The Queen's Secret (The Queen's Secret #2) - Melissa de la Cruz Page 0,83
he have to lash out at birds? There are so many of them now—hundreds and hundreds.
Something even stranger is happening. The birds on the ground haven’t touched the seed yet. They seem suspicious of it, circling Jander, mimicking the shape of the obsidian circle. The birds in the air dip and cluster, so low that some birds brush Jander’s head with their wings. All are agitated, feathers ruffled in the wind, claws extended. Cal steps forward again, but there’s still nothing he can do.
“Hold,” Rhema tells him in a low voice, and he does what she says, even if it goes against every instinct. “We can’t cross.”
Daffran’s head is lowered and tears dribble down his miserable face. His eyes are squeezed shut. He’s still murmuring his fervent prayer, trying to save his beloved birds.
If he looked up, Cal thinks, he wouldn’t be so worried. A crow dives at Jander’s head, smashing into his skull with its sharp beak. The crowd gasps again; someone near Cal and Rhema cries out in surprise. Another crow dives and then another, but Jander stands his ground, flinching with each hit, but refusing to move. Blood seeps from his scalp onto his pale face, but the thin boy remains steady, arms extended, feet planted on the icy cobbles. He stares straight ahead and his lips are moving in a whispered incantation. Cal can’t get close enough to hear what he’s saying.
The crows whirl above, a darting cloud of blackness, attacking again and again—Jander’s face is red with blood—then they drop to the ground around him, now within the obsidian circle. Some fly up against his legs, wings flapping, their caws angry and urgent. With sharp beaks and claws they rip at his leather leggings, but he stands firm. The strength that Cal has always known Jander possesses, his inner greatness, his true heart: This is what’s keeping him upright, in the absence of physical power. The longer he stands, the more crows he lures into the obsidian circle, Cal realizes. The ground is already covered with their blackness, and some are pushed close to the heaps of brown seeds.
Poor Jander is beset by birds. Cal wants to leap in and swipe those birds off his slight frame. He could kill half a dozen with one blow of his sword. But that wouldn’t be enough; there are too many. And as Rhema told him, they can’t cross the obsidian line. What was it Moriah said—that the Guild’s magic is more powerful than any army’s?
He glances at Rhema and sees she’s closed her eyes. Her head is tilted back and she’s sniffing.
“Can you smell it?” she says, as though she could sense that he’s looking at her. “Something like a nut. Linseed. And something rotten.”
“Aphrasians,” Cal says, so low it’s almost a whisper.
“He’s poisoned the linseed.” Rhema opens her eyes. “You might be right about this one, Chief.”
Whatever Jander is chanting seems to be working, because the attacking crows begin to fall around him like a shedding pelt.
Rhema flinches as though she were the one being attacked. What if Jander’s plan doesn’t work? Cal thinks. What if they don’t take the poison? But now that the crows have tired of hurling themselves at Jander’s slender, bleeding form, some are drawn to the nutty heaps of linseed. Once a few of them start jabbing at the miniature piles, others push forward to shove them out of the way.
The crows who eat the poisoned seed stagger beyond the obsidian circle and drop to the ground. This doesn’t seem to deter the ones behind them, who push to reach the food. The first crow who ate the seed begins to convulse, and the crowd instinctively backs farther away.
“My birds!” Daffran cries again, his voice quivering. The crow is on its back, bucking and twitching, while others who’ve eaten the seed start dropping around it.
Thunder rumbles above the courtyard, and black lightning splinters the sky. People in the yard cower, some running to hide in the stables. The first crow twitches again. Its yellow eyes are bright, a livid blotch of color on its ink-black body. When its beak opens, an unearthly caw erupts. The sound is something between a roar and a scream, a rage-filled battle cry. In an instant, the bird explodes before everyone’s eyes, its body morphing from creature to man in an instant.
A man in a gray cape, his features hidden with a black mask. Flat on his back in the yard, staring up at the sky.