“Papa knows I’m here, Aliza,” she said calmly. “I told him I was coming.”
I looked at her then, really looked at her. She had told him—told, not asked. And he’d agreed? What must she have said to persuade him that she belonged out here on the front lines, that she was no longer a child in need of protecting? What arguments must have raged before Papa was at last able to admit that the War of the Worm had done away with his wide-eyed, carefree little girl forever? I blinked, and blinked again. So much had changed since I’d last seen my family, but this? This hurt. Leyda, my baby sister, was my baby sister no longer. And if not that, then what?
The answer came with equal parts pride and sadness. An ally. Not only that; she was an ally who’d once been closer to our enemy than any of us except Alastair. I glanced around. One of the blacksmiths stood two trees away, glaring through the boughs at the empty pasture beyond. On the other side, several branches above the ground, a hunter tested her bowstring.
“Leyda,” I said quietly, “before this starts, I need to ask you something. About what happened with Wydrick.”
The shock in her eyes hit me like a crossbow bolt to the gut, but her expression hardened before I could take it back. I willed away the memory of the monsters she’d seen, that we’d both seen on the blood-soaked battlefield, and took her hand. She would not meet my gaze.
“I’m sorry. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important,” I said.
“I already told you what I remember.”
“Everything?”
“I—” She looked up. There was a long pause. “Tell me why it’s important.”
The words reeled back and forth in my head. Tell her—spare her. Would the truth pour poison or salt into the wound? Kill or help heal? Painful either way, but I had no right to keep it from her. As quickly and quietly as I could, I told her about the ghasts we’d encountered in the Old Wilds and of Wydrick’s cryptic warning in Morianton. She listened without speaking, her eyes fixed on my face, her expression inscrutable save for the occasional tensing of her jaw.
“Whatever the ghastradi are planning, it’s going to come to a head in Edonarle, and soon,” I said. “Did Wydrick give any hint as to what might be coming when you last spoke?”
“Is that why you were heading south?” she asked. “You didn’t come to see us?”
“We did come to see you, dearest, but we need to know what we’re facing after this, and for that we need all the information we can get. Anything you remember about him. What he did, what he said.”
“Ask your husband. He was there too.”
“He didn’t speak to Wydrick.”
She parted the branches with the tip of Alastair’s knife and looked out over the fields. He stood guard a few paces from us, sword in hand, watching Akarra’s approach. She was very close now, zigzagging just above the treetops, pushing the Tekari toward us.
“Leyda?”
“‘One of us must make the sacrifice or all Arle will be destroyed,’” she said softly. “That’s what Tristan told me before he broke my leg.”
“What did he mean?”
“I don’t know.” She paused, and her next words came with effort. “Aliza, I don’t know if it was quite him at that point.”
“You saw his eyes change?”
“For just a moment.” She ran the blade of Alastair’s dagger along her sleeve, as if wiping away streaks of nonexistent blood. “It went back and forth. Like he couldn’t make up his mind. It scared me, and that’s when I decided to run. Only—he stopped me. Or his ghast did, I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking ghastradi then, but I really wasn’t thinking much at all after I saw what he meant to do.”
“Was that when he broke your leg?”
She shook her head. “Not right away. I remember feeling something . . . cold.” She touched her chest, right above her heart. “Cold and angry. It’s hard to explain. I didn’t know what it was, or where it came from. I just knew I had to fight.”
The remembered sting of flesh striking flesh prickled through my palm. Wydrick had hinted at what he intended for my sister in the tavern at Morianton. Another ghastradi, born of terror and desperation on the battlefield, feeding on the innocent fear of Leyda’s young heart, subservient to Wydrick and Wydrick’s mysterious master. I squeezed her hand. Betrayed, crippled, with escape impossible and the Greater Lindworm bearing down on her, and still she had resisted. All the undying strength of the ghastradi brotherhood, all their wiles and dark plans, broken by the stubborn heart of one young girl.
A warning rippled through the line and the hunter and the blacksmith both paused to plug their ears with beeswax. Leyda moved to do the same, pulling a little box from her pocket. I caught her hand, pulled her close, and kissed her forehead.
“You’re brilliant, Leyda. You know that, right?”
She blinked. “Well, aye. But what was that for?”
A direwolf’s howl echoed from the forest to the west. Our smiles evaporated. I nodded to the box of beeswax. “Later. Put that in.”
She obeyed, and I did the same. The world of sound shrank, stoppered like a cork until all I could hear was my own breath and the galloping thud of my heart. It was a strange and unpleasant sensation. I made signs to Leyda to keep her knife at the ready and pushed the branches aside. The sun had dropped below the trees and the shadows along the west side of the pasture were deepening and moving. The black shapes of direwolves sprang from the woods in a silent cascade, their fangs bared. A sharp ache jolted through my jaw, my teeth, and I covered my ears. The beeswax blocked the worst of the banshees’ screams but could not mitigate its effects entirely, and I gasped in relief when it stopped. The banshees broke the cover of the trees in a line of pale, long-limbed horrors, their mouths gaping open, but it seemed they could no longer spare breath for screaming. Grasses swayed beneath their feet, moved by creatures unseen. Blast! Another kind of Tekari.
Alastair crouched in a guard position as Akarra burst through the last row of trees, trailing dragonfire. The direwolves straying too far south changed course and bunched together, redoubling their speed as they charged toward our miserable barrier of sticks and the lone figure of a Rider between them and the Manor.
My heart in my throat, I readied my dagger. They were only fifty yards away now, this snarling wave of fangs and fury. Only twenty. Only ten. Now close enough to see the muscles bunch in the lead direwolf’s hindquarters. It sprang over the barrier in a single bound, jaws open, eyes fastened on Alastair’s throat. It landed a few feet from him—and disappeared.
I didn’t need to hear to imagine the wolfish yelp as it crashed headfirst through the layer of sticks and leaves we’d laid over the trench the garden-folk had dug, nor the sickening crack as the angle of its leap brought its neck into fatal contact with the edge of the ditch. Its body slumped out of sight. Others followed, too close to stop, and Akarra drove those that were relentlessly forward with her dragonfire. Leyda punched the air next to me, her mouth open in a soundless cheer. One enormous banshee dodged the flames, sank low, and sprang straight up, only to fall back with an arrow protruding from its bony chest. The huntswoman to our right smiled and notched a second arrow with shaky hands.