Page 215 of The Black Witch

I turn and look over my shoulder.

There are dead men and dragons strewn across the field. I turn back toward where Fallon lies, incredibly still. A numbed horror washes over me.

Everyone’s talking at once. Men yell out orders as a large contingent of Gardnerian soldiers arrives on horseback. They’re accompanied by a Gardnerian physician and his apprentice, the physician yelling out for supplies.

All the noise is a disconnected mayhem in the face of my overwhelmed shock.

“Give me room!” the physician orders as he rushes to Fallon and drops to his knees.

She’s momentarily blocked from my sight, healers and soldiers surrounding her, one soldier holding a torch, the outer ring of soldiers facing out, their weapons drawn, faces severe.

A young soldier comes down on one knee beside me. “Mage Gardner, are you all right?”

I flinch back from him, shaking with terror, his words barely able to pierce the storm of my emotions.

Someone wraps a blanket around my shoulders.

When the crowd around Fallon disperses, the physician is holding the large knife. Fallon’s tunic is off, her chest covered with tight bandages, her rune-marked uniform and cloak in a tight, glowing ball that’s quickly handed off and taken away.

She’s not dead.

Her eyes are half lidded, but open and staring right at me with a hatred so intense, it jars me to the core.

“The North Tower,” she rasps out. Her eyes loll backward, and she falls unconscious.

Breathless and heart thudding, I watch as two of Fallon’s guards lift her stretcher and carry her away. A small army of Gardnerian soldiers draws protectively in around her, cutting her off from view.

* * *

“Who are they?” I ask a surviving member of Fallon’s guard, motioning toward the dead assassins.

The young man’s brow knits tight. We both take in the sight of the assassins as their bodies are thrown over the back of a horse. The men’s dead eyes are rimmed with kohl. Intricate runes mark their faces, and their lips are painted black.

Chilled to the bone, I hug the blanket tight around myself.

“They’re Ishkart mercenaries,” the guard tells me with grim certainty. “Assassins from the Eastern Realm.” He flicks his finger toward the dead dragons that are being loaded by more soldiers onto a cart. “And their pit dragons.” He looks to the icy North Tower then back to me. “You should return to your lodging, Mage Gardner.”

“But...what if there are more of them?” I worry, looking sidelong toward the dark wilds, the trees like hulking presences.

“They’re not after you,” he says. He nods in the direction they took Fallon in. “They’re only after her. Our next Black Witch.”

“Her clothes,” I say, the glowing symbols bright in my mind. “What were those strange symbols?”

“They rune-marked her clothing with search runes,” he tells me. “Tracked her here.” He gestures toward the tower with his chin. “Unless you have another Black Witch up in that tower, no one will be bothering you there, Mage Gardner.”

A soldier near the North Tower’s door aims his wand and sends out a line of fire around the door’s frame, melting Fallon’s ice. He wrenches it open and slips inside.

My stomach gives a hard lurch. Soldiers dot the entire field, quickly dispersing as they widen their search into the surrounding wilds. Panicked, I look up and catch a fleeting glimpse of an Icaral’s silhouette in the upstairs window.

I get up and rush, stumbling, to the tower, just as the soldier reemerges. He stands aside, his face impassive, as I stride past him, taking the spiraling stairs two at a time, not caring about the flash of pain every stomp of my left foot brings.

Panting hard, I find Wynter waiting for me on the other side of the hallway, the door to our room open beside her.

Marina. Marina. Marina.

I run to the door and my feet skid to a halt just outside it.

Ariel peers back at me from where she lies on her bed, something rustling under the blankets at her feet.

---