Page 92 of Fate of Echoes and Embers
“Hawthorne Manor is yours, my lady, not Draven’s. If circumstances were different, if Kael still led his men, I’d have taken them, and Hawthorne, back already.”
“But Kael is in Aetheria, as unlikely as that seems, and us here.” Lyra turned to me. “Did you not sense the Crystal there?”
Raising his hand, Marek gathered moisture from the air, creating a silencing mist. Then standing, he reached into the pouch on his belt. Taking the Crystal carefully from it, he opened his hand, revealing its contents to Lyra and Adren.
Their reaction would have been amusing if our situation were not so dire. He put it back, the mist intact, and recounted as quickly as possible our experience in the Maelstrom Depths. He overstated my role, clearly proud. “I would not have retrieved it without her,” he finished.
“You’d be at the bottom of the sea without her,” Adren said.
With a swipe of his hand, Marek evaporated the mist.
The four of us stared at each other, the full importance of what we’d accomplished finally settling.
“And now we turn our sights to Hawthorne,” Lyra said. “From what we’ve gathered…” she began, and then hesitated.
That’s when I knew.
Iknewwith the certainty of my ancestor’s senses, even though I wasn’t using them.
“No,” I said, willing it not to be.
“I’m told from the few who got out before Draven fortified the outer defenses, Sir Warren Calder was not only your commander but a friend.”
Was.
“I am so very sorry, Issa. Draven had him killed, using your commander’s death as leverage to bring the others in line. There was an uprising?—”
“No.” I could not breathe. Could not listen to this. I pushed back the tent flap, inhaling the night air. Except it didn’t help.
Marek’s arms were around me from the back before I was even aware he’d joined me. Spinning me around, he held me as I allowed myself to fall apart in his arms.
“He loved me,” I managed. “He loved my father. My mother. Hawthorne. His family.”
Marek said nothing for there was nothing to say. So much death, and by the hand of a man I’d defended. “I should have?—”
“Stop.” Marek took me by the shoulders. “This was not your doing. It was Draven’s. And there are more inside those walls who need you now. This isn’t over yet.”
He was saying, without uttering the words, that I could not fall apart. Not yet. My people needed me.
Wiping my eyes, I took two more deep breaths.
“I’m ready,” I said, lying but wishing it were true.
He leaned forward, kissed me, and led me back into the tent.
“You were saying?” I sat back down, not wanting Lyra’s and Adren’s pity. My face flushed with a sudden vision of driving a knife into Draven’s treacherous heart.
“There were others,” Lyra said softly, “though I do not know their names. By one account, three are dead. By another, up to seven. Some managed to escape. The others are now taking orders from Draven, who is secured inside with the Gyorian mercenaries. They’ve not yet struck our camp, perhaps realizing the war they will incite. We’ve been debating our next move?—”
“If we take it back with force,” I interrupted, “Hawthorne will be decimated.”
None disagreed with me. It was well-known, when a battle broke out in Elydor, little of consequence remained in the aftermath. With all three clans, not counting the humans, involved? Elydor had almost not survived the War of the Abyss, so named afterward for what had nearly become of it.
I began to pace back and forth in the small space afforded to me in the tent. “My father often said the tree cover to the west which runs from the outer defenses all the way to the keep should be removed, though he never did it.”
“We could attack from above,” Lyra correctly guessed.
“As could we,” Marek argued, to which Lyra burst into laughter.
