Copper Ravens (27 page)

“You're going to let them live?” Max asked, looking over at the furious, grunting creature. Despite his lack of an orifice, he still had a lot to say.

“It sends a message,” Mom replied. “Attack my family, be horribly maimed. Attack my family again, and you will perish.”

“Won't he starve?” Sadie asked, glancing over her shoulder at the mouthless orc.

“The curse only lasts forty-eight hours. Though he still has his teeth and may well gnaw his way through before then.”

Sadie, now a lovely shade of green that coordinated nicely with Max's sickly pallor, placed a hand over her mouth as she nodded. Mom patted her youngest's shoulder, then turned on her heel and marched us out of the cell. Disheveled and filthy, she nevertheless walked down the murky corridors like the queen she was, with her head held high. We encountered no guards, goblin or otherwise, though if they had any sense at all, they'd long since fled.

When we reached the public areas of this fine establishment, I saw that Micah's assessment was correct—we were in a brothel. Not one of the nicer brothels, either, if nicer versions of that sort of place existed. Based on the jaded faces of the workers, and the empty eyes of the patrons, this was nothing more than a study in hopelessness.

Heads swiveled toward us; wouldn't you know it, all the workers, and more than a few patrons, recognized the Lord of Silver, despite the fact that Micah was clad in iron. I was definitely going to have to ask him about this notoriety. Thinking that they were about to be shut down, apprehended, or worse, all the patrons and workers fled at once, out of doors and windows or any other conveniently placed opening. Once the place had emptied, we made our way outside into the welcome sunshine.

It was just after dawn, which meant that we'd spent half of yesterday and the entire night as the orcs' captives. We quickly navigated our way back to the square and soon reached the obsidian fountain where this little adventure had begun. Now that the adrenaline high of our escape was wearing off, we took a moment to rest. Sadie moved to dip her hands in the water, attempting to wash up, but Micah stayed her. By way of explanation, he dropped a pebble into the water, which hissed and smoked as it dissolved.

“Oh,” Sadie croaked. “I guess I'll stay filthy.” The dissolving stone reeked something awful, and Max retched. Again.

“Now what do we do?” I asked. “Clearly, that wasn't the way to Dad.”

“Dad never dealt with orcs,” Max said, wiping his mouth on the hem of his shirt. “No matter how deep in hiding he was, he never compromised his morals. Dad just wouldn't do that.”

“This was some fool's notion of a way to earn coin,” Micah said. “They saw Baudoin's son, and assumed—rightly so—that the son sought his father. The orcs attempted to intercede, but their sloppy kidnapping failed. Like as not, Baudoin has not set foot in this market for a long, long time.” Micah looked at Mom while he spoke. Mom didn't acknowledge him, instead she stared at the fountain, scrutinizing the trail of noxious bubbles. All that remained of the once-solid stone.

“So, where could he be?” Sadie asked. She went on to ask Max what else he remembered, when Mom shook her head.

“Perhaps he isn't anywhere,” Mom said. “Perhaps…perhaps when he stopped meeting Max, it was because he was…gone.” I slipped my hand into Mom's and squeezed. She'd been holding onto Dad's memory for so long, I wondered if it had ever occurred to her that he had died, maybe quite some time ago. Rationally, we all knew that his death was a possibility, but out loud, we had always denied it. Out loud, we claimed that Dad was in hiding, and that he would come back.

Gods. Why were we always wrong about these things?

“What I do not understand,” Mom said, blinking from something other than the rising sun, “is how they managed all of this so swiftly. It is not like we frequent the Goblin Market. Well,
most
of us don't,” she added, with a withering look at Max.

“Maybe they were waiting for Max,” I offered, but Max shook his head.

“I never come to the fountain anymore,” he said. “I stick to the bars and the gambling dens. This square is too exposed.”

“Makes no sense,” Mom muttered.

“Come,” Micah said, wrapping his arm around my shoulders. The iron armor he'd fashioned from his manacles was certainly not his finest work, and it had rough edges that bit into my flesh, but I didn't mind. At least he was with me. “Let us leave this vile place.”

24

W
e trudged back up the hill and away from the Goblin Market, silent save for Max's occasional bouts of nausea. It had been proven, far, far beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Dad was not anywhere near us, not in body, or spirit, or…Well, let's just stop there. As much as the evidence pointed toward the obvious, I was not ready to consider my father as passed on. Not now, and maybe not ever.

I squeezed Micah's hand, grateful for his calming, solid presence. When I called him my knight in dirty armor, he didn't get it, but he smiled anyway. His battered leather shirt was tossed over his shoulder, and he was once again wearing the token I'd given him. Since he'd regained his own sword, he'd given me the iron one he'd made on the fly. It was a lot heavier than the one Ash had made me, and nowhere near as beautiful, but the edge was razor sharp; it seemed that Micah had been wrong in sending me to the blacksmith, since he managed to create quite fine weapons all on his own. I only hoped I wouldn't need it.

I also hoped that Mom would be okay. Since we'd left the Goblin Market, she'd done nothing but mutter away to herself. I wondered if Dad's lack of presence at his last known haunt, coupled with the years of mistreatment by Peacekeepers, had finally done her in.

“Do you think she'll be all right?” I asked Micah, my eyes on Mom. He didn't answer, so I tugged at his hand. When he still didn't answer, I followed his gaze down the road and gasped.

Iron warriors blocked our path.

“Stand aside,” Micah boomed, for all the good it did him. The iron warriors, true to their nature, remained immobile. I counted seven standing shoulder-to-shoulder across the road, and a group of at least ten behind them, clustered together as if they were shielding someone important. That someone was probably the person in charge of this little event.

Micah, frustrated that the warriors refused to move or even acknowledge him, the Lord of Silver, raised his arm to fling them aside. They wobbled a bit, and one toppled over, but they remained on the road.

“You think you're so strong,” came a gravelly voice from behind the cluster of warriors. “All you of metal, thinking you're so much better than the rest.” In another moment, Old Stoney stepped around to the front, a pair of orcs flanking him. The very same orcs that had been in the Whispering Dell's tavern the day Max and I were attacked by that iron warrior.

I glanced at my brother, and he nodded. Great. We'd been captured, drugged, interrogated, beaten, and then I find out that we'd also been followed by orcs and iron warriors, for who knows how long, and they had been on Old Stoney's payroll. Could my day get any better?

“Interesting words, Farthing Greymalkin, coming from one of stone who surrounds himself with iron warriors,” Micah observed.

“We of earth and stone have always been stronger!” Old Stoney shouted, indicating the warriors before him. Their feet were held fast by fingers of living stone, thus keeping them in place when Micah would have flung them away. “We ruled the Elemental court for centuries! Nearly a millennium, until you of metal betrayed us!”

“Fool, there was no betrayal,” Micah countered. “Those of stone had been challenged countless times for the right to rule us all. You merely despair now, because, the last time, you lost.”

“And you now ally yourself with his children!” the granite madman continued.

“Wait!” I shouted. Surprisingly, Old Stoney paid attention to me this time. “What about
his children?
What about my father?”

His face split like a fissure carved out by a river long since dry. “He was our greatest rival, for all that he fell before us.”

“Our?” I demanded, but Max got it right away.

“Ferra,” he ground out. “You and Ferra killed my father?”

“We did him one better,” Stoney said. “You recall when iron warriors attacked your prison, boy?” Max, too shocked to be offended, nodded. “That was your father's feeble attempt to rescue you. We captured him ourselves and turned him over to the human magistrates.”

And, just like that, we were all struck dumb. Now we
knew
that Dad hadn't died when he'd stopped meeting with Max, and that he'd tried to rescue Max from the Institute, which meant that he had been alive just a few years ago. Thanks to Old Stoney, this was the first new information we'd had about my father in more than a decade.

Thanks to Old Stoney, we now knew that he and Ferra had betrayed my father and turned him over to an enemy even worse than the two of them combined. Who knows what the Peacekeepers had done to him since then.

“Disappointed that you allied yourself with a loser?” Mom said, her voice dead calm. “It must pain you, Greymalkin, to have betrayed your kind, only to watch Ferra falter and die.” Mom crossed her arms and raised her chin, her eyes glazed as if she was about to take on Old Stoney hand-to-hand. “Pity you weren't there to watch her rust. It was a fitting end for one like her.”

“Mom,” I warned.

“Mom?”
Stoney sneered. “Baudoin's whore, here in the flesh?” He laughed, but Mom didn't so much as flinch.

“Don't you dare talk about my mother that way!” I shouted. As Stoney opened his mouth for one of those “who do you think you are” retorts, the warriors before him melted. And when I say melted I mean
melted
, as if they were butter left out on a hot day. The pain behind my eyes told me that I was the one responsible, and that I was about to faint.

“Sara,” Micah began, catching me about the waist. I shook my head in reply; I wanted his focus to remain on Old Stoney, not shift to me.

“You've no one left to hide behind,” Mom observed. “So, Greymalkin, why don't you tell me everything you know about my Beau, and I'll consider letting you live.”

Instead of speaking, Old Stoney grinned. Later, I understood that melted metal is similar to magma, the even hotter, liquid rock that flows beneath the earth's surface, the stuff that's called lava once it erupts from volcanoes. I would also understand that my reducing the iron warriors to their liquid states had given Stoney an idea, and that he was a diabolical man, more than a bit crazy, and that he had gone into this meeting knowing that he wasn't coming out alive.

Old Stoney raised his arms, and stone caps grew over the pools of cooling metal, far out of our reach. Stoney cackled, chilling my blood despite the great geysers of lava bursting from his feet. Max shouted something about not being able to reach the metal below the bedrock, and I felt Micah's influence tug at the sword in my hand, saw his armor rattle against his limbs. Then Micah grabbed my shoulders and threw me behind him amidst a gale of oppressive heat and impossible loudness. I passed out before I hit the ground.

25

B
lack ash rained around me, like a dusting of dry, dirty snow. I brushed it away from my face, coughed a bit, then took a few deep breaths. I explored the ground with my fingertips, feeling for my sword; when I found it, the hilt didn't seem right. Sluggishly, I realized that it was the sword Micah had fashioned from the iron manacles, not the beautiful weapon Ash had made especially for me.

Micah
. My last memory was of him shoving me away, and then…

I struggled to a sitting position, shaking off more cinders in the process, and took in the scene around me. There was Sadie, lying on her side, but alive and breathing. Behind her, Max was helping Mom to her feet. Before us lay cooling puddles of iron and lava, belching great billowing clouds of steam, and beyond that was Old Stoney's body, his chest cleaved in two by a mass of white metal. By a mass of silver.

Where is Micah?

“Micah?” No answer. “Micah? Micah Micah Micah Micah MICAH!”

I remembered him standing on my left side, shoving me behind him and shouting. Now, all I could see was ash, blanketing the ground, no shapes that resembled bodies. I crawled forward, feeling with my hands, my feet, searching for any sign of him. At last, after far too long, I came upon a small heap of stones mixed in with the ash. I pushed the topmost layer aside, and found a hand.

Gods, it could have been a corpse for how cold it was; the skin had already gone bluish. Still, I knew it was Micah,
my
Micah, and as I dug him out, my skin and nails tearing against the stones and cinders, I knew he wasn't dead. He could not be dead. He was not allowed to be dead. When I unearthed his face, eyes closed and mouth slack, my heart almost stopped.

“Silverkin!” I shrieked. If anyone knew how to help him, it would be the silverkin. Shep always knew what to do.

“Sara.” I looked at the hand on my shoulder, unsure why it was there, and followed the attached arm up to Max's face. His eyes were sad, resigned. “He's gone. Let him rest.”

“Not gone,” I said, holding Micah's cold cheek against my neck. “He promised me he would be okay. He promised me we would leave together.”

“Sara—”

“Silverkin!” And then they were there, crowding around Micah and me like a diminutive cavalry. “Shep!” I called, finding their leader amongst the masses. “Shep, I don't know how he's hurt. Can you tell me?”

“He's sacrificed himself for you,” answered a gravelly voice. I turned and saw the crone hobble toward us through the clouds of steam. “He had nothing left, no weapons he could use against so great a foe, so he used his silver in your defense.”