away from his skin and brush off the iron.
“And did you subdue the kelpies that were found?” Commander Bane asks the lieutenant beside him. Commander Bane’s tone is bored as he looks through some papers, ignoring the pleading, threatening, crying band of Fae.
“We’ve poisoned them, Mage. Set down iron bolts in all the waterways.”
Commander Bane nods, seeming pleased, then rolls up his parchment and thrusts it into his shoulder bag. He looks over the line of Fae, as if both resigned and satisfied.
“Pure-blooded Tree Fae,” Commander Bane marvels as the children sob and the old woman keeps up her ceaseless pleading. He glances back at the lieutenant. “Good work flushing them out.”
Thierren’s gaze is riveted to the children, bile rising in his throat. The ones old enough to talk are speaking what must be Dryadin, but if he closes his eyes, their crying sounds unsettlingly the same as Gardnerian children’s.
And their appearance is so close to Gardnerian.
Thierren’s stomach clenches and a sense of vertigo makes him unsteady on his feet. He looks up and sees a brief flash of white in the tree limbs above the Dryads.
White birds. Translucent as mist. Watching.
Hatred pours from the trees in a staggering wave, adding to Thierren’s vertigo. He feels a sharp tug on his affinity lines, as if the trees are making a play for his magery. Trying to rip the power from his very center. He struggles to set up an internal shield, whipping up air until there’s a dense wall of it around his lines. He fortifies it layer upon layer, but he still feels the relentless attack of the trees, the sensation of branches slapping against the shield. Trying to pierce through it.
His mind spins as the baby cries and cries and cries.
Thierren thinks back to his unit’s training. How he half listened to what seemed, at the time, like the obvious. Advice for foolish, sentimental Mages.
They may give you the illusion of being human. It’s the way the Great Shadow tricks our minds. You must see through it. And follow the Blessed Will of the Book.
But he never expected there to be a baby. Or this lovely young woman. And Thierren senses, deep in his soul, that this is no illusion.
The young woman rocks the baby, and her movements are like a swaying branch, all smoothness and grace. Thierren’s affinity power gives a hard lurch toward her.
The young woman looks up, straight into Thierren’s eyes.
A rush of overwhelming shock flows through Thierren as their gazes lock, her eyes green as summer leaves, tears pooling inside them. Her deep-green lips fall open, and her misery rocks through Thierren, straight into his heart.
Heavily accented Common Tongue sounds to the side. “Mages. Stop.”
Thierren’s head whips toward the old woman with the white hair. The woman’s arms are now out in supplication, her green eyes full of a fierce urgency. She gestures toward the dark forest behind her as if she’s trying to convey a vital warning.
“Leave our forest alone,” the woman says, an ominous weight to the words. “If the trees die, we die. You die. We all die.”
Her urgency strikes Thierren deep in his heart, and he has the disturbing sense that he’s hearing something true. A fierce, disorienting urge to stop all of this wells up.
“The Shadow is coming,” the old woman warns, her voice low and blazing with inescapable certainty.
“On your knees,” Commander Bane orders the Fae, almost blithely, and Thierren’s eyes snap to his commander’s in amazement that he can remain so unaffected. There’s a wicked gleam in Commander Bane’s eyes. As if he’s excited by all this.
A flash of revulsion rocks Thierren. He looks back to the young Fae woman, and their gazes latch again. As if they’re both unwitting players in a nightmare. Suddenly, Thierren wants nothing more in the world than to grab the woman and the baby and whisk them away from here.
The young woman calls out to Thierren in her Fae dialect, her voice as melodious as it is grief-stricken. Thierren opens his mouth as if to answer her, just as Commander Bane’s voice booms out.
“‘By order of the Gardnerian government,’” he reads from a scroll, “‘you are hereby ordered to stand down and surrender your hold on our sovereign territory.’” Commander Bane sighs, as if this is all too easy, rolls the scroll back up, and slides it into his tunic’s pocket. He steps forward, unsheathes his wand, and loosely points it at the Fae. “I said, get on your knees.”
The line