The Skylighter (The Keepers' Chronicles Book 2) (32 page)

“Not the only reason I came . . .” She shook her head as if to clear her thoughts. “Fernando is bringing help.”

“I know.” He ran over the uneven ground and heard her cry out as he threw her across his saddle.

She blacked out long before he reached the estate, and he wasn’t able to make sense of the rest of her message until much later.

The balcony that wrapped around the upper floor of the Council House was packed with Performers. They stood shoulder to shoulder, faces grim. The air in the building was close, full of woodsmoke, spices, and fear.

Johanna stood in the center of the floor and told the story simply, without pomp or pageantry. It wasn’t the kind of tale that required an ornate delivery or tricks to evoke an emotion from the audience. No one spoke, no one moved, all were focused on her in the center of the floor as she relayed the truth about Elma, about Keepers, about
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. In the grim lines of their faces, the pallor of their skin, and the way they leaned toward one another for support, she knew they believed her. But believing her and fighting beside her were two different things.

“Yesterday we lost twenty-one of our own. They were your friends. Your parents. Your siblings, and your loves.” She saw the words take their toll. Poor James hunched over the railing, his head in his hands, his face hidden. “Their deaths will mean nothing if we refuse to take action. We’ve hidden in our valley for too long, pretending to have no part, no sway, no power to affect the goings-on of Santarem.”

She raised her eyes, connecting with the people, before leveling her gaze on the four remaining elders. Elma’s chair had been draped with a swath of gray cloth. Johanna ran her fingers over the funeral embroidery before continuing. “If you want to become a puppet, to have your free will stripped away by a power-hungry madman, then sit here in your wagons and wait. Wait for the fireballs to crash among the tents and burn them to cinders. Wait for the lightning to strike down your children. Wait to have a collar strapped around your throat and become a mindless slave.

“But if you want the sacrifices of Elma, and Didsbury, and Sergio, and Olivia, and Julia, and all the others to mean something, then join me. Follow Lord DeSilva and me. Together, with his power and our help, we have a chance to save Performers’ Camp and ultimately all of Santarem.”

There was a moment of silence, of breath held in anticipation, then with a gasp, sound returned in a cacophony of discussion, arguments, and sobs.

Guilherme, one of the oldest men in Performers’ Camp, raised an age-spotted hand. The volume decreased, though the voices didn’t silence entirely.

“Johanna, you’re saying we have two choices: We stay here and become slaves, or we fight. Are there no other options?”

“What about the Keepers? Would they accept us?” said another.

“Could we go to the Wisp Islands?” shouted a third.

“Is there any way to convince them to leave us alone?”

Johanna shook her head, sickened and disappointed that her people were so blind to the dangers facing them.

Then she felt a hand take hers. It was small, with a callus across the thumb and pad of the palm. “I know what it feels like to lose my will to another,” Yara said. “And I will die before letting it happen again. I will fight.”

Enzo, another one of the survivors, took Yara’s other hand. “I will fight.”

Those who had been captured formed a line, faces brave and determined.

The younger members, those nearest Johanna’s age who barely had any memory of the Ten Years’ War, were the next to join them. The line continued up the stairs, around the curve of the balcony.

The voices quieted, the arguments ceased. All heads turned to the four elders. The woman nearest Johanna, a white-haired grandmother, placed her palsied fingers over the point where Yara’s and Johanna’s hands met. “I will fight,” she said, her words thin and reedy.

Guilherme’s age-clouded eyes followed the linked hands. His bottom lip protruded, his face a mask of deliberation. “Well then.” He raised his hand and reached for Johanna’s. “We will all fight.”

Rafi was strategizing, using sticks, rocks, and shallow trenches in the ground to map out routes and describe defenses. “We can’t stay in the valley,” he said as he placed a rock over a squiggle in the dirt that was meant to illustrate the narrow road that led into Performers’ Camp. “The trail itself is defensible, but there are ways through the trees. Then we’d be at a disadvantage. They’d have the high ground and we’d have nowhere left to run.”

He drew a line that represented the coast, the inlet that formed Santiago’s harbor, and described how they’d be forced into the ocean or to move a long line of people along the beach. His voice and actions were passionate, so certain that his side would find a way to prevail because they were fighting for freedom and equality—as if fighting for the goodness guaranteed victory.

Watching Rafi work made Jacaré sick with anger. Rafi was young and in love, and so thoroughly soaked in
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that it rolled off him in waves, but Jacaré knew too well how this story was going to end.

“Stop, Rafi.” Jacaré leaned against the log—the very log Tex had rested against a handful of weeks ago—and folded his arms across his chest. “Even if Jo is successful in recruiting a fighting group from these Performers, we cannot go to Santiago along the coast. We’ll be strung out and easy targets. If we head due south, we’ll have to pass through Camaçari. We won’t have the men to hold off Ceara’s troops. And in the end none of it will matter. The fight will come to you.”

Rafi looked up; his dark eyes reflected the flames from the fire. He wiped his eyebrow with the back of his fist, cleaning away the smudge of dirt there. “Aren’t you some sort of military commander? Don’t you have some strategy to suggest? Don’t you
want
me to destroy the Nata?”

Jacaré didn’t answer. Amelia wouldn’t have let Rafi leave the wall alive unless it served her purposes.

“I know your leader intends me to fight this battle for her,” Rafi said, snapping the stick he’d been drawing with. “If I win, she gets what she wants. If I lose, then I’ll have weakened her enemy.”

The little kernel of respect Jacaré felt for Rafi grew roots. “And you’ve given her a week to marshal her troops.”

“That too.” Rafi nodded and rose from his crouch. “I learned battle strategy from my father, but nothing about magical battles. I need you to tell me what I’m going to face and the best ways to take down a mage.”

Jacaré wanted to laugh. “I had a decade of training, and even then I was unprepared. A few days . . .” He made a vague hand gesture. “Even with the power of every Keeper in existence, you won’t stand against someone like Sapo.”

“So you’re saying I’m destined to fail?”

“Yes.”

The fist crossing Jacaré’s jaw came out of nowhere. His head bounced off the log, and he raised his forearm barely in time to block the second shot. Rafi knelt over him, one hand gripping Jacaré’s shirt, the other raining blows on his head and arms. Jacaré rolled to the side, throwing an elbow that caught Rafi’s ear. They rolled again, coming close to the fire.

“Stop!” a voice shouted. “What are you—Rafi, stop!”

Jacaré wasn’t sure how Rafi had managed to get on top of him again, but he dimly recognized a few other people in the clearing, all working together to break up the fight. Johanna had her arms tight around Rafi’s middle, looking tiny and angry as she tried to pull him away. Another man, a Firesword maybe, held Rafi’s right arm with both of his own.

Rafi looked nothing like a Keeper, not with his curly black hair and dark eyes, but he moved like one. Jacaré couldn’t remember the last time someone had bested him in a fight. The boy moved faster than anyone Jacaré had
ever
seen—maybe the power from the barrier had enacted more than a magical change on the boy. Maybe it had been a physical one as well.

And maybe that meant they had a chance.

Light, it felt good to smash that smug Keeper’s words down his throat. The carefully composed arrogance, the constant expression of discontent, disappeared the instant Rafi’s fist cracked against Jacaré’s jaw. For a moment he showed a real emotion—shocked disbelief.

As if from a distance, Rafi felt Johanna’s hands on his chest, shoving him step by step to the edge of the campsite.

“What are you doing? What is wrong with you?”

He barely heard her, still immersed in the heat of his anger and wanting to stay that way. Anger was an easier emotion for Rafi to face than paralyzing fear. It was sweat and adrenaline, action and release—all a welcome change to the chilled dread that had dribbled into his bone marrow.

“What did that prove?” Jo asked, giving him one last push, which left him standing in the darkness around the campsite and her still in the light.

“That Keepers aren’t unbeatable.” Rafi smiled, and felt a sharp tinge of pain in his bottom lip. He didn’t remember Jacaré landing a single punch, but the metallic taste in his mouth suggested he was wrong. It didn’t matter. “That I’m stronger than he thinks. That he underestimated me, and that if he can be beaten, then Sapo can be as well.”

“So you punched him in the face to prove that point?”

“Yes.” One of his knuckles was bleeding, but the sting of the gash and the pull of the muscles made him feel alive. He wasn’t stupid and he wasn’t blind. Death was on the horizon, either in a magical battle or when he returned the
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to the barrier, and he refused to live the rest of his life under the shadow of dread. “He needed to know I wasn’t going to lie down and let these Keepers trample over me and my land. I intend to put up the best fight possible.”

“Like when Beta stood against the Horde.”

Fear was a feather in the back of his throat, and he swallowed to force it away. “I hope the odds aren’t that impossible, but yes.”

“You plan to die in the end.” Her voice was too flat, void of emotion.

He had known this conversation was coming, but he’d hoped to put it off till after they’d beaten Sapo. “I’d like to live. I’d like to take down Belem and Inimigo and establish peace. I’d like to go home to Santiago and apologize to my mother for all my stupid mistakes and give my brother a hug. I’d like to see the docks rebuilt and the sewers of Santiago running smoothly. I’d like to do a dozen other things that seemed mundane and irritating when I was going to be duke. But most of all”—he stepped forward quickly, using the same speed he had with Jacaré, and wrapped his arms tight around her—“I want to hear your stories. Not the ones you memorized, but the funny, embarrassing, heart-wrenching tales about Johanna Von Arlo. I want you to sing me to sleep every night. I want to spend an eternity kissing your lips and memorizing the texture of your skin.”

“You’re not going to die,” she said, her elbows digging into his ribs, trying to break free. “You’ll have plenty of time to do all those things
after
.”

After. After. If only after were a possibility.

“Johanna?” James approached. “We want to go over the plans.”

Rafi raised his eyebrows at Johanna.

“I came up here to tell you that the Performers agreed,” she said, backing away from him. “You’ve got your army. They’ll be ready to march tomorrow afternoon.”

•  •  •

The Performers moved faster than any army in any of the books that Rafi had studied. It was the nature of their society to be ready to change locations, without stopping for supplies, at a moment’s notice.

At noon the next day the youngest, fittest, and most powerful members of each troupe cracked their whips over their horses’ heads and began the climb to the valley’s lip. Jacaré had spent the rest of the night walking throughout the camp identifying which members had a strong
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, and through that Rafi learned to sense both the presence and strength of it in those around him.

Birds were sent to each of the states, seeking reports from Performers’ friends, and Rafi took the opportunity to send another letter home. It was difficult to compose, knowing that these few lines would be the last he could offer to his brother, mother, and country. But they were not to know any of that. The letter had to remain on point.

He named Dom heir, with Lady DeSilva serving as his regent until he came of age, should Rafi be killed in the ensuing battle. Rafi also confirmed Johanna’s true identity and stipulated she be cared for as royalty, and finally, that if Johanna wished, Santiago would help her regain and rebuild her ancestral home.

There wasn’t room for apologies and good-byes, but he hoped his actions would serve as testimony enough if he didn’t get a chance to tell them himself.

As the brightly colored army made its way toward Cruzamento, Rafi rode knee to knee with Jacaré.

Neither had said a word about the brawl the night before, and Rafi wasn’t going to acknowledge the nick of guilt he felt about the bruises on Jacaré’s face. As if by some unspoken agreement, they chose to focus on the other challenges ahead.

“Strictly by numbers, I’m more powerful than Sapo. Can’t I just blast him with fire or lightning or something?”

Jacaré actually laughed. It was a cold sound, devoid of humor. “Do you want to lose the battle in the first five minutes?”

The blue light of
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flared up around Rafi with the unexpected rush of his anger. Johanna whipped around in her saddle, eyes narrowed with concern. No one else seemed to notice, and Jacaré didn’t comment.

“Relax,” Jacaré snapped. “You may have the power of a hundred Keepers, but Sapo’s had hundreds of years to hone his skill. If I gave a child an excellent sword but put him up to fight against a master, who would win?”

Rafi exhaled and tried to release his grip on the power. He’d always had a quick temper, but he’d trained himself to hide his anger until he could release it on the training yard. Since the incident at the wall, rage had boiled just below the surface. When it started to bubble over, blue light burst through his skin. He struggled to rein it in, to tamp it down, but his first inclination was to blow something up.