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