Buch lesen: «The Black Witch Chronicles»

Chapter 2: Jules Kristian

Brandon and the others stand frozen, as if stunned that bookish Jules has it in him to defy them.

Filled with relief, I seize the chance Jules has given me. I burst through a gap between Brandon and Gerrig, dive around Jules and fly out the front door, almost losing my footing on the wooden steps.

I skid to a halt at the sight that lies before me, my stomach clenching into a tight vise.

At the center of the five-point intersection, just off to the side of the village’s central, raised dais, a wagon has come to a stop. An angry mob of Kelts surrounds it, their collective voices rising. The wagon is jammed full of black-clad Gardnerians with dark hair and green eyes.

I know them all.

Before anyone in the crowd can see me, I dive behind a stack of grain barrels and peer through the gaps, my heart hammering. The streets are packed, and I can see no obvious route of escape. But if I can’t get out of here, I’ll end up in that the wagon with the rest of my Gardnerian neighbors.

Mage Krell, the mild-mannered cooper, stands against the wagon’s edge and blinks, gazing vacantly at the crowd as the mob rocks the wagon and hurls insults. His glasses are gone, and a large bruise colors the side of his face. Years ago, he made me a small set of wooden animals that were so tiny, I could hold them all in the palm of my hand. His elderly wife clings to him, white strands of her hair flying around like unworked wool, her eyes wide and terrified. Mage Cooke, the quiet widow who scrapes by selling herbs and teas, is cowering, her arm raised protectively in front of her face. Young, sour Rolland is shaking his fist and stupidly yelling back at the crowd. He falls back as a large rock hits him square in the head. Mage Cooke ducks and cries out, her hands flying up to her face as more rocks are hurled at the wagon. When she lifts her head again, blood is streaming down her temple.

The voices swell as a young blonde Keltic woman is dragged onto the central dais by the village smith and his strapping son, Orik. Her head is shorn, and there’s a sign around her neck that reads CROW WHORE. My heart lurches into my throat as I realize it’s meek Daisie, the smith’s own daughter. She struggles in vain as they thrust her into the wagon with the Gardnerians. A limp, black-clad Gardnerian youth is dragged up next—quiet Gramm, who’s been sweet on Daisie for years, his face bloodied, his sign reading FILTHY CROW. I lose sight of him as the miller hurls him off the dais and into the bloodthirsty crowd, their voices surging.

The sea of voices is one loud blur, but some of their rage-filled words sound out clearly.

“Kill the Mages before they kill us!”

“Keltania for Kelts!”

“Smash the Roaches!”

“Kill him!”

“There’s another one! Hidin’ back here!”

I cry out as a large hand clamps down on my arm and I’m wrenched out into the open, the nearest edge of the crowd turning to face me in a sickening, murderous wave.

Terror stabs through me, filling me with feral desperation.

I stomp and claw at my attacker, struggling to free my arm. My other arm is grabbed tight by another man, stretching me out between them. I kick and twist wildly in a futile effort to break free.

Then an ear-shattering shriek rends the air, and the entire crowd gasps and ducks. The hands restraining me fall away, and I almost stumble to the ground.

I flinch as a mammoth black dragon bursts into view overhead and thunders across the sky.

There’s another collective ducking-down as a series of shrieks echoes out from above. Two more dragons slice through the clouds, their dark wings expansive. The dragons are ghoulishly skeletal, their wings covered with sharp feathers. They push air down onto us in a heavy stream that blows my hair flat against my scalp. A foul stench washes over me, like rotted carrion set on fire.

A cheer goes up from the crowd.

My gaze is torn from the sky as another hand grabs my arm, but my panic recedes when I see Jules standing beside me, a finger to his lips. He pulls me backward into an alley, and I stumble to keep up with him as more dragons shriek by overhead.

They’re all flying in same direction. North. Toward Gardneria. Toward my homeland.

Jules’s pace is furious, his bow slung over his shoulder, bobbing up and down as we run. It almost slides off as we dart down the narrow alley, then take a sharp left behind the Guildmarket.

He practically hurls me behind the clutter of damaged barrels, torn jute sacks and other mercantile debris that’s piled up. My elbow makes painful contact with a large crate as I duck down for cover. Then the light is snuffed out as Jules throws an old grain sack over the both of us, and not a moment too soon.

Heavy boot heels thud down the alley and across the dirt ground right in front of us. “She ran back here!” a man yells.

“Must be headed for the Roach Bank,” another answers.

My breath seems outrageously loud. I cover my mouth and nose with my arm to stifle it. I start to feel faint as my pulse hammers in my ears and fear threatens to crack me into a million jagged pieces.

More boots thud by, but the voices begin to recede. “She went this way! Toward the river!”

The alley finally falls silent, and Jules peeks out. Weak twilight seeps in under the sack.

My head is spinning, my heart thundering in my chest. My brother. My grandfather. My entire universe constricts to one singularity: a suffocating fear for my family.

I murmur a fire spell and pull up a ball of magic from the ground.

The spell sizzles up in a buzzing thread to curl tight inside my chest. A vibrating pain grows, prickling like a rotating ball of needles in the center of me. I can’t do anything with this power, not without a wand, but it emanates a steadying warmth that stays my mounting panic.

“We need to get to the top of the peak,” I rasp out breathlessly to Jules, jerking my head toward the small mountain at our backs. “We can see everything up there. And it’s the quickest way to my cottage.” I give him a significant look. “If we can get there, I can get hold of the wand.”

Jules’s eyes widen, but he nods in assent. He knows I’ve experimented with Grandfather’s wand, even though I’m not supposed to. The wand once belonged to my father, but when he died, our Mage Council gifted it to my virtually magic-free grandfather in tribute. It’s ill-constructed, this wand, the laminated wood unevenly layered and of substandard wood, but we’re lucky to have it. Most Gardnerians, especially poorer ones like us, don’t own wands. Even a coarse wand like ours is outrageously expensive—difficult to craft and even harder to obtain.

But I know how to wield it.

Unlike most females of my race, I’ve some magic in me.

Every muscle tensed and on high alert, Jules quietly pulls the sack off us entirely. Hunched down, we slip into the brush behind the refuse, into the slice of forest at the edge of town that quickly slants upward to form Crykes Peak.

It’s our small mountain, Jules’s and mine—one of the only places where a Kelt and a Gardnerian can go together and not be noticed. We’ve whiled away more than a few summer evenings at the top, reading, laughing, talking about history and alchemy, Jules sharing stories of the University with me.

It’s getting darker, and the sunset through the trees is lovely and peaceful, a mockery of the terrible chaos that’s been unleashed. There’s a hard chill seeping into the air, autumn beginning to dig its claws into summer.

I grasp Jules’s hand as he half pulls me up the sheltered, rocky path that cuts through the trees, my heavy black skirts slowing me down. We know just where to go—we’re familiar with all the footholds, and my dark clothing blends into the long shadows.

When we reach the jagged peak, my chest hurts like I’ve swallowed cut glass and my stomach is a painful knot.

More fiendish dragons soar overhead, racing across the sky. Jules and I flatten ourselves among the surrounding rocks to avoid being sighted. One dragon flies so close to the top of the mountain that I can make out the black scales of the creature’s underbelly, its taloned feet curled up underneath, tipped with terrible claws.

Then the air around us goes quiet again, and we rise, trembling, to our feet. My heart lurches as I take in the sight before us.

There’s a whole host of dragons in the air now, soldiers astride them as they wing their way north. They’re like a flat, black swarm of mammoth insects, screeching at each other, wings whooshing. The brilliant orange sunset silhouettes their evil forms.

I swivel my head, following their movement. I rise a bit more and turn my gaze down toward the Wey River, toward home.

Our cottage is a single, bright flame.

All the Gardnerian homesteads up and down the river have been torched and are burning bright. The ball of steadying magic inside me is snuffed out in one painful jolt.

“My house!” I cry. My knees give way, and I stagger down to the rocky ground.

“No,” Jules gasps, his eyes fixed on my cottage, face stricken.

“Oh, Ancient One,” I cry, a great sob tearing from my chest, my palms clinging to the rock behind me. “Oh, Jules, do you think they’re alive?”

He falls beside me as more dragons streak by, his hands coming up to grip my arms.

“Ancient One, help me,” I wail, my chest heaving, sure I’m going to retch. I look to Jules with crippling despair. “Do you think they killed them?”

He opens his mouth, but no words come out. The entire world seems to fall away, but he catches me as I crumble, his arms closing around me.

“They’re dead, aren’t they?” I moan into his chest, rocking my head side to side in grief.

“I don’t know,” he says, clutching me tight.

“My mother’s gone. My father. Not Grandfather and Wren, too!” His hand comes up to cradle my hair. “Oh, Jules,” I sob, “Grandfather should have let me have the wand! He should have let us leave sooner!”

“I know. I know it, Tessla.”

“I could have saved them!” I let out a low, agonized wail as he holds me.

Choking on tears, I pull away from Jules and stagger up to peer north.

The horde of dragons is a dark splotch moving relentlessly over the Caledonian Mountains toward central Gardneria. The Kelts have turned the entirety of broad Crykes Field into a military staging area. Lines of dark tents and geometric rune-marked structures have been erected and hundreds of torches are lit. Some of the dragons are being flown down onto the field.

Horrified, I turn south and spot a large mass of uniformed Keltic soldiers wearing russet military tunics over black pants. They’re riding in tight formation into Doveshire via the Southern Wayroad. Urisk soldiers flank them—powerful geomancers with pointed ears and the blue hair and sky-blue skin of their military class, their cobalt-blue armor marked with glowing georunes. Some of the Urisk are riding hydreenas, the terrible, boar-shaped beasts hunched and bristling, tusks gleaming in the dying light. Some are riding in their rune-powered horseless carriages with glowing runes for wheels.

The Western Wayroad is clogged with Keltic families fleeing toward the coast, away from the fighting, their carts piled high with people and possessions and festooned with red flags bearing black Xs.

“They’ve an Icaral demon!” I gasp as a black-winged soldier rides into view astride a hydreena, his eyes pinpoints of fire. He looks much like the blue Urisk soldiers, save for his glowing eyes and the feathered black wings that fan menacingly out from his back, not entirely unlike the dragons above us.

An Evil One.

I slump down, dizzy, my back to a broad rock as I teeter sideways, weeping.

Jules crouches down and takes my arm. “Come away with me.” There’s steel in his voice. “I’ll find Keltic clothes for you. We’ll escape.”

I thrust my arm out at him, my skin glimmering faintly emerald in the gathering darkness. “It’s no use, Jules. How could we hide this?”

His jaw hardens. “I’ll smuggle you into Verpacia.”

I’m shaking my head as the tears stream down my face. “They’ll catch us. I’m sure they’ve closed the border.”

“I go to the University,” he insists. “I know people. People who could help us.”

“But my family,” I keen in despair, wracked by sobs.

“I’ll be your family.”

He says this with such rock-hard conviction, the tears catch in my throat. I look to him, stunned.

“I’ll marry you,” he insists. “Somehow, we’ll get to Verpacia, and I’ll marry you. We’ll get a cottage there. Somewhere remote. I’ll find work at the University and I’ll hide you.”

“Gardnerians don’t marry,” I remind him, my voice choked with grief for my family, my people. “We wandfast. Then we seal the bond.” Anguish rises in me like a terrible wave. “Just leave me, Jules. I’m going to get you killed. You can’t help me.”

“I can.”

I take a deep, shuddering breath. Kind, foolish Jules. I touch his face. His jutting cheekbone. His infinitely intelligent eyes.

“You can’t marry me, Jules,” I tell him, my mouth trembling. “I’m not a Kelt.”

His expression turns fierce. “I don’t care! When have I ever cared?”

“I will always be Gardnerian.”

“Then be Gardnerian,” he stubbornly returns. “We’ll make a life in Verpacia. And when things calm down, we can wandfast if it’s possible. I don’t care. I’d bind myself to you.”

I’ve known for some time that Jules fancies me. It’s been building in him over time. I’ve seen it in the heat lighting his gaze when he looks at me. In the new tension between us. But he’s always held back, polite and unsure of my feelings. To hear him speak so boldly stuns me into silence.

“We’ll go up through the mountains,” he says. “You can stay here while I get a horse and supplies.”

“What if they’re still alive?” My voice is small and weak, clinging to senseless hope. My crippled, doddering grandfather and my sickly eight-year-old brother. What are the chances they’ve escaped all this?

He gives me a hard look. We both know the likely truth.

“What would they want you to do?” Jules asks, his jaw set tight.

A bitter laugh cuts through my tears. “Grandfather? He’d want me to push you clear off that cliff.” I start to weep anew at the thought of my gentle, staunchly religious grandfather and his overwhelming hatred of Kelts. Grandfather would be horrified at the bizarre prospect of Keltic Jules trying to wandfast to his granddaughter, for the same reasons that he foolishly, blindly heeded our religion’s strictures that barred women from wielding wands without first securing the Mage Council’s approval.

“What would Wren want, then?” Jules asks, softer this time.

I think of my brother’s wide, ready smile. Roughly, I wipe the tears from my eyes, steeling myself. “He’d want me to go with you.”

“Will you do it?” Jules asks, his hand coming up to caress my face. “Will you come away with me?”

I nod and let him pull me into a warm embrace.

A twig snaps to my left.

“Well, isn’t this touching.”

Jules’s whole body stiffens, and I blanch at the sound of the familiar voice.

Brandon stands just a few feet away, smiling triumphantly as three Keltic soldiers surround us and unsheathe their swords.