On Wings of Fire: Chapter 25

Fyn followed Cassia into the room, carrying the crate of shards between him and Sasha. The swatch of fabric they had used to patch the break had shifted, and they had to hold it carefully so the shards didn’t spill. Because he was trying to balance the crate, Fyn was looking down, not up, when he entered the room.

So when he set the crate down behind Micah and Cassia and straightened up, both shock and instinctive fear hit him like a punch to the gut.

The room was large and airy, surrounded on three sides by glass walls that overlooked the city. The other six Archpriests were sitting in a half-moon of plush velvet chairs facing the door, with Micah’s chair on the far right empty. But Fyn barely noticed the naiad absently twirling a five-foot trident or the large hulking form of the troll Archpriest dancing her fingers against her chair with soft tapping noises, or Tilana hurry up to Cassia and pull her into a hug.

His gaze had snapped to the woman in the center chair, who was not sitting but standing, dark, scaled fists clenched at her sides. Her scales were red, not in the gaudy way Fyn’s were, but so dark they were almost black, like rock above magma, or a night tinted with blood. She was tall and strong, with broad shoulders and a sculpted neck, and held herself with a kind of powerful beauty.

Fyn had never seen in her human form before, but he knew her all the same. Every drake instinct he had told him to kneel, to splay himself on the floor before her, but Fyn set his jaw and forced himself to meet her gaze. He would not grovel before Ashwythe, his once-queen, again.

She looked at him for a long time, her face strangely blank. Then a sneer curled her lip. She raised a jeweled hand and pointed at him.

“That drake is a thief and a traitor.” Her voice rang out over the Council’s muttering like the crack of a rock splitting. “Before we listen to whatever miracle Micah has dreamed up this time, I demand justice. You will turn him over to me immediately.”

A stifled gasp emitted from the gap between Ashwythe’s throne — any chair she sat in was definitely a throne — and the wall behind. With a second gut punch, Fyn saw Kez, standing behind Ashwythe’s chair with a spear in one hand and a tray of savory-smelling meat skewers in the other. His gawk had slid into a sneer, but then the drake standing next to him jabbed him in the ribs with the butt of his spear, and Kez doubled over, wincing.

The movement exposed the back of his neck. A deep X marred the scales, two ridges of grey-white scar tissue crossing where his spine met his shoulders. It was the sign of Ashwythe’s Black Hand. So Zhiron had chosen Kez, even before Fyn disobeyed him. Somehow, Fyn wasn't surprised to realize that promise had been a lie, too.

Then Cassia stepped in front of Fyn, wings spread, and blocked his view. “You can’t have him,” she said loudly.

Fyn couldn’t see over or around her. Her feathers had puffed up, exposing the pink flesh beneath, and though one hand was still in a sling she held the other up defensively.

“Cassia,” Fyn started, but Cassia threw him a don’t-you-dare glance over her shoulder and pushed him back with her wings.

Ashwythe ignored Cassia and addressed Micah. “Control your child, Micah, and release the traitor into my custody. Trust me, it will prove… wise.”

Micah looked from Cassia to Fyn, and something in his face hardened. He took a step forward, and Fyn had to admire the nerve it took for him to smile congenially at Ashwythe of all people.

“Archpriestess,” Micah began, and Fyn’s heart skipped a beat — the Archpriest’s tone was careful and wheedling. “I don’t know what this drake has done for you to call him traitor, but he has risked his life to bring these shards here and end this war that would swallow his people. Is that not loyalty? Let us see this through, and then you can do with him as you will. Perhaps his courage will hold some weight in your eyes; I know how Selach admires such things in his followers.”

It was laughable, of course, and both sides knew it. Selach didn’t care about courage, only obedience. But to Fyn’s surprise, Ashwythe appeared to consider Micah’s words, then nodded.

“Personal affairs can wait. We have more pressing business.”

She seated herself again, arranging her sleek black dress over her knees with a slight stiffness to her movements.

Micah pressed Cassia’s wings down with an urging hand and fell back beside Fyn.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Fyn muttered to him. “She’s angry now.”

“I’ve spent a century buzzing around her like a fly just out of her reach,” Micah responded just as quietly. “I can manage one of her moods. You saved my daughter’s life.”

Fyn swallowed. He couldn’t bring himself to make eye contact with Cassia. Ashwythe was too dangerous. He should have known better than to drag them into his fate. Ashwythe would never stop hunting him.

The magic in him that was and was not Selach’s sat heavy in his belly. Unless something changed.

Micah was talking again, explaining the plan in more detail, but Fyn only half-listened to the questions of structure and timing and other magical specificities. He did not think Ashwythe was listening either. Her cold gaze had never left his.

He returned the stare, determined not to break first, but when she saw his concentration she scoffed silently and shifted her gaze to Micah, her face slipping into an expressionless mask as if he was an ant on the floor and she already had forgotten he was even there.

That didn’t fool Fyn. Hunting dangerous prey was about stealth and persistence. You waited under cover, still as stone, until your prey looked the other way. Until they forgot you were there, or forgot you were a threat.

Then you pounced.

“…it will hook them,” Micah was saying. “Unlike last time, we don’t have enough power to bind them and our gods both, but using young Sasha here, we can attract their attention long enough to make them talk to us.”

The naiad Archpriest leaned forward on her chair, trident shifting across her lap. “And when they don’t listen to anything you say, how exactly is that going to get you land-dwellers out of this neat mess you’ve found yourselves in?”

“Yucena is right,” the hamadryad Archpriest said, waving a barklike hand about emphatically. “Though she wants to think this war won’t affect her people, the fact is, the human gods are going to laugh us in the face and then kill us all one by one. With us dead, our alliance will be nothing. The humans will surround us and pick us off one by one. The real answer is obvious.”

He looked around the room and saw only calm stares. He threw his arms up and sank back in his chair. “Well, it is! Don’t tell me you aren’t all thinking it. Why bind our own gods when we have actual enemies? Use this human to bind them instead and you might see me agree to this Treatise.”

“I’d die first,” Sasha said flatly. “You seem to be forgetting this is a negotiation. That I’m your only chance for peace. Try and force me into something, and you won’t like the result.”

“She is an ambassador from her people and you will treat her as such,” Cassia said quietly to the assembled Archpriests. Tilana released her sister’s elbow, and though Fyn guessed Tilana had fed Cassia the words, the steel behind her voice was all Cassia’s.

The hamadryad Archpriest closed his mouth, abashed, and once again Fyn saw them bend before her certainty, beneath that uncompromising gaze that challenged every selfish instinct you held and demanded you admit them. Fyn couldn’t help but smile and remember a moment in the marketplace below them, the first of many times she had fixed him with that same determined gaze.

The hamadryad muttered an apology and yielded the floor to the troll Archpriest, who despite his bulk had a levelheaded, calming presence, and tensions seemed to ease the moment attention turned to him.

“Our first responsibility is to our people.” The Archpriest’s slow, ponderous voice invited everyone to agree to such simple statements — Fyn already found himself nodding along. “Peace is what best serves our people. If we leave a vein to sift rocks, we have already failed.”

“Thank you for your support, Senwe,” Micah said, making a small bow that to Fyn was mocking, but it seemed both sincerely given and received. “If you believe this course wise, then I am reassured that my instincts and reason have led me well.”

The other Archpriests frowned and shifted in their seats, casting both irritated and thoughtful glances at Senwe. Evidently his word was very much respected on the Council, though all Fyn had ever really heard about trolls is that they had the patience of a stone, but the intellect of one too.

“Please consider,” Micah pushed. “If we fail we will have lost little. Our gods—”

“Our gods did not take kindly to us imprisoning them a century ago. They won’t allow it again. Our punishment will be worse this time, Micah!” the hamadryad warned.

“The purpose of the negotiation—” Micah began, but he broke off, though no one had interrupted him. He paused, tilting his head to one side.

“May you? You ask now?” he said to thin air, his tone tight and clipped.

His bushy brows lifted slightly at some response Fyn could not hear. “Very well, I suppose you may.”

His arms fell still to his sides and his posture straightened. He stood there, unmoving, and then he spread his wings and turned his head. His eyes were blazing white and though the voice he spoke with was his own, the words were not.

“Thisbe,” Mithrinde said using Micah’s voice, and the hamadryad Archpriest started in his chair and then tried to look unconcerned at the prospect of being directly addressed by another Order’s goddess. “You’re forgetting that your gods are well aware of Micah’s plan. We’ve closely attended this entire conversation. You haven’t taken any of the precautions you did one hundred years ago to hide from us. Did you think we wouldn’t notice?”

“Lady Mithrinde,” Thisbe said stiffly. “Then I can only hope my Lady Larisa forgives me for my talk of treason.”

“Thisbe,” Mithrinde said again, with a gentleness that was almost scorn. “I’m speaking through Micah specifically to tell you that I support Micah’s plan. That I will consent to bindings that prevent me from doing as I do now, in exchange for peace. That I hope this will make a fairer world. If you care to sit in silence for a moment, you’ll find that Larisa agrees with me. Perhaps the rest of you will find your gods do too.”

Thisbe’s lips pressed to a thin line and a muscle twitched in his neck.

“Fine,” he finally snapped, but he was not speaking to Mithrinde. A green glow filled his eyes and he spoke, a lighter inflection in his voice.

“Mithrinde speaks true,” Larisa said through his voice. “We agree, or will agree when we see it will produce peace.”

The light faded from Thisbe’s eyes, and Micah’s a second later. They both drooped forward for a moment before regaining control of their limbs. Micah gestured at the other Archpriests with open palms, waiting for their answer.

Fyn did the mental tally. Micah yes, Sanwe yes, the naiad most likely yes, and even Thisbe seemed to be resigning himself to the idea. That left only the thunderbeast’s Archpriest, whose skepticism was written on his face, and the sylph Archpriestess, who hadn’t spoken this entire time, but had her hands folded quietly in her lap. And, of course, Ashwythe.

Fyn bit back his frustration. All of this arguing was a foregone conclusion. Selach would never agree to be bound, nor would Ashwythe bind him. They all knew Ashwythe had tricked them, and yet they let her sit in the room on this Council, pretending she was one of them!

No one spoke. The silence stretched.

Then Cassia squeezed Fyn’s hand and stepped forward. She looked around at the assembled Archpriests, and only because Fyn knew her did he catch the flicker of uncertainty in her eyes.

“I am not my father,” Cassia began, speaking slowly and carefully. “I’m not my sister, either. I didn’t train to ascend as an Archpriestess and I never studied any of the world outside of Mithrinden as well as I should have. I don’t know enough about each of you to know what I should offer you, what will win you over.

“All I know is that you’re people like me. And I think you have hopes and dreams like me. I hope you want to go home, and want to see your family safe. And I hope that just how you can see you are like me, you can see how I am like the hundreds of thousands of humans outside this city’s borders. You don’t know any of them, but I know they are people like me too, and so I hope they want to go home, and I hope they want to see their family safe. Maybe it’s not true. Maybe all of them hate us more than they love their families and that’s why their gods hate us too. But I hope, and so I have to try for peace. Can you hope, too?”

And Fyn watched the mood of the room turn. For a moment he forgot about everything else — Kez, Ashwythe, Selach’s trickery. This was how Cassia changed people. He watched, lost in awe, as each head back and forth across the room nodded. No one spoke, but this new silence was full of purpose.

Then Ashwythe uncoiled on her throne. She drew every eye like a magnet, scorn playing across her lips as she stood.

“Well,” she said. “This has all been a very touching display of nauseating sentiment. You are all weak-willed fools, but that is hardly news. Nor is it news that Selach will not be bound, and I do not want peace, and family, or the other happy things this angel child speaks of so prettily.”

She turned her back on the room and clasped her hands in front of her. “No, really the only shocking thing is that it’s taken this long to get rid of you all.”

Something in him, new magic or old instinct, warned Fyn. He was already swelling into his drake form when black tendrils crept up the glass walls surrounding the room and shattered them into dark-edged pieces.

The other death witch barreled into the tower, borne up by strange black vines that crept around the bricks and between the mortar. Glass flew in every direction as Archpriests dove for cover behind their gilded chairs. The sudden wind tore the shouts from every throat.

Fyn crouched low to the ground and flinched as the glass shattered over him, though none of it penetrated his thick scales.He ducked his head so it wouldn’t hit the ceiling. He wasn’t sure where Cassia and Sasha and Micah were, other than behind him. He had jumped in front to face the drake queen.

Ashwythe stood without moving, her glittering eyes fixed on Fyn, daring him to strike. She had not even changed to her drake form.

Fyn snarled at her, setting fire building in his throat. The new power inside him burned like dry wood, eager to light. The world faded away and it was just the two of them, eyes locked.

Fyn’s stomach churned, but his fire was not lighting. It fizzled in his stomach as he reached for the power and it slipped through his grasp like dust.

“Go on,” Ashwythe smirked. “Do it. I’m growing old, and the fall beyond this window is so far…”

She shifted her foot back until it brushed the very edge of the shattered window and dangled over the drop below. “Of course,” she hissed, “that false power you hold won’t save you. He will burn you and laugh and it will be less than what you deserve. And if you think you can escape, if you think your angel friend will beg her goddess to save you, just wait until she sees Mithrinden ruined by our people. I hear the walls just fell…”

Ashwythe’s words rooted Fyn to the spot, the signal to burn dying in his closed throat. Scores of drakes with red eyes swarmed over Mithrinden’s crumbling walls in Fyn’s head, angels fleeing before them. It couldn’t be true, she could not have sent the Order swarming into Mithrinden so quickly—

“Fyn, come on!” Cassia screamed, and the sound broke through Fyn’s stupor. He spun his head around, arcing a trail of fire through the room, and saw Cassia beckoning him from the door, her eyes wide and terrified. The Archpriests’ bodyguards, as well as Micah himself, were fighting the other Death mage, dodging her tendrils of death and throwing their spears out the shattered windows to where she hovered.

Fyn lifted his paws and terror seized his heart for a moment — they were nearly numb, the inky blackness seeping into his skin and leaving it gray and dead. Standing there, caught up by Ashwythe’s words, he had not even noticed.

His eyes met Cassia’s, and without a backwards glance, he turned his whole body and leaped toward her, shrinking to his human form mid-jump. The moment his paws left the floor, he sent a surge of his new power through his body, driving out the taint of Death.

He crashed to the floor in his human form, his knees slamming forward and sending bursts of pain up and down his legs. Ignoring it, he climbed to his feet, pushing back the Death magic that tried to creep in again when he touched the floor.

He staggered toward Cassia in the doorway but tripped over a body. Its head turned toward Fyn as he stumbled.

Kez's dull black eyes stared silently at the ceiling. His spear was clutched in his hand and his skin was pale and gray. He had never even made it into his drake form.

Fyn’s gut churned, but he didn’t stop. He reached Cassia in the doorway and she pulled him into her arms, her chest heaving. She broke away and shoved the crate of shards into his arms.

“Take these and run upstairs, everyone is heading up there. We have to make the Treatise now. I just have to get my dad.”

“But—”

“Take them and go! You have to start the ritual and take Ashwythe’s place!”

Fyn’s legs obeyed her without thinking. He was halfway up the stairs before his mind rebelled — how could he have left Cassia? He skidded to a halt on the narrow spiral staircase, looking up, then back down. The box of shards dug heavy lines into his forearms. Help her, or deliver them.

He had to trust her. He kept running, though that quickly slowed to a fast stagger. Finally, he burst onto the next landing, his chest heaving with the exertion.

Hands reached out around him, helping him up and taking the box of shards. He caught only flashes of feathers and hairstrands and gray skin as the Archpriests surrounded him, hurrying to sort out the shards from the box and lay them in the ritual circle Tilana was drawing with some chalk. Sasha hung back, awkward with her large white wings against her dark leathers.

The naiad Archpriest looked Fyn up and down. “Micah’s daughter said you can bind Selach. Against his will?”

Fyn’s stomach was churning in time with the still-displaced magic of Selach as he once was. He swallowed. “I think so. I have his old magic. From the shards. Instead of a mote. He can’t take me, but I think I can bind him.”

He left out the fact that the magic wasn’t working for him right now. He just didn’t know how to use it properly. The ritual would do that part for him.

She studied him for a moment. “By the seas, I hope you’re right. Either way, you’re in for a fight,” she muttered, and steered him to stand in his place in the circle. The other four Archpriests were already standing in their positions. When the naiad took her place, that made her five, and Fyn six. The shards of their gods’ power were scattered around their feet, leaving Fyn heady and hardly able to keep a firm grip on his magic.

Sasha sat crosslegged in the center of the circle, knees just inside a smaller white ring. She met Fyn’s eyes and he heard her silent question. Are you ready?

No. There was still a gap in the circle, a gap waiting to be filled by an angel. Tilana had finished drawing out the ritual, but she drew aside, pressing back against the wall of this small observation chamber at the top of the tower.

She, along with every other pair of eyes in the room, watched the stairs for the two angels they had left behind to fight the death witch.

Please, Fyn begged Cassia, seconds away from breaking formation and sprinting down the stairs himself. Please come.

They needed her. Maybe Tilana, even without a mote, could have sealed the angels’ portion of the Treatise. But without Cassia, they would never convince the human gods to agree to peace.

The seconds stretched. He couldn’t have counted them if he tried.

At last, footsteps pounded against the stairs. The other Archpriests shifted, pointing weapons at the door, but Fyn knew it could not be anyone else but her, and when her blonde hair and bandaged arm broke above the stair-line, he jumped forward and let her lean on him, helping her over to her spot in the circle.

“Micah?” the thunderbeast Archpriest said shortly.

Cassia shook her head, her arm still around Fyn’s shoulders. He could feel her heart pounding with exertion and fear. “Still fighting. He’s buying us time.”

She half-pushed Fyn back into his spot, and then started whispering words to him under her breath, telling him how to do his part in the ritual. “Did you get that?”

Fyn nodded. He just had to say what everyone else was saying, to shape the magic and create the contract. The hard part would be forcing Selach to abide by it.

“Are we ready?” the troll Archpriest said, his voice measured and absurdly calm.

Each head around the circle nodded in turn. At Cassia’s final nod, the troll paused.

“May the web of fate be with us.”

He took up the chant, followed the hamadryad across from her, then the naiad. The Archpriests joined the chant one by one until Fyn was the last to start, repeating in his place after Cassia. The circles they stood in blazed multicolored light as their magic ran to fill the chalky lines.

All as one, the godformed breathed in and pulled their gods’ magic from their ancient, broken vessels.

The power roared through Fyn with all the force of an eruption, violent and new and demanding to be used. His skin steamed and he felt sure he was about to burst into flames, but he forced his mouth to move and form the final syllables as he thrust forth his power.

They finished the chant at the same instant, leaving a split second of silence as the last word fell from their lips.

Then a flash erupted from their bodies, and everything went white.