Chapter 31: The Glass Orchard

Chapter 31: Chapter 31: The Glass Orchard

Iris opened her hand.

Everything she’d been holding dropped at once. Elias slid down the crystal trunk and hit the ground on his knees. His dagger fell point-first into the soil beside him. Tobin’s cleavers came down spinning, and Tobin caught both by the handles without even looking up, the way a cook catches a pan. Marcus’s rifle snapped back level in his hands.

Iris was already gone, leaping backward off the bulging earth, riding the iron of the nearest fence twenty meters up the slope.

The ground beneath where she’d stood exploded.

It came up out of the earth like a cathedral rising from a flood. First the body, a mound of living crystal as big as a house, glittering pale green and shot through with veins of refracted light. Then the necks, seven of them, unfolding from its back like the fingers of an opening hand, each one thick as a tree trunk and twice as long. At the end of each neck was a head shaped like an arrowhead of glass, eyeless, edged sharp enough to shave light.

All seven heads opened their mouths at once, and the sound that came out was a thousand windows shattering.

In the Link, seven red markers burned, fused together at the base. Above them, a single health bar stretched so long it ran off the edge of Elias’s vision.

Up on the slope, Iris raised both hands toward the nearest head and pulled.

Nothing happened.

Elias saw the moment she understood. Her fingers curled, reaching for something that wasn’t there, and her face went blank with disbelief. There was no metal in it. Not a gram. The thing was glass all the way through.

The first head came down on her.

It struck like a falling tower, straight down at the fence she stood on. Iris was fast, faster than anyone Elias had ever seen, but she’d spent a full second reaching for metal that didn’t exist. She wasn’t going to be fast enough.

Aveline was.

The knight crossed twenty meters of slope in five long strides and leapt onto the fence beside Iris with her shield raised. The glass head hit it with a sound like a bell cracking. Aveline’s boots punched through the fence’s iron crossbar. The shield screamed. She was driven to one knee, then to both, her arm locked, her whole body a wall.

She held.

The head reared back for another strike. A long, thin crack ran across the face of Aveline’s shield, top to bottom.

Iris stared at her from half a meter away. A minute ago, this woman had been straining against Iris’s grip on her shield.

"Move," Aveline told her calmly. "It’s coming back."

"Marcus," Elias said. "Heads. Any of them."

The rifle cracked. A blue round hit the second head square between where its eyes should have been, and glass burst outward in a spray of glittering shrapnel. The head reeled back, a crack running down its whole length like a crack across ice.

Then the crack closed.

Elias watched it happen. The glass simply flowed back together, smooth and seamless, as if someone had poured the shattered part back into a mold. Three seconds, and the head was whole again.

"It regenerates," Marcus said flatly. "Of course it does."

Tobin waded in at the base of the nearest neck, both cleavers swinging. Each blow bit a chunk out of the crystal with a sound like dropping plates. The neck lashed sideways and knocked him off his feet into a row of crystal saplings, which shattered around him.

"Ow," said Tobin from inside the debris. Then, rising, brushing glass out of his beard: "Right. That’s personal now."

The hydra fought in waves. One head would strike, then two, then three at once, from different angles, so that nobody could watch them all. Every time a head was hit, it burst into shrapnel that rained down across the grove like hail made of knives. Elias felt fragments slice his cheek and his hands. Aveline held the front, her cracked shield taking blow after blow, the crack spreading wider every time. Marcus kept firing, round after round, each one leaving a wound that healed before he could fire the next.

"Left, two heads," Elias called. "Tobin, down! Aveline, high!"

He called it right. Every time. And it didn’t matter, because every wound they made simply closed again.

Up on the slope, Iris had recovered. She’d stopped reaching for the hydra and started reaching for everything else. She tore a length of fence wire out of the ground with a flick of both wrists, rusted barbed wire forty meters long, and whipped it through the air like a lasso. It wrapped around the fourth head’s neck three times and pulled tight.

For one second, the neck strained against it.

Then the glass under the wire simply shattered, and the head fell, and the wire slid loose. The neck grew a new head out of the stump in four seconds flat.

Iris swore, very fluently, in a way that made Tobin look up approvingly.

Elias kept watching. Not the heads. The body. Every time a head regrew, a faint pulse of light moved through the hydra’s crystal chest, like a heartbeat seen through a window. It came from somewhere deep inside. He couldn’t see the source. The light refracted through so much glass that it seemed to come from everywhere at once.

He needed more. He needed to see it happen again. And again.

The health bar at the edge of his vision hadn’t moved at all.

A head swung low across the grove, and Elias threw himself behind a boulder of milky quartz. A second later, someone landed beside him in a swirl of charcoal coat.

Iris Blackwood crouched with her back to the rock, breathing hard, a thin line of blood running down her temple where shrapnel had caught her. The three steel coins still orbited her hand, but slowly now, as if they were tired too.

For a moment, they just looked at each other.

"Your knight," Iris said. "She took a hit for me."

"She does that."

"I pinned you to a tree."

"She noticed." Elias wiped glass dust out of his eyes. "She’d still do it again."

Iris stared at him as if he’d said something in a language she didn’t speak. Over the boulder, they could hear Aveline’s shield ringing under another blow, and Tobin bellowing at the hydra about manners, and the steady, patient crack of Marcus’s rifle.

"Fine," Iris said at last. "Truce. Until that thing is dead. After that, you’re answering every question I have."

"Fine."

"I mean it."

"So do I." Elias peered around the edge of the quartz. The hydra had all seven heads up again, swaying, waiting. In the Link, the light pulsed through its chest one more time and was gone. "It’s not the heads. Hitting the heads is pointless. They grow back from something inside the body. I can see it pulse every time one regrows, but I can’t find where it’s coming from yet."

"So we can’t hurt it."

"We can’t hurt it yet." He looked past the hydra at the slope, at the long rows of rusted iron fence running between the crystal trees, row after row, all the way down the valley. "How much of that can you move?"

Iris followed his eyes. "All of it."

"At once?"

She hesitated. Then, slowly, something like a smile started at the corner of her mouth. "Probably."

"Then I need a hundred meters of iron," Elias said. "Ready to go. And I need you to wait for my call. Not before."

The smile vanished. "I don’t take orders from porters."

"Then don’t take it as an order." He looked at her. "Take it as the only plan anyone here has."

Iris held his gaze for a long second. On the other side of the boulder, the hydra screamed, and all seven heads reared back together, rising high against the green sky.

She breathed out through her nose.

"Fine," she said. "What’s the call?"