The Queen of Blood (29 page)

The bridge ended. Just stopped in midair. Ahead was the village tree. It had been sheared of all branches at midforest level, with no trace of the village that it had once cradled in its powerful arms. No trace except one hut, its roof sunken in, its door hanging on one hinge, but otherwise intact.
This
was home, this broken place, in a way that the charm-covered, garish-green house never was. She'd felt safe here. And happy.

She felt a hand on her shoulder, Mari's hand. She couldn't pull her eyes from her old home. There, she remembered the day that Arin had been born. She'd been like a squalling kitten, and Daleina had been surprised she was so messy. Daleina remembered the breakfasts that her mother used to cook in that kitchen . . . or was she remembering those breakfasts in their new home? The memories were jumbled. She wished she could separate them out clearly.

After a moment, she forced herself to look down toward the forest floor. For an instant, she saw the wreckage again—the just-broken boards, the just-broken bodies—but then her eyes focused, and there was only green, the lush green of bushes spread between the tree roots, as if denying there was ever a tragedy here.

There was no trace of her village below. Only the broken bridge, the missing branches, and her home, alone.

“Are you going to be all right?” Mari asked softly.

“I don't know,” Daleina said. “Are you?”

Mari was silent for a moment. “I don't know either.”

T
he other candidates coaxed new branches from the old trunk, thickened them, hollowed them, and shaped them into new houses. Dozens of spirits from the surrounding woods were performing the construction, swooping and soaring among them.

Daleina knew she should be out helping them, but instead, she was inside her old house, sweeping the dust from the half-rotted floor with her mother's decade-old broom. A family of bats had taken up residence in the roof, and she'd shooed a nest of squirrels out of the fireplace. The chimney would need to be patched before it could be used again, and the pulley system that they'd used to haul up water and other supplies had been severed.

When she'd swept out every speck of dirt, she forced herself to walk out of the house and all its old memories. She affixed a rope from inside to a hook and lowered herself to the forest floor. Bayn was prowling between the bushes, sniffing at them.

“They're buried under there,” she told the wolf. “Everyone I didn't save.” You'd think she would have outgrown the old hurt by now, forgiven herself, and moved on. Kneeling, she pressed her palms against the cool earth. She sent her mind down, as if that would let her touch her old friends, family, and neighbors—

She felt something beneath her. It moved, deep within the earth, like an undulation of a wave. It spread wide beneath them,
under the roots of the village tree, its thick tentacles reaching out in every direction.

Oh no
.

She'd felt this once before.

The shifting sand.

But it couldn't be the same spirit.

It didn't matter if it was. It was old, impossibly powerful, and beneath them, and it knew they were here. She felt its hatred rolling through the earth. It meant to—

“Run!” she cried.

Bayn obeyed her instantly, sprinting through the underbrush, and she ran after the wolf. Above her, she heard the chatter stop. She felt the eyes of the other girls, friends and strangers, watching her curiously from above. “Don't be idiots!” The tentacles reached far. If they flexed—“It's below us! Reach down. Don't you feel it? It's too strong!” Jumping onto a tree trunk, she began to scale it, shoving her feet into the groves of the bark.

One of the candidates—a girl with silvery hair—laughed, a sound like a bell. Another laughed as well. Daleina ignored them, climbing higher and calling to her friends. “Revi, Linna . . . remember our first survival class? Remember when you were all talking and thought I was foolish to climb a tree, and then the wolf attacked?”

“Yes, but there was no danger,” Mari called to her. “It was Bayn!”

“There's danger here! Feel down. Can't you feel it?”

“There's only earth,” another said. “Nothing to fear.”

Dammit, they weren't going to listen to her. The smaller wood and air spirits could feel it—they were straining to resist commands, to flee the area, and she realized climbing wasn't going to be enough. “The trial isn't about building the village; it's surviving His Highness beneath us.” She heard murmurs—about her, about how she was afraid, about how an heir shouldn't fear spirits—and she sensed the earth spirit coil its tentacles, ready. “Fly, everyone. Right now!” She tossed the thought to every air spirit.
Fly! Fly us high!

Already agitated, they listened to her—she was telling them
to do what they already wanted to do: Flee. Three air spirits dove for her, grabbed her arms, and pulled her into the air. Another scooped up Bayn. Around her, she saw other spirits lift candidates up into the air.

And the village tree began to sink.

Air spirits fluttered to the tree, and the candidates were lifted up out of the branches as it sank beneath them, as if swallowed by a vast mouth. The ground around it shifted as if it had turned to liquid, and the other trees undulated. Above, held by spirits, Daleina watched as her home sank toward the earth.

She didn't listen as the other candidates shouted to one another. They were trying to stop it, fight it, control it, but Daleina didn't try. The tree sank, despite their attempts, lower and lower. She wondered how there was so much earth beneath it to claim it, but there was. The trees around it continued to tremble, but none of the others sank. Only the village tree, lower and lower, until at last the tops of the leaves disappeared into the brown lakelike sludge. And then it was gone.

Lower me,
Daleina ordered the spirits. They obeyed quickly, plummeting down, and she sensed their curiosity like pinpricks in her mind, the only reason they obeyed so fast—they'd never seen anything like this. But she had. She bent her knees to absorb the impact from landing. Around her, the other candidates flew down on their spirits.

The ground was hard beneath her feet. Kneeling, she felt the soil. Solid.

“How did you know it was going to do that?” one of the candidates asked.

“Because it did it before.” Granted, it hadn't done it on such a scale, but she'd felt its power. She reached out with her mind but felt only ordinary dirt and rocks beneath them. “I think it's gone now. We can build the village.”

“Is it coming back?” That was Evvlyn.

“I don't know,” Daleina said. “But it's not here now.”

All of them drew closer, touching her arms and back, and touching each other's hands and shoulders, as if reassuring themselves they were all still here, whole, and alive. They murmured
to one another, an overlap of voices that felt like a comforting blanket.

“I'm sorry about your home,” Mari said softly, to Daleina. “I know it had memories, good ones as well as the bad ones.”

“It's all right,” Daleina said, and strangely, it was, because this time . . . this time she had saved them all.

O
NE OF THE GIRLS HURRIED OVER TO
D
ALEINA
. “W
E
'
RE READY
. Where do we start?”

She contemplated the trees for a moment. They'd decided that there wouldn't be a single village tree—without the queen's power, it was too difficult to grow one massive tree, but more important, a single tree was prone to attack from the earth kraken. Instead, the houses would be shaped from the surrounding trees and connected via bridges that would sprout from the branches. “Start with establishing platforms for each of the houses and then construct the bridges between them. Grab everyone who's good with larger wood spirits for that, and we can fill in the details after.”

They were listening to her, both because she'd saved them and because she was one of the few that had grown up in an outer village and knew what was needed. She laid out the plan and divvied up the tasks, and then they dispersed, calling to the nearby spirits. Except for her.

It was a hard, bitter-tasting pill to swallow, one that stuck in her throat and scraped all the way down. All of these girls were more qualified, more powerful than she was . . . and these were merely the candidates. There were heirs already out there in the world with both training and experience. If all of them were at the coronation ceremony, the spirits wouldn't hear Daleina calling to choose her any more than they'd hear the cries of an ant. She had no chance.

She watched Linna coax water spirits into creating a well for fresh water, and she watched Revi rouse the fire spirits into hollowing wood into furniture with the heat of their fire. Evvlyn was summoning earth spirits to pile rocks. Others, many whose names she didn't know, were working with the wood spirits to build houses and bridges. All of it was beyond Daleina's skill.

Oh, she could help, and she did. She could command the smaller spirits, assisting the others as much as possible, but they did the bulk. Every shred of confidence she'd developed had dribbled away. She may be able to sense spirits, but she couldn't command them, not in the same way or with the same ease as the others—not unless the spirits were already agitated. If they were worked into a frenzy, she could redirect them, shift them from destruction to creation, but this kind of pure control was beyond her. This was what Headmistress Hanna had been trying to tell her from the very beginning. This was what all her teachers had tried to tell her on every test and in every report. This was what the other champions, the ones who hadn't chosen her, saw.

Her greatest regret was that she would disappoint Ven. He'd believed in her, for some unfathomable reason. Maybe he was out of practice as a champion, or maybe he'd been fooled by a few lucky moments. When the trial was over, she'd tell him, she'd explain she simply wasn't born with the gifts that the others had. She'd never be queen.

But she could
assist
the queen, as heir. She'd play a vital role in Aratay. She was sure of it. She could be the queen's trusted adviser. Her right hand. Surely there was a place for that in the palace. She could coordinate the other heirs, find a way to effectively use them.

As plans went . . . it wasn't bad. In fact, she could feel herself getting a bit excited about it. She'd be like Headmistress Hanna, but for the graduates. She could unite them, even lead them. Yes, this was a future that fit her talents and personality. She wasn't meant to be a star, shining brighter than the rest. She was, as her reports said, a team player. After she became an heir, she'd talk to Queen Fara and propose her idea. She could be a valuable heir, even if she would never become queen.
I could still have a purpose
.

As she worked on the village, she continued to watch the other candidates. Each of them had a preferred kind of spirit, it seemed, though all by necessity could work with any kind. They fell into groups, and each group had their star. She was happy to see that some of her friends shone just as much as the others.
Iondra, for example, was adept with water spirits. She funneled them into paths, creating channels for water within the trees—rainwater basins high above that would then run through water-worn paths toward the houses. Another girl, adept with wood spirits, worked with her, creating valves and dams to control the water flow. Each house would have water in its sink. Evvlyn was working with several others to create the bridges, encouraging the wood spirits to thicken branches between the houses. Linna and Revi were a team making houses. Revi concentrated on the structure, while Linna added details like doors and windows. On the forest floor, Zie worked with a group that was cultivating the berry bushes and creating corrals for the villagers' domesticated animals.

But it was Mari who shone the brightest.

She was concentrating on the heart of the village: the marketplace. She stood in the middle of the platform, eyes closed, conducting spirits as if they were instruments in her orchestra. At some point during her training, she'd become the best of them.
She'll make an excellent queen,
Daleina thought, and was proud that she felt only a twinge of jealousy, quickly damped out.

Close behind her in skill was a woman named Berra, who had brown skin and clipped white hair and who controlled air spirits with a dizzying speed, as well as another candidate, Tiyen, a short green-haired woman who worked with a dozen earth and wood spirits at once. And then Linna—after directing wood spirits to create windows and doors, she commanded a line of fire spirits to decorate them, using their fire to etch designs into the wood. It was beautiful, precise work that required exquisite control.

All of them would make strong queens,
Daleina thought as she watched them.

On the third night, they slept in the village. Daleina picked a hut that was close to the forest floor—not on the floor, because that would be foolish, but close enough that Bayn could leap up to the platform and come inside.

It wasn't a home yet. It lacked all the details that made it lived in: bedding, curtains, dishes. But the people would bring that
when they moved here. This was the shell, the empty nest, that would welcome them. It was, she thought, a fitting tribute to the people of Greytree. New families would be happy here.

All of them had chosen to believe the earth kraken was a onetime event. It hadn't returned, and there was no way to prevent it if it did. It was chalked up to be a natural disaster, not their responsibility, though they agreed to tell the queen about it. Then she would be able to control it, once she knew it was out there.

Daleina offered Bayn a bit of her dinner. He caught plenty for himself out in the woods, but he'd developed a taste for the occasional cooked meat, or at least he never said no when Daleina gave it to him. “The others did a great job, didn't they?” Daleina asked.

Bayn never answered, but it still always felt like he understood more than he should.

“I hope the queen sees that. All of them are worthy.” She wondered what the wolf would think of her plan, to assist the queen, to admit she wasn't one of the worthy but still to try to add value. Hamon, she thought, would support her. Her family wouldn't understand.

Daleina heard footsteps outside her hut and then the door burst open. Zie stood in the doorway. “Have you seen Mari? She's missing.”

“What do you mean, ‘missing'?” Striding toward the door, Daleina signaled for Bayn to come with her. The wolf trotted after her. “Who saw her last and when?”

“No one for several hours. She told Linna that she was going to find some burn herbs. She wanted the new hedgewitch's shop to be set up with some of the basics, in case the new villagers needed any medicine when they first arrived. ‘Sickness and injury don't wait for you to settle in,' she said. But she never came back.”

“Send out spirits. Get them looking for her.”

“Already done. None of them has seen anything.”

Kneeling next to Bayn, Daleina said, “Find her, okay? Mari. Find Mari.” The wolf raced off the platform and into the forest, plunging into the underbrush.

“She couldn't have disappeared. How have you told the spirits to find her?” She approached a worried group, mostly comprised of Mari's friends. “Do the spirits know who she is?”