CHAPTER FOURTEEN: STORM
I am the storm, and the storm is rage,
and all the peace I seek shall die tonight,
consumed in a fire I cannot contain.
-Lucratos, 'The Elements'
Thea awoke slowly, wonderfully, with Matthias right behind her, his body warm and his arm draped over her. She lay there for a while, content to listen to his breathing, distracted only from the bouts of giggling erupting at regular intervals from across the hall. She slid out from under Matthias, leaving him to sleep - he needed it. After their bout in bed yesterday, Matthias had gone out and helped the workers moving lumber from the old great hall over to the palisade. Then afterward, he and Thea had gone back for an even more vigorous round two.
Thea had exhausted herself, too, practicing at drills with Cano and the fighting volunteers. She ended up being Cano's demonstration partner because she could get the moves right on her first or second try, even when they were pretty complex. Then she tried to partner with some of the women to drill on strategy and technique, but kept getting sidetracked by men who needed to see the moves for laying a pike, dismounting a rider, disarming a swordsman, or charging an archer one more time. She thought it was because her technique, copied from Cano, was excellent (which it was), realizing only after a dozen or more such demonstrations that they just wanted to watch her darting and jumping around, and that nearly all of the men would stop and watch whenever she went into action. Thea knew her new form was distractingly attractive - she was even proud of the fact - but it was aggravating how it could interfere with things. Hopefully, she hadn't distracted the volunteer militia from learning what they needed to learn to fend off invaders.
Thea slid out from under Matthias and padded across the hall, cracking the door open just enough to see Maddie and Svilga sitting on their bed and giggling. Svilga picked up one of Matthias's golden talents, holding it above Maddie's hand. Then she let the coin drop... only, instead of catching it, Maddie's hand faded translucent and the talent hit the mattress with a little piff. Svilga and Maddie giggled and bounced excitedly. Then Maddie picked up the coin and did the same thing to Svilga... only, Thea distracted them at exactly the right moment and Svilga mistimed her 'trick'. The coin froze in its fall, half-embedded in her hand.
"Ahh! Ow... ow ow ow ow," Svilga said, shaking her hand, but the coin was in there good.
"Ghost your hand! Ghost your hand," Maddie said.
"Ow ow ow..." Svilga ghosted her hand mid-shake, rocketing the coin over to Thea, who caught it just before it popped into her forehead.
"Good morning, girls," Thea said. She placed the golden talent - far too much for children to be carrying around - on the mattress. "Is that a new trick?"
"Sort of," Maddie said. "We were doing it before, but we didn't know it. If we really think about it, we can go right through things. Only a few seconds at a time, but maybe we can get better."
"Maybe so," Thea said. "I wish I could have done that the time I got shot by an arrow."
"Your armor didn't stop it?" Svilga asked - Thea had changed back into her black dress, the only other ensemble she owned, but would be changing back into her Battle-Maiden armor at the first sign of trouble.
Maddie tugged at the patterned satin of Thea's bell sleeves. "She didn't get her armor until after Purgistok, remember? Her dress changed until it was armor. That's one of her powers - not as good as ghosting, but I still figure it's pretty useful."
"It is," Thea agreed. "Why don't we get breakfast while your dad catches up on sleep?"
+++++
The downstairs of Swill Bill's was already packed with people waiting to get paid for yesterday's work and even more who'd heard about the good deal - an argento per day - and decided to seek their fortunes, as well. Thea popped back upstairs, helped herself to the contents of Matthias's pouch, and then did some fancy change-making to pay the people who'd worked half a day. Naturally, some people showed up who hadn't worked yesterday. They either hadn't been there when Matthias took the names or had been there, but had slipped off and never done their assigned work. Since Thea already had the names, both from hearing Matthias and speaking with Larian that evening, she knew who'd been working and who hadn't. She did some fancy change-making with Bill and several of the others to manage half an argento for each worker.
"What do you mean I don't get any?" Garro Bask grumbled. "I worked half the day at the earthenworks."
"You signed up, but you didn't actually do the work, did you?" Thea looked him up and down - a large man and reasonably strong, they could have done with Garro's help, but he'd just wandered off to get drunk somewhere else rather than helping yesterday.
"Are you calling me a liar?"
A large, angry man was a bit intimidating to Thea now... though certainly less so than when she'd first changed. She was growing used to being smaller than many men and had skills aplenty to balance the difference. She looked to the crowd, all of them curious and closely attentive as to what was unfolding. If Thea folded to Garro Bask, there'd be five times as many cheaters tomorrow.
"I'm suggesting, Mr. Bask, that you may be mistaken," Thea said. "Now... you can go out there and work for a day today and collect your argento. Or you can press your luck and get nothing. Which will it be?"
"I ought to..."
"You ought to what?" Thea asked.
"I ought to get to work," he sighed. "Earthworks?"
Thea nodded. She looked to the rest of them, muttering amongst themselves about what had just happened. "Don't try to trick me. I don't doubt that most of you were able to fool me seven ways to Seasday when I was Theo. But however much of me is him, I'm a very canny version of him... so, please, don't try your luck."
And, fortunately, nobody else did. After giving work assignments for the day, Thea went down to find Cano in the basement of the church. He had a dozen people down there working with him - right now, most of them were working on adding reinforcements and defenses to the crypt entryway. They'd already done the big work on the entry to the tunnels - with some help, Cano had taken out elements of the floor and moved them to the periphery of the crypt. Now, there was a broad passageway down into the tunnel-works below, with something resembling steps made from appropriately-large stones piled into a slope. It wasn't the most accessible part of Rouentz, but it was much better than the claustrophobic chute the day before.
"You were able to get all of the militia up here yesterday?" Thea asked.
Cano shrugged and gestured to a pile of hemp rope. "Some of them weren't in any shape to climb, even when unbound, so I had to haul them up. No problem, though. We've got them in the secure room at the old town hall. I figure they're a lot safer than their friends out at the encampment - as soon as they start anything funny, they're in for a world of hurt, and I can't be gentle with eighty men the way I can with six or seven.
"Understood," Thea said. "I'm going to have some supplies brought down to the tunnels. Some potable water and enough dry food for a few days' living for a few hundred people. Regardless of what happens with this 'Lord Quill', I don't think our troubles are over yet, and I'd rather be prepared than not."
"Have it brought here, and I'll see that it's down and safe. I'm more concerned about making sure our people can get in but can secure the door behind themselves."
Thea nodded. Cano was a good man (well, teenager) and dependable when he wasn't on the warpath. But the real question, as far as Thea was concerned, was whether the people of Rouentz ought to hole up in the tunnels in the event of an invasion or escape into the countryside. Boththro options had their advantages and their inherent dangers. And, realistically, they weren't going to know which option was better until it was too late to change their minds. She felt like a third wheel, among the big men lifting and hammering at things a bit beyond her own ability, and so Thea proceeded back up to direct food and supplies into the church - but she never got a chance to do that.
Thea walked out to the churchyard, looked across that, through the commons, and to Henrietta Fielder's dry goods, wondering at the best way to feed a few hundred people underground for a week or so. There, past Henrietta's, past the palisade and past the tree line beyond, dark clouds were gathering. These weren't dark clouds brooding on the horizon - they were roiling in faster than any storm that she'd ever seen. That couldn't be a coincidence.
She dashed back into the church, up the three flights of stairs to the big belfry bell, grabbing the great brass ringer and swinging it back and forth as hard as she could. The sound up close was deafening, and Thea noticed the little box of cotton earplugs by the bell a moment too late. She stopped clanging at the bell, stuffed cotton in her ears, and rang again. Now, the sound was only slightly deafening, and she was more aware of the rattling of her teeth than anything else. After a minute of that, she dashed back to the tavern to fetch her armor. The dark clouds were already sweeping over the town, gradually dimming the sun and threatening a deluge at any moment.
As she dashed by him, Heath stopped Thea, tugging at her sleeve hard enough that it ripped at the satiny fabric. "What in the hell is happening? Somebody was just ringing the church bell in alarm..."
"That was me, and I have no idea." Thea pointed to the clouds. "Do you think that's a coincidence, because I don't? Get up in that church tower and shoot whoever needs shooting."
If Heath had any problem with being ordered around by her, he didn't voice it. He looked to the sky, looked to the belfry, set his jaw, and dashed off without another word. Thea proceeded to Bill's grabbing Maddie and Svilga out from their game in the commons.
"Girls, I want you to take all of the children you're playing with and go into the basement in the church over there. It's very important."
"It's just a storm," Svilga said.
"It's not. Now go!"
She said it with such vehemence that they didn't question her again. By the time Thea shrugged out of her clothes and affixed her armor properly, big droplets were splatting against the tavern's wooden walls. Matthias stood in the doorway, concerned.
"The girls aren't here..."
"I sent them to the tunnels," Thea said. "Find something to fight with and get ready..."
"I'll guard the churchyard. Promise me you'll join me there - if things get too bad, we can escape through the tunnels with the girls. Or maybe you should just go down there... keep the people safe..."
Thea shot him an annoyed look, her crystal-blue eyes glaring into his golden ones. "I'm not staying out of this. I may not be Heath or Cano, but I'm not retreating from Bestel Myrdon and his stooges. Not when lives are depending on it."
"Don't do anything daft," Matthias said, grimacing at the word. "Sorry. Bad connotations. I mean..." He pulled her into a kiss and Thea didn't resist him, sighing into his body's warmth. "I mean stay safe. Either before, during, or after, depending on how things go, I'll see you in the church yard."
Thea stood on her tiptoes to kiss Matthias again, and then smacked his butt. "I'll see you there, moneybags. Let's go."
+++++
The rain was coming down in sheets and lightning licked across the sky. As she approached them, the timber towers with their siege bows drew out of the gloom, and as soon as she glimpsed their tops thirty feet above, she saw that the watchmen were waving and shouting frantically - though she couldn't make out a word of what they were saying. Their urgency made it pretty clear, though: they'd spotted somebody approaching. And, given the low visibility and the fact that the first watchman was cranking and aiming his siege bow, the invaders were pretty damn close. The storm had given them excellent cover.
Thup! was the sound that the siege bow made, rocketing an arrow the size of a javelin out into the storm. Thup! Thup! Both towers were firing now. Then the sky flickered, and an instant later Thea found herself momentarily blinded and reeling from the deafening peal of a lightning strike. Lightning had just struck one of their siege towers, lighting the top afire and sending the suddenly-dead watchman toppling over the charred rail. Thea looked back to the church belfry and hoped that Heath was ready - despite the rain, his keen eyes and expert aim would be able to pick out anybody in the commons yard. Thup! There was another flicker in the sky and another deafening crack - a bit farther away this time. The second tower was struck with similar results. The top was smoking and splintered, the guard twitching and probably dying where he lay, feet dangling over the platform.
"He's able to control the lightning!" Thea shouted.
Cano was nearby to hear her, nodding grimly and unsheathing his sword. Rain dripped from his nose and streamed down the coppery red of his hair. When they faced right into the course of the driving rain, it was almost impossible to see. A moment later, a third strike of lightning hit the weakest part of the palisade, sending timber and loose soil flying. Already, Rouentz's fighting volunteers were assembling in the commons, looking uneasily toward the ruins of their outer defenses.
"Stay back from the gap!" Thea shouted, barely audible over the fuzz of rain and rumble of thunder.
"Hold! Back!" Cano shouted right after, gesturing them back ten yards or so.
Just then, the first of the enemy soldiers started through the new five-yard gap in the palisade, streaming in two at a time, clad in ruddy leather and salmon-pink gambolin, short swords drawn. Heath's arrows zipped out of the rain just as fast as the men could cram through, each shot piercing effortlessly through the armor and even splintering bucklers when the men had them. A sergeant with a metal shield had an arrow pierce half-way through, and when he staggered at the force of the shot, a second arrow struck right through the middle of his face. In the course of a minute, perhaps twenty men had streamed through, and now all of them were now dead, dying, or gravely wounded. The Rouentz volunteer militia hadn't so much as taken a swing at an invaders.
The sky flickered again, and Thea watched with sickening certainty as two lightning bolts streaked down to the belfry, one-two, the first one sending clay shingles and bits of rock flying and the second one surely hitting the inside, because it left the bell ringing a single resonant howl before it went mute with the collapse of the roof.
"Heath!" Cano roared. Thea was sure he was going to sprint back to rescue Heath, assuming he hadn't been killed, but that wasn't what he did at all. Cano turned toward the gap in the palisade, pairs of soldiers once again beginning to surge through, and charged.
"Cano! Don't!" Thea shouted.
Of course, Cano didn't listen. Once he'd been whipped up into a combative fury, it was just about impossible to get through to him. He dashed to the gap, struck three men down with a series of savage strikes that leather, gambolin, bucklers, and probably even steel were completely incapable of defending against. A fourth man he kicked so hard that the impact was probably deadly. Then he dipped over the earthworks and disappeared into the rain.
"Shit!" Thea shouted and sprinted after him. Before she headed out into the rain and into the open, she looked back to the volunteers. "Hold fast! Defend the church!" she told them. Whether any of them heard, she couldn't say.
Another four bodies lay out beyond the palisade, victims of Cano's fury. But there were more men streaming in, dozens of them, some of them well-armed and well-armored mercenaries, and some with the gambolin, short-bows, and forearm-length dirks of the militia. A pair of the mercenaries noticed Thea and moved to attack her - or perhaps capture her and present her to their captain. But she was well-prepared.
Thea had drilled with Cano the day before. She'd seen Cano fight. She'd seen the Soenmen fight. For most people, that would have barely been enough to know how to swing an axe or jump out of the way. But Thea learned a lot faster than that and she could do a pretty decent job of figuring combat techniques out from observation alone. When the first man lunged at her, she whirled out of the way and had her axe swinging toward the weak spot at the leg joint in his armor. After the first strike toppled him down, she used her forward momentum to kick him over and then strike his neck with the piercing point at the back of the axe.
The second mercenary, seeing this, wasn't about to sacrifice himself capturing Thea - he'd kill her and worry about the consequences later. He lunged forward with his sword, quick and competent. But Thea had specifically drilled in disarming an opponent with a blade, and Cano hadn't taken it slow or easy. Thea grappled the sword with her axe, spun it around enough to get a hook, and very nearly yanked the sword from the man's hands. However, he was a lot bigger than her, and he body-checked Thea, sending her down onto her back. She somersaulted backward and right back to her feet, barely missing the downswing of the sword. And when that swing left the sword momentarily jammed in the mud, she slammed the haft of her axe into the mercenary's face, followed by the hard metal of her greaves. The mercenary dropped his blade, so Thea used it to separate the man's sword hand from his body - if he survived the blood loss and came to, he wouldn't be much help to his friends.
The scuffle had all happened in about four seconds. Fast enough that only two passing militia men had taken in the whole thing - and they decided that Thea wasn't worth messing with. They continued toward the gap in the palisade with their fellows. Thea took her bearings and sprinted after Cano.
It was easy to figure out where Cano had been - Thea just followed the bodies. Another eight or ten maimed and obviously-dead men, most of them militia, but a few armored and dark-clad mercenaries, too. It didn't matter how well-armed or -trained you were when Cano had his sights on you. Thea presumed that these well-armed ones were Quill's men from his arms dealing rather than town guards - she felt a lot less bad about bad things happening to hired swords than militia.
Beyond the field of bodies, Cano stood, his sword dripping red and his golden cuirass gleaming despite the gloom of the storm. In front of him were four men on horses - three in the dark mail of the mercenaries, and one man in dark blue robes with the strange fuzz of electricity arcing and pulsing about his body. His horse didn't seem to mind. Thea walked up beside Cano and looked up at the blue-robed man. He appeared to be in his thirties or early forties, with cotton-white hair and eyes that carried the same energetic spark as the storm.
"Call off your attack, or I'll kill every last man under your command," Cano stated, pointing his sword at the man.
"Lord Myrdon told me there were others like us out there," Lysander Quill said. A smile flickered across his face just as lightning flickered in the background. "I didn't expect them to be guarding this shit village, though..."
"Well we are," Thea said. "Leave now or we'll make you leave."
"What a mouth for such a pretty thing," he tutted. "What are you a scion of? Love? Beauty? Eros? Pleasant thoughts? Hmm... you know what. I don't want this village. It's yours."
"Really?" Cano asked.
"Not really," Quill chuckled. "I'm the bloody god of thunder."
Before Thea could react, a great bolt of lightning struck down from the sky and right on the spot where she and Cano were standing. She caught the tearing sound of the lightning, growing unbearably loud in an instant, and then nothing. No sound, no pain, nothing but intense, white light everywhere. She was dead...
At least that's what she thought in those first few seconds. That she'd died and that this was the anteroom of the afterlife... or perhaps the whole of it - an eternity of undifferentiated white light. But then the brilliant light faded to a tolerable, many-colored glow, and Thea realized that she was the source of the light, that a massive power was coursing through her and had lifted her right off the ground. She could see Cano below her, sprawled out, injured or dead with his armor smoking and his hair charred. And she saw Lysander Quill and his lieutenants looking on with shock and awe.
"I did ask nicely," Thea said, her voice echoing over the rain. "But the time for pleasantries is over. You reap what you sow, Lysander Quill."
Arcs of pure power flitted out from her body, licking over Quill and his lieutenants. The three men had been blessed with some power beyond normal mortals - it took substantially more energy to kill them than it had normal men. But die they did, hearts incinerated - their horses, too. Thea didn't like that bit, but she had a hard time controlling the flitting arcs of power. Anything that might be considered hostile got touched with an arc of light, twenty yards out, thirty, forty... the arcs rendered perhaps two dozen men dead and the rest fleeing for their lives. And then she directed her ire toward Quill, a great glowing aura of destruction reaching out to envelop him. The horse collapsed beneath Quill, but he remained where he'd been, now floating in the air.
"You'd kill the god of thunder with energy?" he chuckled.
"You aren't a god. You're a man playing with powers he shouldn't have," Thea stated.
God or not, he seemed to soak in her power, to absorb it. And he fired it back as a great jolt of energy... which, in turn, soaked into Thea. They couldn't hurt one another with their attacks, it seemed. Quill snarled, unhappy that Thea wasn't subject to the power of his lightning. Then a cruel grin spread across his face.
"We can settle this without our fancy tricks," he said.
Quill juddered forward through the air, slamming into Thea. Her axe... where was it? Somewhere in the mud below, it seemed. Quill grabbed her, energy arcing back and forth between their bodies, the two of them caroming into the earth with the clank of metal and the squish of mud. Thea felt the water at her back, seeping through creases in her armor, soaking into her hair. She punched Quill twice in the face, and he spat blood back at her, grinning maniacally. She tried to buck his body off, but he gripped onto her, larger and stronger, and brought his hands up, wrapping them around her throat.
"It seems a shame to destroy such a beautiful thing... perhaps I'll have your body preserved for posterity."
Thea sucked in insufficient gasps of air, her head swimming as Quill cut off circulation. She kicked at him, several of her kicks landing pretty well, but he held on. Her vision started to go fuzzy at the edges, started to close in, and she could feel her last reserves of Astrilla's power lashing out, trying to strike at Quill, and instead hitting terrified men a hundred yards distant or nothing at all. She was about to die, not by some godlike bolt of lightning, but by being strangled by this brute of a man... and she'd only just started to understand things, just started to have friends, to fall in love... she wasn't ready to die yet...
Suddenly, the pressure at her throat was gone, and Thea's vision came swimming back. She rubbed at her throat and sat up, gasping as the form of Lysander Quill went flopping backward through the air... and then went flopping forward again. It took Thea a moment to realize that it was Cano, still steaming, still charred in parts, slamming Quill back and forth into the ground like a dog throttling a caught duck. Thea struggled to her feet and dodged to avoid Quill's next impact with the ground
"Stop!" she shouted to Cano. "Cano! Stop!"
Cano grunted his assent and splashed Quill down, barely conscious and badly injured, probably about to die. He'd deserved it to be sure, but some remnant of Astrilla's power within her informed her that it was good he was still alive, that his fate would now be far worse for angering her. Thea looked down at Lysander Quill, coughing up blood, missing teeth, eyes going in and out of focus - and she spotted his artifact: a strange silver-blue necklace with a big black gem, inside which sparked the energy of lightning. She straddled him and bent over him, whispering into his ear as she slipped the necklace off:
"This is mine now," Thea whispered. And, in that moment, Quill exhaled his very last breath and the rain stopped.
Awesome fight scene, I loved the end,
I'm glad you liked it!
Slay Queen