare at his blood-streaked face, I know. I know as surely as I can smell the sting of war in the air, as surely as the fire roars against the night. The Firstblade’s words from days earlier come back to me now:We need a miracle.
He is it.
The miracle.
He is the weapon we have been waiting for.
10
There are no cheers.
We may have forced the Federation to retreat, but nothing about this night is worth celebrating. We’ve lost two defense compounds. Our warfront has been pushed farther back. Our own defense compound is destroyed, the gates burned and blackened. The valley around us is littered with our dead.
I make my way into the fields where the main battle happened. Everyone is at work—black silhouettes fill the firelit night, clearing the space of their fallen friends. Blood has soaked deep into the earth, and the tang of its coppery smell hangs in the air like a cloud of death.
Nearby, two soldiers are holding down a Striker. Right away, I know what’s happened. The Striker has been bitten by a Ghost. She’s crying. Already her limbs are trembling with an unnatural strength.
My heart sits heavily in my chest as I watch the soldiers restraining her call for a Striker’s help.
I recognize Jeran and Adena as they head to the scene. Jeran’s slender figure is straight and unerring, his face grave with resolution. As he goes, he draws a sword with a single flourish. Adena walks in step beside him. The wounded Striker sees their long blue coats approachand starts to scramble furiously against the ground. She knows what comes next.
Jeran stops before her. For an instant, he bows his head and closes his eyes, bracing himself. Then he slashes his sword down in an arc.
It’s a mercifully precise strike. The injured Striker trembles once, every muscle tight, and then slumps against the ground. Jeran nods to the two who had held her down. He looks exhausted, far too young to be bearing this, and when he turns away, Adena holds out an arm to make sure he doesn’t fall.
I look down and help another Striker hoist a body into the wagon. Elsewhere, I can hear the Firstblade as he does a survey of our dead and injured, how much land we’ve ceded.
For a while, I lose myself in the work of clearing the fields. There are more who must be executed because they’ve been bitten by Ghosts, while others are given lethal doses of a tonic when it’s obvious that their wounds are too great to bear.
Finally, as the blackness of the night sky gives way to a pale gray, I see the Firstblade striding toward me. He nods when our eyes meet.
“Talin,” Aramin greets me, nodding toward the compound. His cheeks are streaked black with dried blood. “Your Shield is starting to stir. We can finish up out here. See to him.”
Red had been brought to the makeshift infirmary hours ago. For the first time, hearing the Firstblade call him my Shield feels less like a jest and more like a formal command. Binding us together.
I bow my head and tap my fist to my chest.
Aramin lifts his head and surveys the field, ultimately settling his gaze on the ravaged compound’s ramparts. “When he wakes up and starts to talk, tell me,” he finally says. “Everyone wants to understand what happened tonight.” He’s quiet for a moment, and I wonder ifthere’s an apology in that silence, his way of telling me that I was right to have saved Red’s life. Then he asks, “Did he mention anything to you about his abilities?”
I shake my head.
“I’ve never seen anyone fight like that in my life,” he mutters, and in this moment, he sounds less like the Firstblade and more like the fellow Striker we all used to train with. “He didn’t even look human.”
It’s the same thought I had when I watched Red cutting through the Ghosts like they were made of nothing. Still, I stop short of nodding in agreement. His expression when he finally snapped out of his rage, when he blinked up at me in confusion before collapsing. That washim, the boy inside the war machine.
“I’ll let you know when he’s up,”I sign, turning in the direction of the compound.“I’m not convinced he himself understands everything that happened.”
As I go, I can feel Aramin’s eyes on my back. He doesn’t trust Red. I’m not sure if I do, either.
The infirmary is actually the compound’s courtyard, now a mess of makeshift blankets lined up on the ground and ripped strips of cloth stained crimson. The low din of moans and sobs swirls around me.
Red is held in a separate room, a former officer’s quarters at the back of the infirmary. The first thing I notice when I walk in is that they have chains on him again. Shackles sit heavy on his wrists and ankles, anchored to weights even as he lies on his side, unconscious on a cot. It makes me wonder whether he’s done something in my absence that frightened the nurses.
I move without a sound to him. They’ve removed his ruined coat so that he lies in his tunic, the sleeves rolled up, the back of it cut up from his wings expanding and retracting on the battlefield. Now those wings are completely retracted into two slender strips of metal runningflat against his back. He moves in a restless sleep, his fingers twitching slightly, his eyes shifting beneath their lids. His lashes rest long and dark against his cheeks. His hair, dark and tangled, fans out in a halo on the floor. A sheen of sweat gleams wherever his real skin is exposed, but he’s shivering enough to make his chains clink.
