Lost Ones

CHAPTER 18

It didn’t sound like any war Oliver could imagine. From time to time he heard the pop of a gunshot, but guns were so rare in the legendary world that those sounds were few and far between. The rest was thunder. Axes and swords and fists and the pounding of booted feet. Crackling noises and the rush of air blotted out other sounds from time to time, but those came from the spells of sorcerers, not cannons or rocket launchers.

All his life he’d wished for magic, but never for this.

With Julianna at his side, Oliver hurried up the hill amidst tents now abandoned by the soldiers who had camped there. Aides and runners and a handful of officers and advisors still rushed around, but the army had risen as one and gone to battle. Riders on horseback carried messages back and forth to the front lines. Legends flew overhead-some perhaps Borderkind, others surely not-but they drew no line between themselves and the Lost Ones of Euphrasia. The war involved them all.

Blue Jay climbed the hill ahead of them, effortlessly moving upward as though what he really wanted was to fly. The feathers in his hair danced as he moved.

“What about the others?” Julianna asked him. “The Harvest gods, and the ones who came with Kitsune?”

“Kit and Konigen are working that out. But none of us is going anywhere until we get orders from the king,” the trickster said.

Oliver saw the irony. “I never thought of you as much for taking orders.”

Blue Jay glanced over his shoulder, tall grass parting as he passed. “Another thing I owe the Atlanteans for. When it’s all over, I’ll make plenty of mischief. For now…”

The sounds of war carried to them up the hill, the area around the head of the Isthmus a natural theater. The acoustics sent a chill through Oliver. Their view of the ocean unnerved him. Normally the sight soothed him and it seemed somehow abominable to have a war on the shore. The ocean ought to have meant peace and tranquility.

“This is creeping me out,” Julianna said.

“Hell, yeah,” Oliver said, glancing at her as they labored up the hill. “Of course it is.”

“I don’t just mean the war. It’s being up here, after they’ve all taken off. Like we’ve been left behind on purpose, cheese baiting the trap.”

Oliver frowned. “This isn’t-”

“I know.” She waved his protest away. “But I’d feel safer down there with all the people who have weapons.”

Even as she said it, they came around a tent and saw a larger one. Six riders sat atop their horses around the tent and a couple of dozen others were spread out at the top of the hill. Two massive ogres with twisted features and carrying war hammers stood on either side of the tent’s entrance. In the air, robed in dark green, a trio of Mazikeen floated over the tent.

“The King’s Guard,” Julianna said.

Blue Jay glanced back at them. “Hurry, you two.”

Oliver felt his pique rising. “We’re only human.”

The trickster said nothing. Julianna squeezed his hand.

“You’re not,” she said. “I’m having a hell of a time keeping up with you.”

“You got me. My secret’s yoga, in case you’re wondering,” Oliver said, but only because he couldn’t think of any reply that wasn’t a joke. How was he supposed to respond to that? He wasn’t ready yet to start thinking about himself as being anything other than human, even though in his heart, he had always been a child of two worlds.

Julianna rolled her eyes.

He lifted her hand and kissed it.

Blue Jay stopped in front of the tent. Oliver and Julianna halted on either side of him. A severe young woman in the uniform of the King’s Guard ran to meet them.

“Tell him Oliver’s here,” was all Blue Jay said.

The young woman-barely more than a girl-widened her eyes in surprise, nodded, and nearly fled into the tent.

“Damn, you’re like Elvis now,” Julianna whispered to him. “No last name needed.”

The soldier emerged from the tent, pulled a flap aside, and nodded for them to enter. “His Majesty, King Hunyadi, will see you.”

Blue Jay grumbled something about protocol in the middle of a war, but Oliver couldn’t quite make out the entire sentiment. He held back so that Julianna could precede him into the tent, and went in last.

A table with maps of the battleground and troop deployment had been moved to one side and now stood forgotten. King Hunyadi still looked like the rough-hewn, bearded fisherman he had seemed when Oliver had first encountered him, despite the armor and the sword at his side. Damia Beck stood with him in the tent. Blue Jay strode over to the tall black woman and exchanged a quiet word with her, their fingers entwining. As they traveled together over the past few days, Blue Jay had spoken of Damia quite a bit-and Oliver remembered her from their brief encounters in Euphrasia-but he’d had a hard time picturing the beautiful, yet grimly serious soldier and the trickster in love. Seeing the way they looked at each other erased all of his preconceptions.

Frost stood in a far corner, deep in conversation with Wayland Smith. A hundred distrustful thoughts went through his mind when he saw them, but he spared them only a glance.

“Collette!” Julianna cried happily.

The two women ran to one another and embraced like long-lost sisters. Oliver stood by during their reunion, until Collette detached herself and turned to look at him with a mischievous grin.

“You’ve got a bit of a tan,” Oliver said.

“I’ve been on a millionaire’s boat in South America, sunning, enjoying life,” Collette replied. “Of course, the boat was stolen and we were getting shot at, but beyond that, very luxurious. Hence the tan.”

Oliver drew his sister into his arms and held her close.

“If he hadn’t gotten you back here alive, I’d have killed him,” Oliver whispered into her hair. “Damn it, Coll, I was afraid for you.”

Collette ran her hands up and down his arms and stepped back. “Me, too, little brother. But at least you had Julianna to look after you.”

“Oliver,” Blue Jay said, sharply.

He turned to see King Hunyadi looking at him and Julianna expectantly.

“Your Majesty, I’m sorry,” Julianna began.

“We’re both sorry,” Oliver said. “It’s just that we were-”

Hunyadi held up a hand. His eyes spoke of hard-won wisdom, but also of a fondness that touched Oliver.

“I understand. And it’s good to see you, my friends,” said the king. “But the morning is fleeting and the time has come for all of us to share what we know. For the sake of Euphrasia, for the Two Kingdoms, and two worlds, the Legend-Born must be protected. Morale depends upon hope, and hope, right now, depends upon you two.”

He nodded at Oliver and then Collette.

“Your presence means a lot to the human soldiers down there amidst the bloodshed and monsters. Still, it would be simpler if you were elsewhere.”

Oliver opened his hands wide. “But we’re here. And we can help, Your Majesty. All my life has been about pretending, whether in a court of law or on the stage. The time’s come to do something real.”

“You can’t-” Julianna began.

“He’s right,” Collette interrupted. “We have-it’s hard for me to say magic, but we have magic in us. We can help.”

Frost flowed across the tent on a blast of frigid air. “No. Absolutely not.”

Oliver turned on him, scowling. “You know, I’ve had just about enough of you pulling the strings. You’ve got some grand plan for us? Great. Hope that goes well for you. But we’ll make our own decisions.”

The winter man narrowed his eyes, blue-white mist rising from their edges. “I did what I had to do.”

“Frost,” Blue Jay warned.

Wayland Smith gazed at Oliver and Collette from beneath the brim of his hat. “The two of you must understand, the outcome of the war is vital, but there are even greater things at stake. We cannot risk your lives, no matter the cost.”

Oliver pointed at him. “What makes you think I’m going to listen to anything you have to say? Last time I saw you, you murdered a man in that inn at Twillig’s Gorge just because he figured out who I really was. You’ve been in this scheme with Frost from the beginning.”

Smith raised an eyebrow. He glanced at King Hunyadi, then shifted his gaze back to Oliver. “If you must know, the scheme-as you call it-was primarily mine.”

Oliver glared at him. “Well, then you’re a fucking asshole.”

King Hunyadi stepped into the middle of the tent, separating them.

“Enough.”

They all looked at the king, but no one argued with him.

“I’m sorry,” Oliver said. To Hunyadi, not to the others.

The king held up a hand again, brushing it away. He began to ask questions, and soon they were sharing their stories. Frost and Collette spoke of the Atlantean forces. Oliver and Julianna and Blue Jay talked about the chaos they had left in Palenque. Damia reassured them that the anarchy they had begun still raged in the capital city of Yucatazca and beyond.

“The rebels have nearly taken control of Palenque. They’re demanding that Prince Tzajin return to Yucatazca and address the public himself. They will return control of the city to the prince, but only after hearing the words from his mouth.”

King Hunyadi nodded. “Yes. According to Frost’s report, mistrust of their purpose has caused the Yucatazcan warriors to lose heart. It may be that we can turn them to our cause or convince them to withdraw from the field of battle.”

Oliver felt almost as though he were in a courtroom, and Hunyadi the judge. “If it pleases Your Majesty, I’d like to speak.”

The king smiled thinly. “Now you ask permission?”

With a glance at Julianna, Oliver nodded. “Look, it seems pretty obvious to me that everyone’s on the same page here. Maybe we’ll win this war on the ground, but it’s a hell of a gamble. Those ships Frost and Collette saw-who knows how many more of them there are? There could be another entire invasion force on the way. We need an ace in the hole, and Prince Tzajin is that ace. I’ve been thinking about this ever since we heard the kid was in Atlantis.”

Oliver studied King Hunyadi.

“Your Majesty, I’m going to get him. I’ll find the kid, get him out of Atlantis, and back here. It’s pretty clear that Smith can travel in ways that the Borderkind can’t-ways he doesn’t seem interested in explaining to the rest of us, but that’s fine. Let me choose a small group. I’ll pick them myself. Smith drops us in the middle of Atlantis, as close as possible to the library where he saw Prince Tzajin. We’ll bring him back.”

At last, he allowed himself to glance at Julianna. Her nostrils flared with anger.

“Don’t do this,” she said.

Oliver didn’t reply. He had to do it, and she knew that. After what Ty’Lis had done to them all-the murder of his father, the Sandman terrorizing Collette, the death of Ted Halliwell-how could he not do whatever was necessary to stop Atlantis?

“After what Ty’Lis did to you, Jules?” Collette said.

Julianna shot her a withering glance. “You can’t agree with this.”

“Agree?” Collette replied. “Hell, I’m going with him.”

Silence fell. One by one, they all looked at King Hunyadi. The big man stroked his beard. At length, he glanced at Frost and Smith.

“Your Majesty, the risk,” Smith warned.

Frost shook his head. The familiar sound of his icicle hair clinking made Oliver nostalgic for a time before resentment and deceit had come between them.

“You can’t let them both go, Majesty,” the winter man said.

“What a surprise,” Oliver mused. “One of us is expendable.”

Blue Jay glanced at Damia, who seemed to be growing impatient to join her troops. “They’re right.” He glanced at Oliver and Collette. “I’m sorry, my friends, but they’re right. You can’t both go. I’m not one of the Lost. It matters not to me if your people ever get home. But if you both die, that’s a victory for Atlantis, and it could undermine all that Euphrasia is fighting for.”

King Hunyadi raised both hands. “Agreed. And it is decided. Oliver, choose your allies. Smith, you’ll take them in and bring them back, with the prince.”

“I’m not supposed to interfere, John,” the Wayfarer said grimly from beneath the brim of his hat. His eyes were shadows.

“You aren’t. You’ll ferry them, nothing more.”

Smith didn’t argue further.

Julianna had no such compunction. “So, what?” she said, staring at Oliver. “I’m just supposed to wait for you, again, wondering if you’re dead or alive, trapped in this crazy place alone?”

Oliver glanced away. “You won’t be alone.”

“No,” Collette agreed. “I’ll be with you. They’re not going to let me go.”

Julianna glanced around the tent, fixing her eyes one by one on Frost, Smith, King Hunyadi, and Oliver.

“Fucking men.” She turned and left the tent.

Collette stared at her brother for a moment. Then she went to him, hugged him close, and looked up at his face.

“I’ll look out for her. You look out for yourself. Don’t think I’m not pissed, though. I want you coming back alive so I can kick your ass.”

Oliver kissed her forehead.

“Wouldn’t miss that for the world.”

Sara woke in the small hours of the night, the Maine wind howling outside the windows. A storm had blown up, but she couldn’t hear the patter of rain. Just that wind, rattling the windows in their frames and whistling in the eaves. Her father’s house was a relic of the past.

It surprised her to find that she’d fallen asleep. All day she had been on the phone, ordering the shutoff of the utilities, calling her friends in Atlanta and an editor she knew would give her work. Calling her mother, and crying again. Both of them weeping for a man they had never found a way to stop loving, even in the times when they had wanted to.

When she’d gone to bed, her mind had been bustling with activity, with plans and their repercussions, all the while trying to avoid the truth around which it all revolved. Her father’s house would soon be empty, and it might be that way forever. She’d tossed and turned with these thoughts, wide awake, first too warm and tossing the covers away, then freezing cold and retrieving them, burrowing underneath.

Somehow, she’d managed to drift off.

Now she stretched, head muzzy with sleep, and listened to the creak of the old house and the cries of the wind, and wondered if that was what had woken her. The clock on the wall ticked. The seconds seemed to pass too slowly, lengthening, stretching out as though hesitant to move on. Tick. A breath. Tick. Its oddness drew her. Eyes closed, she listened intently, wondering if the battery was dying. And as she strained to make sense of the sluggish passage of time on that clock, she heard another sound.

A sifting.

A shiver ran up her back. Her skin prickled with gooseflesh. The sound seemed familiar, but she knew she had never heard anything precisely like it before. The sifting, scratching noise seemed to cascade toward her, and then abruptly ceased.

“What the hell?” she said, mostly to hear herself speak.

Sara turned, rising from the pillow, and her breath caught in her throat. The thing that stood by her bed could not have been a man. Not with those fingers like knives and its long, cruel face, and the terrible lemon eyes that shone in the dark.

She screamed, letting out a torrent of words and curses and pleadings to God as she scrambled off the bed. Her right ankle tangled in the sheet, she fell to the floor with a thump and then backed into a corner. As she went, those lemon eyes followed her, the hooded thing coming over the top of the bed at her as though weightless.

Perhaps it was because she had been sleeping in her father’s house, or perhaps because all of her fear and grief were bound tightly to Ted Halliwell’s vanishing. But in that moment, Sara called for her father like she had as a little girl, waking in the dark from a nightmare.

“Daddy!”

The cruel, hooded thing froze with its knife fingers stretched out toward her. Lemon eyes went dark.

Like a statue, it had frozen solid, halfway across her bed.

Within the consciousness of the Sandman, Ted Halliwell screamed his daughter’s name. She’d called out to him. His powdered bones sifted with the sand and the dust, and he fought the horrid will of the monster. Holding him back was like stopping a bull from charging, yet he had done it. His soul felt as though the strain would tear it apart, but for the moment, the Sandman had been halted.

Grains of sand shifted. Skittered to the floor.

No, Halliwell thought. But he knew it was no use. His love for Sara had given him the strength to stop the Sandman, but he would not be able to hold the monster.

Pain clutched at the core of him, the part that would have been his heart if he still had flesh. The maelstrom that was the Sandman had slowed. It parted like curtains-like a veil-and he could feel the hatred searing him. Those terrible eyes looked inward, now, and they found Halliwell there, alone.

“I wanted my vengeance,” the Sandman said. The voice echoed around inside the maelstrom, inside the consciousness that was all that remained of Ted Halliwell save those powdered bones, scattered amidst the grains of the monster. “The fox bitch, Kitsune, and the nothing, weakling man, Bascombe. They turned my brother against me and I wanted vengeance. You denied me that vengeance, little nothing man. You infest me like pestilence, like rot, like conscience, and I will not have it.

“You must be punished. The little girl’s eyes will pop in my teeth, and I will be certain that you can taste them on my tongue, as if it were your own.”

The words/thoughts slithered inside Halliwell’s mind, and whatever trace remained of him, soul or echo, shuddered-not with fear, but with rage. The man in him might have let death and this bizarre damnation corrupt his spirit, weaken him, but his daughter called his name and now this abomination mocked her love for him and her pain. The man might be afraid, but Ted Halliwell was more than a man. The soldier in him, the detective in him, the father in him was not afraid.

His grip on the Sandman tightened.

The monster roared fury. Halliwell felt aware of every bone shard, every particle of yellowed bone and marrow that mixed with the substance of the Sandman, and he reached out into the paralyzed limbs of the child-killer and he took hold.

Fucker, he said/thought. That’s my little girl.

Awareness radiated out from Halliwell’s consciousness. His senses searched the maelstrom, knowing already what he would find. There, hiding in the midst of the soul-storm created by the merger of their spirits, their essences, he found the third consciousness locked inside this body. Peering, spying, from the maelstrom, was the Dustman. Swiftly brutal, the Dustman might be the brother of the Sandman-another aspect of the same legend-but he was also a kind of mirror. The Dustman was an English legend, proper and grim. He was a creature of order, where his brother was chaos and anarchy.

Help me, damn you! The blood’s on all of our hands, now. You can’t just hide, or he’ll erode you away to nothing!

Still the Dustman did not stir.

The Sandman remained paralyzed, but Halliwell’s grip began to slip. Somewhere beyond the tiny universe that existed within the maelstrom, he heard his daughter’s voice again. She muttered prayers to God. By now she’d be rising from that corner, trying to get past the monster to reach for the phone to call the police, or maybe she’d just run.

God, Halliwell hoped she would run.

“He’s a coward,” the voice of the Sandman sifted through the churning gloom around Halliwell. “He dared to stand against me, to betray his brother, and now he’ll be nothing, no more than you.”

Listen to me, Halliwell hissed at the Dustman. All of those children you visited, the ones who couldn’t sleep or didn’t want to…you were gentle with them. You cast your dust in their eyes and they slept in peace and dreamed the way children should. I’ve felt your mind, I’ve seen it all in your thoughts. We’re all part of each other, now. Is this what you want? To terrify those kids, to murder them in their beds, to mutilate their-

“It’s exactly what he wants,” the Sandman said.

Halliwell’s soul-whatever remained of it-froze at those words. Could that be true? Was that what the Dustman had always wanted? Was that why his brother was ascendant, now, because he didn’t want to fight?

“You lie!” the Dustman roared.

He stepped from the maelstrom, closer to Halliwell now than he had been since the two of them were merged with the Sandman, spirits trapped within. In his greatcoat and bowler hat and with that mustache, he might have seemed almost absurd were it not for the hatred in his gleaming, golden eyes.

I thought I could do nothing, the Dustman said, but now the voice did not echo in the maelstrom. It was right beside Halliwell, in his own mind, thought to thought. I’m only a facet of the legend. A shard. That’s what you’ve become yourself, Detective. A facet.

But that’s all he is, Halliwell replied. One facet.

Yes.

Halliwell held out his hand for the Dustman to shake, to seal the deal.

The maelstrom calmed. Halliwell felt the Sandman try to break free of his grip and the form he had given himself in this nothing place, this spirit cage inside the prison of the Sandman, was thrown down.

“Go to hell,” Halliwell snarled, and he stood, reaching out once again to shake the Dustman’s hand. There was power in a vow. An oath. And that was what they were about to enter into.

Then the Sandman was there. Somehow he was their cage, but he was also there inside the mindscape with them. Those dreadful yellow eyes peered out from beneath his hood.

“I will not allow it,” he said, almost a sigh, a skittering of words and sand.

Halliwell smiled. The bastard was too late. He and the Dustman clasped hands…

Sara ran around the bed, colliding with the closet door and pushing off. She lunged for the phone on the nightstand, snatched it off the cradle, and even as she did, she turned to look at the bizarre statue-rough like concrete-on the bed.

It said her name. The whispering voice did not sound cruel or mocking. Instead, it sounded familiar.

She froze.

No longer a statue, the thing began to shift and flow as though reality were ocean waves rolling in and reshaping it. The hood went away. The figure slid to the end of the bed, away from her, stood facing her. Its cloak had become a long coat, collar turned up high around its neck. A derby sat upon its head, made of the same material as the coat and the monster’s hands, its flesh.

Sand.

It looked up at her and she caught her breath. Lemon eyes had turned golden. It had a thick drooping mustache, but all of the same shade, the same gray brown of sand.

But the face…she knew the face.

“Daddy?” she whispered.

The strength went out of her legs and she staggered back, catching herself against the doorjamb, barely staying on her feet.

The thing looked unsure a moment, but then a smile spread across its face, lifting that mustache. Her father’s smile. All of the things that Robiquet had told her-about the Veil and the creatures of legend, about the Borderkind-came back to her now.

“Dad?” she ventured.

“Yeah, Sara-love. It’s me,” he rasped.

His voice sifted, but it was his, like they were talking over a bad phone line and she could only hear him through static. Sara-love. He’d called her that all the time when she was little, almost unconsciously, just the way he’d done now.

A hitching breath came from her and she held a hand to her chest. Hope, she found, could be far more painful than grief.

“How can it be? What are…what was that?”

“A monster, sweetie. I was wrong, all those nights I told you they didn’t exist. But we’ve got it under control, now. Locked it up in here and threw away the key.”

All those nights, as a girl, when he’d come home late, Ted Halliwell had told his daughter he’d been catching bad guys. And when little Sara had asked if he had caught them, his answer had always been the same. Locked them up and threw away the key.

Sara took a step toward him, then hesitated, fear lancing through her. The image of that monster, of those lemon eyes and finger knives, lingered.

“What are you now, Dad?”

His face-sculpted from sand-contorted with sadness and loss. He reached out toward her, though she was still too far for him to touch her.

“I was away. Far away, Sara-love. All I wanted was to come back so I could tell you how sorry I am that I didn’t understand when you needed me to. The life you have…I had dreamed it so differently for you. A wedding. A little girl of your own. It took me a long time to realize my dreams for you had to give way to yours. Hard for me. I figured it out, though, sweetie. Eventually, I got it. All that mattered was that you were happy. That you could be adored the way you deserved. But by then, I couldn’t find the words to say it. If I’d seen you…but that never worked out. And then I was gone.”

Sara stared at him. Her hand flew to her mouth and a small sound escaped her lips. Her eyes blurred with tears and she wiped them away.

“Maybe you don’t remember, Sara, but that question…I asked you the same thing, once. The worst thing I ever did, asking you what you were. The stupidest, most heartless thing. And what did you tell me, do you remember?”

Sara did. “I’m me.”

Her father, this odd figure in his hat and coat, this Sandman, took a step toward her. “I don’t know what else I am, but I’m me. I’m what I had to be to get back to you, to be here to say I’m sorry, and that I love you.”

Sara stared at him, her fear still fresh.

“Never was much good at saying any of the important things. But all I wanted was this chance to say it to you. I can…I don’t want you to be afraid. I’ll go now. But-”

“No!” Sara rushed to him, danger forgotten. The idea of losing him again made her cry out. She threw her arms around him. His coat-whatever he was-felt rough to the touch, but she held on tight, afraid he would slip through her fingers.

Whatever part of him this was, it had his voice and his heart. She could not lose those, now that she had them back.

“Please don’t go.”

Even if they had stayed that way for a year, it wouldn’t have been enough for Sara. All of her hesitations and resentments were long forgotten. She had another chance with him, a chance for him to know her and know how she felt, and for him to understand.

In time, he stepped back.

Sara gaped. The silly mustache and hat were gone. The face belonged, now, only to her father. Even his eyes seemed more his own.

“Dad, you look-”

He reached up to trace his fingers along his features.

“How many of you are in there?” she asked.

He blinked and then looked at her in surprise.

“You’re a pretty smart young woman, you know that?”

Sara smiled. “My father’s a detective.”

Ted lowered his gaze, then raised his eyes again. Sara knew that look. She had seen it hundreds, maybe thousands of times growing up. The words had not even begun to come from his mouth, but she could hear them. There was something he had to do. He couldn’t be home with her right now, because there were some bad guys out there, and Detective Ted Halliwell was on the case. He had to stop them before they hurt somebody.

Her father saw her eyes, and he knew.

“I’ll come back. I swear. I can do it, now. And I’ll be here with you. But the Dustman and I have business to handle. Debts to pay.”

“And you have to stop the bad guys,” Sara said, her voice small.

As he nodded, the sand of his flesh and his clothing sifted again, and the hat and mustache returned. The Dustman. That’s what he had called it; what he was, now.

“Yeah.”

“Detective Ted Halliwell’s on the case.”

He smiled. “I promise I’ll be back.”

“You always promise.”

“And haven’t I always come back?”

Sara thought a moment, then reached out and touched his face in wonder. “Yeah. You have.”

He kissed her forehead. His lips were rough as sandpaper.

“Close your eyes,” he said.

She did. The sound came again, that scritching, skittering noise, along with a little breeze that made her shiver.

When she opened her eyes, he was gone.

But Sara found herself smiling.

Battle raged.

Ovid Tsing crouched, nocked an arrow into his bow, and fired. The arrow took an Atlantean soldier through the eye, the tip punching out through the back of his skull. The impact threw his head back but momentum carried him forward and he hit the ground, rolling, dead before he came to rest on the rocky shore where the Kingdom of Euphrasia met the Isthmus of the Conquistadors.

The eastern flank of Hunyadi’s army had broken. The Atlantean attack was vicious, supplemented by Yucatazcan warriors. Air sharks darted across the morning sky, but they were far away, as were the giants, who fought Borderkind and northern legends at the center of the battle lines. Sorcerers of Atlantis hovered just over the heads of the troops-swords clanging, screams rising, blood soaking the earth-but a dozen Mazikeen hung in the air above the Euphrasian troops, fighting back. The magical combat seemed a war all its own, each side’s sorcerers keeping the others from interfering in the ground war.

Still, the eastern flank had broken.

“To me!” Ovid screamed to his archers.

They knelt around him in a line.

Atlantean soldiers ran toward them, their armor gleaming, some of them in helmets that shone like the glass ships at anchor far off the coast. Their swords were raised high but they attacked in savage silence, unnerving Ovid, but only for a moment. He waited until they had reached the first soldier to break through, until they were trampling him under their boots.

“Fire!” he cried.

The archers let fly with their arrows. Men and women of Atlantis went down. Even at a distance, Ovid could smell their blood. It stank like low tide.

He stood, shouldering his bow and drawing his sword.

Ovid Tsing raised his sword.

“Attack!” he thundered.

The Stonecoats marched around Ovid and his archers, the first wave to move in. The Atlanteans attacked them with sword and dagger, but blades broke upon the rock-skin of the Jokao. The Stonecoats marched right through them, crushing heads and breaking bones, and kept going.

Sorcerers and giants might be able to kill them, but not ordinary Atlanteans. And the Jokao held a seething hatred for the Atlanteans. The time had come for them to take vengeance upon the culture that had once held them as slaves.

“Ovid!” Trina shouted, running up beside him.

She pointed to the sky.

Dozens of octopuses were sweeping toward them, tentacles dangling. They floated like balloons, but even as he watched, an octopus snatched up a Stonecoat in its tentacles effortlessly, as if the Jokao were weightless. It could not kill the Stonecoat, so instead it hurled him out to sea.

“Archers!” Ovid cried. “Fire!”

His archers followed the command, taking aim at the floating creatures. Two were felled with that first attack. Ovid turned his attention back to the Atlanteans, many of whom were slipping past the Jokao. There simply weren’t enough Stonecoats to kill them all.

“King’s Volunteers!” he shouted. “Attack!”

He pointed his sword forward and the soldiers-men and women he had brought from Twillig’s Gorge, or who had joined him along the way-rushed into war with their weapons at the ready.

For the first few moments, Ovid only stood amongst them as they rushed around him and watched. Blades and cudgels fell. Atlanteans and Euphrasians and Yucatazcans died, their blood mingling together on the shore. The ground drank it greedily, and equally. To Death, all blood was the same.

Ovid roared and charged, racing into battle. He caught a glimpse of LeBeau, but then he could focus only on the enemy. He slashed and stabbed and used his elbows and knees-whatever it took to stop them; whatever it took to kill them; whatever it took to stay alive.

The King’s Volunteers tore into the forces of deceitful Atlantis with courage and determination and hope. Ovid’s mother had understood that it was hope that they all needed the most. He had begun his militia for his own purposes, but now he fought for his mother, and for hope.

An axe swept toward his skull.

Ovid dodged, but not in time.

A sword stopped the axe’s descent. A tall figure in armor stepped in, grabbed the axe-wielding Yucatazcan by the head, and snapped his neck, dropping the corpse to the ground.

Ovid stared. His rescuer stood a foot or more taller than he. She wore her dark hair in long braids and wielded an enormous, heavy sword. Her armor glistened with blood not her own. She gazed at him with lavender eyes, and Ovid knew that he stood face-to-face with a goddess.

She wore a wild grin, as though the war and bloodshed made her giddy, and then she rushed away from him, felling Atlanteans with crimson abandon.

Not far away, a massive wolf made of tangled vines and leaves lunged into the Atlantean ranks, tearing at them with its jaws, crunching a skull in its teeth.

Hope had arrived.