Daggerback just to break the tension when he realized something was wrong. He froze for several seconds, listening as hard as he could, and then he shot to his feet and started marching toward the tree line.
“What is it?” Josef called behind him.
“The forest is silent,” Eli called back, breaking into a jog.
The Awakened Wood was never silent. Ever. In all the times Eli had been here, he’d never heard all the trees fall quiet at once. Something was wrong. He could actually see it as he came closer. Despite the stiff breeze blowing down from the mountains, every one of the narrow trunks was perfectly still, their branches frozen in place.
Even the leaves were motionless, their narrow, golden shapes as still and sharp as knives against the pale blue sky. Frowning, Eli reached out to touch the closest trunk. The wood was tense beneath his fingers, taut as a drawn bowstring just before it snapped. Eli snatched his hand away, but before he could think of what to say, the silence shattered.
It broke like glass, and the trees surged together as one word echoed through the forest.
“Gone!”
The trees screamed in a single ragged voice so loud that Eli clapped his hands over his ears on instinct, even though he knew it would do no good. Nothing physical could stop that raw terror, that crippling, hopeless despair.
“Gone!” they roared again. “Gone, gone, gone!”
With each repetition, the unified voice began to splinter. The tremendous roar sent Eli stumbling back, putting several feet of distance between himself and the trees that were now thrashing furiously, transforming the graceful, golden Awakened Wood into a storm-wracked sea.
“Eli!” Josef shouted. Eli turned to see the swordsman sheltering Nico with his body, staring at the rocking trees in confusion. “What is going on?”
Eli had no answer for him. He could only cringe in horror as, with a final, sobbing wail, the trees tore their roots from the ground and began to rip each other apart.
CHAPTER
13
Alric, Deputy Commander of the League of Storms, sat at his desk behind a mountain of reports, rubbing his temples in a futile attempt to forestall the massive headache that was building at the front of his skull. There had been many, many times in his long career with the League when the Lord of Storms had demanded the impossible, and every time, Alric had delivered. That used to make him proud, but as the years rolled by, he’d come to realize that the problem with always doing the impossible was that people came to expect it. You had to keep performing miracles over and over again until you finally hit a task that was truly impossible and were forced, at last, to fail. He glanced up again at the stack of waiting reports. Had his time come at last?
As though in answer, a cluster of thin, white lines opened in the air above his desk and another half-dozen reports fell onto the pile below, sending the rest of the papers sliding. Alric closed his eyes and wondered if he should just retire now, while he still could.
On the surface, the task was a simple one: find and kill the Daughter of the Dead Mountain. Alric still shuddered at the name, remembering what he’d seen a few years ago at the Shaper Mountain, and then again recently in the forest on the outskirts of Den’s bandit city. Alric had seen her clearly both times, but even for him, a longstanding League member, fear made his memories hazy. He could recall only glimpses: the endless black shadows, the wings, the millions of mouths…
Even these few details were enough to make him shake. The Daughter was the largest demonseed he’d ever personally encountered, perhaps the largest in the League’s history, but strangely, it wasn’t the killing part that had him worried. Even the Daughter of the Dead Mountain couldn’t stand against the unified efforts of the League of Storms now that the Shepherdess had withdrawn her favor from the man who had harbored her, Eli Monpress. No, it was the finding part of the mission that was giving Alric fits, and the Lord of Storms was swiftly growing impatient, even more so than usual.
And it was all Alric’s fault, too. That was the worst bit to swallow.
Alric had, of course, been keeping an eye on the girl on behalf of the League from the moment Monpress and his companions had left the bandit’s camp. Her thrice-cursed coat made it impossible to actually watch her through the network of spirits who reported to the League, but keeping track of her companions had been almost laughably easy.
Josef Liechten in particular had been making quite the name for himself, and if the events at Izo’s had taught Alric anything, it was that wherever Liechten was, the Daughter of the Dead Mountain wasn’t far behind. So when the Lord of Storms had called them all together to announce the hunt, the first thing Alric had done was check Liechten’s location. And, he recalled with a deep sigh, the second thing he’d done was convince the Lord of Storms to wait.
He’d done it with the best of intentions. Liechten had been in Zarin at the time. Alric was not squeamish about the spilling of innocent blood if it got the job done, but this was simply too much. Any fight between the Lord of Storms and the Daughter of the Dead Mountain was sure to destroy anything it was near, and Zarin was the largest city on this half of the world. If the League had gone after her there, it would have been a massacre of unimaginable proportions.
So, using every trick he’d learned in the several lifetimes he’d spent as the Lord of Storms’ second, Alric had convinced his commander to wait. They knew where the demonseed was, he’d argued, and she still reckoned herself safe. They just had to draw her out to somewhere less populated, an easy task requiring little more than a duel challenge from the Lord of Storms to Josef Liechten. The swordsman would never turn down a duel against a superior opponent. Liechten would go, the demonseed would follow, and then it would simply be a matter of closing the trap.
Such a good, simple plan. But then, between one hour and the next, everything had changed. Without so much as a warning, the rivers had gone mad, and in the confusion that followed, Alric’s agents had lost both Josef Liechten and the Daughter of the Dead Mountain. That was almost eighteen hours ago, and since then, nothing. It was like the girl and her swordsman had just vanished into thin air, which, considering she was a demonseed, wasn’t actually impossible. As the night wore on, Alric had expanded his search to the entire continent, but the answer was always the same: no sign of the girl or her swordsman.
Alric leaned back in his chair with a long sigh. He was working up the will to go through the newest batch of reports that had just landed on his desk when his body froze. As always, he smelled the Lord of Storms the second before he appeared. The sharp tang of burning ozone brought the Deputy Commander to his feet, and Alric fell into a low bow just in time as the white portal winked into existence.
The Commander was shouting before his boots hit the floor, his voice thundering with a fury that still made Alric cringe even after so many years.
“Have you found her?”
“Not yet, my Lord,” Alric said. “I have every agent looking as we speak.”
The Lord of Storms gave him an accusing look. “You told me she’d fully awakened in the mountains while I was away. I don’t care what she did to cram herself back down after, her damn coat can’t have kept up completely. How have you not found her yet?”
“I don’t know,” Alric said truthfully. “Even stretched beyond its limits, Heinricht Slorn’s craftsmanship remains superb.”
The Lord of Storms bared his teeth. “I’m going to skin that bear man.”
“That wouldn’t help matters,” Alric said. “The coat is no longer her only cover. She’s learned to dampen herself somehow, to clamp down on her own demonic nature. I have reason to believe she used her powers quite heavily in Osera, and yet there was little more than a blip so far as the spirits were concerned, though any panic might have been lost in the chaos caused by a war between stars.”
The Lord of Storms settled his long fingers on the hilt of his sword. “I’m hearing a lot of excuses, Alric. That’s not like you.”
