Chapter 109. The Bell Rang Softly at Dawn, and We Both Knew What It Meant

Chapter 109: 109. The Bell Rang Softly at Dawn, and We Both Knew What It Meant

I looked up.

She was sitting in her great white chair, with her hands folded, and the light from the dome had gone strangely thin.

Her face was calm. But there was something in her eyes that hadn’t been there before, a hard, bright, watchful gleam.

"Cassian will not wait for the moon to fall," she said.

Nobody moved.

"He is wounded... He is angry... And he has lost his best weapon." She glanced at me. "He knows what he must do."

"He will not come for the princess... He will come for the one thing that makes all of you proof against him."

I felt my stomach turn over.

"He will move," Elysandra said, "against whoever he can still turn."

A silence fell.

And in the middle of it, the great doors at the far end of the hall slammed open.

It was one of the Warden’s runners.

A young fox girl, no more than sixteen, in the green tabard of the city.

She stumbled across the marble on legs that looked like they were about to give out, with her red hair plastered to her forehead and her chest heaving.

She skidded to a halt in front of the chair and dropped to one knee.

"My lady," she gasped. "Forgive me...!"

"The watch-tower on the southern ridge sends word!"

"Speak," said Elysandra.

"The beacon." The girl swallowed. "It did not light...!"

I frowned. And I didn’t understand what they meant.

Sometimes... they always have a different accent and choice of words, but I’ll manage it. It is just that detailed and unique with how they speak as their representative animals.

"The Redhorn beacon, my lady...! On Horn Ridge!"

"It has burned every night for a hundred years! Every night, without fail!"

"It is the sign that the minotaur holds are safe." She looked up, and her eyes were enormous. "Last night, it was dark... and the night before!"

"The watch thought it was a storm, but... it was not. There is no light at all."

"No smoke. And not even a word."

Behind me, I heard something clatter on the marble floor.

I turned my head.

Magnara had dropped her axe.

It lay on the polished stones with its great blade ringing faintly, and she stood over it with both hands hanging open at her sides.

Her face had gone gray. And her mouth was slightly open.

She was staring at nothing at all, and I swear her whole body was shaking.

She said something. It was a single, broken, guttural word, in a language I didn’t know.

I’d never heard her use it... It sounded like a name.

I moved.

I didn’t think. I crossed the space between us in two strides, and I stopped at her side, close enough that my shoulder brushed her arm.

I didn’t touch her. I just stood there, and she didn’t push me away.

Across the hall, Velora’s eyes met Elysandra’s. Her hand had gone to her sword.

Elysandra had closed her eyes. She sat very still in the great white chair, with the daylight falling thin across her face.

"Then it has begun," she said.

On the table beside her, the little silver bell trembled once, very softly, and rang.

I looked at Magnara’s gray face. I looked at the small bell, still shivering faintly on its velvet tray.

And I understood, with a cold, clear certainty, that whatever time I’d thought I had, it was a great deal less than I’d hoped.

...

Nobody sleeps well in a city that is waiting for bad news, and I would like to formally report that Elarune did not sleep at all.

The Hall of the Covenant emptied out slowly after the runner left, and for a long while it felt like the quiet after a funeral.

Magnara had not picked up her axe. It lay where it had fallen, a great curved blade across the white marble, and nobody seemed to want to be the one to touch it.

Elysandra sat in her tall chair with her eyes closed. Velora stood at the window with her arms folded, looking south.

Elsbeth and Sylvara had drifted to either side of me without a word, close enough that I could feel the warmth coming off them.

It was Elysandra who finally spoke, and she did it in the calm, even voice of someone who has made a great many terrible decisions and had practice at making them quietly.

"We will not ride tonight," she said.

Magnara’s head came up like a bull’s.

"I know," Elysandra said, before the other woman could say a word. "I know what you wish to say... I would wish it too."

"But hear me, Magnara... The rune-lamp towers to Redhorn have gone dark, every one of them, which means that someone has put them out."

"A message that cannot be sent is a message someone does not wish to be heard..."

"If we ride south with no knowledge of what waits, we may ride straight into a trap built for exactly that purpose."

"My mother is there!"

"Yes..."

"My people are there!"

"Yes." Elysandra opened her eyes.

They were very clear and very sad. "I have sent riders, the fastest I have, with orders to come back and tell us what they see."

"I am asking you to wait until dawn tomorrow... One day, Magnara."

"That is all I could’ve hoped for."

For a long, terrible moment, I thought Magnara would refuse.

I could see the muscles standing out in her neck. Her hands had curled into fists, and her horns had begun to hum with a low, vibrating note that made the glass in the dome buzz.

Then the Veil Bell, still sitting on its tray beside Elysandra, gave a thin, silvery ring, as if to remind her of why this was a bad idea.

She closed her eyes.

"One day," she said, between her teeth. "Not one hour more."

...

I didn’t sleep. I want to be clear about that, because I’d like it on the record that I tried.

I lay in the narrow bed they’d given me in a guest wing of the Covenant, staring at the ceiling and listening to the city.

I could hear boots in the halls.

Someone was hammering at a forge.

A baby was crying, somewhere, in the thin, rhythmic way babies do when they’ve been crying for a long time.

When I closed my eyes, I saw a small plain woman in a white robe, and when I opened them, I saw nothing at all.

At some point around the second hour past midnight, I gave up, put on my boots, and went out to find air.

I found Magnara instead.

She was in the training yard behind the great hall, a wide, flat square of packed earth enclosed by a low stone wall, lit by a few guttering torches.

At the center of it stood a thick wooden post, twice as tall as a man, bound in iron hoops, scarred from a thousand years of practice. And she was hitting it.

She wasn’t using her good axe. She’d taken an old practice one off the rack, a blunt, heavy, ugly thing with a chipped edge, and she was swinging it with both hands, over and over, with a steady, brutal rhythm.

Every stroke landed with a crack like a falling tree.

Splinters flew.

Her shirt was soaked through, and her arms shook, and her breath tore in and out of her chest in great ragged gasps.

I sat down on the wall.

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t ask if she was all right.

She obviously wasn’t, and I knew better than to insult her with it.

I just pulled my cloak around my shoulders and sat there in the dark, with my elbows on my knees, and watched.

She saw me. I know she did, because she faltered on the next swing, just slightly, and then went on.

And she didn’t tell me to leave.

An hour went by. Then more.

The torches burned down. The moons wheeled slowly across the sky, the little pale one and the big white one, and she kept swinging.

I started to wonder when she’d fall over.

"If I stop," Magnara said at last, without turning her head, "I will think."

Her voice was rough and hoarse, scraped thin by effort.

"Then don’t stop," I said. "I’ll count."

She said nothing. All she did was swung.

"One."

Crack.

"Two."

Crack.

I counted. I don’t know why.

It seemed like the only thing I could do. I counted every swing, out loud, in a low, steady voice, while the splinters flew and the torches sank.

When I reached fifty, she was still going.

At a hundred, her arms had begun to tremble so badly that I thought the axe would fly out of her hands.

At one hundred and forty-nine, her breath started to sob.

"A hundred and fifty," I said.

The axe came down. It stuck in the post and stayed there.

Magnara stood with her hands still wrapped around the haft and her head hanging, her whole back heaving.

Then, slowly, she let go. She turned and walked across the yard and sat down on the wall beside me, heavily, like a tree falling over.

We didn’t say anything else. We sat there, side by side, with a few feet of cold air between us, and watched the sky go gray.

I was aware of the Veil Bell in my belt pouch, where Elysandra had pressed it into my hand before I left.

’So that you may know,’ she’d said. It lay quiet and cool against my hip.

It rang, once, very softly, as the first light touched the roofs.

Magnara closed her eyes. She didn’t speak.

But after a moment, her shoulder shifted, just slightly, until it was touching mine.

[Lust Energy: 96/100]

’Don’t even give me that bullshit when my energy is not under sixty, bruh...’