Page 53 of Swords of Soul and Shadow
“It’s Harlan Shackley!” a voice shouted from up ahead, interrupting Jove’s spiral.
Jove looked up. Others had blocked the corridor. Saldr’s hand went to his pouch, though Jove knew it to be empty. The individual people in the crowd varied—mostly Jaydians in various states of dishevelment, though he did spot a few Yalven men towering over the rest. Several had minor injuries. Some looked on the brink of death.
Dark braids caught the corner of his eye. He whipped his head toward a corridor branching off the one he was in. A woman strode in the other direction—the same stature, the same smooth gait as his missing wife.
“Clara!” Jove shouted, stumbling and pushing past a few refugees who stood in his path. She didn’t look back.
He couldn’t blame her. But he had to see her. He just had to know she and Samuel were all right.
“Clara!” Jove couldn’t go much faster with each step shooting knives into his injured shoulder.
She still didn’t stop—but Jove did. The parchment crinkled in his jacket pocket, mocking him.
Clara wasn’t cruel. She would answer if she heard him calling. It couldn’t be her.
Had his wife and son perished in the attack after all? Had they died not realizing how sorry he was?
People moved around him like fish in a stream. Some muttered curses at him for standing still amidst the flow.Shouting echoed off the tunnel walls from behind him. He brought a hand to his eyes.
He couldn’t live without Clara, just like he wasn’t living without Zeke.
“Jove!”
That voice.
He dropped his hand and turned wildly about. Behind him. It came from behind him. His eyes searched the refugees, the faces all blurring together with his tears and panic.
He knew that voice.
A woman in her late fifties sprinted for him, her dark hair threaded with silver; outside of her usual bun, the curls were as unruly as Kase’s. Dirt streaked one of her cheeks. Rips decorated the demure yet elegant gown she’d worn hours earlier to her husband’s sentencing.
“Mother,” Jove choked. His mother was alive. Alive. And if she’d made it—
He took three steps toward her before the ground rumbled. Most people clung to the edges of the tunnel. Jove did not. He reached for his mother.
He pitched forward as the ground beneath him was ripped inexplicably skyward. He flew through the air and landed hard on his bad shoulder. He screamed. Hands encircled his other, but his vision blurred in and out. The pain—it was like when his father had shoved him into the desk when Kase and Ana had tried to run away, and Jove’s arm had snapped.
And then he was falling.
Clara
CLARA SHACKLEY WAS NOT IMMUNE to anguish and sorrow. She’d dealt with both in spades. She painted in part to relieve those feelings, to process, to analyze, and finally lay them to rest. However, with a heavy pack on her back, a newborn in her arms, and the metallic smell of blood in the thick underground air, she didn’t think she’d be able to paint away her grief over the sight before her.
Some might have called the brick walls and torch-lined tunnels claustrophobic and eerie, but with her artist’s eye, she appreciated the beauty of the weathered and beaten dirt floor contrasting with the shape of the brick archways leading to other parts of what the soldiers called the Catacombs. Yet nothing could have prepared anyone for the wails echoing off the walls.
Samuel’s mouth yawned wide, his own cries joining those mourning loved ones lost in the fires and fighting.
Clara couldn’t fall apart like those around her. But each of Samuel’s mewing cries was another arrow in her chest.
That night, she had just reached the outer gates when the city went dark. While arguing with the soldiers stationed there, screams had erupted behind her. She’d turned to find a beast out of legend flying overhead, an inferno they had not seen since the fire of Kyvena gushing from its jagged maw. At the sight of it, the soldiers had ushered her down into the Catacombs, and she hadn’t fought them. Even if she’d wanted to, shock had ravaged her body with such deep, dark cold she could hardly move without being led.
A female officer had stayed with her, organizing the streams of refugees who followed them. Clara could only sit and pray someone would arrive and announce they’d all been hallucinating.
A dragon.
A real, live dragon.
It still didn’t feel real. She’d painted several of the mythical creatures over the years, in swaths of beautiful, bright colors with striking poses suggesting elegance and intelligence that went beyond human atrocity to something wiser than they were, but they’d only been studies in preparation for Les’ figurines.
