Chapter 13

Telise

T he Red Towers are quiet, like I expected. I'm the only one walking among the great pillars of deep orange rock that spiral up into the sky. There are all sorts of creatures worth hunting here: Massive hyenas with gorgeous striped coats, elephants with huge tusks and thick leather hides, even birds of prey with supple feathers that make a pretty accent on any piece of clothing you could imagine.

For a while I can lose myself in tracking. I manage to take down a hyena with an arrow through the head—a perfect shot that doesn't damage any of the hide or fur. Once I have it skinned, I toss the corpse to some vultures sitting around stale water, and they scream and caw with glee.

After I've collected a hefty load of supplies in my pull cart, I venture back to the small outpost at the top of one of the many towers, which you can only reach by a big bucket attached to an impressive pulley system. I call up to request a ride, and it takes a good thirty minutes before anyone is near enough to hear me and pull me up.

The outpost itself is almost empty.

"What happened?" I ask the one guard posted at the guard tower. "Where is everyone?" Things have clearly changed in the weeks that I've been out hunting.

"War." His eyes look heavy. "Conscription."

"What?" I almost drop my bag.

"Every eligible man and woman not currently involved in a military operation," he gestures at his guard tower, "is required by law to return to the capital and join the war effort." Then he looks away from me. "Deserters punished by death."

My chest constricts. No. There's no way.

"Why?" I try to keep my voice steady as I think of Deleran, being dragged from his parents' home and stuffed into steel armor, a sword shoved into his hands.

"The trollkin are advancing quickly. It's not long before they reach the capital, so it's all hands on deck to keep them at bay."

Oh, fuck. A lot has changed just since I was home in Great Oak.

"I can pretend that I didn't see you," the guard says, surveying me. I just look like a pretty young thing with a cart full of supplies.

"Thank you." But if Deleran is going to be pulled into this, I have a responsibility to find him. To protect him, because he'll never be able to protect himself out there. "I'm going to enlist. Voluntarily."

The guard looks surprised, then a little sad. "You shouldn't," he says. "They're dying out there in numbers."

"I won't die." I'm too quick and too smart for that. "I'm just going to help a friend."

"Your friend is probably already dead. "

I just have to hope he isn't right.

Raz'jin

We're only thirty miles from the capital when the tides change.

The humans must have begun conscripting, too, because their numbers suddenly surge. We meet a powerful resistance at the next town, and many of the new, young recruits fall at my side as we bludgeon our way through humans who look no older than children. Where I came to lose myself, instead I find a well of things to care about. I cleave another child through the head, watching his face fall in half in front of me. My axe is drenched in blood.

But we're still losing. There are more of them than there are of us. I'm one of the few left alive when our captain calls for a retreat. We fall back to our camp, where the human force wouldn't be so bold as to attack. We just have to sit and wait for the big guys to come up with a new plan.

That's when Blizzek arrives along with the next wave of conscripted recruits. I find him sitting around the fire one night, sipping up the same slop that I am. How he ended up here, when there are plenty of other fronts he could've been dragged to, is a mystery to me.

"Raz." He almost looks relieved to see me when I sit on the log beside him. "You're alive."

"Yup. Unfortunately. They got you, huh?"

"I came willingly. Didn't need to be told twice." He looks down into his bowl. "We're supposed to survive on this shit?"

"Welcome to war." At least I can trust Blizzek to keep himself alive, unlike these other whelps.

"Did you find her?" he asks. I furrow my brow. He still remembers that? "You've said plenty without saying anything," he says at my expression. "There's only one little critter walking this land that could do all this to you."

I shrug my shoulders. "No sign."

"Maybe she's already dead."

This feels like a dagger to the heart. I imagine finding her somewhere face down in the mud, and that ball of iron in my ribcage starts to burn. I would find whoever did it and kill them, even if that ended in my death, too.

But at the same time, I can feel that he's wrong. No, she's still out there somewhere. If she were gone, I would know it, deep in my soul. There's still a chance to find her before we take the capital and the world falls at our feet.

"I'll keep an eye out," Blizzek says. He holds out his hand, and we shake. "It's an ugly thing, isn't it? All this." He gestures at the filthy camp, our dirty, blood-stained armor, and the bodies piled high in the woods nearby.

I don't have anything to say to that. It is ugly. It feels like if we win this, the world will come to an end.

My unit marches out the next day. The plan is to attack from both sides and burn their shoddy wooden defenses down with fire. I watch more and more of my fellow soldiers fall around me as a volley of arrows descend on us from the guard towers. I have a shield now, which I hold over my head as I slash again with my axe, bringing down another human whelp in thin leather armor.

Telise might be fast and clever, but eventually the war will find her, too. And when it does, she will fall just like the others.

Telise

On the way back to Culberra, I'm surrounded by people carrying what weapons and armor they happened to have back home. There aren't enough supplies to arm all of us, so we're responsible for bringing what we need ourselves. Of all people, I run into Sden at the armory, where he's been conscripted into making what he can with the small supply of leather that remains.

"I could use an assistant," he says, offering me a very valuable non-combatant position in all of this. But I decline because I have to find Deleran. I can't let him face this alone. Sden just nods in understanding, like he expected this answer.

"You won't find him, by the way. The trollkin have conscripted, too. There are tens of thousands of them out there."

"Oh, I know." But there's a glimmer of hope in me, too. If Raz'jin were dead, I would feel it. That much is an absolute certainty to me.

I learned what that word means, from a book I read. "Mate." It wasn't just some fancy word for marriage—it meant a lot more than that. Like the book said, our souls were tied together on some other plane, and I can sense that his is still out there. Dirty and miserable and lonely, but out there, nonetheless.

But I don't get a chance to look for Deleran. I just have to go where I'm told, and I climb into a train car meant for hauling cargo along with a hundred other shivering humans. We're shipped like coal to one of the outposts around the capital city, where we'll act like fodder to keep the trollkin forces at bay. There doesn't seem to be any greater plan than playing defense. Our bodies will fall like so many dominoes, until our enemies finally storm the castle over a carpet made of our flesh.

When we finally reach our destination, we're split into squadrons. My first night in camp, I start to make my rounds looking for Deleran. I ask everyone I come across if they've seen the tall man with sharp blue eyes and a family crest shaped like a deer.

"Squad fourteen," a quiet woman says, and the life has clearly left her eyes. "I saw him. Kind of a hottie if you ask me. You his girlfriend?"

It's easier if I say "yes," so I do, and with her direction I find my way to where fourteen is holed up on the other side of town.

Sure enough, Deleran is there and still very much alive. When he sees me, he leaps to his feet and pulls me into his arms, and the familiar smell of him is surprisingly comforting.

"You're alive," he says, pushing my hair back from my face. He hugs me again, even tighter than the first time.

"For now. I haven't seen combat yet."

Deleran's face falls. "Oh. It's awful out there, Tea. You don't know just how bad until you see it with your own eyes." Then a little light reappears in him. "But it's not so hopeless as all that. There's a plan."

"A plan?" I'm glad to hear this. Maybe we could get out of this hellhole alive.

He gestures to something that just looked like a pile of wood to me. "Trebuchets. We've collected up all the steel leftover from battle—" he means armor and weapons scavenged off the dead, "—and it's been melted into shrapnel bombs. We drop a few of those on the trollkin and we can take out thirty, forty, fifty with a single shot."

Oh, no. What a terrible way to die. I imagine Raz'jin hit with one of these, his body filling with shards of steel and falling to the ground in front of me.

Deleran reads my face. "Don't jump to conclusions yet. You don't know anything for sure. He could still be out there."

My troll is a clever bastard. He must have found a way to stay out of this.

"Find me on the battlefield," I tell Deleran. "I'm not letting you fight alone."

He smiles a little sadly. "That's the most romantic thing you've ever said to me."

Raz'jin

Despite our recent loss, our captains feel confident that our next assault will work. Maybe with enough bodies to throw at it, they'll be right, and we can finally take this forsaken place. And perhaps this time, I'll join the piles of the dead.

What we don't expect are the massive balls of steel the humans start to hurl into our ranks. I watch as they fall and explode, sending shrapnel flying in every possible direction. I'm only saved from it thanks to my shield being in the right place at the right time, but I can sense that elsewhere, Blizzek isn't so lucky.

Fifteen years I've traveled with him, all across the world, and now I don't know if I'll ever see him again.

The humans don't even bother to leave their fortress as they rain hell down on us. But I do my job and advance on the walls, bringing my fire to the kindle laid all along the base of it. The fire catches, swells, and quickly starts to spread. From up above I hear the sound of screaming. I listen closely to it, searching out anything familiar .

A spear falls from above, and I'm forced backwards. I rejoin the soldiers standing under the shelter of the trees, where we're partially protected from the shrapnel bombs falling on top of us, and watch as the fire spreads.

It's not long before the gates open and soldiers start streaming out. My eyes are riveted on them, searching their ranks for a familiar head of red hair, when another ball of steel is launched over the flaming wall. It lands right in front of us and blasts apart, showering us with bits and pieces of swords and spears and breastplates. One catches me in the leg, sending splitting pain across every possible intersection of my body.

These soldiers aren't here to fight us—they're here to collect and scavenge what remains of us.

I stumble backwards, blood streaming from my unprotected leg. Now I'll be here bleeding out until one of our enemies finally finds me and takes me prisoner or lets me die an excruciating death.

My leg can't hold me up any longer, and I fall back to the forest floor into a bundle of dense brush. The thorns tear at my face, but the branches soften the blow.

Already the blood loss is making my head swim. Humans shout as they fan out across the land, some of them trying to put out the fire, others searching for remaining combatants.

I've wanted to die so badly, and yet I've fought so hard to stay alive. Why? Once again, I drag myself into the brush so maybe they won't find me. Why am I clinging to life this way?

Because she's still out there, and, as long as I know that, I'm going to keep fighting.

The world starts to spin overhead, and then everything goes black.