On Wings of Chaos (Revenant Wyrd Book 5) (36 page)

Still the sounds of battle drifted to her ears.

“Sisters, move in!” Pushta said. “My blade is hungry, and all of its food is being spilled across the ground.”

Uthia didn’t want to protest. They had been told to wait, but the dryads had also been promised their payment in blood.

The ebonwood dryads, with Uthia in tow, surged forward.

And then they were in battle. One dwarf ran toward them, casting worried glances behind him. His feet shifted in the snow, slipping in his misshapen boots. He was terrified, his weapon lost far behind him.

Just as he neared the line of dryads, however, an arrow burst through his throat, and he fell, gurgling and drowning on his own blood in the snow. A crimson pool spread out beneath him, melting snow and perverting the serenity of the whiteness.

It was the first of many. A wave of dwarves had broken from the attack and fled toward them.

“Ready!” Pushta said, lifting her sword. The dwarves were in range. The line of dryads swung their leechblades. They connected.

Uthia watched in horror as the blades connected with the dwarves. The dwarves must have known dryads were coming. They must have counted on the woodland dryads to aid their Twin Guardians. She could see the weaving of wood in the mail shirts over lumpy bodies.

“NO!” Uthia screamed. But it was too late.

The line of dryads before her exploded in a deafening roar. Black splinters rained down around her. Uthia collapsed, her hands to her ears. She tried to blot out the noise, but she could hear the inhuman scream of her darkwood sisters in the very fiber of her being.

The snow was cold beneath her knees. It seeped into the wood of her joints. She cried tears of sap, dripping down the white bark of her skin.

Dwarves ran unheeded around her. In fear of the giant machines and what wyrd drove them, the dwarves fled. Time seemed to stand still around her. Uthia’s eyes were rooted on the snow churning up under the feet of the dwarves.

In the distance she heard the roar of trolls, the thumping of their bodies landing dead in the plains.

She wept for them, she cried for the races of the Realm that she could feel weakening with every blow, with every death.

Then she understood why the gnomes and woodland dryads hadn’t wanted to help. The races of the Realm of Earth were bound in the earth. She could feel it now, though she had never felt it before. She could feel the weakening of the troll race. She could feel the deaths of the dwarves. It was almost a physical blow to her.

But what if they’d won?
she wondered, wiping sticky sap from her black eyes.
What if they had killed the Guardians?

Slowly Uthia stood. She gathered Cataresh to her, and waited for another dwarf to run past her. She had let enough go. She had made her decision long before now, she had cast her lot in with the humans. Was there any going back to her sisters? She wasn’t sure, but she also couldn’t stand by and let tyranny rule the realm, and that’s what her sisters and brethren gnomes were doing by not defending the Realm Guardians in their time of need.

It was horrible to think that the Twin Guardians had done so much for the races, yet the races wouldn’t do anything for them.

Cripple,
Uthia thought,
not kill
.

But she wouldn’t have a chance to cripple anything. She stood in the center of the field of battle. Around her, like a circle of destruction, black splinters and red, churned up snow was all she could see. She could smell the ebonwood in the air, sweet and thick like cloves. The scent of blood came to her, but she pushed the iron smell away.

She tried not to look at the few remaining dryads, crouched in the snow, lifting frozen scarlet handfuls to their blackened mouths, eating it, grunting with each bite as if it were the finest meal they had ever eaten. Their swords lay on the ground, and even the wooden threads were stiffened into the snow, feasting on the blood that resided there.

But then it was over. Giants roamed around the battlefield, massive wisps of sentinels, checking for life in their fallen comrades, ending the suffering of their enemies with a giant smash of stone.

The frement eased their wagons back, the rumble shaking the very fibers of Uthia’s being. The ones on land were holstering guns; they hadn’t gotten close enough to use their swords. Still they came, the dark elves cleaning their blades as the hecklin sauntered forth, easing to a halt by the dryads.

Uthia was sure by the looks on their faces, if the dryads hadn’t been nearly decimated by the armor woven with wood that the dwarves wore, they would have hunted the chaos dwarves to extinction. But since only a handful of dryads remained of what had come, they ambled around the battlefield, gathering the splinters of their sisters to take back to the Haunted Forest and burn in their funeral pyres.

But what was left for Uthia? She looked to the east, toward the Sacred Forest. Uthia thought she could almost see the peaks of the trees rising out of the haze of snow, but she knew it was only her imagination. She had broken away from the race, gone against the ruling of the gnomes, the unspoken leaders of the dryads. For her, there might be no home to return to.

“How did they do?” Joya asked.

Sara lowered the drape from its binding, settling it into place before the window. She used her cane to press the bottom of the drape tight against where wall met floor.

“Perfect. The trolls are thinner than I would like. I don’t know yet if they will make it. I might have to make sure they aren’t hunted, and see to their breeding. The dwarves escaped with more than I wanted, but they are dwindled enough that they won’t mount another attack for a long time, if ever.”

“Success?” Joya said.

Sara nodded. The truth was, she didn’t feel very successful. She had seen to the decimation of two races of her realm. Though it wasn’t something she could’ve escaped, she didn’t like that her hand had been forced.

“What now?” Joya asked, her hands clasped in front of her, mirroring Mag’s stance on the other side of where Sara sat on her bed, her mind in turmoil.

“Now we gather our dead,” Sara said, her voice a rasp of emotion. “And then we burn them.”

Jovian remembered all the funerals he had ever been to, and for that reason alone, he didn’t want to go. Their lives were becoming nothing but death, and while he believed in honoring the dead, he hated the act of it. It reminded him that all they had left to their name was a list of dead relatives, past memories, ghosts of smells to remind them of happier times.

The courtyard had been equipped with various chairs; enough to seat all who attended, and after the attacks, that wasn’t many. A high votary ran the services, standing on a stage before an altar, the gloomy winter sky adding to the somber atmosphere of what was taking place.

In the distance, behind the high votary, Jovian saw the dead on the plains below. The place where there had been so much death. The snow was still tainted red, and he was sure there were bodies under the flow of snow that wouldn’t be uncovered until it melted in the late spring.

Jovian could see the other votaries down there, hoisting bodies onto the stacks of wood, their chants muffled by distance. Maeven walked behind them, his head freshly shaven, his blue robe blowing in the stiff wind. He carried a censer that billowed red copal into the air, a miasma of blood reaching toward the sky. Jovian tried to follow the smoke, see the point where it faded away to the whiteness of the snow beyond, or into the gray cloud coverage, but he couldn’t. The wind was too strong, whipping tails of scented smoke out behind Maeven as he walked somberly around the pyres.

Jovian clasped his hands, thoughts of home weighing heavy on his heart. He had spoken reverent words over the mass pyre they had built. He remembered the bodies, the parts of bodies whose identities he still didn’t know, melting in the flames, billowing their smoke to the skies. He wondered if one of them had been Dauin. They hadn’t found their father. Jovian wondered if the fact that he didn’t hold stock in religious ceremony would affect the people he had prayed for, wondered if their souls would find their way from the grave and to Death and his three wisdoms with the aid of his baseless words.

Already they had missed their darkest hour. Would they have been stranded on the realms? Were these soldiers, dwarves, frement, ooslebed, dryads, trolls, and giants all bound to the realm now, since the prayers didn’t come soon enough to help them along their way?

Jovian looked to the sky and remembered the purple void he’d seen many times. He knew the Goddess existed; he had seen her in those purple clouds. He had even seen the silver radiance of her distant Kingdom that first night he met Baba Yaga. He couldn’t believe she would strand her believers to wallow in purgatory if someone wasn’t by their side soon enough to chant a senseless prayer.

No, this ceremony was for the living.

The scent of the sacred red copal drifted to his nose as priests and priestesses walked up and down the aisles, brushing the smoke toward all who lingered there, helping them find peace with the death, with the Goddess, and remembering those souls who were even now being transmuted to smoke.

The pyres below came to life with fire, and as the first licks of flame reached the heavens, the votaries on the field below began their death chanting. They would hold vigil through the night, watching the flames and praying the souls to the Ever After.

Angelica felt the hands clasped in hers long before the dream unveiled what it had to show them. One strong, callused hand in her right that she knew was Jovian’s, a delicate, smooth one in her left that she knew was Joya. There was another with them there — she could feel them, other minds with them. One beside Joya, and Angelica could feel the hum of Cianna’s sleeping mind within the darkness before the dream.

Before Angelica, the darkness wavered like a pebble dropped into water. It rippled out, and from the center, stretching out as far as her eyes could see, color flowed, until a picture hung before her. It was a picture of her family table. At the head of it Dauin sat, lifting a glass of whiskey to his lips as Jovian and her sisters laughed around a mouthful of apple pie. Grace sat next to Dauin, and they shared a secret smile. Angelica had never really known Grace to smile the entire time they had lived under that roof, but she must have, hiding her mirth behind a surly mask.

Angelica couldn’t remember what they’d been talking about, but she remembered the night well. Alhamar had excused himself, and the kitchen staff were in the kitchen eating their dinner and enjoying their dessert. It was those times of night, when the house hushed from activity, that Angelica loved the most. It was a calm time, restful from the active day, a time to enjoy the company of her siblings and enjoy the sweets conjured in Ashell’s cooking fires.