Where’s the other half of the army? Sora wondered. Were they so arrogant that they thought they could defeat an entire fortress full of taigas and decided to use only a fraction of their forces?
“It’s better for us,” Daemon said. “After you blind them, there will be fewer for us to fight.”
Sora kept shaking her head, though. “I worry what the other half is doing. If—”
Hana rode forward. Sora froze. She couldn’t remember what she was going to say. All she could focus on was her sister and the seething hatred in her eyes, so intense, it felt as if they burned a hole straight through Sora’s heart.
She had to look away.
“Commander,” Hana said, raising her voice and sounding ever Virtuoso. “We have come home to mourn Empress Aki’s death, and to usher in the reign of Emperor Gin. We bring with us the gift of new magic to the Society. Open the gates, and let your returned warriors in.”
Glass Lady nodded subtly at Sora to set her plan in motion.
“What is your name, child?” Glass Lady said to Hana.
Hana scoffed. “I am no child. I am Virtuoso, and I am second in command of this army.”
“Well, child,” Glass Lady said, her voice oozing the same venomous disdain as Hana’s, “I may be old-fashioned, but I think current etiquette still dictates that it is rude to try to force one’s way into another’s home.” She gestured at the stone staircase the ryuu were building with their magic, and the flames that had begun to heat the iron of the gates orange. “You claim to come here respectfully,” Glass Lady continued, “and yet you begin from a position of utter disrespect. Therefore, we must treat you in kind.”
She waved her hand, and taigas appeared from their hiding places just below the top of the fortress walls. Others waited on the foot- and handholds below them, ready to pounce on the ryuu once Sora blinded them.
She focused the emerald particles around her. Make the crystal invisible. Bring it to me.
With Sora keeping the wall invisible, the ryuu wouldn’t know what was blinding them. They wouldn’t be able to shoot it down. The only one who could understand—who could see invisible things—was Hana.
Sora’s entire body trembled with the effort of moving the crystal. She’d forgotten how much energy she’d already used to cut the wall from the palace and transport it here. There wasn’t much in her reserves.
Daemon noticed. He placed his hands on Sora’s shoulders, the heat of his touch steadying her. It was like when the Imperial Guard had bandaged her wounds while she was working on cutting the crystal from the palace walls, except tenfold, because this was Daemon.
Sora’s hold on the magic strengthened, and the slab of crystal rose faster from the ground where she’d left it, soaring through the air toward them.
Hana sneered at Glass Lady, her attention, at least for now, on the commander. “Your old-fashioned view of the world is exactly why I’ll replace you as leader of the Society once Emperor Gin wears the crown,” Hana said. “Now I’m going to ask you one more time to let us in.”
The commander glanced at Sora.
The slab of Rose Palace hovered just below the top of the fortress walls, where Hana couldn’t see it.
Now! Sora ordered.
The crystal shot up into the sky, directly in front of the sun. Sora rotated it from side to side.
The light blasted down upon the ryuu, not in a beam of pink, but rather in a brilliant, intense spectrum, everything from red to violet, as the light filtered through the prism of the Ora tiger crest. It was beautiful and painfully glaring, all at once.
The ryuu shrieked as they were blinded. Some shielded their eyes. Others clawed at them, as if they could rip away the brightness of the light.
“Attack!” Glass Lady shouted.
Taigas swarmed over the fortress walls, climbing up and over like an army of fire ants. They rained down on the ryuu below, throwing stars and darts tipped in genka. The goal was not to kill them—most of the ryuu were taigas who had recently been hypnotized by Prince Gin—but to blind them, knock them out, and then imprison them until the Society could figure out how to undo the Dragon Prince’s spell. Sora kept turning the magnifying glass in the sky, varying the rays of sunlight unpredictably, so that any direction a ryuu looked for their emerald dust, they’d immediately be confronted with more of the blinding light. But her trick with the magnifying glass would handicap the ryuu for only a minute, maybe less, before they figured out a way to avoid looking at it. The taigas needed to incapacitate the ryuu quickly.
Hana roared, her anger audible even through the chaos of the fight.
The stone stairs her ryuu had been building were only six stories high, still four stories from the top of the fortress walls. But four floors wasn’t impossible for a ryuu to jump.
“Watch out for Virtuoso!” Sora said.
Hana shielded her eyes from the flashing light above and sprinted up the stones. She pushed off the last one and leaped up.
Others began to follow her lead. Beetle—Sora’s friend—kept his gaze to the earth, where cicadas, centipedes, and thousands of other antennaed things crawled out of the dirt. They climbed on top of each other and created a moving platform to carry him and a few others up. At the same time, the fire ryuu doubled her efforts on the gates, their lower bars red-hot, while another ryuu who could work with metal coaxed it to bend. Another minute or two, and they would have a hole large enough to let themselves through.
Hana landed on the top of the fortress wall. Sora glanced over, and her stomach curdled at the way her sister’s face twisted, her eyes narrowed, and that cute button nose now scrunched, nostrils flared in anger. Sora’s spell on the magnifying glass almost slipped.
Taiga officers began to shout new commands to the different squadrons.
“Stay up on the wall and continue shooting any ryuu you can with genka darts!”
“Drop down to the ground and draw your weapons!”
“Remember—if they can’t see, they can only fight like we can, and we outnumber them. Go!”
Grasshopper spells were cast. Taigas jumped down from the ten-story fortress walls, into the melee below. They drew swords and sickles and chains, also dipped with genka.
Some taigas and ryuu would die. The Society would try to spare as many as they could, but stopping Prince Gin’s army was the priority.
In the meantime, Beetle, Firebrand, and other ryuu were making progress on the wall.
Sora trembled under the concentration required to keep the piece of Rose Palace in the air. Sweat soaked her entire uniform. Her eyes were beginning to cross.
But she held on.
Fairy and Broomstick ran past her to fight the ryuu who were landing at the top of the wall.
“Be careful!” Sora yelled after them.
“‘Careful’ isn’t part of the League of Rogues’ motto,” Fairy shouted back.
League of Rogues. Sora liked the sound of that.
But she didn’t have time to respond. Beetle and his insects lunged at Fairy and Broomstick. Hana smirked at Sora.
“You won’t be needing that anymore,” Hana said, as she commanded green particles to wrench the magnifying glass from Sora’s magic’s grip.
It wasn’t even a fight. Sora was already exhausted, and her hold slipped as soon as Hana’s stronger one snatched at the crystal.