“Get in there!” Mideon shouted at the Belgriclungreian leader, Caldern, who started forward with a troop of well-armored warriors.
“Wait,” Fenelyus shouted. With one hand up, still holding the shield that illuminated the world around them, she squeezed her other hand over and over, molding something into existence. Gifford couldn’t see what it was until she threw it.
A dark ball rocketed across the plain from pedestal to pedestal. Gryndal threw up his own shield of light, but the dark ball passed through, snuffing out the shield as it did. A burst of brilliant light blinded everyone watching. When the flash was over, Gryndal was gone, and so was his pedestal. What remained was a shallow crater.
By then, the armies were converging on the former fane.
With a grunt, Fenelyus swept her arms and threw everyone back with a force that, in the land of the living, might have been a powerful wind, but in Phyre, it was a spray of silver.
“Whoa,” Roan whispered.
“Fen! The Breakwaters!” Mideon shouted.
With teeth clenched and eyes ablaze, Fenelyus thrust an outstretched hand and sent another purple ball of light. Once again, it picked up speed and size until it was huge. The bounding boulder rushed at the giants, who braced for impact, tightening their locked arms and leaning forward. When the sphere hit, it did nothing. The great boulder of light popped like a bubble. But at that moment, Fenelyus clapped her hands and the ground beneath three of the giants tilted sharply upward.
They fell back, sliding into the Abyss.
Hooked arm in arm, unwilling to let go, the chain of giants was dragged backward, toppling one by one over the edge. The armies stopped to watch the sight, for there was a terrible slowness to this strange inevitability. No one screamed, no crash of weapon defeated them. What brought that powerful wall down was the giants’ inability to let go of one another’s arms. Fenelyus had ingeniously and elegantly touched off a landslide, and everyone paused to watch the tragedy unfold.
When the last three giants were whipped off their feet with looks of disbelief in their dull eyes, there was a pause in the battle that Gifford wanted to think was a moment of silence to honor the Breakwaters.
It lasted less than a minute.
Then the clash returned, and Gath ordered them forward again.
The White Tower was as beautiful as a winter’s night when it was so cold that ice cracked. No chairs, no cushions, no furs—everything was hard, white, and chilling. Sebek hadn’t lied to Tesh regarding the tower being vacant. Stairs and corridors were silent, save for the sound of Andvari’s, Tekchin’s, and his own footfalls. And as he rushed as best he could to escape, Tesh saw no one but his own reflection. Nearly all the walls were polished to a mirror-like shine.
“Don’t look at the walls!” Andvari shouted, but Tesh already had.
He saw himself—not as the hero of the Harwood, not as a Techylor, but as a Dureyan. Even less than that, he was a Dureyan boy, thin, dirty, and frightened.
Tesh stopped to stare at himself.
Am I really that pathetic? That small?
He did feel tiny. Ever since entering Phyre, he had felt like that—the way he was brought up to feel. What he saw in the mirror was how he still saw himself, that part he had struggled to erase but failed.
Maybe because that’s how I am. I have no false body to disguise the truth. In Phyre, Gifford is an athlete, but this is what I am.
“Stop looking and run,” Tekchin called back.
Tesh felt a hand on his arm and found Andvari pulling him away.
“This is an enchantment,” the dwarf said. “Who you are lies at the intersection of how you see yourself and how others do. Where the two overlap is truth. You aren’t seeing yourself. This is how the queen sees you. You’re looking at yourself through her walls—her eyes. It’s not the truth.”
“But it isn’t a lie, either.”
“It is a truth. Her truth.”
Tesh forced himself to look away and focus on running—no small feat, as he still felt the terrible weight. Reaching the main floor, they spotted two soldiers in black-and-white armor.
Not entirely deserted, after all.
Tesh slowed down and watched as Tekchin waved to the soldiers. One waved back. Neither of them looked at Tesh—at the dirty Dureyan boy.
“Better hurry. The party is about to end,” the guard who had waved told Tekchin. “The queen has unleashed Orr.”
Tekchin cursed as he bolted out the door. Tesh followed. No one stopped him; none looked his way; no one cared.
Back on the stony plain, Tekchin and Andvari no longer waited, and Tesh fell hopelessly behind. He knew where to go. Lightning bursts flashed at the front of a bridge beyond which lay nothing else.
Tesh was fearful that without Tekchin, the forces of the queen would recognize him for the escaped prisoner he was. None did. Even as he ran past hosts of men, he didn’t receive even a second glance.
Maybe all they see is a starving boy in a ragged shirt. No threat here.
He came to a crack in the valley, one of the many crevices that weren’t wide enough for a bridge. Others were jumping it with ease, but they weren’t panting from exhaustion, or stooped over like an old crone. And this time he didn’t have Brin to help him across.
With no choice, he made a running leap, hoping this would be another illusion, a mere crack in the rock. It wasn’t. Still, he almost made it.
Most of him reached the far side. His left leg was the exception. His shinbone cracked against the sharp stone’s edge. He heard it snap. Felt the bone break. Crying out in pain, he fell and rolled, thrashing on the flinty rock. His eyes watered, and his sight blurred. The pain ran up his leg and coursed through his whole body. He clutched at his shin and found the brittle bone where it punched through the skin.
As he lay on his side, shivering in agony and fear, he felt a downbeat of wind. Above him a great shadow passed, a long one with two vast wings and a massive tail.
The army of King Mideon was nearly to the pylons of the bridge, which appeared as twin spears jutting up from the end of the flinty plain. Those formations marked the start of the narrow crossing. A roar sounded. That Gifford could hear anything above the crash of combat was astounding. The battle had reached a tumultuous pitch. He felt it, as he had once perceived Elan through the Art, but Gifford didn’t believe it took much insight to feel the urgency in the rapid claps of swords on shields and the staccato cries of desperate men. This was the push. Here was the final conflict. The two sides threw themselves into the effort—and the forces of Mideon were winning. Inch by inch they advanced. Gath coaxed Beatrice and the six of them closer to the bridge.
A monstrous creature with a small head, tiny eyes, fangs, and a spiked club charged, but it was brought down by half a dozen men wielding spears. A squad of dwarfs from the queen’s forces advanced in chevron formation. Swinging shining hammers, they ripped through rings of defenders. Seeing them, Gifford understood how it was that the Belgriclungreians came so close to defeating the Fhrey. The dwarfs made small targets and shook off blows that would have crushed an average man. The last of their attack made it all the way to Gath who, along with Bran of Pines, put an end to them.
By then, they were close enough to the bridge that Gifford saw it wasn’t merely narrow; the width was so small that their passage across would need to be single file. He thought of Tressa and worried whether she could manage it.