50
Eliana
“Whatever tomorrow may bring, the world will remember this as the day Astavar stood its ground against a great evil and fought for its fallen sister kingdoms until there was no more fight to give.”
—Speech from Tavik and Eri Amaruk, kings of Astavar, to their army
August 16, Year 1018 of the Third Age
Eliana jumped off the ship and into the lifeboat, landed hard on her knees, then used Tuora and Tempest to hack through the boat’s load lines.
Once they were free, she grabbed the oars and started rowing. Gunfire struck the water on either side of them. Adatrox crowded the ship’s railing, guns sparking with every shot.
Eliana ducked as a bullet shot past her ear and yanked Simon down by his collar. Cannon fire slammed into the water nearby, rocking the boat and splashing them with a frigid spray.
At Simon’s hissed curse, Eliana spared a glance for his bloodied torso. She had grabbed him a jacket and sword from one of the adatrox she’d slain while securing their boat, but a jacket and sword would do him no good if she couldn’t get him to a healer—and fast.
Once out of the adatroxes’ firing range, Eliana passed the oars to Simon. “Can you row? Just for a minute.”
“I’ll row for as long as you need me to,” he replied.
She hurried to the front of the boat, crouched beside Simon, and scanned the water ahead.
“Maybe five hundred more yards,” she said, “through these icebergs, and then I think I see a path to shore.”
“You see a path of what, exactly?”
“Ice. Some rocks too.”
“Ah. No problem at all, for a newly blinded man to skip across the water on such a path.”
She couldn’t help a smile. “I’ll help you. So will Zahra.”
“Eliana?” Zahra’s stricken voice made Eliana turn. “Something’s happening.”
“What?” Eliana squinted across the black water. The Empire fleet—thirty vessels, most of them massive warships—were moving into a long line along the thinning ice. “What are they doing?”
“Describe it to me,” Simon said.
“They’re gathering beside the ice in a line, one right after the other, their prows facing north.” Eliana couldn’t make sense of the maneuver. “It’s like they’re making a barrier between the ice and the open water. A blockade?”
“And they’ve stopped firing,” Zahra observed.
With a scraping thud, the lifeboat rammed into a low slab of ice. Eliana climbed out at once and held the boat fast, Zahra floating beside her.
“Climb out over here,” Eliana instructed.
Simon fumbled to find the stolen adatrox sword and obeyed, slowly feeling his way out of the boat. Eliana guided him across the ice, then over a narrow gap of dark water to another huge slab.
Simon looked out at the fleet with reddened eyes. “Why have they stopped firing?”
“I don’t know, but we should take advantage of it and hurry.”
But then, just as Zahra let out a sharp cry of despair, a low horn blasted across the water. As one, entire sections of the warships’ hulls fell open and slammed down onto the ice. A wave of darkness tumbled out and started galloping madly for shore. Discordant, shrill cries filled the air—howls, half-formed words, screams of fury.
Eliana’s blood ran colder than the ice now quaking under her feet. She knew those sounds, from her time in the Fidelia labs.
“What is that?” Simon tensed beside her. “Eliana, tell me what’s happening.”
“Crawlers!” Zahra shoved through Eliana’s shoulders. “We must go, my queen!”
But Eliana stood frozen. She watched the creatures barreling toward them across the ice. They moved so quickly, half running, half crawling, their limbs turning unnaturally with every stride.
“Fidelia,” Eliana whispered, taking two unsteady steps back. It was just as Zahra had said: Fidelia had turned the stolen women of Ventera into monsters.
Zahra stretched to her fullest, darkest height and roared, “Run!”
Eliana spun, slid and fell, hit her jaw on the ice. She scrambled back to her feet, found Simon, grabbed his hand.
“Can you see at all?” she cried over the approaching din. Alarm bells rang across the Astavari ships. Their cannon fire resumed, blasting a dozen new holes in the ice before the encroaching wave of crawlers.
“Just run,” Simon shouted at her. “And don’t look back!”
He tried to shake her off, but she held fast. “I’m not leaving you here!”