Page 180 of Of Empires and Dust

The voice boomed again. “Ella!”

“Trust in the blood.” Freis rested her free hand atop Ella’s. “Blood is all you can trust.”

“What?” Ella felt hands gripping her shoulders, shaking her, fingers pressing in so hard it hurt. “Mam, what do you mean?”

Freis simply smiled. “Trust in the blood, Ella. I was wrong. Find me again. I will listen for your voice.”

“Ella!”the voice roared, and the world of smoke swirled around her like a tempest, then smashed.

Ella lurched upright, her eyes opening. Tamzin stood over her, hands grasping Ella’s shoulders.

“What did you do?” Ella roared and shoved Tamzin off her, then leapt to her feet. She extended a clawed hand, visibly shaking. “What. Did. You. Do?”

Tamzin stepped backwards, white mist rising from beneath her feet. She raised both hands in the air. “Ella, I need you to breathe.”

“What did you do to me?” The wolf prowled in the back of Ella’s mind, teeth bared. “Why did you make me see that?”

“See what? Ella, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Then why did you wake me?” Ella made no attempt to hold back her fury. “Why?”

“Because we needed to keep moving.” Tamzin’s fingernails grew, curling and sharpening, her fingers growing thicker, fangs protruding below her upper lip. “If you don’t back down now, I’ll put you down. That is your only warning.”

Ella clenched her jaw but held herself in place. She drew a long breath through her nose, letting it out slowly.

“I woke you because we are less than a day from the Darkwood and we need to move. When I tried, you were limp as a doll. I panicked. People can lose themselves in this place.”

Ella recoiled as the woman made to rest a hand on her shoulder, but Tamzin moved closer, placing both her palms flat on Ella’s forearms and meeting her gaze. “What did you see?”

“My mam. I think she’s alive.”

Tanner Fjorn stoodon the edge of the plateau that overlooked Alura, a warm mug of Arlen Root tea cupped in his hands. The tea was one of the worst things he’d ever tasted, but Elia Havel had brewed a batch every day since she’d begun to recover. After a while, Yana had started to do the same. That meant a lot of tea was going to waste. He didn’t like waste. And most tastes could be acquired with a little perseverance.

His breath misted and rose into the morning sky, glinting in the pale red light of the Blood Moon. That damn moon had sat there, carved into the sky, for just over two weeks now, making every day too dark and every night too bright.

In a sense, he had been a little underwhelmed. The last time the Blood Moon had risen, the entire continent had run red – or so the legends told. And now there he was, sipping a mug oftea to the sound of birdsong. The tea tasted like shit, but the sentiment remained. He was under no illusions though. There in Aravell – surrounded by walls and mountains and a forest that had a nasty tendency to kill anything that moved – he was sheltered from the chaos. The reports from elsewhere in Epheria were very different. Entire cities had been wiped from existence, burned to ash, tens of thousands slaughtered – hundreds of thousands.

The world was on fire. The idea of Tanner sitting around sipping tea while so many fought and died clawed at him. He had never been a man to sit back and wait. It was not his way. A glass of brandy by the fire after a long day, that was something that warmed his heart, but this was different. Farwen and Coren and the others, they were still there, still in the heart of the war. He had made the choice to leave, to go with Ella, but that didn’t mean he was free of the guilt at leaving the others behind.

He took a sip of the tea, grimacing as the aftertaste of dirt hit his tongue.

Once Ella woke – and she would – the sitting around would be over. They would join the fight once again. That girl was a fighter, a warrior in her heart. She had a will of wrought iron. She would come back to them. She had to. If she didn’t, Tanner wasn’t entirely sure that it wouldn’t break Yana forever.

Women were strange creatures. He’d found that they were slow to love, slow to trust, but when they did, they bound themselves to that love with all their strength. And that was the way it should be as far as he was concerned. Love should be hard won and defended with every shred of a person’s soul.

Tanner sipped at the tea again, watching as Alura started to awaken and the soft sound of chatter drifted through the basin. Without Ella’s brother and the others, the place felt empty, quiet. Thousands had become a handful. Most of the Rakina remained, along with the sick and injured, a number of guardsleft behind from the Draleid’s army, and the elves who tended the dragons – Dracårdare, he believed they were called. At that time, only a handful of souls wandered the paths and tended the plateaus, mostly elves who had been assigned to keep everything in order.

Tanner turned and ambled across the plateau, nodding to two men in half-plate with the white dragon emblazoned across their chests. He stepped through the doorway to the familiar, earthy scent of Arlen Root and Elia Havel in the same place he’d left her: stirring a pot of steeping tea, her neck tilted to the side, her eyes fixed on something that wasn’t there.

The woman may have recovered physically from her time in the Beronan dungeons, but the horrors she’d experienced there were very much still with her. At times he thought two minds lived within her skull. One a woman so sweet and chirpy as to almost cause him a headache, the other a crippled soul who saw demons lurking in every shadow.

“Elia.” Tanner approached slowly, holding his empty mug in his left hand. She didn’t answer. “Elia.”

Elia continued stirring the large pot, her head twitching.

“Elia, are you all right?”

Tanner rested his hand on Elia’s shoulder, and she jerked away, catching the pot with her arm and knocking it, the scalding tea pouring over the floor.

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