A shifting form of black smoke and lightning, Ril wailed up and along the ether, his denial finally abandoned. He loved Leon, too, that emotion somehow sneaking into him over the years, and he
did
want him to live. That was why he couldn’t kill him, and why he’d been self-destructing. He loved his master anyway.
He almost went to Leon to save him, but in his epiphany and shock he couldn’t focus his shape, let alone his power. He’d kill everyone, including Leon, and Solie’s rule was absolute. Harm no one.
Solie! She could stop this.
Wait for me!
he broadcast. Then he shot away, angling himself behind the crowd and toward the stairway into the hive. He had to find her before it was too late.
Leon was glad when they finally came for him. He’d known it would happen. It didn’t matter how horrible he felt or how much he tried to apologize. He’d still helped kill these people, and he had to die for that. He kept silent instead, trying to make it easier for them.
Though he mourned that he wouldn’t see his family again, he was also relieved. What he’d done to Ril…The realization of it had torn through him and left him bloody. He couldn’t forgive himself. He’d thought himself a man of honor, only to find he had no honor at all. He’d become a murderer and hadn’t even realized, blaming Ril, loving Ril, never thinking Ril had a reason for all his unending hatred. He’d even dared think that on some level Ril loved him back. He was such a fool. Now he’d pay for it.
He was dragged from his cell and through the corridors of the underground palace they’d dug, up into a cold that froze his skin and made his teeth chatter. Eyes squeezed shut against the wind, he was heaved through a crowd that roared for his death and to the edge of the cliff. Finally looking up, he saw the stone scaffold from which they’d hang him, the rope already waiting.
Wait for me!
Leon started at the voice even as they pulled him to his bloodless feet and helped him stand. The pirate leader put the noose around his neck and tightened it, saying something about rightful punishment. Leon looked over the crowd, but he couldn’t see who had spoken. The words shivered through him and he tried to speak, but no one had given him water since the day before, and his mouth was parched. He had to wait, though, just for a minute. He tried to tell them.
The long-haired leader finished his speech and took a deep breath. “May the gods have mercy on you,” he told Leon, and put a firm hand on his chest. The men to either side let go, and he pushed hard.
Leon fell backward off the cliff, the rope leading from his neck twisting in the air. He only had an instant to see a flash of light before everything went black.
The children of the Community were making things. Some made candles. Others carded wool or used drop-spindles to spin yarn. Solie had graduated from her usual potato peeling to scraping carrots. As usual, Heyou sat beside her, dumping peels into a bowl with one hand while feeling up her leg beneath the cover of the table with the other.
Solie alternately blushed and giggled, wondering if she could get him back to her room without the widow noticing. The woman couldn’t ban her from being with Heyou, but she certainly made such pleasures impossible during the day. Right now, though, the woman wasn’t paying her any attention. Mace had come down to the cavernous eating area and was, for lack of a better word, stalking the human girls. Solie could feel his interest.
So could the girls. From where she was sitting, Solie watched Mel and Aneala both gape at him with scarlet faces. Loren winked at him daringly, and the big battler went straight for her. His interest was so strong that it made Solie blush from halfway across the room. The boys watched enviously.
“I didn’t know you guys could project
that
,” Solie managed to say to Heyou, her face warm.
“Yup.” He grinned. “Do you want me to do it to you?”
“Maybe later.” When they weren’t in public. Solie wasn’t so sure Loren cared about decorum, though. The girl’s breathless response to Mace’s lust was obvious. “I think I better stop him,” she said. But she didn’t move. Neither did any of the other youngsters, entranced as they were—though
the very young children continued playing obliviously in one corner.
Ignoring all of them, Mace moved around the table toward Loren and reached for her, his eyes glowing.
“Don’t you even think about it!” a harsh voice screamed. Shocked out of their trance, everyone turned to see the Widow Blackwell storming toward Loren and Mace, her ever-present spoon in hand. “Loren Malachi! Get yourself into the kitchen this instant, and if I
ever
catch you behaving like some sort of gillie again, I
and
your mother will tan your bottom until it’s red!”
Flushing with embarrassment, the girl fled.
The widow turned on Mace. “You! Chasing young girls! Whatever are you thinking?”
“You can’t tell?” the battler asked.
The other girls giggled, but the widow shook her spoon at him. “Well, get that thought out of your head! None of these children are available. I don’t care how grown-up they think they are, or how all-important you think you are. You won’t touch them, do you hear me?”
Mace blinked, and looked deliberately at her chest.
“You won’t look at me, either!” she shrieked. “Out! Out!” Brandishing her spoon, she advanced on the battler while the teenagers laughed. He grudgingly allowed himself to be herded toward the door, his emotions amused, Solie noted, and just a little bit disappointed.
Heyou moved his hand farther up her leg, making her shiver. He said smugly, “Guess
he’s
out of luck.”
Mace walked quietly, the widow smacking him across the back with her spoon and continuing to berate him. As he reached the exit, his emotions changed. He stiffened and suddenly spun, snatching up the widow and leaping out of the path of the door. She screamed. An instant later, Ril blew through the doorway in his natural form.
Everyone started shrieking in panic. Ril’s aura was flexing
out from his storm cloud despite Solie’s orders, the balls of lightning that were his eyes glowing so bright they were nearly white. Solie felt Heyou grab her around the waist and yank her out of the way as the battler flew forward, Ril’s emotions so overwhelming they made her head swim.
Ril reached her table and shifted to human form, not bothering to appear inside his clothing. They tumbled to the floor around him as he leaned on the table, naked. “They’re going to hang Leon,” he told her. “Stop them!”
“What?” she managed.
“My master! They’re going to kill my master!” He almost sobbed it, his emotions agonized. Mace stepped up behind him, putting a hand on his shoulder and pulling him away. Heyou was still tense, Solie saw. Both battlers watched Ril, ready to attack.
Solie forced herself to think. Leon was being hanged? No one had told her anything about that. She glanced at Heyou, her heart in her throat. “Go!”
He hesitated for a moment, staring, then he was gone, a flicker of black smoke and wings racing out the door.
Ril stared at her, his eyes wide, and wrenched free of Mace. Turning to smoke himself, he followed Heyou.
Solie lifted her arms. “Help me,” she commanded Mace. It was so far to the surface. Too far, she suspected, to arrive in time.
His arms surrounded her, warm and covered in coarse hair thicker than that of Heyou’s human form. He lifted her up and changed, became blackness that engulfed, caught, and raised her up. Then she felt them both move.
She couldn’t see, and tried not to hold her breath as the battle sylph raced after his fellows. Her position changed from horizontal to vertical and back to horizontal, but finally Mace shifted back, setting her down on snowy ground
but keeping the edge of his mantle around her for warmth. Frightened, Solie stared at the scene before her.
“What have you done?”
Heyou shot out of the stairwell at high speed, arcing over the crowd just as Morgal pushed Leon backward off the cliff. Lesser sylphs scattered at the sight of him, and he focused a short sharp wave of destruction that lashed out and hit the scaffold, cleaving through it just as the rope was about to reach its full extension. The entire top of the scaffold broke away with a bright flash and a roar of shattering stone.
Ril shot past, zipping over the crowd and down, catching Leon in his mantle before the man could fall more than a few yards. Heyou followed, not understanding. The other battler was moving toward the bottom of the bluff, Leon fully encased and protected. Hadn’t Ril hated him? Why would he want to save his master at all? Or was this why Ril had been acting so unbalanced?
Heyou knew that Mace was worried about Ril’s control. Sometimes, Heyou knew, conquered sylphs subsumed into new hives went mad. Both he and Mace shared fears this was happening to Ril, and that they’d have to kill him to protect the hive and Solie. Already neither of them wanted Ril near her, and the young battler suspected Ril knew. He himself couldn’t imagine being banned from his queen.
He saw Ril reach the bottom of the cliff and shift, laying his master on the ground. Leon had been bound at the wrists and ankles, and Ril reshaped a finger into a claw. Using this, he cut through the ropes, and the man groaned as his limbs flopped free. Heyou could feel Petrule’s pain at the sensation coming back into his hands and feet. Heyou shifted to human form, but Ril ignored him as though he weren’t there and focused on his master.
No, Heyou really didn’t understand.
Ril gazed down at Leon, so exhausted he could barely think. Distantly he suspected that he was in shock, that he had been now for a long time. So was Leon, who stared up with wide eyes as Ril loosened the noose around his neck and finally pulled it free with a terrible gentleness.
“I thought you hated me,” he whispered.
“I do,” Ril said automatically. “I hate you more than anything.”
Despite his words, when Leon shivered, Ril partly shifted, draping an edge of his mantle over him. He tried to focus his aura just to prove his hatred, but that wouldn’t come. Only relief and confusion. Leon sighed and sat up, trying to rub his wrists with fingers that wouldn’t function. He’d been tied so long the tips were gray.
Ril looked up, sending out a call. An answer came almost immediately, in a form flowing gracefully over the side of the cliff and down to them while her master shouted impotently for her to come back. Luck the Healer settled next to them and took on her blurred human form. Glancing first at Ril and then at Leon, she chose the human first after seeing Ril’s glare.
She touched Leon’s hands and then his feet, restoring life to the strangled limbs, soothing the concussion he’d suffered. Then she reached out for Ril, and the battler sagged as some of the pain in him lifted, the wound Mace had inflicted finally healing. She didn’t speak; healers rarely did. She just did her work and went back up the cliff face.
Heyou had watched in silence. He now glanced at Ril and Leon, seemed to make a decision, and followed the healer.
Ril regarded his master. Leon’s energy was weak, but it still tasted good to him. Leon rubbed his wrists for a moment and miserably returned his stare. “What do you want?” he asked.
Ril shrugged, too tired to say anything but the truth. “I want the girls. I want to see Lizzy and Betha, Cara, Nali, and Ralad. I want them to come here.”
“And me?”
Ril glanced away. “I need to drink energy from somewhere. I can’t take it from the queen all the time. She has too many of us.”
“I see.” Leon seemed to absorb this. “We can bring the girls here, if I’m welcome. I don’t know that I will be.”
“No one will hurt you,” Ril promised.
Leon smiled faintly. Ril felt his old master accept the situation and nearly shuddered, still not sure how to accept it himself. He had to learn, though, or someday soon he suspected Mace
would
put him down. He’d probably welcome it. Only, that would mean he’d never see Lizzy again.
He forced himself to look at Leon, refusing to think of the man as his master ever again. That way lay the madness he no longer wanted to risk. There was nothing else to say.
“We’ll go get the girls,” Leon remarked. “Bring them all here. I couldn’t go back to Eferem anyway. Not now.”
Ril nodded, looking down. Again, he felt Leon’s shame. “Thank you,” he said.
Hesitantly, the human male put a hand on the battler’s shoulder, and the sylph lifted a hand to grasp it in his own. Neither of them said anything aloud, but everything was said in silence.
Solie stared at the broken scaffold in horror, her hand pressed to her breast. They’d tried to hang Leon? She had to remind herself that they couldn’t feel his regret the way she could. Still, the thought of killing him made her nauseated.
Most of the people didn’t pay her any notice, arguing and exclaiming over the prisoner’s escape. Solie could see Cal standing close. The carter who’d brought her and Devon to the Community was currently trying to see over the shoulders
of others, and everyone was yelling for someone to announce what was happening at the bottom of the cliff. Cal’s earth sylph stood nearby, staring at Solie. All of the other sylphs were doing the same, waiting for her to give a command.
Tears filled her eyes. She didn’t want this! She didn’t want to be in charge of anything, let alone a hive of sylphs and three battlers. Feeling her pain, Mace put a hand on the junction of her neck and shoulder, massaging her gently. He’d do anything for her. He’d do anything
to
her, she realized, and blushed. She didn’t want that either.
The one thing she wanted came back over the edge of the cliff, a cloud of thick smoke and lightning with red eyes and wide wings. The humans all backed away and he landed, shifting to his human form. He was hardly bigger than she, forced to look up at all of the men and even most of the women, and he watched her intently. He was waiting, too.
What was she supposed to do? She didn’t want anyone to die. But it wasn’t her place to say anything to her elders. Only, it was. She was the queen, by right of the sylphs.
Distantly she felt Ril’s weariness, but the wrenching turmoil inside him was much less. Whatever had just happened between him and his master, he’d found some measure of peace. He’d lose that if Leon died.
That decided her. If Ril could forgive Leon, she would too. “Nobody dies,” she whispered.
Her battlers moved. Heyou turned and slammed a palm against what remained of the hangman’s scaffold, which shattered, exploding into dust that blew out over the plains on the glacial wind. Mace stepped in front of Solie, flaring protectively as Ril reappeared at the edge of the cliff, setting Leon down. The king’s head of security looked humbled, his regret real as he faced the crowd.
The crowd was unconvinced. They started to push forward, demanding vengeance.
Ril moved in front of Leon. The rest of the sylphs reacted, too, grasping their masters and pulling them back. Solie shivered, seeing the surprise on the human faces. Morgal regarded his fire sylph in stunned horror as she hauled him away, her flame contained so as not to burn him. Even Airi had her suddenly very solid arms around Devon’s, keeping them from being raised. The men shouted orders, but the sylphs refused to obey.
“No one dies!” Mace boomed. “The queen has spoken!”
The humans turned to Solie in shock, the men held by their sylphs, the women standing in confusion beside them. All looked at Solie, who wanted to sink into the ground. The Community was full of surprise and growing anger—which made the three battlers growl.
“You can’t give the orders here!” Morgal gasped. “You’re just a girl.”
“She’s the queen,” Heyou said.
“The queen,” the sylphs all echoed.
“The queen.”
“The queen.”
Men stared in surprise at their sylphs and then at her.
The queen
, Airi breathed, holding Devon still.
“Oh, my god,” he managed, truly understanding at last.
Leon looked at the crowd that slavered for his execution, and at the dozens of sylphs willing to defend him at the word of a tiny redheaded girl standing half in Mace’s warm mantle as if it were some kind of cloak made of darkness. He shivered, feeling the cold, and walked forward, everyone watching as he crossed to her.
Mace’s eyes glowed as he approached, but the battler didn’t do anything before Leon dropped heavily to one knee and bowed his head. “I am Leon Petrule and I hereby swear
my loyalty and allegiance to you, the queen of the sylphs, forsaking all other oaths. I am yours to command, my lady.”
Solie swallowed, shaken, while behind the man, Ril gave a strangled little sob. The last of the conflict in him evaporated. She shivered.
“I accept,” she whispered, her voice echoing in the silence.