Queen of the Sylphs (28 page)

“Uh-oh.”

Ril growled.

Chapter Twenty

Just as the sun flooded the Valley with morning light, Betha and Lizzy’s sisters ran outside to defend her against a crow. Above, the window of their house’s master bedroom exploded outward, and battle sylph hatred drove them all to their knees.

Wat had crashed through the window. Diving out after him, Ril flipped in midair and landed in a crouch on the ground, gasping. Using his power drained him faster than any other battle sylph and he only had a few blast waves left. He hadn’t dared use his full strength—not so close to Leon—but his first attack struck Wat squarely. The battler landed on his ass in the road, his legs up over his head.

Ril charged. He didn’t know what Wat thought he was doing and he didn’t care. He’d felt the sylph’s full intention to kill Leon, and he didn’t need Lizzy’s order to know a response. He didn’t have to worry about Solie’s command not to harm any humans in the Valley either. Sylphs weren’t human.

Wat sat up, gaping in surprise. Distant battlers were screaming in alarm, but Ril had no urge to wait for them. He sent a rolling wall of power at the other sylph.

Wat was stupid but not suicidal. He rolled out of the way, moving fast, and rushed Ril with a snarl of his own. He didn’t try to change his shape or use his own energy, which was strange. Ril had no idea why, unless it came from a feeling of superiority or an equally dumb desire to fight fair. Either way, the tactics gave Ril a chance.

He took it. Snarling, he lunged at Wat, painfully lengthening his fingers into claws. Wat jumped back, taking a cut along his stomach, and stared down in confusion. Ril slashed him across the face.

“Stop that!” Wat shouted. “I was just going to make him go to sleep! You’re hurting me!”

Ril snarled again, hating him so intensely that he could taste it. He could sense other battlers coming but didn’t want their help. He didn’t need them.

“You tried to kill my master, Wat,” he accused, circling.

Wat frowned. “Well, yeah. So?”

Ril lunged, slamming into the other battler. They both went down, rolling on the hard-packed dirt, clawing and biting. Now Wat did use his power, lashing out, but Ril countered with his own, redirecting the blast upward and causing himself terrible pain in the process. He thrust his head forward, biting down hard on the junction of Wat’s neck and shoulder. The attack tore loose a chunk of flesh that turned into streams of sparkling energy.

Wat shrieked and threw him off, and Ril crashed into a pile of firewood in front of one of the neighbor’s houses. Everyone was screaming. The people who lived in the homes around the Petrule dwelling were rushing out of them in terror, running down the street and away from the fight. Not Lizzy. She sprinted around the side of her family’s house toward them, her arms and back covered in scratches.

“Ril!”

She screamed his name, running forward until her mother tackled her from behind, knocking her to the ground. Ril pushed himself to his feet, firewood clattering noisily around his legs. Grabbing a piece, he hurled it at Wat and the battler was blown off his feet again, squealing in pain.

Ril charged, growling. As he did, Wat forced himself up, reeling in confusion and pain. He saw Ril coming and took cloud form, soaring upward and trying to get himself out of danger.

Years before, Ril had fought a battle sylph more powerful than himself and been torn apart when he tried to take cloud form. The experience had been enlightening. Now, he didn’t even slow, agony flaring through him as he forced spikes sharp as blades to jut out of his body at every angle. And as Wat rose into the air, lightning sparking slowly through his essence, Ril leaped.

He went right through the other battler, rolling in midair as he did. Lashing out, his claws and blades tore completely through Wat’s vulnerable shape. Not quick enough to get a shield up in time, the other sylph had no protection, and Ril’s blows sliced his mantle to shreds. Landing on the far side, Ril rolled and rose up to his knees, staring.

The other battler squealed in pain, shifting to human form but already dissolving below the waist. His pattern was collapsing with his shape, dissolving into a sparkling rain of energy that reeked of ozone. He fell over, still squealing, and stared at Ril in confused betrayal. The last of him disintegrated, spreading across the lawn, scattered to nothingness by the morning breeze.

Battle sylphs descended all around, roaring and shifting shape. Ril ignored them, pushing himself wearily to his feet as he regained human form. Lizzy ran to his side, throwing her arms around him with her eyes wide, and together they limped back into the house.

Gabralina couldn’t stop shaking. She’d been at the Widow’s house to help with breakfast when she felt Wat’s confusion and pain. Then she felt his terror. Then she felt him die.

He couldn’t have. He just couldn’t. She’d screamed when she felt it and started crying, wailing no matter what the Widow did, but then Mace finally came for her and brought her to this windowless room. Her heart broken, she didn’t care that the huge battler loomed over her now, staring through her with cold eyes. She just kept sobbing, her face soaked with tears.

Mace studied the shaking girl, looking as deeply into her emotions as he could. She was devastated. That much was obvious, and she couldn’t fake it. Wat’s death had destroyed her.

He felt no sympathy. Mace loved women, had taken more women into his arms and bed than even he could clearly remember. He’d certainly never harmed a woman before, but if this girl ordered her battler into the fight that led to his death, he’d break with that tradition immediately. He couldn’t think what reason she’d have to tell Wat to smother an unconscious Leon, but that was irrelevant. He just needed to know if she’d done it.

Shoving the table out of the way, he knelt before her. Gabralina was blubbering at him, her lip quivering and her hands fluttering all around like little birds. He reached out and cupped her face with both hands, and she gasped for air, her expression distorted and ugly.

“W-w-w-
whyyy?
” she stammered.

Mace shook his head and stared into her eyes, deliberately searching her with his empathy. He couldn’t read her mind, but he could read her heart. There was pain there, and grief, the pattern that had been Wat unraveling even now inside her. Below that was confusion, with no understanding of why her lover died. Nothing at all.

Mace dove deeper, searching the core of her, and she made no move to stop him, not knowing how and even more not caring. She wanted to die, wanted her battler back, wanted this nightmare to end.

It wasn’t her first nightmare, it seemed. Old fears, old abandonment, a mind that was slower than the minds of her peers . . . She was often left in confusion when they laughed, not knowing if she was the target. Old, old fears these were. She would do anything for love, risk anything. She’d hold on to it tight and never let go. But she never wanted Leon’s death.

Mace leaned back after a moment, certain. The core of Gabralina’s soul was open to him, and there was no enmity inside. Part of her even loved Leon for rescuing her, albeit in a helpless, hopeless sort of way. Her pain over his attack was deep and unmistakable. She would never have tried to harm him or anyone else. For whatever reason he’d done it, Wat had acted without her.

Done with his examination, Mace leaned forward. He took the blonde girl into his arms and soothed her. “Shh,” he said. “Shhhhhh, girl. It’ll be all right.”

Gabralina clung to his uniform, sobbing. It felt like she’d never stop crying, and he could sense how much she wanted to die. That was unacceptable, but not easy to deal with. Not for him. Mace closed his eyes, holding her more tenderly, and sent out a silent request.

He held the weeping girl for half an hour before the response came. Not from Lily, either. She was at the Petrule house, helping Betha deal with her children and grief, as well as her comatose husband. She also was back and forth to her own house, keeping the orphans under control. Instead, a tall, stout woman knocked on the door.

“Oh!” she gasped as she entered. “My poor little duck! Come to Iyala.”

Gabralina looked up, saw Galway’s widow standing there with her arms open and tears in her eyes, and she squirreled out of Mace’s arms. She was soon wrapped in Iyala’s embrace, the woman rocking her back and forth.

“My poor little dear,” Iyala whispered. “We’ll take care of you.”

“It was awful!” Gabralina sobbed. “He can’t be gone! It . . . it hurts too much.”

“I know. I know how you feel, sweetheart,” the woman said. “You just cry it out and eventually things will get better. I promise.”

Mace nodded to Iyala, who smiled at him sadly, and went out the door. He closed it behind him. Gabralina was innocent, which was a good thing, but he still had no idea why Wat had gone after Leon.

Stupid creature. He’d been useless for the hive, and now he’d left Ril feeling guilty about having to kill a hive mate while he was dealing with all those other stresses. Wat had been a true plague on their happiness.

Mace went up a set of stairs and shifted to cloud form, rising over the town and heading toward the Widow’s home. Battlers were on their rooftop perches again, guarding. Those not on duty watched their masters, and the masters of their neighbors; and elemental sylphs were taking up the slack. This would take more organization and communication, and the system was far from perfect, but it was overall progress. No master was more than thirty seconds from a sylph. This wasn’t going to change until the person who pushed Leon down those stairs was caught.

Whoever it was, he was clever, like the man who’d slipped by Wat and freed the assassins. Perhaps it was even that man Umut, whom Leon told them about. Someone they couldn’t sense. Such a concept still resonated in Mace as an impossibility, but Lily had given him a suggestion the day before, in the brief hour they both managed to be together and after they’d finished the more important things. It was a suggestion upon which he was just following up.

“You said that Leon told you he managed to evade the battlers in Meridal by controlling his emotions?” she’d asked, sweat still drying on her bare breasts. Mace kissed them slowly and deliberately, scraping his teeth gently over her nipple.

“He did. He tried to demonstrate, but we found him right away.”

“Of course you did. You
know
him,” she said. Sighing, she arched her back, and he repeated the soft nip.

“That’s what he said.”

Lily shook her head in exasperation, even as her fingers raked through his short hair, delicately rubbing his temples. Mace closed his eyes and leaned forward.

“I was thinking about that,” she said. “When you guard, you look for negative emotions, correct?”

“Correct.”

She pushed on the top of his head, and Mace went back to lavishing attention on her breasts. She shifted and sighed. “So you look for malice most of all.”

“Of course.” He shifted lower, sliding under the sheets. Lily closed her eyes and exhaled.

“Have you ever looked for an absence of emotion?”

Mace paused and lifted his head. “What do you mean?”

“Look for someone who doesn’t feel malice, or love, or anything else. When I was a girl, they hung a man who took an ax to his neighbors and then sat down to drink tea in their kitchen. He didn’t even blink when they executed him.” She lifted her own head, eyeing him along the length of her body. “Would you even think to worry about someone like that?”

Mace stared. He hadn’t thought of that. The concept was too alien to him. But, how else could a killer move around the Valley so easily when battle sylphs were on the alert? He’d ducked his head again and showed his thanks, and Lily gasped, shivering in appreciation.

Thanks to that conversation, he’d checked Gabralina for the absence of soul. Truly plumbing her depths hadn’t been easy—it was simpler for those a sylph was patterned to—but he’d gone deep enough to feel Gabralina’s soul and all the grief therein. He’d felt that very clearly indeed. No, Gabralina wasn’t the enemy. That left every other man, woman, and child in the Valley who might be.

Mace flew to the top of the colored dome that covered the battler chamber. There he shifted to human form, gazing out over the roofs and fields of the Valley. This was his home as much as anything ever had been. He would die to protect it; he would challenge the ideas he’d previously held.

Battle sylphs,
he sent, shouting his silent words along the hive line.
We have a new target. Watch for a person with no soul. Watch for someone
without
emotions—without compassion, without malice, without rage. Understood?

A chorus of yeses and not a few what-the-hells came back to him.

From below, inside the dome, Claw floated up to the glass. He flowed out an exit vent and shifted to human form beside Mace. He stood slightly down the slope, his eyes downcast.

“Someone with no soul?” he whispered.

Mace eyed him tolerantly. Claw had saved him once, killing his original master when Mace couldn’t, and despite his turmoil and pain, Claw had never once failed in his duty.

The smaller battler shivered, his hands clutched together at his chest. “Someone . . .
with no soul?
” he repeated.

“Yes. Someone who can do evil but doesn’t feel evil,” Mace clarified.

Claw seemed terrified by the concept, which wasn’t a shock. It still sounded strange even to Mace.

“Someone . . . like that . . . They’d be easy to find?” The other battler stared hopefully up at him.

Mace could imagine the source of Claw’s pain. With one master murdered already, he likely was horrified by the thought of another being at risk, and by such an aberrant villain. Mace had spent long hours considering his Lily being taken—and the mass violence he’d engage in as a result.

“I don’t know,” he replied. It was best to be honest. “I doubt it. If it were an obvious thing, we would have noticed already.”

Claw sagged. “Okay.”

Mace clapped him on the shoulder. “Just keep your senses open.”