the street where Asa and Lucy and Mr. Jameson waited.
“Go to the house!” Olivia said to Lucy. “Take care of my sister! We’ve got one last chance to win this!”
“Don’t worry,” Lucy said. “I’ve got it!”
“We’ve got to get to our posts!” I said. “Come on!”
Olivia and I ran to the walls and climbed our ladders. We stood, hands over our components belts, twenty feet between us, in our crow’s nests over the battlefield. Asa blitzed to a section of the wall where Mowse lay, crumpled and hiding. He stood over her and looked out over the battlefield.
The scene before us was a bloody one. Through the clouds of smoke, we could see glimpses of the cavalry, rushing, striking, rearing on mechanical limbs. The ground was splashed with dark blood. And through it they fought on.
Zo had come down from her tower and was fighting hand to hand with a Dust Soldier, her spear pulled from a fallen mechanical horse and rider. Judith, bleeding from multiple wounds, held two spears, fighting a Dust Soldier back with one while she threw the other like a javelin, skewering another Dust Soldier in the chest.
Susanah was still out front, fighting two and three Dust Soldiers at a time. And just as three Dust Soldiers were bearing down on an unsuspecting guard knocked from his horse, I saw his eyes go white. Moving like one possessed, he turned and sliced the three of them through the belly with his spear. Then he blinked as Mowse let him back to himself.
From her spot behind Asa, Mowse was doing her best to cast, even though her skin too had taken on the gray of death and the red mark on her hand had deepened to the dark red of blood.
Up on the wall, Cassandra sent illusion after illusion, turning one horse into five, one soldier into ten. She was fading fast. And she had been carrying our weight for too long.
Olivia and Asa sprung into action, throwing down every spell they knew into the jigsaw puzzle stretched out before us. Flames, wind, light, shadow.
Mr. Jameson climbed up the nearest tower and pulled out his enchanted rifle. Dust Soldier after Dust Soldier exploded with his every shot.
I hesitated, holding the Master Stone in my palm. Then I closed my eyes and closed my hands over it. I accept.
The amber grew warm, melting in my palms like honey. Then there was a powerful surge, an unspeakable wave of power, rocketing through me. It filled me up, full to bursting, so full of magic that the very follicles of my hair seemed to glow with it. There seemed to be no end to the well of magic inside me, Mother Morevna’s magic. My magic. And I saw for the first time, the memories that were in the cricket. Mother Morevna’s memories.
I saw two Mennonite girls: an older girl, Greta, and the other, a young Marike Morevna herself, running away from home. Home, where their strange ways were ways to be hidden or punished away. For there was no room in the community for girls who could keep the bees from stinging and make the plants grow just by whispering to them. Greta had been thrown out, excommunicated, and Marike’s punishments had gotten so harsh that she thought she would rather die than live another day being punished for being who she was. Then Greta had returned with spell tattoos under her gloves, returned and whisked Marike away into the safety of the night, to the safety of the Russian coven. I saw the amulet Mother Morevna had made as her first object, this very cricket in amber itself as she learned to use it. I saw the tattoos rise on her hands. I saw the hands beneath the tattoos begin to age. I saw the coven rise in sisterhood and fall to bickering, to competition, to spite, until every witch in it splintered from the group, certain she alone knew what had gone wrong.
I jerked myself back into the real world, a lump of sorrow in my chest that was not my own. There was a wiggling in my hands then—the cricket had come back to life. It jumped out of my hands and down onto the battlefield.
I took a deep breath, mustered as much magic as I could into my voice.
“Setzen Sie es richtig!” I shouted, willing power into every syllable. Set it right.
A thrum of power knocked me to my knees. Magic spread from me, and though