The monster leapt back up into the trees, bounding from branch to branch as its ribcage locked around her. Mika squirmed and shrieked, panic flooding her veins with wild energy. She thought she couldn’t breathe, but her heart was racing so hard she feared it’d burst if she didn’t calm herself.
So, with the greatest effort it had ever taken her, she stopped moving and lay still. By drawing in a deep breath, she found she was able to do so. That horrible, nails-on-sandstone sound hadn’t stopped echoing in her ears, but she could feel the rhythmic brushing of air against her feet. The beast was breathing, too. Suffocation wasn’t a concern, then. At least not for now.
She wondered if the orcs had given chase.
Of course they have, idiot. You’re too valuable not to.
If they’d recovered their hearing or Singing yet, it didn’t show. And they couldn’t shoot. The ear-shredding ring began to subside, and she thought she heard the very distant shouts of her thrall.
But the beast surged on, and she did not hear them again. She couldn’t Sing, for the thing held her with her mouth pressed to one of its ribs, effectively gagged. What felt like an eternity passed, but she guessed it’d been less than half an hour. And at last the thing slowed.
Muffled voices issued from outside of her cage of flesh and bones. They spoke a strange, hissing language she couldn’t understand. A language that sounded somehow wrong. Even snakelike. Her blood ran cold.
Humans.
For several moments, they seemed to argue. Then one of them hummed a command. The cage-monster yawned open, but didn’t loosen its vice-grip on her body. Faces loomed into view. Five of them, pale and sickly of skin, with vaguely asymmetrical features as though they’d been crafted from wax and left too close to a fire. Mika cringed as they leaned in. Between their ugly heads, she saw the arched opening of a narrow tunnel, lit by the glow of the luminescent jellies clouding the air beyond.
“Hello,” said the one in the middle in heavily accented Old Ahvari. “We need you alive, not whole. Understand? Don’t give any trouble. Don’t Sing.”
She writhed, icy veins going hot in her sudden fury. Desperately she longed to leap onto the human’s head and scratch her eyeballs out of their lopsided sockets. But she could barely move.
The human, whose hair was the color of urine, laughed. Mika was sure that the hatred she felt in that moment would burn a hole through her heart. Desperate to do something, anything, she reached out through her new threads of connection…and found what she sought.
Her captors turned from her to progress down the tunnel, and the cage beast followed.
Hurry, Mika called desperately through the connection. Please, please hurry.
She’d just begun to fear they’d traveled out of reach when there was a strange sort of rushing sound, growing rapidly louder. Then something luminous and cerulean shot into view, hurtling down the tunnel from the way they’d come.
The humans shouted, spat words that had the edge of curses. Yellow Hair Sang out—a grossly discordant melody—and then several things happened at once. The humans pulled leather muffs from their necks and up to cover their ears. The cage beast spat Mika out, whirling to place itself between the humans and the huge tendril of blue slime before them. And one of the humans, an orange-haired one, grabbed her up, squeezing her legs together under one arm and holding her arms tight against her chest with the other.
The cage beast shrieked again, and Mika along with it as glass-shard agony shredded through her brain. But the massive tendril flowed forward over the thing. Its secondary layers hardened and it came down like a slimy sledgehammer to crush the monster against the stone of the tunnel floor.
At the same time Mika bit, as hard as she could, into the meat of the human’s arm where it pressed against her upper chest. He yelled and dropped her, and she rolled forward. The tentacle shot out to meet her. She grasped hold of it, its outer layer softening to stickiness once more. Then she was hurtling from the tunnel as it drew backward, emerging heartbeats later into the open air of a broad cavern.
Gently, slowly, the former blight beast lowered her to the ground, depositing her on a slippery mass of floating plants at the outer edges of its lake. It was the largest of the creatures she’d cured, and perhaps the strangest. At once Mika peered up at the tunnel opening. She caught a glimpse of pale human faces glaring down at her. But then there was movement from the far end of the cavern where it opened out into the main branch, and the humans turned at once and were gone.
“Princess!”
She could barely hear Uthur’s shout, only just guessing at what he called to her.
The iron-haired prince forced his way through the brush, Retga trailing a ways behind him and the rest of the thrall after her. Mika’s gaze returned to the water beast, and she craned her neck to peer up at it. It was a scaly creature, the lower half of its body hidden beneath the water. The tentacle retracted, merging with the layers of translucent goo that coated the beast’s body and spilled from its open throat. It peered back at her with luminous, jelly-filled sockets.
Thank you, she thought at it, hoping it understood the concept of gratitude.
Uthur panted a question at her that she couldn’t quite make out, reaching the lake’s edge at her side.
“Humans!” cried Mika. “The monster was Stitched! They’re getting away, up there!”
Then she cursed herself, realizing her mistake. I should have stood aside and let the beast pummel the humans, too.
But no, I allowed my instincts to overcome me and fled. Of course.
Uthur’s eyes followed her gesture, narrowing as he issued a string of guttural sounds Mika couldn’t understand. And then he was off, leaping, climbing, surging up the mossy tumbled stone leading up to the tunnel entrance. A moment later Retga came huffing up with Ixos under one arm to help Mika off the slick vegetation and onto more-or-less dry ground. She’d hardly finished recounting what had happened when the red-eyed prince dropped the construct and started off after the first. She shouted over her shoulder, and all of the hunters and several of the guardians chased after her, leaving Mika in the care of Mouse, Mr. Legs, and a handful of others.
Her hearing began to clear somewhat, and from the tunnel issued the faint strains of another horrid human song. And then a deep, pained shout rang out, and she knew at once whose it was. Not one of her keepers tried to stop her as Mika hummed Ixos awake and hopped onto his back, pushing him as fast as he could go toward the source of the shout. Toward Uthur.
The cage beast had somehow managed to drag itself back up, shattered though it was, but two guardians had stopped to hack it to writhing pieces. Mika pushed past them, skidding to a halt as she came against the wall of orcs blocking her way. Throwing herself from Ixo’s back, she negotiated a path between their legs. It was only guardians and Retga still there, the hunters must have taken up pursuit.
But not Uthur, who lay broken and bleeding on the stone. The other prince bent over him, teeth bared and eyes gleaming with tears.
“Don’t touch him!”
Mika hesitated, flinching back for just a heartbeat as the prince’s words crashed over her. But Uthur…who’s been kind to me, who saved me…Uthur was dying. If he still breathed, she couldn’t tell, and she thought it easier to list the bones of his that weren’t broken than those that were.
It’s all my fault.
Her own tears leaving hot tracks down her cheeks, Mika fell to her knees before the broken man.
Bosarg couldn’t accompany them this far into the Rend on foot, not without exhausting his powers in the process. And so it was his apprentice who knelt at Uthur’s other side next to Retga, voice breaking every few notes as he tried to Sing his prince back together. But it was all he could do just to keep the orc’s heart beating.
Mika’s inner voices were silent. But she knew what she wanted to do, though it made no sense. Ignoring Retga’s glare, she reached out and pressed her hand to Uthur’s chest, right beside the apprentice’s. His skin was cool, but there was the ghost of warmth there still.
Without allowing herself to think about what it was she was doing, Mika began to Sing—echoing the apprentice note-for-note as best she could. She felt the weight of all the orcs’ shocked attention as they watched and listened.
Mika didn’t know what she’d expected. For the sounds to burn her tongue like acid, perhaps, or for the DeepMother herself to rise up and strike her down. What she did not expect, not for even half a heartbeat, was that the beat of Uthur’s own heart would strengthen at once beneath her touch.
But it did.
His chest expanded as he took the first proper breath she could detect since rejoining them. And as she Sang on, settling into the rhythm, her Song synced up with that of the apprentice. Gradually, the purple bruises that covered every visible bit of Uthur’s skin lightened. The shattered bones that pierced it drew beneath once more and reset. And that tingling, glowing sensation returned, dancing up and down Mika’s spine.
As his golden eyes pulled open, fixing at once upon her, Mika’s hand fell away and her voice trailed off.
And then she threw up all over him and passed out.
