Traitor (11 page)

“They’ve lost almost ten thousand men trying to retake that city,” Jace said quietly as we all sat around a table in the dining hall. We’d gone there with the intention of finishing up Felix’s welcoming party, but no one seemed to feel much like drinking anymore.

“It’s idiocy,” another rider muttered in agreement. “Barrowton is overrun. We cannot take it back. Not without burning it to the ground.”

Prax shook his head. “Colonel Bragg would never support such a decision. There are still too many civilians trapped inside. The gray elves are wise to keep them alive. It’s the only thing that prevents us from raining dragon fire upon their heads.”

Without thinking much about it, I had started fidgeting with my necklace. I twisted it in my fingers thoughtfully, listening and trying to process it all. I didn’t offer my opinion. I didn’t have much of one yet, anyway. After the news Felix had dumped on me earlier, seeing the other riders deploy, and catching a glimpse of Beckah as she followed them into battle … I had a lot on my mind.

“That she-elf harpy must be leading the forces out of their jungle again,” I heard someone else growl bitterly. “She’s the only one who has been able to rally their forces in the past.”

Jace snorted with disgust. “It should have been us. We should have been sent to retake the city.”

“You just want another crack at her, eh?” Prax chuckled softly, like he was trying to ease some of the tension in the room. “She slips through your fingers like hair through a comb. Face it, Rordin. You’ve met your match in that witch.”

Hearing something even remotely personal about Jace made me snap out of my trance. “What are you talking about? What witch?”

“The princess of the gray elves. She’s the only one to ever outmaneuver him in the air.” Prax was grinning knowingly at Jace, who was scowling down into his mug like he wished we would change the subject. “He takes it rather personally.”

Even Felix was acting curious now. “How do you know she’s a princess?”

“The gray elves dress their royalty in a long war headdress. It’s easy to spot; you can’t miss it. It has the white horns of a deer on it,” Prax explained. “Jace has brought down all three of the princes before her in an effort to demoralize our enemy into surrender. They may not be fond of fighting together as an organized unit, but they won’t fight at all without someone to lead them. But now he’s met his match in that crafty little she-demon.”

“I wounded her last time, and you know it,” Jace snapped in angry defiance. “She went limping back to her forest before I could catch up to her. It won’t happen again. She won’t escape me twice.”

Memories of my last dream flickered through my mind in an instant. I still remembered vividly what it had felt like to be clinging to the back of a shrike, wounded, and fleeing toward Luntharda. I’d never had a dream quite like that before. That is, I’d never been someone else in my dreams. I’d always been myself, usually invisible and irrelevant to whatever was happening around me. But that time, I’d been a wounded gray elf—a wounded
female
gray elf. Surely that was just a coincidence, wasn’t it?

The sick, swirling sense of dread in the pit of my stomach begged to differ.

Prax leaned over to me, interrupting my moment of private panic, and murmured, “She lost him in the clouds. Their speed and the camouflaging scales of a shrike make it near impossible to track them when they hide like that.”

“I’m not deaf, you know.” Jace slammed his mug down on the table, making all the dishes rattle. “Mark my words. I will have her head on a pike the next time we meet.”

A few of the other riders sitting around us laughed and rolled their eyes. They started going on about how embarrassed they would be if a woman had shown them up like that. I wondered how they would feel if they knew their so-called hero, Seraph, was a woman, too. I doubted they would find that very funny.

“So, what are the chances of us actually getting called up to Barrowton?” Felix piped up. I suspected he was changing the subject on purpose. He was the only other person besides Sile and myself who knew who Seraph really was.

Thankfully, it worked.

“The only reason we would be called is if they need reinforcements or if there’s another battle elsewhere that requires our attention,” Jace answered. “We’re immediately put on waiting shift. The next horn that sounds is meant for us.”

“And so we wait,” Prax agreed.

I noticed there was something strange in the pocket of my pants—something I definitely hadn’t put in there—when we got back to our room later that night. Jace was busy grabbing up things to take to the washroom, so he didn’t notice when I pulled a small square of folded paper from my pocket. I was baffled. How had that gotten in there?

Then I remembered the barmaid at the Laughing Fox. She’d been awfully touchy feely with me, which was beyond strange. Human girls weren’t usually so eager to be friendly with me. She must have slipped it into my pocket when I wasn’t paying attention.

At the risk of being teased in case it was something embarrassing, I waited until Jace had left to take his bath before I read it. It was just a small slip of paper with a few plain words scribbled on it. But the sight of them made my adrenaline surge:

On the roof. —B.D.

I quickly grabbed my cloak and sword, just in case, and started out the door. The tower was fairly quiet this late at night. Only a few people were still milling around in the halls, and none of them gave me a second look as I slipped to the staircase and started to climb.

It wasn’t far up to the top level of the tower, just four or five flights. But the roof was barred by a large iron-reinforced door, made like a hatch, which was held closed with two bars of solid iron. Each one of those bars weighed nearly a hundred pounds, so it took me a moment to move them so that I could open the door. As soon as I did, fierce cold wind came howling into the small, dark corridor. Another narrow staircase led up to the very top of the tower, which was open to the stormy night sky.

Against the roaring winds and frozen rain, I saw the shape of someone standing at the top of that staircase. At first glimpse, it looked like a knight; a petite man clad in armor that shimmered like obsidian glass and adorned in painted golden wings, even on the gauntlets and helmet, giving the wearer an angelic appearance.

I stretched out my hand toward the black armored knight, who had started descending the steps. Once we were both inside, we began working together to push the door closed again to keep out the cold.

Then she took off her helmet.

Beckah’s long dark hair fell down over her shoulder in a braid. Some of her bangs were sticking to the moisture on her forehead and the sides of her face, and her lightly freckled cheeks were flushed from the cold wind. When her bright green eyes looked up at me in the darkness, I felt like I couldn’t breathe.

I kissed her. It was a much deeper, more passionate kiss than any we’d ever had before. She put her arms around my waist and hugged me close, and for a long time we just stood like that. I couldn’t believe how much I’d missed her in such a short amount of time. Under all that armor, she was still the simple, beautiful girl I’d eaten peaches with on the beach in Saltmarsh. She was still the Beckah I loved.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” she whispered as she laid her head against my chest. “I’ve missed you so much.”

I ran my fingers through her soft hair and wished I could have said the same to her. But I couldn’t. I didn’t want her to be here, on the battlefront, risking her life like this. I wanted her somewhere safe. Unfortunately, the world seemed to be running out of safe places to be.

“How did you know I’d be at that bar?” I asked.

She pulled back some—just enough to give me a coy little grin. “I saw Felix and Nova arrive this morning. Lucky for me, dragonriders gossip worse than old ladies in a knitting circle. I had heard you both wound up in the same flight, so I knew you’d be coming out tonight. I followed you all to the bar, then I paid off that barmaid to slip my note to the naïve-looking halfbreed in a dragonrider uniform,” she explained.

She sounded rather proud of herself, and I have to admit, she was much sneakier than I had given her credit. I already knew she was smarter than I was, which could be scary at times. It was a good thing, though. She probably wouldn’t have lasted this long, disguising herself as a man and fighting in battle alongside dragonriders, if she hadn’t been so clever.

“I thought you were going to Barrowton,” I said. “I saw you leaving with them.”

Beckah put her head back against my chest and sighed. “I am going, but not yet. I had to see you first. Besides, I can’t fly with them in their formations; it would be much too risky. It’s better for me to arrive fashionably late to see where I’m most needed once the battle is underway. Icarus’s presence alone makes the enemy forces scatter and panic. He takes good care of me, you know.”

I held her tighter. Once again, I didn’t trust myself to say anything because I might slip up and tell her how I really felt. I didn’t want her involved in this. I didn’t like that she was fighting. But I knew better than to start that conversation. This was where she was meant to be, and how I felt about it didn’t matter. Arguing about it wasn’t going to make any difference.

“There’s something else, Jae. Something I have to tell you.” Her voice grew softer so that she was nearly whispering. “I’ve thought every day about what you told me in Halfax, about your father and the god stone. But it wasn’t until I came here that I started to understand what the stone might mean in all this.”

Now I was the one pulling back so I could look her in the eyes. “What are you talking about?”

“The god stone,” she stared up at me earnestly, as though she were afraid I wouldn’t believe her, “it’s precious to the gray elves somehow. I’m not sure why, but they’re desperate to get it back. So desperate that they are willing to send their soldiers on suicide mission after suicide mission just to find it.”

“How do you know this?”

Her expression faltered. She looked down and didn’t say anything at first. Then she spoke in a quiet voice, “You’ve heard of the city called Dayrise? It was once a place much like Barrowton—a flourishing trade stop near the border of Luntharda. It’s nothing but ashes now. Icarus and I hid out there for a while when I first began to fight.”

Beckah’s voice became unsteady. She put her hands on my chest, although I couldn’t feel any of her warmth because she was still wearing her riding gauntlets. “I couldn’t bear to stay there for long. It’s essentially a mass grave. But I found one building still standing. Inside it were the remains of a dozen or so gray elves. They weren’t much more than charred bones gripping rusted swords, but one of them had used the point of a dagger to etch something into the walls. Two words … ”

“Return it,” I finished for her.

Her eyes grew wide. For an instant, she almost seemed afraid of me. “H-how did you know that?”

“Those words have been echoing in my mind for years now,” I explained. “Until now, I didn’t understand why. Beckah, what if I’m the one who is supposed to return the god stone to Luntharda? What if that’s why I’m having all these dreams?”

“Jae, you can’t be serious.” Beckah was shaking her head in protest. “Regardless of what your father did, that doesn’t mean you have to be the one making amends for all his mistakes. Going into that jungle is suicide, even for someone like you. You saw what happened on the Canrack Islands. Your power was essentially useless there. How do you know it will be any different in Luntharda? And even if you made it to one of the gray elf cities, the likelihood that they would even listen to—”

“I know that!” The words came out much more harshly than I intended. I was so frustrated by it all, but I tried to soften my tone when I spoke to her again. “You told me once, when Icarus first chose you, that you felt like there was something you were supposed to be doing. That’s how I feel now—like every force in the universe is pointing me toward something that I’m supposed to be doing. I don’t know what’s waiting for me at the end of all this, and frankly thinking about it terrifies me. But I may not have a choice.”

She didn’t look convinced. Her eyes narrowed dangerously, and she took a step away from me.

I wasn’t letting her get away that easily. I knew she could be stubborn, just like her father. So I put my arms around her again and dragged her toward me. She resisted a little, at first. Then I kissed her again. And the second our lips touched, I felt her begin to relax.

“You know just as well as I do that feelings like these are impossible to ignore. I can’t outrun them. I can’t push them away. I’ve been trying to do that for years, and it’s driving me insane,” I said once I was sure she would hear me out. “I’m not interested in dying, either, just for the record.”

“Please don’t do anything stupid,” she muttered angrily.

I smiled and put one of my hands against her cheek, brushing a bit of her hair away from her eyes. “I’ll try. At least, no stupider than usual. I don’t have any plans to go tromping through that jungle, believe me. Felix and the others need me here.”