The rainbows in the sky were barely beginning to shine as the smallest edge of the sun peeked over the eastern horizon. Zafidi tossed his noble head and stomped shining white hooves on the cobblestones of the courtyard within Prism Castle as Meg led him out of the stables.
“Easy, boy.” Meg scratched his nose. “We’ll be moving soon enough.”
She reached for the pack on the saddle and opened the leather flap, peering inside. A sack of jerky. A canteen of water. The hilt of a training energy saber to use until she could get a replacement for the one she lost.
It was old and whirred whenever she turned it on, but it would do in a pinch. And they were most definitely in a pinch.
The shrill whinny of an agitated horse echoed in the courtyard, and Meg smiled faintly as Mickey rode Adamya into the open. The high-spirited black mare didn’t let just anyone ride her. But it was fitting Mickey had made friends with her.
By her side, old Bhuna trotted with Jim already mounted.
Poor Jim.
He looked miserable, but he had an expression on his face that Meg wasn’t sure she’d seen before. His jaw was set, almost clenched. His knuckles were white as he gripped the reins.
Determination. Fierce and unyielding.
He wasn’t a fighter. All legs and no coordination, Jim Taylor was six feet of awkward, and the majority of his 120 pounds was brainpower. But when Meg had announced her reckless plan to go after Barb and Jenny in spite of the Josharon High Council’s judgment, he hadn’t hesitated.
He could be as logical as Velanna, but when it came to protecting his sister, logic could pound sand apparently. This is why they were friends.
Mickey and Jim guided their horses to where Meg was standing.
“We’ll hit the trail hard,” Meg said, “and we’ll move fast through the forest. I want to make at least twenty miles by nightfall.”
Mickey frowned, and Meg met her eyes.
“What’s wrong?”
Mickey clenched her jaw. “I’m scared for Jenny, Meg.”
Meg touched her elbow. “I know.”
They stared at each other in silence. Over the last month, the only person Mickey had really connected with was Jenny, which made sense because of how they’d met. But it also made sense because that’s just who Jenny was. She was the vibrant, living glitter glue that bound them all together.
A muscle ticked in Mickey’s jaw as she tied Adamya’s reins to her saddle horn and gathered her frizzy brown hair back in a clip. “We need to get her back, Meg.”
“We will.” Meg nodded. “I promise.”
She turned away and scanned the courtyard for Danny. He was gathering supplies and should have been in sight, but she hadn’t spotted his orange hair yet.
“I hope you like riding, Jim,” Mickey said as she settled herself in the saddle. “It’s going to be a long day.”
“Who me? I’m a natural.” Jim forced a stiff grin.
Lying through his teeth. But brave of him to fake it.
“Margaret.”
Meg stiffened as Velanna approached from behind. Zafidi nickered unhappily as Velanna’s familiar cumin and vanilla scent tickled his nose.
It had been a huge encouragement to hear Velanna stand up for their family to Mirwais, to call him out on his attitude and behavior. With everything that had happened, with Tolan’s death still so fresh, it was good to know Velanna’s opinion. She still saw Jenny as her daughter.
Even if everything else had changed, Meg could trust that Velanna would always keep Jenny safe.
Velanna pressed her hand against Meg’s saddle. “Do you have what you need?”
“Yes,” Meg said. “Provisions. Supplies. Medicine.”
“Well done, Margaret.” Velanna set her hand on Meg’s shoulder, and Meg turned to her.
Her dark green robes draped down her shoulders, and her hijab hung around her neck, not covering her ears and hair as it normally did, allowing the striking streaks of silver in her black hair to shimmer in the rising sun.
“Hear me, Margaret.” Her fingers tightened on Meg’s shoulder. “I support your action in pursuing Jennifer and Barbara, but you are yet reckless when the heat of battle surrounds you. You must learn to think before you act.”
Meg clenched her teeth. Thanks, Velanna. Way to be encouraging.
“James and Michelle are wise and cautious, and you and Daniel should listen to them. You especially.” Velanna sighed. “Ask for their guidance before you rush into a situation that could end your life.”
“You could come along,” Meg said.
Velanna sighed quietly. “Part of me desires to do so,” she said, “but I believe your analysis of the Centaurs’ actions is accurate. They will attack us again. I shall remain here with Tzaitel in order to coordinate our response.”
Velanna set her hand on Meg’s knee.
“Velanna?” Meg asked.
“Please be careful.” The older woman’s eyes were full of grief. “There is far more at work here than I am able to speak of.”
“What do you mean?”
“For now, trust me.” Velanna nodded. “And be wise.”
Meg took a steadying breath and nodded. “I will. We will. And we’ll be back with Barb and Jenny.”
“I pray you are right.”
Across the courtyard, groups of Josharons gathered in bunches, each group carrying construction supplies and carpentry equipment. Some had shovels and bags for carrying sand.
Above them, four black banners waved high in the wind.
Mickey cleared her throat and made a face. “What’s that smell?”
Meg looked back at her.
Mickey’s face turned toward the sky, her nose wrinkling.
The clear sky overhead shimmered with rainbows as the sun cleared the horizon, but the scent of something rotten drifted on the gentle breeze.
The Josharons all began to mutter, noses and tails twitching.
“I don’t smell anything,” Jim muttered and sniffed under his arm. “It’s not me.”
A startling screech split the air above them, and Zafidi reared back with a shriek of his own.
“Gajas!” A Josharon on the watchtower bellowed. “We’re under attack!”
Meg wrestled with Zafidi’s reins, trying to get the horse to calm down as Velanna spun to gather Josharons around her.
“Inside!” she cried. “Get everyone inside now!”
But no black dragons dove from the clear skies. No leathery wings beat overhead. But Zafidi and Adamya wouldn’t stop screaming.
“Where is the attack?” a Josharon from the courtyard shouted up.
“They have surrounded the castle,” the report returned. “But no one is attacking.”
Meg leapt out of the saddle and grabbed the horse’s bridle. She reached into the saddle back and grabbed the saber hilt. “Mickey, get them back in the stables.”
Mickey was already on the ground and had Adamya by the reins.
“This isn’t right.” Jim dismounted as well, but his tennis shoe got caught in the stirrup.
He tumbled backward, and Meg caught him. His face the color of a tomato, he braced himself on her and pulled his foot out of the stirrup.
“Why would they bring gajas but not attack with them?”
What were they waiting for?
The morning rainbows overhead vanished, like the light of a candle being snuffed out.
Strange. That only happened when sudden cloud cover obscured the sunlight, but there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
“Meg,” Jim gasped.
Meg turned toward him and froze.
On the other side of the castle walls, a black curtain stretched upward from the ground. Reaching, reaching, reaching until it was as tall as Prism Castle itself. A shifting, boiling wall of oily darkness, the smear obscured the sunlight and towered over their heads like a giant’s foot waiting to crush them.
“What is that?” Jim gawked.
“I have no idea,” Meg stepped toward it.
“Abbu kareem.” Velanna’s voice shook, dark and fearful and bleak.
Meg spun to face her mother and stared. Velanna, who never fainted, never faltered, never feared, stared at the curtain of blackness with wide eyes and a face the color of ash.
“Naheen dobaaraa.” She trembled with her hands against her chest.
“Velanna?” Meg gasped, her heart hammering in her chest.
Why did she look like that? Meg didn’t know the words that had spilled from her mouth, but she knew the language. Jankaida. Ancient Celtican.
Meg turned back to the shadow wall hanging over the castle. What was it doing? Was it just going to stand there?
“Meg.” Mickey appeared at her shoulder, staring upward at the shifting blanket of darkness. “It’s the same thing we saw in Chandan Village.”
The broad ribbon of shadow shivered against the sky and shot forward like a streak. The edge of the black mass crashed into the castle walls with enough force to jar the structure at its foundation.
Like massive fists pounding at the walls, the shadowy mass hammered at the castle walls like wrecking balls.
“Arm yourselves!” The Josharons cried as they took positions on the castle walls and in the courtyard.
“With what?” Jim squeaked, scrambling for the firearm in his bag. “Do we even have anything that can hurt whatever that is?”
“We don’t know what it is,” Mickey said. “How can we know if we can hurt it?”
Meg turned to Velanna and gasped.
Gone.
Where had Velanna gone? She had just disappeared. One moment she’d been in the courtyard, and the next she had vanished.
The pounding on the castle walls shook the ground, like a giant’s feet hammering against the earth, sending jolts of force through the stone and mortar.
“It won’t hold,” Jim whispered.
With a jarring crack, the castle’s courtyard walls crumbled like dry plaster, dust and debris collapsing under the strain of the onslaught.
Meg raised her saber and ignited it in a blast of gray light. The dust cloud hit her so hard it drove her backward, rammed dirt and plaster and stone dust up her nose and down her throat.
Screams echoed all around her as the castle walls collapsed with Josharons standing watch on them. The zing and ping of arrows marked where the archers tried to stop the shifting darkness as it loomed closer, but the arrows didn’t touch it. They zoomed right through it.
The spreading darkness rose again above their heads as chunks of glowing marble and iridescent wall thumped on the cobblestone courtyard like hailstones.
The darkness shuddered again and jolted forward, driving its edge into the ground, beneath the cobblestones, and uprooting the courtyard itself. Like a shark fin splitting the ocean waves, the black shroud tore a jagged line through the courtyard of Prism Castle.
Meg yelped as a cobblestone struck her lower back hard enough to send her tumbling forward. Jim grabbed her arm and pulled her up.
This was destruction on a different level from Chandan Village. Whatever it was, it had torn down the walls of Prism Castle. No Centaur weapon had ever done that. No Centaur commander had ever done that.
And if Meg had anything to say about it, none would ever do it again.
She reignited her saber and spun to face the black shroud as it rose from the ground again, boiling out of the earth like poison. Meg raised her saber. Jim aimed his gun. Beside them, Mickey appeared with a long chain in hand.
Around them, Josharons scrambled with bows and arrows and knives and swords.
But nothing could touch the darkness.
The smear trembled as if it were laughing and burst into a thousand strands of sticky black threads that wrapped around arms and legs and tails, choking necks, binding wrists and ankles.
One strand jerked Meg’s legs out from under her, and the back of her head struck the cobblestones with enough force to send the world reeling. She tried to stand, but the rope of blackness tightened around her ankle and flung her across the courtyard.
Meg hit the rough dirt shoulder first and rolled until her back struck a chunk of marble. Her saber lay four feet away. She scrambled to reach it, and the darkness ripped her body off the ground and slammed her into a still-standing wall.
The breath rushed out of her lungs in a whoosh. The world spun, her vision swimming in bloodshot eyes.
Across the courtyard, the strands of blackness stabbed into Josharons like daggers. Tendrils of the stuff choked the life from others. Long arms of blackness beat Josharons against the ground, against the walls, against the dead chunks of Prism Castle laying in the dirt.
Gunfire.
Jim opened fire on the darkness. The flash of the muzzle caught her eye. He aimed at the shifting blackness and squeezed the trigger, and the sound of the shot rattled the air. But nothing happened. The darkness didn’t react. It did nothing.
Mickey screamed somewhere in the black before her body came soaring into view and struck the ground in a tangle of limbs and frizzy brown hair.
Meg gasped for breath. There was no beating it. Whatever it was, they didn’t have a weapon strong enough to fight this darkness.
Her heart ached, as though a thousand tiny daggers pierced it over and over.
How can we fight this? How can we fight darkness itself?
With a deafening sound like the force of a waterfall, the blackness withdrew. It slurped away toward the remnants of the castle gates, like a rushing river of shadow, drawing itself smaller and smaller until it vanished.
Meg blinked.
Where the castle gates used to stand, a Centaur astride a gaja beamed at them with a triumphant smirk on his twisted face. His burnished horns shone in the sunlight, now restored to the sky since the shadow had gone.
But where had it gone?
The crystal. Meg strained her eyes to see the medallion around the Centaur’s neck more clearly. All that blackness went inside that crystal. But how? What was it? Where did he get it?
Meg stumbled forward and got to her feet. Her ribs ached, but she drew herself up as tall as she could. “Whoever you are, you’re not welcome here!”
The gaja shrieked, arching its neck and swinging its thorny tail. The Centaur on its back roared with laughter.
“I am Tiron,” he announced in a voice that shook the air. “The Lord of the High Northern House. The Grandest Son of Tiru, son of Tipal, son of Tilar. The Master of the Grayfields and the Dunes.” He pounded his breastplate, and a chorus of angry roars sounded from somewhere in the distance. “I am the Lord of the North Port and the Brown River and the Wasted Plains. And now I am the Lord under the Kucheza Angani!”
The roars behind him grew louder, more intense, and with the shaking of the earth, two hundred outcast Centaurs marched into view behind him. Five more gaja screeched at their flanks.
And now there was no castle to protect them.
“That was the longest, most boring introduction I’ve ever heard.” Meg straightened her shoulders and walked toward him. “You could be king of Candyland for all I care. You still aren’t welcome!”
“Not one more step, kusuka!” He held up his hand. “You shall stay where you are and watch your life crumble around you.”
Meg drew herself up in spite of the pain in her ribs and lifted her chin. “You know, I have a name,” she said. “I don’t have the fancy titles like you do, but I might think about leaving your head attached to your shoulders if you started using—”
“Where are the Dark Bloods, Kusuka?”
“Nope, still not my name. That means I’m going to cut your head off.”
“Foolish, Kusuka!”
“What does that even mean? How about I make up a name for you that you don’t understand? You can see how it feels?”
The dragon rider stomped one hoof on the platform harness. “Where is Velanna Ittai?”
Meg started to respond.
“Here.”
Turning in surprise, Meg stared as Velanna appeared out of the dust and debris of the Prism Castle courtyard. Her dark green robes had turned pale in the white plaster dust, but the ashen tone of her face had changed.
Dark. Fierce. Focused.
This wasn’t the Velanna Ittai Meg had known for ten years. This woman walked like a warrior, energy saber hilt drawn at her side.
Tiron roared with laughter again. “This?” He pointed to Velanna. “This wrinkled old fool is Velanna Ittai? You are looking your age, old woman. Please, come and fight me, and I will utterly destroy you.”
Velanna stopped just out of reach of the gajas jaws and twirled her saber. “Tiron, Grandest Son of Tiru, son of Tipal, son of Tilar.” She settled into a defensive pose, the tiniest smirk in the corner of her mouth as the pure white blade of her saber arched over her head. “I would like to see you try.”
Tiron snarled at her and snapped the reins to the gaja.
“Velanna! No!” Meg reached for her.
Like lightning, only faster, Velanna blurred. The humming whine of her saber rang in Meg’s ears. Velanna swung, and the white energy blade cut clean through the impenetrable skin of the dragon with a hiss and a squeal.
The beast shrieked in agony until the blade severed its vocal chords.
Velanna followed the strike through, and the dragon’s head dropped to the remnants of the cobblestones in a bloody heap, while the rest of its body went limp.
Tiron lost his balance on the platform and tumbled backward to the ground.
Meg stared, mouth hanging open as Velanna straightened and snapped the blade in the air.
How had she done that? Saber blades hadn’t been able to touch a gaja before. What had Velanna done to be able to change that?
“Do not let down your guard, Margaret,” Velanna said darkly. “The battle is not yet won.”
Meg reached again for her saber, but the rushing sound of angry wind hit her with the force of a hurricane. She bent beneath the flow of the wind, but it drove her backward still.
“Velanna!” Meg screamed.
The morning sun went out. The sky turned black.
No, it didn’t. The darkness was back, unleashed from the crystal around Tiron’s neck. The twisting black ribbon streamed toward her with dagger-sharp fingers trying to stab out her eyes. Meg raised her hands to protect her face, and the tendrils wrapped her up in a ball of oily black darkness.
Her face stung. Her nose dripped with blood.
Years of effort wasted on thee. Thee does nothing that I say.
Meg flailed. “Master T’zuman?” The words spilled out of her and vanished in the silent screaming of the black.
Pulling her hair, her limbs, her skin. She couldn’t escape, couldn’t fight, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see. Like suffocating in tar—boiling tar that tried to peel off your skin.
You will never succeed, Margaret. You will always fail.
“Velanna!”
Lightning pulsed in the darkness, scraping over her body like claws on a chalkboard. Agony lanced through her eyes, up her spine, sharper than the pain of a sword or a knife.
What was it doing to her?
You killed him. His blood is on your hands. Tzaitel’s voice rattled Meg’s mind, heavy with hate and loathing. My father would not have died if you had never come here.
“I’m sorry, Tzaitel.”
Fire. Tongues of flame licking up the upholstery of the car. The scent of blood and gasoline. The wail of distant sirens. The splash of Charles Mitchell’s blood on her face.
Don’t lose them, Maggie.
No air. No breath. No light. No sound.
No. There was sound.
Screaming. Voices overlapping. Shrieks of agony, torment to the extreme, like a woman somewhere was being torn apart a piece at a time.
Jankaida? The woman screamed in ancient Celtican. Her voice was a dagger in Meg’s ears, driving the sound into her deeper than her soul, until Meg was sure she’d never forget the sound of it.
So many voices. So much pain.
How could anyone survive so much pain?
Air thrust down her mouth and into her lungs as the black orb peeled away from her body with a forceful jerk that sent her sprawling. Her back struck a chunk of wall, and her breath came in shallow gasps as the wind whipped her hair around her face.
Terrified screams and bugling horns joined the shriek of the wind around the grounds of Prism Castle as blinding light filled the sky. Washed over her with warmth and sparkling softness, as if snow could be warm, happy like confetti but alive with glitter and joy.
The world spun.
It smelled of smoke and ash and dirt and blood. The agonized cries of the woman still rang in her ears, but not as loud as the trumpeting retreat of the Centaurs.
Retreat?
Mickey’s arms crashed around her. “Meg?”
Meg gasped in pain as Mickey jarred her.
“Easy, Meg. Easy.” Mickey gathered her close, eyes wide and mouth bleeding.
“Centaurs?”
“Leaving.”
“How?” Meg gasped. “How?”
Mickey’s arms trembled. “Ask Velanna.”
Over Mickey’s shoulder, Meg’s eyes focused on a slender form standing where the castle gates used to be. Her dark green robes fluttered in the wind. Her long black hair, shot with silver, waved like the black battle flags.
She was glowing. And it wasn’t sunlight.