“You’re going to leave us behind?” I hear a voice snap.
“If there are survivors, we’re going to need room to carry them,” Roiven answers.
“There aren’t,” I say, so quietly nobody listens. In my mind I’m seeing the village we stayed at, the children playing and Nor carrying a tray of food, Hevrin finding peace and a new life, in a land with plants and people who just want to survive. I know this is a different village, but the people in it deserved life just as much.
I don’t want any more Enchanted to die. But if I keep trying to reach the War-Father and beg for peace, am I just dooming more people to die, with a plan that will never work? If he’s willing to use weapons like this, to destroy a peaceful village, why would he accept a surrender? He doesn’t care about saving the Enchanted or the sailors. He never has.
“All others, stay here in case those ships make it to the Tower before we return,” Roiven says.
“There aren’t survivors,” I say more loudly.
“We’re going to check,” Roiven says flatly. “They could have evacuated before the blast hit. We don’t know. Nor can only farspeak to those they’ve met, so there’s only one way to be certain.”
There’s a push to move down the stairs, a flood of bodies trying to leave that way. As the last to come up, I jog down to get out of their way. A sick feeling still sloshes in my stomach.
“Roiven,” I call. I don’t see him in the crowd around me. Sava launches up into the sky, and I raise a hand to block the snap of wind from my eyes.
Roiven is already airborne.
The green dragon launches up a moment later, carrying Aria and the troop of warrior women I saw before. Sava wheels ahead of the green dragon and plunges into the night. I reach for the bond and feel him slipping further away. I feel cold all over. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that he left me behind, without saying farewell, and in the face of whatever annihilation just happened I have no right to feel upset about it.
“Put out a call. All lights dark. We do nothing to help them find us,” Torain announces to the witches still in the caldera. A pair of them unload the packs they’d strapped to the blue dragon. The others are talking in tight, uneasy clusters. A few still stand on the platform, staring out the direction that Aria and Roiven flew.
“Why should we harbor a knight?” a man growls. He shoulders through the crowd towards me. The witch is tall and broad-shouldered, with red hair in a long braid. People part to let him through. “She could be a spy. We’ve seen what her kind does.”
I stiffen, hearing the violence in his voice. This man wants blood. He emerges from the crowd. Ten feet separate us, and he doesn’t slow as he draws a shortsword. There’s a crazed look in his eyes that I recognize as grief.
“Beran,” Torain warns. The silver-haired witch folds his arms. He looks unsteady on his feet after watching the explosion. “She has the King’s protection.”
Beran slashes at me. I don’t have it in me to draw my sword on a witch, not tonight. Not after what I just witnessed. I block him with my metal arm and dodge to the side. I don’t want to lead the fight towards the other witches, not while he has a drawn blade.
“I don’t want to fight you,” I tell him.
He screams and stabs at me again. I move to block, but the blade doesn’t connect.
Shadows surge forward and drag Beran back, blinding him and yanking the sword from his grip. It clatters onto the caldera floor asAvreen shoves her way through the crowd. I can’t believe she, of all people, would protect me.
“You should go to your room,” Avreen says flatly as she strides between Beran and me.
“But…”
“It would be best, knight,” Avreen says. Her voice is low and simmering in anger.
I leave the caldera silently, slipping back through the doors into the mountain’s passages.
Surely I can find my way down to the sea without a guide. All I need to do is follow the stairs Torain took me to before.
35
I walk through quiet neighborhood squares, and then a louder street where a dozen adults sit outside and food sizzles over a fire, children laughing and running as the adults talk in hushed voices about what’s to come. Their conversation pauses as they see me. I give them a nod and continue on to the next stairs, hoping nobody will challenge me.
Nearly three hundred people on Lusern. Is that more or fewer than the number of Enchanted they drained to create that explosion?
Then I reach the sea.
The last set of stairs is enclosed in darkness. I feel my way down carefully and reach a cave. A pale lance of moonlight spills from the far end, and I follow it past a rack of rowboats, hand on my sword hilt in case something lurks in the cave’s darkness.
Outside, there’s a cove where the sea laps against black sand and rock, the waves less violent than I have come to expect. A narrow beach. The moon is nothing more than a brightening in the sky, through thin clouds that dull its light and hide the stars.
