26
Glenn turned and watched as the smudge grew, taking up more and more of the sky as it approached. There was a sound now too, like blowing wind mixed with some kind of high-pitched call, chaotic and jumbled. Closer, the smudge was like a haze of oily smoke, but soon Glenn was able to pick out individual parts of it, small bits turning within the whole, a swirling mass of dark forms and flashes of silver tumbling through the sky.
“What is it?” Glenn asked. “Aamon?”
“Do you see what your attack has gotten you, Sturges?” Aamon growled. “Do you see what you’ve awoken?”
“Aamon!”
“It’s her,” Aamon said.
“Who?”
His green eyes flared. The black cloud behind him was moving impossibly fast, growing and darkening as it came.
“The Magistra,” he said.
Glenn could almost reach out and touch the trees that marked the beginning of the border, they were so close. Sturges urged the wagon forward, but the cloud and that awful windy scream sounded right behind them. It seemed to take over the entire sky now, a swirling mass of screeching. As it lowered, Glenn finally saw what it was: an enormous flock of black birds with long silver-tipped tails. Thousands of them, moving as one.
Sturges snapped the reins again, but it was too late — the flock rolled over them like a cloud. The horses bucked, refusing to go any farther. Glenn dropped her head into her hands as she was buffeted by their small bodies. They were everywhere at once, a swirl of claws and wings and shrieking. They washed over the wagon, then turned and began to circle it, going faster and faster until they seemed to suck the air out of the sky. It was like being caught in the eye of a tornado, the bodies of the birds making up the black and silver walls of its funnel.
The soldiers looked to one another, unsure what to do. Sturges was screaming at them to move, but it was no use. The call of the birds was so loud that no one could hear him.
The birds spun until Glenn lost track of their individual bodies, and the cacophony of their screeching became one ear-tearing scream.
And then everything went quiet.
It happened all at once, as if someone had turned the sound off.
The flock was converging in front of the wagon. Like water flowing down a drain, the birds reached one point and disappeared in a haze of darkness that grew deeper every second. The sight of it made Glenn’s heart go still and her skin turn clammy and cold.
Glenn dimly felt Aamon pulling at her, and thought she heard Kevin calling for her to run, but she couldn’t move or look away. She stood up in the front of the wagon and watched as the hole of darkness surged and coalesced. The birds silently dove into it, their bodies disappearing. Slowly, a form began to take shape amidst the black.
Glenn could hear Sturges beside her now, shouting at his soldiers to fire. Some did. They drew their fine Colloquium bows and loosed arrows, but while their aim was true, the bolts were simply swallowed up, useless.
As the form in the dark solidified, Glenn’s heart began to thrum.
She knew that she should be afraid, she should be terrified, but still she yearned for her mother to appear. Soon the inchoate shape of a body floated in the air before them, tall and lean and black. More of the birds dove toward it, eagerly sacrificing themselves to form its hands and face and long trail of dark hair.
Soon, color and form emerged from the dark, and Glenn saw the pale curves of a heart-shaped face. Her lips were a smear of red. A smoky dress hovered around her and came into focus. The breath fled Glenn’s lungs and she stood there, empty.
After all these years, there she was.
Glenn started to speak, but before she could, one of the soldiers was lifted off his feet and thrown into the forest. There was a red flash, and Glenn saw his body strike the trunk of a tree and crumple at its base, lifeless. Another soldier screamed and fell where he stood.
Another struggled and gasped, suffocating. Some tried to fight back, loosing arrows and spears into the air, but they all fell uselessly at the Magistra’s feet.
Glenn’s mother hovered soundlessly in front of them, impassive, unconcerned.
“Stop!” Glenn shouted, standing up on the wagon’s seat. “Stop it!”
The Magistra turned and Glenn’s blood seized in her veins. The Magistra’s face was as pale as chalk, with red lips and black eyes as large and strange as a raven’s.
“Stop this,” Glenn said, but it wasn’t much more than a whisper.
Her mother glided toward them, trailing her dress of smoke
behind her. Sturges leapt up, pulling a knife out from under his jacket.
He tried to grab Glenn, but with a flick of her mother’s finger, Sturges flew off the front seat and landed in a heap on the ground.
The dark form was only feet from them now. A pillar of black and white, studying Glenn with its inhuman eyes. Even through the shield that surrounded Glenn, she could feel her mother’s power buffet her. It was like a twist in space, a wrongness, as if the air around her mother’s body was made of plastic that had been warped and deformed.
There was a rumble behind Glenn, and as she turned she saw
Kevin rushing up from the back of the wagon, a fallen soldier’s blade gleaming in his hand.
“Kevin, no!”
The Magistra lifted one hand and he shot up into the air,
suspended in open space. She let him dangle there a moment, regarding him like a cat does a bird, and then slowly she closed her fingers as if crumpling a piece of paper. Kevin’s arms were thrown back behind him.
His neck arched. He doubled over with a scream.
“Stop it!” Glenn shouted, finding her voice again. “Let him go!”
The Magistra’s hand stilled. Kevin hovered by the side of the wagon, moaning, alive. Her dark eyes fell on Glenn. Her lips moved silently. Her voice, when it came, seemed to come not from her mouth but from everywhere at once.
“These people defiled my home. You are with them?”
“No, we’re not. Please, let him go.”
Her mother’s head cocked to one side, curious. “I cannot feel you,” she said. “What are you?”
“It’s me,” Glenn said, her voice quaking. “It’s Glenn. Stop this.
Please.”
The Magistra hung there, studying Glenn while one hand held Kevin in the air. She drifted closer, and Glenn fought the urge to buckle under the pulse of the Magistra’s Affinity. Her head swam. The air tasted brackish in her mouth.
“Please. He’s my friend.”
The Magistra raised her other hand, white as snow with torn and dirty nails, up toward Glenn’s face. Glenn made herself go still as that hand came closer. When it was inches from touching her, Glenn moved without thinking.
She stripped the bracelet off her own wrist and clamped it onto her mother’s.
At first there was nothing. Stillness. Kevin dangled in the warped air. The Magistra regarded Glenn coldly with her eyes of oily black.
But then something started to swirl in them. It was mesmerizing, like a whirlpool, as the black faded ever so slightly. A bit of gray appeared at the edges and then turned, with agonizing slowness, white. A flush of rose rushed into her mother’s pale skin. Soon the black in her mother’s eyes was wiped away and they became a bright and clear blue. She stepped down out of the sky and her feet touched the edge of the wagon.
“Glenn?” she asked, her voice weak and tremulous.
“Yes,” Glenn said. “Yes, it’s me.”
Her mother reached out to her, but before she could touch Glenn, her body shuddered. Glenn scrambled to catch her as she fell and lay her down onto the wagon’s bench. Her mother’s face had gone pale, her lips were tight, pained lines.
“Mom?”
Glenn turned her over. The seat of the wagon was covered in blood. The shaft of a black arrow was sunk inches deep into her side.
Beside Sturges, one of the surviving soldiers reached into his quiver for another arrow.