Chapter 9

CHAPTER NINE

T he earth was still trembling with the aftershocks of the impact of where Ironwraith had struck Castelorain, crushing part of my town. A flurry of terror and panic had cried out from my people and my heart twisted with the destruction besieging my homeland. But despite the disorder ripping the air in two with the magnitude of what had just happened, I still didn't turn my eyes from the man I was intent on laying to ruin.

"You'd better kill me now or I'll hunt you for the rest of your days," I snarled at the Flamebringer who had killed my mother.

After he'd gotten apparently bored of parrying my attacks on his legs, ankle and a few sharp jabs at his cock, my enemy had taken his boot off my chest to observe Ironwraith falling from the sky and slamming into Avanis across The Crux before striking the edge of Castelorain too. I'd gained my feet and forced his attention back on me even when the ground had quaked from the violent impact. We had been in a back and forth since of me striking while he lazily parried my blows, barely offering me the courtesy of looking at me as his gaze trailed to his friend, North, and Harlon's fight. I couldn't spare a moment of my attention to them, leaping from the snowy ground again and stabbing straight for my enemy's chest.

He knocked me away with his blade, flames skittering across it to hiss against the icy metal of my mother's sword. He hadn't even bothered to draw his second blade, and I got the feeling I was boring him as I threw all of my power into my next attack.

I swung my sword high then dropped it, catching it with my injured hand, carving it low instead at the last second as a hiss of pain spilled between my teeth. His sword was somehow there again to take the impact, his movements so fluid it was like he was an extension of his weapon. I'd never seen swordplay like it, and no matter how practised my movements were, I couldn't get past his guard.

"Fools dig their own graves," he said, the barren, deep tone of his a weapon of its own, plunging straight into my heart.

"Cut the fucking poetry," I snarled, my ire digging deeper as I struck at him again.

He swept his fiery sword around in a circle, the force of the blade driving against mine making the hilt score into my bloody palm, but I willed the agony away and demanded my focus to sharpen. With a skilled twist of his blade, he forced the sword free of my grip and it landed in the snow at his feet. I lunged for it with a gasp, but his knee came up, driving into my face and making me stagger back as pain bloomed through my mouth, blood wetting my tongue.

"What will you do now?" he asked, as if he couldn't actually care less what I did. He crouched down, taking my mother's sword and weighing it in his free hand. "It's a good thing you didn't ignite the magic in this blade before stepping through The Boundary, or it would have been turned to ash."

"Give that back," I demanded, lunging at him and he swung both swords wide, allowing me beneath his guard then driving them into an X at my back, caging me within his muscular arms.

I was so close to him that I could smell oak and cinders on his skin, the perfect concoction of villainy. The tinge of danger in his calculated movements told me I was half a second from my body being cleaved apart on the edge of both swords, but he had let me too close to him. He believed me so insignificant that he had actually drawn me into this vulnerable space, and my hand snared the hilt of the short sword still sheathed at his hip.

I drew it fast, slashing it against his skin, scoring a diagonal line from his hip to his shoulder, blood spilling from the vicious cut that should have had him roaring in agony. But instead, all he did was part the swords at my back and kick me so hard that I was thrown to the ground beyond The Boundary. I didn't care about the pain of his strike, a savage smile of victory lifting my lips at what I'd done.

He took stock of the wound, his blood red fighting leathers torn apart by the strike and blood dripping down to stain the snow crimson. His dark eyes fell on me, his boots marking a passage my way as he raised his swords with the intent to kill. And I swear the sky shuddered as it acknowledged the demon stalking toward me.

Ironwraith was climbing back into the sky beyond him, dominating the view as the sunrise bled into the sky.

The ground began to quake, first a gentle rumble then an almighty roar of noise as great lashes of air magic came tearing down from the Skyforgers' island. I threw myself to the right to avoid the blast as a ferocious wind hit the ground, scoring through the earth like a knife, carving its way through the hillside and off towards the ocean, slicing our town in two, and we stood on the very cusp of the land the air wielders were seeking to steal.

I gasped as the ground jolted violently, turning to look for Harlon and finding him on top of North, their swords discarded in the snow and his knuckles turning white as he worked to choke his enemy to death.

North was turning blue and my own assailant turned from me, setting his sights on Harlon instead, swinging my mother's blade in one hand and his fire sword in the other.

"Harlon!" I shouted a warning as the earth was ripped skyward, my stomach bottoming out as we sailed up towards Ironwraith at a ferocious pace.

The Skyforgers were doing what they did best, stealing land from other nations and claiming it for their own. But as we rocketed towards the island in the sky and the wind pressed down on me, a gigantic hand built of the ocean itself reared up and slammed down on the far edge of the chunk of land, tilting it violently downward.

There was no doubt it was the brutal, beautiful work of my father.

I skidded down the slope along with the others, Harlon thrown off of North by the sudden decline and slamming into a tree. He fought to hold onto it as screams sounded out across the lump of land and I went careering towards him along with the Flamebringers.

We had to move, had to get free of this land before it joined with Ironwraith where the Skyforgers would be waiting to butcher anyone left clinging to it and hurl our bodies to the ground far below.

Harlon caught my arm before I could tumble past him and I held on tightly, hauling myself up to cling to the branch.

A hand locked around my ankle and I cursed as the full weight of my enemy hung from my leg. I kicked hard, forcing him off me and he caught the branch of a tree just below, while North went sprinting away down the tilting island with a cry of alarm, nearly losing his footing at every step.

My enemy glared up at me from the branch below and I kicked at his hands, trying to force his grip from it while Harlon clung onto me. The bastard had managed to sheathe my mother's sword at his hip, but his fire sword was lost to the carnage as boulders the size of houses went crashing down the hill towards the water hand.

Whips of air struck at the fingers of the water hand, breaking its grip and then we were tilting violently back the other way, falling from the tree that now stood upright once more. We let go, hitting the ground, and the Flamebringer did the same, sprinting for the far edge of the land.

The water hand was reaching up once more, its fingers tearing into the ground and forcing the earth to tip sharply toward it once again.

"We have to jump off this land," I gasped.

"Jump? We'll fucking die," Harlon said in refusal, but I grabbed his arm and forced him into a run.

"Trust me," I insisted, watching the place those giant fingers locked around the edge of land again and charging straight for them.

The world tilted and I nearly lost my footing as the snow slid beneath my feet, but instead I kept running, speeding along the ever-increasing descent to dry, warm land, passing between brush and rock then meeting the streets of the town I knew so well.

The water hand was right at the end of the next alley, the smooth stone beneath my bare feet making it harder and harder to stay upright. But somehow we did, and then we collided with that watery hand, diving straight into it as I pulled Harlon after me. It was like jumping straight into a whirlpool, and I was flung around in the churning saltwater, unable to see anything, unable to breathe or swim as I lost my grip on Harlon's arm.

I was plunged into darker water, kicking and kicking, swimming for the surface, hoping Harlon was close on my heels.

I broke the waves, finding myself out in the ocean where the arm of the hand stretched up and away from us. Harlon surfaced beside me, gulping down air and we stared in horror as the hand's grip was broken by more whips of air and a chunk of our town at least a mile in diameter was stolen away into the sky.

In the distance, I could just make out another hunk of land being torn from Avanis, dragged up to join the hulking mass which was Ironwraith as the newly-grown island launched itself towards the heavens once more.

I glowered at the dark, rocky underside of the island as it sailed higher for the cover of the clouds, the lump of land which had been held by those harpoons now carved off and left to rot in the wasteland between our two nations.

My gaze locked on movement by the shore as two figures dragged themselves from the water, the dark clothes of the Flamebringers telling of who they were.

I started swimming, furious they'd survived that fall and determined to finish this fight once and for all. But as they darted into the torn-apart earth and rocky boulders where the land had been ripped from its roots, I lost sight of them among the shadows. Still, I didn't stop swimming, my mind set on that single goal as the grief came for me again in a rolling wave of agony.

By the time I made it to shore, my limbs were trembling from exertion and all I found waiting for me was Commander Rake striding along the beach with his warriors grouping together, Ransom and Alina close behind them.

"The Flamebringers were here," I said urgently, running to my father, hoping he would send a battalion of warriors with me to hunt them. "They killed Mama. I ran to The Forge to warn her of the Skyforgers and was there when the blast was set. I-"

The commander's gaze dropped to the blood that was beginning to swell again on my left hand and he snatched my wrist, staring at the red skin that would surely scar beyond repair. His brown beard was blood-flecked, and the scales of his Merrow Order still on show, though the spikes between his knuckles had slid back beneath his skin. In the wake of battle, he looked even more terrifying than usual. The strike of his back hand came so fast that I had no time to even flinch before I was thrown into Harlon's hard chest.

"You failed her. And now you have destroyed one of the only worthwhile pieces of yourself," the commander said in a cold tone, his words cutting deep.

Harlon's arm came around me protectively. "She fought to kill the Flamebringers. We chased them to The Boundary."

"So where are their heads?" Father growled.

"They got away," Harlon admitted in a mutter, and my failure was crushing.

"I'll find them. They're heading for The Boundary again, there's still time," I said, pushing out of Harlon's arms, and my father stared down his crooked nose at me.

"You will do no such thing," he hissed, then snapped his fingers at two of his guards, sending them off to take the path I ached to follow myself. "From now on, you will be a shadow in our land. A creature akin to rats and foxes, and you will be treated as the useless vermin you are."

He turned his back on me, directing his warriors to their post-battle duties while I stared after him, finding the sniggering faces of Ransom and Alina glancing my way before they scurried off after the commander.

"Wait," I gasped, ready to try and make him see that I held some worth. That I wasn't useless, that I could still fight, still walk the path of a warrior. But the words died on my lips as the warriors marched away up the beach, because what proof did I have of that? I'd failed in rescuing my mother, I'd failed in ending her killer.

Harlon rested a hand on my shoulder as my soul fractured a little deeper, my father's rejection cleaving me apart.

"He's wrong, Ever," he said quietly, shifting closer behind me, the warmth of his body calling to me. But I wouldn't seek solace in his arms. A divide had just been drawn between me and the rest of this town, and Harlon deserved more than being caught on the wrong side of it.

"No, Harlon," I whispered, my voice hoarse with the raw agony of the loss of my mother. "This time, he's right. I couldn't save her. I couldn't even avenge her."

Harlon turned me to him, his brow drawn low as he knocked his knuckles under my chin. "It's not your fault."

Never rest, Everest. My mother's parting words to me carried to me as if upon the back of the ocean breeze. I inhaled them like a toxin, letting them fill my lungs and bind themselves to the shattered remnants of my soul. And I felt them taint me with a dark kind of strength, one that twisted and altered me, shaping me into something sinister.

"It is," I said, looking up at him with a newfound strength gilding my words. "But I won't rest until I have her killer's heart."