it would rise to crush them. And likely some deserved it. Others would only care that so many people would suffer because now it would be their turn to suffer, too. But none of that mattered. Lizzan had not become a soldier so she could choose whom to save. She would simply save all that she could.
Aerax pulled her close, captured her face in her hands. His urgent gaze searched hers. “Run with Caeb,” he said thickly, as if already knowing her answer. “I will see your family safe.”
She shook her head. “We’ll fight it. We’ll kill it.”
He went still. “Can we?”
“We can.”
“Then tell me how I will do it, and go.”
“Oh, Aerax,” she laughed. “You tell me never to leave you, then keep trying to send me away. But I will fight to stay with you. Did I not promise that?”
“And I will fight to keep you with me.”
“So we both will fight. But not each other,” she added, her throat suddenly aching. “We will not fight each other.”
“Not each other,” he agreed, and kissed her so fiercely, so sweetly, even as the screams began behind them.
“It has eyes,” Seri said with a note of horror. “So many eyes.”
So many eyes. She looked up into Aerax’s as his gaze searched her face again.
“How do we kill it?” he asked softly.
“With flesh and blood,” she told him. “Yours and mine. Maybe also with a prayer to Vela, but most definitely together. And we will need swords or spears . . . and a boat, I suppose.”
He nodded. “I will find them.”
With another hard kiss, he strode off. Lizzan turned toward the water and her heart rolled sickly into her gut. If wraiths were twisted into their new forms but were still recognizable as once human, then she could hardly fathom what the demon’s true form was. And all that was visible right now was half a head.
And a gaping mouth like a canyon filled with serrated teeth.
“Lizzan!” Her mother raced toward her, Farzan at her side. “Did you see Cernak?”
“He’s on the king’s yacht.”
“On the water?” Terror in her voice, Yuna spun around. “Temra have mercy.”
“They will reach the shore before it comes near,” Lizzan told her.
“Then where do you go?”
“Nowhere. Aerax and I will fight it. As you can.”
Kelir turned to her sharply. “How?”
“You cannot,” Lizzan told him. “Though likely every Kothan can. How vulnerable it will be to people on the ground, however, depends on what lies beneath that water. If it is covered in eyes . . . a fine chance we have.”
Though surely a brain would not lie behind all of those eyes, still they might hurt it. But more importantly, she saw not only terror in her mother now, but also hope.
Yet if all went well, the demon would be dead before it reached the shore.
Lady Junica came near, her gaze searching out Lizzan. “Do I hear that we can fight it?”
“I believe we can,” Lizzan told her. “A demon can be killed by its own flesh and blood—”
“It is a rock!” called a man near Lady Junica whom Lizzan didn’t know.
“That’s true, but it is not only a rock.” More of a crowd gathered now, and Lizzan could not see them all, knew they could not all hear her. She looked around, found a stump from one of the trees cut down to make the refuge wall, and hopped up. She turned to find Preter standing near, holding out a pine cone.
“Speak into that,” he told her—and though Lizzan felt like a fool, she did.
“You can fight it,” she called out, and the sound of her voice shot through the air, causing panicking Kothans to spin in her direction, others abruptly falling silent. The monk had cast a spell like the echo chamber, she realized—so that all she said came from every pine cone strewn across the ground.
“We can fight it!” she called out again. “A demon can be killed by its own flesh and blood. And you say that it is a rock, but it is not only a rock! For thousands of generations, as every Kothan was born, as all of you were born, your birth waters splashed on the ground. After the red fever, as the parents and children that were lost burned on their pyres, the falling snow turned gray with the smoke and ash and sank back into the soil. On the King’s Walk, the blood of a thousand soldiers was spilled—they were your brothers, your sisters. Koth is