Island of Fire (The Unwanteds) (28 page)

“No, I’m the only one,” she said with no evidence of grouchiness whatsoever. “Florence sent me to look for you.”

“Perfect,” Alex said. He helped the ostrich up and out. He sealed off the tunnel behind him with another glass spell in case anybody was coming after them. And then he bounded halfway up the ladder, and just as his head emerged, he froze.

In his face was a saber, held by a stately woman with long silver hair. He gasped, his eyes darting around the hole, where Lani, Sky, Crow, and the ostrich were being held by four brutes, each holding a saber to the Artiméans’ necks.

“Hello, you annoying little man,” the woman said, drawing her words out in a sickly sweet voice. “I am Queen Eagala. I think you need to turn back around. We’ll get a collar and chain on you right away so you can stop stealing my people.” Her voice was eerily familiar, and so were her looks. In an instant, it dawned on him. He knew exactly who she must be.

Alex hesitated, inching his fingers toward his pocket. He didn’t dare slide his eyes toward Lani, but he knew she’d be ready. “I’m not stealing your people, I’m rescuing mine,” Alex said in as calm a voice as he could muster. Against the ladder his fingers slid into his pocket, where the prototypes were. “They want to leave, don’t you, guys?”

“Yep,” Lani said.

Sky followed suit. “Mm-hmm.”

“Sure do,” said Crow.

The ostrich rolled her eyes.

“They can’t leave. They’re on my property, they’re branded,
and they work for me now,” said the icy woman. A smile played on her lips as if she was enjoying the little game.

“Maybe you could
fire
them,” Alex suggested. He put extra emphasis on the word “fire” and glanced at the ostrich, who couldn’t possibly be hurt by the blade on her neck but was playing along beautifully so far.

His fingers felt the sandpapery stone claw, and he tried not to be too distracted as he thought the word:
Seek.

“Oh, they’re much too good at working for me to do that,” Queen Eagala said.

Nothing happened, and for a moment Alex feared the worst—that somehow Artimé was gone. But then he remembered what Simber had said, that his claw might not work because he hadn’t created it artistically.

Alex was starting to panic, but he forced himself to remain calm. A drop of sweat rolled down his back as he moved his other hand to grab more spells, but he didn’t have much choice. He clutched the dewclaw harder and said, “So, you
seek
to hire more people, is that it?”

With that, a ball of fire burst from Alex’s pocket and shot straight up into the air, and everybody reacted. The ostrich
slammed back the foot she wasn’t standing on, straight into the man’s kneecap. Then the bird launched her stone head backward into the brute’s face as hard as she could, dropping the guy. The ostrich flapped her stone wings, knocking Crow’s guard in the side of the head. Teeth flew from the man’s mouth. He dropped his saber, staggered a few steps, and fell to the ground on top of the first guy.

At the same time, Lani stuck a pincushion component into her guard’s thigh with one hand and tossed a handful of scatterclips at Queen Eagala, pinning her to the tree behind her. The queen screeched, furious, unable to move.

Lani’s guard, feeling a thousand pins pricking his skin, began dancing around in agony, but still took a swipe with his saber at Lani as she searched for more components. The long, sharp blade caught Lani in the thigh, slicing through the fabric of her pants and deep into the skin. She gritted her teeth, unwilling to show how much it hurt. Seconds later, blood soaked through the fabric and spread in a growing circle around the wound. She whirled around and managed to dodge the next swing, wondering where Samheed could possibly be. Was he already on the ship? She didn’t know, and there was no time to
go back through the tunnels now. It was too late. “Samheed!” she screamed, frantic. She couldn’t leave without him.

With his last component, Alex blinded the guard holding Sky, who scooted out from under the knife and grabbed Crow. “Run!” Alex shouted to them, and they went a short distance, but Sky turned back.

Alex jumped up the ladder the rest of the way and slammed a fist into the blinded guard’s gut, almost breaking his fingers. But the guard was expecting it. He picked Alex up like a toy and shook him until his eyes and teeth rattled, and then threw him through the air. Alex slammed back-first into a tree trunk, his head ricocheting into the tree bark without a sound. He flopped to the ground, face-first in the sand, and didn’t move.

“Alex!” Sky screamed as Simber, without a sound, arrived, diving through the trees, knocking them down left and right. “Rrrun forrr the ship!” he growled. He picked up the guard who had tossed Alex like a sack of beans and roared in the man’s face until it turned white and his eyes rolled back in his head. Then Simber grabbed the man, flew straight up, and deposited the guard in the top of the tallest tree, leaving him there. He came back down and dive-bombed the pincushioned guard as
the creep started toward Alex’s motionless body. Simber picked the man up with his claws and hurtled him with all his might, sending him soaring far across the island. The man crashed through the palm fronds that made up the shipyard roof.

Samheed had been ambushed on his way to find Lani by some rather ugly guards, but he managed to fight his way out of their grasps and went back to his initial plan. He raced to the fire cave, but by then he could tell he was too late. It was empty. He turned back and raced for the south exit, not exactly sure how to get there in the maze of tunnels. “Lani!” he yelled as he ran past glassed-in caves with Warblerans peering out.

A squirrelicorn darted past his head. “I’m Rufus. Are you Samheed?”

Samheed took one look and blew out a breath of relief. “Yes.”

“I had a feeling you were still down here,” Rufus said. “Follow me.” He buzzed through the tunnels as if he’d lived there all his life, Samheed on his heels. Two Warblerans came out of nowhere and began to chase him, and after working hard all day, Samheed wasn’t as fast as he wanted to be. “Call horse!”
Samheed cried, and an invisible steed shot up under him, running at full speed for the exit. Samheed hung on.

Just before they reached the exit hole, Rufus shouted, “Whoa!” He dove into a hairpin turn and the steed slammed on the brakes and skidded to a halt. With no time to react, Samheed wasn’t so lucky. He flew forward off the steed, clanged against the glass wall Alex had left, and bounced to the floor of the tunnel.

“Ooof,” he gasped.

Rufus came back around more slowly and began ramming the glass spell in the hallway with his horn. “We need—to get—through here,” Rufus said between jabs, but he was getting nowhere.

At first Samheed didn’t know what had hit him—or what he’d hit. And then he reached his hand out and moved it across the glass. “Dang it, Stowe,” he muttered, rubbing his shoulder, and he would have laughed if it hadn’t hurt so much. Quickly he got back up. The men were on his tail.

He released Alex’s glass wall spell and cast a new one between him and the approaching guards. Then he dispelled the steed and crawled up the ladder as fast as he could go. He
was free! Rufus zoomed up and out the hole past him to make sure the coast was clear.

“Lani!” Samheed yelled at the top of his voice, not caring about anything else. He was free, but was she? He thought so, based on the glass walls. But he wasn’t going anywhere without being sure.

He looked around and nearly fell back into the hole. The queen faced him just a few feet away, and at first he didn’t realize she was stuck to a tree.

“Release me!” she screamed, but no one came to her aid. Certainly not Samheed. To his right he saw two enormous guards lying in a heap—probably one of them was the one who had dragged them out of the dark cave.

He heard Simber roaring somewhere nearby but couldn’t see him. Samheed blasted the queen with a silence spell, which was a relief, and tossed shackles on the two guards, who weren’t moving. Then he shot another round of scatterclips at the queen just to make sure she was stuck fast. He ran down the path.

“Lani!” he shouted again.

Simber landed on the ground in front of him and raced past
Samheed to a tree in the woods just as an orange-eyed girl ran up to him. Samheed whirled in alarm.

“No—Samheed, it’s me. From the raft. I’m Sky. You need to come with me. Hurry!”

It took him a second to recognize her as the Silent girl. He hadn’t even seen her with her eyes open before. “Oh. Sorry. You look like . . . ”

“Everyone else here. I know. Come.”

He followed her, wiping the sweat from his forehead. “Have you seen Lani?”

Sky nodded. “She’s hurt.”

The look on Samheed’s face startled Sky. “Where!” he cried. “Where is she?”

She grabbed his arm. “This way. I’m trying to take you to her. She can’t walk.” She ran in the direction of the lagoon, where Lani lay off the path. It was as far as she had been able to go. Her eyes were open but she was breathing hard, her face telling everything.

“Sam,” she said, reaching for him.

He ran to her and knelt down. She wrapped her arms around his neck and he lifted her up. She stared at him, and he
stared at her. Sky watched, a little puzzled, and then her lips parted. A second later she snapped her lips shut and tugged on Samheed’s sleeve again. “We need to hurry,” she said.

Sky led Samheed as fast as he could go to the lagoon, where Florence stood. She paced, looking around anxiously. The ground shook slightly around her. “Ah, there you are.” She took a giant step to reach Sam and Lani and picked them both up like they were a sack of arrows. “Thank you, Sky,” Florence said over her shoulder as she walked Sam and Lani to the ship, where a cheer rose up at the sight of the rescued Unwanteds.

But Sky was not there to hear it. Instead she raced back to the trees as Simber gently nudged the young mage of Artimé into his jaws.

Simber looked up when he sensed Sky standing there. His eyes were sad. He unfurled his wings, letting one come to rest at her feet, and tipped his head, indicating she should climb on. She scurried up his wing and settled on, grasping him tightly around the neck, pressing her face against the cool stone.

Just then a silent army of Warblerans, unstuck from their temporary spells, melted out from the cover of the trees and spread like lava, surrounding them.

Simber flashed them a disgusted look as he bolted down the path and leaped into the air, pumping his mighty wings. The Warblerans’ spears, rocks, and sabers only fell back to the ground, harming no one but themselves.

S
imber lowered his hindquarters into the water at the edge of the ship and folded his wings to give the Artiméans a better chance to remove Alex safely from his jaws. Once Alex had been brought to their temporary triage area, Simber made a bridge of his wing for Sky, who crawled across it and waited anxiously, watching as Henry came running with Ms. Octavia to see how they could help.

“Wherrre’s Carrrina?” the cheetah growled. “She has some healing experrrience, doesn’t she?”

“She’s over there where you left her, still out from the sleep
dart, Sim,” Ms. Octavia said. “I’ll do my best, and Henry’s here. He’s been studying.”

Simber frowned. There was nothing else they could do. He glanced back at the shore and then turned to the ship. “Leaderrrs,” he roared, sounding fiercer than they’d ever heard him. “Is everrryone accounted forrr? Sound off, just as yourrr mage would have you do!”

Those who could, did, and Florence covered the rest. “You’re the last ones in, Simber,” Florence said gently. “Unless we want to try to rescue some of the other people of Warbler.”

Simber glanced over his shoulder once more as the army of Warblerans reached the beach, but they didn’t enter the water—at least not yet. And then he looked at Alex. “We can’t,” he said, defeated. “We arrren’t strrrong enough to go back now. And we’ve rrrisked enough alrrready.” He turned sharply. “Captain,” he called, silencing the muttering statue, “We
must
hurrry.”

The captain commanded the statues to raise the sails, and he took the wheel. “Ye can’t escape, thou treacherous beast!” he cried, shaking his fist toward the nebulous east. There was little wind to take the sails. “A longer night no man or beast
has likely seen,” he added, but no one was really listening.

Simber pushed the ship farther out until he could reach the sea’s floor no longer, and then he rose into the air as darkness settled.

Suddenly the fox came tearing up the stairs and jumped up and down next to Florence. “Hey,” he said. “Hey. Hey. Kitten is missing! Kitten isn’t here!”

“What?” Florence asked, alarmed. “You’re serious? No, I’m sure I counted her. Or maybe I counted you and assumed she was on your back.” The ebony statue cringed. She looked over to the shore as if she might be able to see the tiny kitten in the dark. She looked up at Simber.

“We can’t go back,” Simber said gruffly, reading her mind. “Not now. I’ll come back forrr herrr laterrr. She’s a cat. She’ll be fine.”

The fox hopped, anxious, and then he flopped to the deck dramatically and buried his face under his paws, sobbing.