Chapter 74. Sleeper Seeds Woke Up, and Friends Became the Enemy in a Single Note

Chapter 74: 74. Sleeper Seeds Woke Up, and Friends Became the Enemy in a Single Note

Sylvara pushed herself to her feet and stood swaying beside me, with a bleeding scratch on her cheek and her hat long gone.

She drew three white stakes out of her pouch with trembling fingers and drove them into the stone around the cocoon, one after another, and each one lit with a thin silver spiral.

The glow that rose from them wound in with the glow already there.

"It will hold until dusk," she said. "Perhaps..."

"P-perhaps?"

"Wait, no... The word I would prefer is probably." She swallowed. "I am... not certain."

I looked at the cocoon. And I looked at the little crumpled shape beside the pool, in a white robe, with plain brown hair spilled across the stones.

Somebody had laid her arms across her chest. I thought it must have been Sylvara, and I couldn’t remember it being done.

I went and knelt beside Bonette. I didn’t say anything for a long time.

I touched my fingers to her forehead, which was still faintly warm, and I told her I’d be back.

I told her I’d bring Millie out of this alive, and that I’d bury her somewhere with a view of the moon, and that I was sorry about the cloak, because I’d never thanked her for mending it.

It was the stupidest thing to say to a dead woman, but... It was the only thing I had.

From somewhere beyond the walls, a woman screamed.

The keep had come apart while we were underground.

I’d expected a battle. But... What I walked into was something much worse.

The courtyards were full of people I knew, and they were... killing each other.

It was the note, the long, sweet, and awful note that the Throne Glass had sent out. It hadn’t hurt anyone, but it had simply woken something.

All through the keep, in the bodies of refugees and wounded and even a handful of the Warmother’s own Hearth Guard, tiny seeds of blue crystal had been sleeping.

"Sleeper seeds," Sylvara called them, with her voice thin and horrified.

The Chain had planted them during the raids on the outer villages in people who had been captured and released or who had simply been touched by a Chain-mage on the way past.

They’d been lying dormant for days.

But now... they were awake.

I saw a young Hearth Guard woman, one of the ones who had given me a piercing stare on the first night, turn without a sound and drive a spear into the shoulder of the guard beside her.

Her eyes were glowing pale blue, and her face was perfectly empty.

In the next courtyard... a group of rescued villagers stood in a circle, swaying and smiling faintly, and then in a single motion fell on a row of wounded Nightclaw lying on cots.

I ran. Sylvara ran beside me, one hand pressed to her side, throwing nets of violet light over everyone she could reach.

"Don’t hurt them!" she kept gasping. "They are not in control!"

"I know!" I yelled. "I’m trying!"

I didn’t have a good way to stop a person without hurting her.

I used the flat of Gate Junior, the pommel, my elbows, and a kitchen table, and I tackled a woman twice my size into a haystack and sat on her until Sylvara could reach us.

Every time I knocked somebody down, I thought of Torunn and of the small, still shape in the shrine.

I didn’t say a word... I didn’t have any jokes left, and I wasn’t sure I would ever find them again.

I rounded a corner into a long, narrow passage and nearly ran straight into someone’s back.

She was standing at the iron-bound inner gate with both hands on the great bar, hauling at it with all her strength. She was a small, gentle-faced woman in a patched gray dress, with soft brown hair and a smile on her lips.

I recognized her instantly... with a sick, cold drop in my gut.

She was the woman who had brought us tea.

"Excuse me," I said.

My voice cracked. "What are you doing?"

She turned her head. And the smile didn’t change.

Her eyes were the pale, empty blue of a winter sky, and she regarded me with perfect, placid tenderness.

"Master said you would be kind to me," she said.

I hit her with the pommel of my sword.

I didn’t do it hard. I did it exactly hard enough, behind the ear, the way Velora had shown me, and I caught her as she folded and laid her down against the wall with her cheek on her arm.

A thin crack ran across a small blue shard behind her ear. She was breathing.

"Her name is Dagny," Sylvara said, hoarsely, coming up behind me.

She had her hand on the woman’s wrist. "She was one of the nine we rescued at the ford..."

"She was the one who brought the tea."

"She’s been listening," I said slowly.

"Not her." Sylvara shook her head. "The seed... it hears what is said around it and passes it to whoever holds the Throne Glass."

"That bastard... Cassian has known every word we have spoken for days."

I stared at the woman on the floor. I thought about the long table, the maps, and the plan I had drawn with my own finger.

A plan that I’d been so proud of... A plan that fucking son of a bitch had known about before the sun was up.

"I... told him," I said. "It’s my fault... I drew him the whole thing."

"You did not know."

"No!" I stomped the ground. "I should have."

"Leon." Sylvara took my sleeve. "There is no time for this."

She was right. And I wanted to hit something because of that.

I swallowed it down and pulled the bar off the gate, and we ran on.

Ding!

[Lust Energy: 36/100]

I wasn’t even startled... I was beginning to think the number was following me around out of spite.

And somewhere between the Moon Shrine and the courtyard, my brain, which hates being idle even in a crisis, quietly came to the worst conclusion of my life.

The son of a bitch I called Cassian wasn’t just a man with a lot of crystals. He had walked into a shrine full of the strongest women in the world, and they had all been struggling to stay on their feet.

He didn’t fight them like an enemy. He took them apart like a lock, one tumbler at a time, with the exact right key.

He was the thing built to break them.

I didn’t know yet how wrong I was... I’d find out later.

At the time, running through the smoke with a sword in my hand, it was simply the most frightening idea I’d ever had.

Velora was holding the gate alone.

I knew it was bad before I saw it, because the first thing I heard was her voice. It was low and hoarse and absolutely steady, and it was giving orders in the tone of someone who had decided that she would not be the first to break.

I rounded the corner into the gatehouse and stopped.

She stood in the center of the broken doorway with her katana in her hand. Her white coat was torn, her hair had come half out of its ribbon, and a thin line of blood ran from her lower lip down her chin.

She’d bitten through it... I understood why.

Around her, in a loose, swaying ring, stood a dozen Nightclaw riders, and every one of them had a pale blue glow in her eyes.

They weren’t attacking... Not yet.

They stood with their blades half raised, shaking, as if two people were trying to occupy one body.

One of them was crying. And another had both hands clamped over her ears.

"Do not let them die," Velora said.

She wasn’t talking to me. She was talking to herself, I think, or to the gods, or to the riders she had led for years and was now going to have to knock out one at a time.

Her voice nearly cracked on the last word.

"You are late," she said, without turning her head.

I came to stand at her back. Our shoulders touched as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

"I had a tea-lady situation," I said.

"Of course you did."

"Long story."

"I do not wish to hear it."

There was something strange in her voice. It was almost a laugh, but it didn’t quite make it out of her throat.