“I don’t care about them,” Kate replied. “All I care about is making sure that the thing responsible for Will’s death dies!”
“You would need your power to do that,” their mother said. “The pathways to it are still there, but damaged.”
Sophia reached out to put a hand on her sister’s shoulder. This time, Kate let her.
“We’ll find a way to kill him,” she said. “Even without your powers, you’re still my sister, you’re-”
“If I’d had my full power, Will wouldn’t be dead,” Kate said. Sophia saw her look over to their mother. “How do I get them back?”
“There is a place,” their mother said. She bowed her head. “And it fits in with the rest of what I have seen. If you truly want to do this…”
Sophia knew that there wasn’t even a choice now.
“We do,” she said. “We’ll help Kate get back her powers. We’ll defeat the Master of Crows.”
She saw her father shake her head. “This is one thing that you can’t do together. There is too much to do and too little time to do it. The world depends on the tasks you each have now.”
“What tasks?” Sophia asked.
She saw her mother grimace before continuing, briefly sitting back and closing her eyes. “The poison is getting stronger. I had… forgotten it hurt so much.”
“We have to do this,” their father said. He moved beside her, reaching out to take her hand. Almost as soon as they touched, a vision came into Sophia’s mind.
She saw Monthys, the ancestral estate sprawling in the countryside beneath the Mountain Lands. She saw it in a way she hadn’t seen it before though, shimmering layers of force wrapped around it in weavings that were as intricate as they were powerful. They seemed to form a network designed to protect what lay within, and to reach out to connect to the land. Yet there were missing pieces in that network. Dull points stood out, and without those points, Monthys was nothing more than a ruin. Symbols floated over five spots, and as Sophia looked at them, she understood what each meant.
Stone, Ice, Fire, Shadow, Spirit, her mother’s voice whispered to her. Some of the oldest of those with magic believed that these were the things the world is made of, and gave each a home in the world.
“Stonehome and Ishjemme?” Sophia guessed aloud.
And others, her father’s voice said, joining her mother’s. Each holds a heart, a source of power. Morgassa used to hold the place of fire, before its rulers decided that the heart was too valuable to leave in a desert. You will retrieve that, Sophia, and take it to rebuild.
The Ill Ysbryd is a strange place, her mother sent. Things are real and not real there. Lucas must go to retrieve that heart. He will only succeed with help, but must trust enough to go alone.
The place they call Si is more dangerous still, their father sent. I worry for your sister. She will find what she wants, but what then?
The vision broke, or at least, Sophia assumed that it did. It was hard to tell, because magic still seemed to be swirling around the room. She saw the outline of the world below them light up, the same way that the disc Lucas had brought had. They glowed with power, and five points of light seemed to burn themselves through the floor, standing out, even against the rest of it.
Sophia stood up, staring at them. She could make out one burning brightly from her kingdom. Another stood close to it, in the spot where she knew Ishjemme to be. A third was near the middle of the map, clearly centered on the spot where it stood. Two more stood out: one on an island surrounded by coral reefs, another a city in a patch of hills at the midst of a broad plain. Nothing seemed to be within a hundred miles except a river running through it.
“They’re so far,” Sophia said.
Lucas nodded. “It is why we cannot go together. I will go to the place of the spirit, and seek the heart. I will not fail.”
“And I’ll go here,” Kate said, kneeling to jab a finger at Si. “If this has what I need to kill the Master of Crows, I’ll get it, and I’ll bring this heart thing back too.”
“Which leaves me to persuade King Akar of Morgassa,” Sophia said. It didn’t seem as difficult a task somehow, at least until she thought about the way he’d tried to keep them all from this forgotten place. Even the caravan that he had sent to guide them would have led them somewhere else. Put like that, it might be more difficult than Sophia had thought.
“You’ll do it,” Lucas said. “We will succeed.”
“I’ll kill anyone who tries to stop me,” Kate said, her eyes hard.
“Kate-” Sophia began, but her sister shook her head sharply.
“Don’t. I need this. I need to be angry, because if I stop being angry, there’s nothing left. I’m going to do this. I’m going to do everything that we need to do. Besides, it doesn’t sound as if there’s anything nice living in a ‘place of shadows’ does it?”
“I guess not,” Sophia said. She looked around to their parents, hoping for some other piece of advice, or maybe for some help in persuading Kate that there was a better way to do all this than through violence.
They sat there on the couch they shared, perfectly still, eyes closed as the magic worked around them. Sophia felt her breath catch, and she went to them, taking hold of her mother’s shoulder and shaking it.
“Mother, can you hear me? Mother, Father?”
They were both far too still. Even their chests had none of the rise and fall of breathing. Her mother’s skin felt cold to the touch now, the warmth drifting from it along with the magic. How much had they put into this last spell? More to the point, how much of the poison had been able to use it as a link to them? They had shown the three of them where to go, but in doing it… in doing it they’d left themselves open to everything they had shut out for so long.
Her parents were dead.
CHAPTER FIVE
The New Army came forward, and Sebastian knew that there was no way to hold it back without Stonehome’s shield. They hadn’t been able to do it in Ashton, or in any of the other towns of the kingdom, so why would they be able to do it here, in a settlement of a few thousand?
“Because we have to,” Asha said, drawing her blade and a pistol. “We have to hold, or Violet will never grow to be everything we have seen her become.”
Sebastian ignored the part where she seemed to have read his thoughts again. It was enough that she was prepared to help, and that she was there as the first wave of soldiers came in.
Muskets and pistols sounded for that first charge, and it slowed as men fell, scythed down by the hail of lead shot and arrows. It wasn’t enough though; it could never be enough when there was no time in which to reload. A few of the settlement’s warriors got off second shots, from spare weapons or just because they had somehow managed to reload, but the enemy kept coming even as their comrades fell, charging up to the wall that surrounded the village.
Sebastian readied his sword and stepped up to meet the enemy coming for his daughter, thrusting the blade into the throat of the first man to come close, then aiming a backhanded swipe at a second.
He cut men down, and they kept coming, even as he tried to think of ways to save the people who stood around him. He saw the warriors of Stonehome standing side by side with those of the refugees who knew how to fight. They struck out without any kind of overall plan except to keep holding. There was no time for any subtlety or strategy, only the need to stand there and fight.