“And then what? Then who will we be?”
He leaned in toward me the tiniest bit.
“Then everything changes,” he said quietly. “Then I’m different. You’ll be different, too. You’re different already. I knew it from the beginning, but . . .”
I leaned toward him now, too, and, as if I were channeling Gert, anticipated something I really wanted. Wondered if I actually could make it happen. Without any magic at all.
Suddenly his face changed and he looked away. “You have to promise to be careful tomorrow,” he said. “I didn’t want to bring you, but Mombi wouldn’t listen. The Lion’s no joke. You have to promise me you won’t do anything stupid. I—we need you too much. You’re too valuable.”
For a second, I’d thought he’d been saying something different. But now his jaw was set, and I remembered again.
“I know the deal,” I said. “I know why I’m important to you.” I was testing him now. I wanted him to correct me.
He stared at me for what felt like the longest time. But he didn’t say anything else.
I turned around.
“Dorothy must die. I get it. But in the meantime, what are you living for?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. “I have to go,” he said. I was already walking away. “There’s planning to do. You should try and get some sleep.”
A screeching sound woke me in the middle of the night. When I opened my eyes, still groggy, I saw it. A bat.
It was zigzagging around my room, wings flapping, howling with a voice that was ten times bigger than its body.
I knew what it meant. It was a signal. It wanted me to follow it.
When I got to the war room a few minutes later, everyone else was already there, dressed for battle and clustered around Glamora’s scrying pool. Melindra and Annabel had grim looks on their faces. In other words, some things were the same as ever.
“What is it?” I asked.
“The Lion’s moving faster than we thought,” Gert said. “It’s time to go.”
Glamora pointed to the pool, where the shadowy image of an enormous lion breaking through the door of a small thatched house appeared. It was too dark to really make him out, but he didn’t look so cowardly to me. He looked mean—and hungry.
Behind him, I could see other silhouettes. The bumpy outlines of some kind of reptile, and a furry blur that looked like it might be some kind of enormous rodent.
“The Lion spent so long afraid of every creature in the forest. Now he commands them,” Nox whispered.
“What are those things?”
“You name it. If it has claws and teeth and it drools, it probably answers to the Lion.” I felt myself shiver as my imagination filled in the blanks.
“What are they doing?” I asked quietly, fighting back the irrational fear that he could hear me.
“What they do best,” Glamora replied. “Going door-to-door. Some of the villagers he’ll capture to bring back to Dorothy; the rest of them he’ll kill. For fun. After he eats, of course.” She trailed her fingers through the water, and the image disappeared in a swirl of red. “It’s too late for this village—it’s already lost. But he’ll be on to the next one soon, and if we act fast we can stop him before he gets there.”
“Not to mention get to us,” Nox said.
“Exactly,” Mombi interjected. “He’s less than a hundred miles from us. If he gets any closer, we run the risk that his senses will be able to see past the magical barriers that keep us hidden here.” She looked at me. “I hope what I saw yesterday wasn’t a fluke, Amy. This isn’t a test anymore.”
“Mombi,” Nox said, cutting in. “Please. Think about it. Amy should stay behind. We can’t risk her on something like this. It’s too dangerous.”
Mombi dismissed him with a wave of her gnarled hand. “We’ve already been through this, Nox. I wouldn’t expect you, of all people, to let your feelings get in the way of what must be done. We need all the strength we can muster tonight.”
“If we can’t count on Amy now, when all the rest of us will be there, she won’t be much good alone against Dorothy anyway,” Melindra added, shooting a sidelong glance in my direction.
I was annoyed. They were talking about me like I wasn’t even there. And why was Nox trying to prevent me from going? Didn’t he think I’d improved? “I’m going,” I said coolly, all heads turning in my direction. “Melindra’s right. And I’m a member of the Order now. I’m not just going to hide out here while everyone else fights.”
Nox’s forehead creased in frustration, but he let it drop. It was settled.
Mombi, Gert, and Glamora left the war room to make the final preparations. I was about to leave when Nox pulled me aside. “Here,” he said, pushing something hard into my hand.
I turned the object over in my palm. It was a knife, but it wasn’t only a knife. I could tell it was special just by the way it felt. It was heavy, heavier than it looked, and it was almost vibrating with something that I now recognized immediately as magic.
I didn’t want to like it. I didn’t want to like anything that Nox gave me. But I couldn’t help it: the knife was too beautiful. It was nothing like the kitchen knife that Pete had given me. It had a glinting silver blade with mysterious symbols engraved into it. The hilt was smooth and white, and was intricately carved into the figure of a bird with wings outstretched, ready to take flight.
“I carved it by hand from a Kalidah’s bones,” he said, looking down to avoid meeting my eyes. “The blade’s made from the claw. Gert spelled it and Mombi sealed it. It’s designed to channel your magic for you—to store it and make it easier to access. Not so different from Dorothy’s magic shoes, really. Except, hopefully, you know, not totally evil.”
I rubbed my fingers over Nox’s handiwork. It must have taken hours. I knew that he’d done it for the cause, so that I could be a better fighter. But it was still a gift and it was still beautiful.
“It will protect you,” he said. “And there’s another spell attached to it, too—push the wings down.”
The wings didn’t look like they would move, but when I pressed gingerly on them, they ceded easily to my touch and folded up neatly against the side of the bird’s body. As they did, the knife sparkled in my hand and then evaporated into smoke that drifted off into the air.
“Where’d it go?” I asked.
“It’s still with you,” Nox said. “Just not anywhere someone else can find it. Now picture it in your hand again.”
I looked down at my empty, open palm and imagined I was clutching the weapon. Its image entered my mind, and as it did, I was holding it again.
“Thank you,” I said quietly. I wrapped my fingers gently around the hilt. I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had given me anything, and this was something that Nox had made just for me. Something magic. I felt my spirit lift inside myself. The corners of my mouth threatened to turn upward, but I didn’t want him to see how happy the present had made me. “What kind of bird is this?” I asked. It didn’t look like any bird I’d seen before.
“It’s a Magril—a bird that’s native to Gillikin Country. It spends half its life as a beetle, and when it’s an adult, it goes to sleep for a year and wakes up as this majestic creature.”
“Kind of like a butterfly.”
“Kind of like you,” he said. I didn’t have an answer to that.
I didn’t need one. At that moment, Mombi appeared before us. She looked down at the knife and up at me, and then Nox.
“It’s time to go,” she said.
We all gathered a few minutes later in the training room—me, Nox, Gert, and Mombi—and held hands. Glamora would be staying behind, along with Melindra and Annabel.
Melindra complained about being left behind—she wasn’t the type to want to miss out on any action—but she seemed placated when Mombi reminded her that it was important that our most skilled fighter guard the headquarters in case it was a trap. Melindra didn’t look happy about it, but she knew better than to argue with Mombi.