Chapter 43

I crumple as the air snaps around me, and the sun blazes down on my body once more.

“Tal—Talia.” Caleb’s voice is frantic in my ear, and I flail back to consciousness, worry surging up in my throat along with my own blood. Someone stands beyond him, tall and straight. Someone…almost familiar.

“Go,” I gasp, as my mind grapples with what he’d called me. What had he said—it seems wrong now—wrong. “Caleb, leave, they’ll come to finish me. You must get away.”

“No.” He flops down at my side and wraps his right arm around me, firmly pulling me into his embrace. “No, Talia, you can’t die .”

His words strike an impossible echo with what I’d just told Gent, what I told Merritt weeks ago, then I piece together what he’s said. My skin seems to crack with the effort it takes to smile. “Talia,” I mutter. “Did you call me Talia on the open field?”

“You’re an idiot,” Caleb groans as he rocks me, protecting me with his body. “You should have run, you could have run...” I struggle to meet his gaze, and see those eyes are filled with anguish now. “But Gent left you. How can he have left? He could have protected you?—”

“I let him go.” The pain is somehow lessening now, everything blurring into one sensation as blood drains out of me and onto the open field. I open my hand, and the sentient band pulses there, shimmering with life.

Caleb gasps. “You didn’t.”

“I’m going to die.” The words fill me with a peace I hadn’t expected. “He shouldn’t.”

“You can’t .” Caleb looks to the west and the bright sun, and I let a little more of the world back into my awareness. With it comes a wash of pain, but I struggle up, trying to make sense of what I’m seeing.

“What’s happening?” I whisper.

Shuddering Divhs and dying warriors, still scrabbling to hold onto life, and horses and soldiers lie everywhere on the field. But the battle still rages on in pockets. The marauder women are in the thick of it, and a few of them have come to surround me on horseback, their blades and axes pulled. No one else is close.

“I don’t know,” moans Caleb. “It was a melee, a fight, then Rihad’s winged monster showed up and everything…shifted. The men of the First and Eighth Houses turned in earnest on the others, whether they were on their official side or no. They fought not to best or pin, but to kill.” He grimaces. “They succeeded.”

“They can’t—” I wince as I try to sit up further, and taste more of the bright coppery tang of blood. Gent is gone, and my heart surges with relief. But everywhere else, there’s carnage. Nearest to me is Hantor’s bone creature, its eyes wide and glassy, a line of blue blood trailing from his mouth. Even as I stare, it disappears, and my breath stops. Hantor … “This cannot be.”

Suddenly, Rihad’s winged scorpion screeches in earsplitting fury, and Caleb jerks around, jostling every wound open on my body. I nearly swoon, and darkness rushes in, narrowing my vision to pinpricks.

“What in the…”

Pulling his arm from me, Caleb grabs the glass around his neck and fixes it to his eye. I can’t see anything in the roiling dust.

“Rihad is down,” Caleb cries. “The guards are fighting with Fortiss!”

I sag back, my heart twisting anew. That’s why Rihad’s Divh screamed. Fortiss must’ve finally realized that what was happening on the tournament field was not the result of crazed monsters and men, but the careful plan of the Lord Protector.

He’d seen the truth of Rihad, and he’d driven his blade into the man. It’s too late—far too late, but…

The air around Caleb and me shudders again, and my squire collapses back to the ground, dragging me with him. With a resounding boom, the sky turns black, the sun completely blotted out. I roll into a ball with Caleb, certain this is the end.

“Go,” I scream, but my words barely come out as a whimper. “You must go.”

“Watch out —” Caleb throws his body over me as the ground shakes violently enough to bounce us up a few inches, and then we crash suddenly down.

It happens again, and again.

I blink, trying to see through the dust, but there’s nothing but Divhs in a wide circle around us—upright Divhs this time, ones I’ve never seen before. Enormous clawed and taloned, leathered and furred, feathered and scaled Divhs, each of their thunderous feet pounding hard into the ground, loud enough to bring the very heavens down.

Life. The earth seems to cry out with every stomp. Life.

“Ahh!” I jerk rigid. An immense bolt of fire rips through me, and I scream as salt and dust assault us in a whipping gale. The warrior band I’m still gripping splits in my hand, tearing straight down the middle. I blink at it blearily, trying desperately to understand. But…how? Only the Lord Protector has the power to split his band! It is Law!

Law or not, one half of the sentient band falls away from my fingers, while the other half races back up my injured arm, leaving a searing trail of pain in its wake, to wrap tightly around my bicep once more. And before my eyes I see it return to its full, untorn size—exactly as the Lord Protector’s has done since the dawn of the Protectorate.

“ No .” I cough blood and seem to burn from the inside out, even as Caleb shrieks in agony beside me.

“Get it off me!” he bellows, dropping me to the ground to claw at what remains of his left arm. There’s a burning trail across the front of his clothes and my hand is now empty. I know what’s happened before he does, but I can’t speak, dizzy with pain, blood loss, and confusion as the stomping continues and the mighty beasts around us roar. How is it I’m still alive? How is it I’m?—

Then a familiar enormous foot plants itself not twenty paces from my head. I know that ebony claw, that swath of thick green hide. I look up—and up still further, unable to stop the tears now coursing down my face.

Oh no… Oh no, no, no.

“Gent, no ,” I scream, half-sobbing. “You can’t be here!”

A rush of wind rips across my face, my body, driving dirt into my mouth and eyes. Then Caleb is howling again, and an enormous claw scrapes the ground out from beneath me, toppling me into Gent’s palm.

A palm he curls to his heart as he roars.

Not death, his mind pounds against me, his enormous heart beating as one with mine. Not death, not death. Life.

I can’t see anything then for a few minutes, but we are running forward, running and stomping and howling, only it’s not just Gent but an army of Divhs, more than I’ve ever thought possible could be in one place. They burst into the group of battling men and monsters and separate them, scattering and even trampling the banded soldiers and warrior knights, and knocking the exhausted Divhs end over end. The soldiers still left fighting immediately break ranks in the face of this newest threat. The battle seems on the edge of finally, blessedly ending—no more dead and dying warriors, no more thrashing bodies of Divhs littering the open plain.

Then Rihad’s winged scorpion surges up into the air, freezing all the Divhs with its piercing scream.

I crawl up in Gent’s paw, realizing distantly that the worst of my wounds are no longer bleeding, that my breath is coming more easily. And I know: somehow, Gent did this. My Divh. His protection is not only shielding me…but healing me as well. How is it we know so little of the wonder of these creatures, after all their centuries of service? I dash the blood from my eyes to see more clearly as my Divh swings around.

Rihad kneels over Fortiss, one hand on his shoulder holding him to the ground as his other is raised high. As I watch, however, Fortiss surges up and claps his hand over Rihad’s left bicep, then wrenches something away. High above them both, the scorpion bellows again, but there’s another screeching roar that follows hard upon that scream.

A howl of rage that comes from deep within the mountain.

Gent swings around. The side of the cliff well behind the First House suddenly shatters, and the percussive boom! of exploding rock knocks us backward. The knot of Divhs lurches to the side, and the Divhs of the Eighth and First Houses scream in fury, adding their cry to that of Rihad’s creature.

Before I can see anything more, Gent’s paw contracts again, cradling me to his chest. He pounds over to the high walls of the coliseum and drops me on to its tallest wooden tier of seating. I land on the sun-blasted surface with a bone-rattling crunch.

Then Gent turns, roaring, and dives back into the fight.

I struggle to my feet, dizzy with pain, and stare at the new creature rising above the mountain.

A dragon nearly two-thirds Gent’s size arrows through the sky, one glorious wing outstretched, and one horribly bent. Her speed is astonishing, however, and she plows into the side of the winged scorpion, sending it cartwheeling. I turn, watching the aerial attack continue over the far end of the coliseum. Szonja can’t win this battle—she can’t. Her talons can rip and tear, she may even summon fire, but the moment the winged scorpion realizes she can’t truly fly…

Suddenly, another Divh bounds toward me on my coliseum perch, an ungainly giant with the hard-beaked head of a falcon, the muscled torso and arms of a man, and legs as thick and hairy as an ape’s. It seems like it’ll charge straight through the wall of rock, but it stops at the last moment, hurling something down. I try to duck but am unable to escape the heap of body that crashes into me.

Caleb. Apparently dead.

“ Caleb .” I have no voice left, my throat is filled with rocks, but I wrap my arms around his shattered form. I pull the squire into my body, as he’s so recently done to me, and realize he still breathes. He shakes, in fact, convulsing. I hold him, not knowing what else to do as I search the skies for the dragon and the winged scorpion that have soared beyond the clouds.

“Szonja,” I whisper.

In the far distant reaches of my mind, I feel her return touch. Hers and someone else’s…Fortiss, bold and valiant Fortiss, her new warrior knight. Fortiss, whose wildly beating heart now gallops in frantic rhythm with my own.

Keeping Caleb with me, I pull myself over to the walls of this highest rampart of the coliseum and gaze down.

I fumble for the glass around Caleb’s neck, yanking it free to place it against my eye.

In the midst of the battlefield carnage, Fortiss and Rihad are frozen in fierce combat, for all that they aren’t touching each other. Ringed round them are two layers of guards, clearly at a loss for how to proceed. They cannot break the connection between the two men, but it’s as if they’re as locked as much in place as the warrior knights are. Blood runs down Rihad’s face and Fortiss’s arm. Fortiss’s tunic has burned clean away at the shoulder too, revealing a bicep which now bears the unmistakable cuff of a warrior band.

He has finally chosen to fight. To rip off the band Rihad had stolen from his father and claim it as his own. Szonja has answered his call. And the battle of their respective beasts is so strong, the two men are caught in their thrall.

The screeching rage of the flying beasts above catches me again. As I look up, they cartwheel through the sky, slashing and ripping. Szonja’s poorly healed wing makes her flight awkward and seems to require her constant correction. However, the uneven angle of her attack is precisely what’s causing the winged scorpion the most trouble.

They snarl and fight in the sky. I sense the touch of Fortiss in the distant part of my mind, the part that holds the fragile connection with Szonja.

And I realize with horror…he’s losing that connection. Fortiss isn’t yet strong enough. He hasn’t fought with his Divh at all, and he’s not truly connected with her—or maybe he’s just reeling from the act of being banded. Either way, he’s not yet strong enough to fight this fight—he’s not enough!

But I am, I know with absolute, unshakable certainty.

I am enough.

Suddenly, the words tumble forth as if directly from Nazar’s teaching, and I push them out to Szonja like an offering. Szonja, beautiful Szonja, whose scream in the sun-bright sky now takes on a new and bloodcurdling ferocity. A scream that is echoed on the bloody battlefield not only by Gent, but by howls of all descriptions.

“Body and soul,” I breathe, slowing my heart, standing tall as I look into the heavens with both my form and spirit, hitting from a place of emptiness as I direct Szonja to fly at Rihad’s Divh again and again, accelerating strongly despite her shattered wing. Fortiss’s mind reaches for me too, adding his strength to my fiery intensity.

I press harder, my mind as Szonja’s mind, my eyes her eyes. The cut of no conception and no design is the one strategy that cannot be defended against, not completely, because it combines the best of improvisation and the best of strategy in a hit without hitting, a cut without cutting, a thought without thinking.

I pour my thoughts forth, barely moving, my whole body wrung out, as the battle crashes across the heavens, each cut more vicious than the last. But then, finally, with one last, driving thrust, Szonja closes her vicious maw around the winged scorpion’s neck, and the two of them plummet to the ground, far to the west of the coliseum. Another muffled boom! rocks across the plain.

For one long, sickening moment, there’s nothing but silence.

Fortiss is there, I am there, our link unbroken as I see what he sees—Rihad on his knees, torn and bloody, his mouth working though I cannot hear his words. Is he sending his injured Divh back to his own plane? Is he conceding?

I cannot see at first through Szonja’s eyes—there is only blackness. Blackness…and then sky.

Sky!

My heart seems to swell to several times its normal size, and I’m swamped with an elation so great, so terrible, I nearly pass out from its ferocious joy.

A moment later, her jaws opened wide and stained with the blood of her enemy, Szonja’s screech of rage and glory fills the air.

The air snaps tight around me once more. A sudden, whipping gale blows me back from the coliseum’s walls, and I crouch down against the stone, huddling Caleb close against the ferocious wind.

When the storm passes, I peer out again. My hand shakes Nazar’s eyeglass, throwing everything in motion.

But I can still witness the truth of the battle below; I can still see the truth.

It is finished.

Fortiss stands at the edge of the battlefield, looming over Rihad. The Lord Protector is out cold at his feet, blood at his mouth and staining the front of his robes. Fortiss turns to stare across the wide field. The guards drop to one knee.

Then, around Fortiss, billowing forth like a sea kept too long from high tide, the crowd of Trilion suddenly flows. They stop at the very edge of the carnage, where the dead warriors lie, their own Divhs long gone, and kneel to Fortiss as well. He is the symbol they know, the heir to the ruling House. He is the man they will follow, now that Rihad has fallen. He is their leader—and he can remain their leader, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t want the burden of all these people. I only want…

I blink, realizing the truth of it.

I want to be what I am.

A warrior knight. First-blooded and firstborn.

Below me, a huge, resounding cheer goes up.

Then, beyond the tide of humanity and across the wide plain, one Divh steps free from the collection of giants gathered there. He turns and points. Not to Fortiss…but to me. My heart surges again in my chest as I recognize my beautiful silver and green goliath, feel the touch of his mind on mine, the view of ocean and flowers and an endless, sun-drenched field.

Gent extends his long arm toward me, and I, in turn, high atop the coliseum, reach out to him.

Then thirty other Divhs extend their arms and wings and claws toward me as well—and roar.

Somewhere far across the sky, Szonja adds her scream to their song.

I stand, arm outstretched, totally still as the people of Trilion, spectators and villagers alike, rise up and cheer anew. Then I drop my arm…and the monsters disappear.

I sag.

“Talia.”

The gasp behind me seems to come from far away—so far away—and I turn with a startled cry as Nazar tops the stair, the old priest seeming barely winded as he rushes toward me, staff in hand, his long robes flowing out behind him.

Nazar only speeds up as he sees the boy crumpled at my feet.

“ Caleb ,” he moans, and in these two words, I’ve heard more emotion from the priest than in all the time I’ve known him.

Nazar casts his staff down, and together we crouch toward Caleb, shoulder to shoulder as we peel the boy away from the wall. Caleb is curled tight, protecting his stumped arm, his body still awash in violent tremors. I exchange a glance with Nazar and lay a hand first on Caleb’s foot, then his leg, talking the whole while.

“Caleb,” I soothe, and Nazar adds a low murmur to my words, speaking in a language I don’t know as I babble, “Caleb. It’s all right, you’re all right. I’m here, Caleb. It’s okay.”

I make it all the way up to the boy’s shoulder, and with Nazar’s help turn him over to face me. He goes willingly, burying his face against my shoulder as he convulses again.

Then I realize that these aren’t the pain-scorched throes of a broken boy.

Caleb…is crying .

I jerk my gaze to Nazar, and the priest settles back on his heels. There’s no longer a look of worry on his face, though. In its place is an expression of fierce pride.

“It is good,” Nazar declares, his face creasing into a tired smile. “It is of the Light.”

In my arms, Caleb merely sobs harder.

“Mistake,” he manages, his entire body shaking. “There’s been a—a terrible mistake.”

I gape at him but cannot yet break in past the wracking agony of his cries. Finally, Caleb hiccups a shuddering breath and seems to collapse in on himself. I set him back from me, searching his face, as he shivers with silent sobs. “What mistake, Caleb? What happened? Are you injured? Are you?—”

“This!” With his mouth contorted in a wash of pain, he reaches with his right hand and lifts the torn and tattered cloth of his left tunic sleeve, pulling the material up and over his shoulder to reveal the most slender of warrior bands, clamped tightly into his skin.

“It slid onto me from your—from your band,” he manages, his breath coming too quick, too harsh. “And then…and then that Divh…that hodgepodge, mashed-up, incredible Divh…” He shakes his head and turns to Nazar, then back to me, his eyes wide and shining with disbelief.

I know that disbelief. It wasn’t so long ago that I suspect I wore that same stunned, confused, and deliriously bleary look. I smile, a smile so wide it makes all my bruises ache. “What’s his name, Caleb? What’s the name of your Divh?”

“Marsh. His name is Marsh,” he says, the words barely a whisper. “He chose me , Talia, to be his warrior. Me .”

“And he chose well.” Nazar places a hand on Caleb’s shoulder, and in the priest’s worn and dust-streaked face, I see the resolve of decades of truth and training, hear it in his voice. “There is no one who fights so long and so well as you, warrior Caleb, and no one who?—”

But Nazar’s words are cut off by the sound of the crunching earth, a steady, rhythmic thudding and heavy woosh of wings that could only be a Divh—or two of them. Gent and his fellows have already left, and Nazar’s and my gazes lock, knowing this as the sudden threat it must be. The ear-shattering pounding reaches a crescendo as I pull Caleb to the side. Nazar grabs up his staff, whirling around with a shout?—

And freezes.

I can only stare as the old man’s face slackens in shock, his eyes fixed up, up on the enormous beast who even now leans down toward him, our great height at the top of the coliseum rendering us nearly even with the Divh’s bulky form. Its sharp, golden beak glints in the light, its snowy white plumage bursting around it to cover its head. Its piercing black eyes, cunning and intelligent, stare at Nazar with an unyielding gaze, while its powerful lion’s body, coated in midnight blue fur in stunning contrast to its mighty spread of snow-white feathers, practically vibrates with excitement. The quietest, questioning trill escapes from its beak as it tilts its head to lean down more closely to us.

A clatter makes me blink, and I realize that Nazar has dropped his staff. The priest steps forward once, twice, then lifts his ruined left arm free of his cloak, reaching high. The scrap of what is left of his warrior band, buried in his wrist, flashes in the bright sun, while the mighty creature dips its beak toward him, exhaling another soft, chittering trill.

Nazar’s eyes are mirror bright, but his face is calm, and his voice, when it comes, is resolute. The single word he speaks carries on the breeze, rich with power, purpose, and a warrior coming home.

“ Wrath. ”