I needed to find Timur. The sun sank lower in the sky, casting long shadows from the trees. It had passed like minutes, but I must have been in the lake close to an hour.
As soon as I got to my feet, a shrieking bird dove toward me. I shielded my face as it tore into my sleeve, clawing my arm. I slashed my dagger at it and ran into the trees, leaping over bushes with vines writhing like serpents. Leaves sharper than glass rained around me. Timur should have finished crossing the lake already, unless he tried to cross at a wider juncture of the lake. If Mehti and Diya reached the bluff before me, Timur would lose his chance at the second trial. Without my interference, he could not cry sabotage to Vaida. He would not die in Ayume.
I tore away a branch clinging to my vest, straining to hear the other Champions. A flock of birds screamed as they flew into the bladed leaves. Bloody feathers floated into my field of vision, and I stumbled over an eddy of water divorced from the lake. A rabbit lay sideways in the shallow pool, enveloped in the void but for a single, open eye.
The battle of Ayume had warped this territory into a sick mimicry of nature. Dania’s twisted magic saturated the very pores of Ayume. The Orbanian forest survived as a relic, a living massacre, kept sentient by the blood of Kapastra’s fallen soldiers surging through the forest’s veins.
I lost track of time as I cut through the forest. When the trees thinned, I unfurled my clenched fingers from around my dagger and panted. The white cliffside loomed ahead, its edge a crooked line along the sky. Sunset threatened on the horizon. Had any of the other Champions already reached it? Had they climbed the bluff?
I pressed the cloth closer to my mouth, sipping the air and running my gaze over the vast line of Ayume. Where were they?
“You finished first.”
I wheeled around. Timur tossed a rock from hand to hand. Sweat shimmered on his forehead, and his words came sluggishly. He had inhaled too much of the toxic air.
“I wish you hadn’t. I wish Her Majesty had been wrong, just this one time.”
Essiya, back away, Hanim said suddenly, urgent. Get away from him.
“What do you mean?” I asked. Behind my back, I pulled my dagger free and planted my thumb on the base. “Are you all right, Timur?”
I already understood. Had I not been embroiled in the muck of my conscience, the possibility would have been glaringly obvious. Vaida needed her Champion to win. I remained her biggest obstacle. If I would not concede defeat, I would be stopped.
“What did she offer you?” The sky clung to the vanishing sun as twilight painted orange streaks over the horizon. “Wealth? Protection?” I recalled our conversation in the courtyard. “Is she threatening your family?”
Timur’s brawny arms trembled. He coughed, spitting a bloody wad to the ground. “My sister is dying. The supplies the chemists need to make the cure are limited, and we do not have the means to pay them ourselves. Sultana Vaida—she promised, she said if I made certain you lost the Alcalah, Maram would be taken care of.”
“What about the riches awarded to the Victor? Surely such wealth could produce a cure for your sister.”
Timur was already shaking his head. “There isn’t time. There is one vial of the cure available now, and if you do not continue to the second trial, my sister will have it by this evening.”
I wanted to throw the leaves of Ayume at Vaida, slice her layers of artifice and manipulation bare and toss what remained for the carrion-eaters.
“She created the problem, and now she bargains to fix it! Royals weave traps for the likes of us. They watch while we squirm and expect gratitude when they deign to release a select few from their web. I was a chemist’s apprentice in Omal. The foremost chemist in the entire kingdom. I can help your sister, Timur. We will make more vials. You do not have to carry out Vaida’s will.”
“Knowing you are in a trap does not make it any easier to escape.” Timur’s eyes brightened with unshed tears. He shifted to the side, revealing a cavity in the gray boulders behind him. He hurled the rock into the cave. “Forgive me, Sylvia.”
Three sets of indigo eyes materialized from the cave, and a guttural growl shook the earth.
At one point in time, the three nightmares emerging from the cave were probably average mutts. The mangy dogs Fairel loved, the ones most often covered in soot, found nosing through Mahair’s smoldering garbage. Ayume had layered its evil over these dogs. Black drool dripped from jaws the size of boulders. Claws protruded from misshapen paws, and long, pointed teeth mashed together. They did not spare Timur a glance, but fixated on me.