CHAPTER TWENTY-TWOElric
ELRIC’S MIND RACED. LORD RAVEN’S plan had worked; the elves knew who he was. This was bad.
Axis’s face was expressionless, and his orange eyes now seemed calculating. “Lock them in the infirmary,” he said.
A guard scooped up Osmund’s now-limp body and carried him toward a nearby building, but Elric fought.
“What do you want from me?” Elric shouted. He tried to make himself bigger, but he was still only a boy, and these were grown men. It was no use, they had him overpowered and surrounded. He stopped struggling and stood up straight.
Axis glanced down at the ground, then folded his hands behind his back, creasing the elaborately embroidered edges of his heavy robes. He paced away from Elric. “I want to right a terrible wrong,” he said. “And fortune has smiled upon us. I have you now. The queen’s power will weaken, and without you there, her precious shield will lose its strength. That is when we can finally mount our attack.”
“Why would you do such a thing? The queen is only trying to defend her people,” Elric said through gritted teeth. He felt a tightness in his chest, and he fought the stinging in his eyes.
Axis turned to him and stared him down. “So am I,” he said.
“No,” Elric said. “You’re a selfish betrayer.”
The Headmind’s eyes widened as he stormed forward and grabbed Elric by the throat. Elric grasped his forearm and tried to pull away from him, but it was no use. “We betrayed no one!” he shouted.
He let go of Elric and turned away as Elric fought to find his feet.
“That shield is powered through the crystal that we gave the queen in friendship,” Axis said with a growl in his voice. “It has the power to defeat the Grendel, but instead of using it to rid the world of darkness, she has used it to keep her people safe while we suffer in this wood alone. The Grendel destroyed our great city, decimated our people, and does the queen care? No. When my mother, Headmind Reason, was murdered in our woods, did the fairies come to our aid? No.”
The elf’s gaze turned piercing. “The queen put up her precious shield using the power of our crystal, and left us to suffer and die alone in these woods. She has never cared about us. That changes today. We will break the shield and take our crystal back.”
“Reason stole the queen’s child and gave her to the enemy. The fairies saw what happened!” Elric argued.
“What?” Axis shouted. “Why would we do such a thing? We were friends to the fairies. Besides, we found my mother dead in the woods the night before the shield appeared.”
Elric looked at him dumbfounded. He didn’t know what to say. “How is that possible?” If what the elf said was true, the elves had nothing to do with the death of the fairy princess. And if they were innocent? But this could all be a trick. It was easy to lie. However, it wasn’t easy to fake the shock and confusion he saw on the elf leader’s face. Axis looked to Elric like an old king who was tired of war, but unable to escape a siege. And when he first met the elf, he struck Elric as the sort that never gave any hint of emotion away freely.
“Father!” A young elf in dark robes with a necklace made of amber skittered into the room. She carried a fat black hen under her arm. “Father! You have to come and see!”
“Not now, Lexicon,” Axis growled.
“Mildred!” Elric shouted. She was alive! Elric pulled against the elf holding him.
Mildred let out a mighty squawk. She looked over toward him, then immediately struggled to free herself from the elf girl’s grip. She flapped and twisted, leaving the elf girl awkwardly holding on to her legs as Mildred fought to go to him. Mildred fell forward, landing on her chest on the hard ground. The elf girl let go, then blinked up at him with big orange-yellow eyes so like the color of her necklace.
“You’re Elric,” she said with wonder in her high-pitched voice. Then she clapped her hands over her mouth. Elric didn’t think it was possible, but her huge eyes widened even more.
Elric’s heart jumped. Mildred was here. This girl knew his name. That could mean only one thing.
“Wynn is here!” he shouted. “You have my sister!”
Mildred ran to him. He pulled free of the guard’s hold and scooped up the hen. She chattered and clucked, as if she were recounting her entire journey through the woods to him. “Where is Wynn?” Elric demanded of the Headmind.
“Lock him in the infirmary with the other one. Allow no one to speak with him,” Axis insisted.
The elf girl took her father by the hand and pulled him forward. “Father, now is not the time. You have to come, quickly. You have to see.”
“Lexicon, I will deal with you later,” he said. “I have urgent business to attend to.”
“Dex is awake!” She balled her fists, and the thick sleeves of her robe fell over them. “I went to Wynn in the night and asked her to use fairy magic on him, but she said she didn’t know fairy magic, but she knew a different kind of magic and she taught it to me. She taught me to sing, so I did.”
“Music is forbidden!” the Headmind shouted. “It gives the fairies power!”
The elf girl balled her fists. “Well, I sat up and sang all night at Codex’s bedside, and now he is opening his eyes.”
The girl’s words tumbled out in such a rush that Elric wasn’t entirely sure he understood. He only really caught the bit about singing. That certainly sounded like Wynn’s doing.
The Headmind’s skin paled to a sickly green, and Elric watched as his face lit with a sudden fire. “My son? He’s awake?”
Axis strode toward the building where they had taken Osmund. The elf girl gave Elric a look, then reached out
