“Is that man the leader?” asked Teela, who’d first squinted out the window on Yilenn’s side, and then moved to the other side, where Fala was sitting. She’d pushed Tem against the wall and was using him as an inanimate support for her upper body while she stretched her neck to get a better view of the outside. “And what is he wearing? It looks like gold! Who is he? Why is he alone?”

  “I think it’s Prince Arcos,” Fala answered. She’d sat back against the seat and crossed her legs and arms with foreboding resignation. Her face was blank, and somehow also unspeakably sombre.

  “Mantis, where are we going?” Yilenn spoke up, and her tone of voice was no louder than how they’d been conversing previously. Through the glass beside her head, the Nell river came into view, and it was closer than Leroh would have believed.

  A bridge connected both halves of land from the edge of the Sun capital to the dark woods across the water, in a brief span of the neverending vein across Yriaa which narrowed considerably before resuming its normal width. From where Leroh was sitting, the immense, ominous forest was visible in the distance, pushing almost into the water like a dense fog of green and brown.

  Mantis picked up the pace, leaving the last remnants of the city behind, and headed straight for the utilitarian bridge of robust, blackened stone demarcating the farthest branch of man-made structures before nature reclaimed the landscape ahead.

  Leroh couldn't visualize a positive outcome, one in which they all managed to get away happily and unscathed. The bridge was both close enough to nearly smell, and also obviously too far to offer a realistic route of escape. Perhaps with a much more generous head start, they could have found an opportunity to hide in the vastness of the forest without being seen. But, as it was now, there was nowhere to go, nowhere to disappear into. Even if Mantis accomplished the impossible and succeeded at bringing them across the bridge, their pursuers could simply cross behind them.

  She might be able to kill them all, Leroh knew, but then what? What’d come after? Surely, the Sun had to know their whereabouts now. He’d just send more people. And the more of his servants she killed, the more affronted he’d be—the bigger his hunger for revenge.

  “In the name of His Holy Majesty, halt and surrender to justice,” commanded a deep, solemn voice.

  A great man rode up past the jouncing body of the carriage to speak directly to the woman at the driver’s seat, who in no way appeared inclined to cease her furious retreat. He was alone, but Leroh could faintly hear the numerous sets of hoofbeats of his troop clopping further behind.

  There was no doubt in Leroh’s mind as to the identity of the lone rider who’d dared to come so close to them on an elegant white mount, the man whose eyes glowed so powerfully bright that they were painful to behold, and whose hands were the only part of his body left exposed so his mightiest weapon might be freely wielded: it was the prince.

  With awful clarity that only emphasized his impotence, Leroh understood what was happening. Arcos, the commander of the Sun’s royal army, had been sent to capture them and bring them back to the castle for their ultimate judgment, and he’d come prepared to face Mantis personally, for his neck and vital organs were well protected from her questing links. His body was covered from head to toe in golden armor, and underneath, Leroh knew he’d be wearing chainmail. The breastplate spanning his large chest rose high enough to meet the broad neck-piece protruding from his helmet, and even Leroh, with his lesser eyesight and limited visibility within the moving carriage, could see that there was no point of access for Mantis’s links to grab a hold of his neck.

  But Leroh had no more time to worry about what the prince might do now that his direct order had been so brazenly disobeyed, for it seemed he’d only tried a command first as a sort of formality. The man wasted no effort, and only moments after demanding they stop, he proceeded to stop them himself.

  A wave of hot light unlike anything Leroh had ever experienced hit the front of the carriage, aimed decidedly at its driver, and a shadow simultaneously blackened the opposite side of the vehicle past Yilenn’s window for a split instant, which Leroh noticed as he spun around and shielded his head with raised arms.

  An explosion of sensations assailed him. The window on his right shattered inward, gratefully serving as a barrier for the initial onslaught of heat that barreled toward the people inside. Despite this and the fact that he’d looked away almost immediately on instinct, Leroh’s eyes suffered from the powerful flash, which rendered him momentarily blind and left him blinking furiously to replenish the lubricating moisture sucked away from his eyeballs by the scorching air. A familiar smell of burning wood overwhelmed his nose, and the chilling sound of animal cries his ears.

  “Clover!” Teela wailed. She was squinting with pain, Leroh was able to see upon wrenching his eyes open by painful effort, but she regardless lunged across the small space to seize the door handle.

  Before his sister could push the door open and crawl over Yilenn to get out, the creaky thing was pulled open violently from the outside. Mantis looked more distressed than Leroh had ever seen her. She was holding her chest with a hand and hunching over, but it was her face that showed the worst hurt. She glanced at his sister for a fraction of a moment before yelling at them all, “Get out! The coach is on fire!” and while they scrambled to exit through her side, opposite from where the prince had been riding alongside them, Leroh heard her say to Yilenn, “Help me with him. He’s resisting my charm.”

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  “I will do it,” Yilenn told her, grabbing her arm to hold her attention a little longer. “Take your shoes off. Any bulky or heavy clothing. Get them to do it too, and fast. We have no time.” Mantis only nodded in answer, evidently by some understanding that had not yet reached Leroh, who looked around himself only then to observe in inert dismay the messy scene before him.

  He stood immobile a few feet away from the carriage that was slowly catching on fire. From the right, the searing blaze had blackened the wood of the coach and set the smaller, more vulnerable parts alight. From corners and edges and the thin rods that supported the wheels, flames had sprung into existence and proliferated. Only now were they starting to devour the rest.

  Behind the burning carriage was Arcos, still astride his horse. But he wasn’t doing anything except twitching back and forth almost indecisively. Yilenn stepped around the veritable bonfire to go to him, all the while using her graceful, long fingers to undo the laces and ties of her tunic and trousers.

  The last thing Leroh regarded, the thing he’d been deliberately avoiding for as long as he could, was the front of the coach, where the horses had fallen to their knees from the pain of their injuries and were now whinnying—or shrieking—their torment as they actively withstood more wounds from the burning parts still holding them trapped in the merciless conflagration. Their legs and flanks had been completely stripped of hair and skin, leaving charred muscle and sinew exposed, and their manes were still partially ablaze.

  “CLOVER!” Teela ran to her horse.

  The expression on her face was something that would forever stay engraved in Leroh’s mind.

  He tried to go to her, but Mantis impeded their approach. “Teela, stay back. Don’t look.” She pushed at his sister’s shoulders with her hands, tried to bodily turn her away, but the girl was beside herself. In the end Mantis could only extend her hands and do what she had to, right there in front of Teela, and there was a look of pure devastation on her face unlike any she’d worn before in their presence.

  All ten of her links flew out from under her fingernails to wrap around the horses necks, five for each animal. Then they pulled violently backward in a movement that twisted both of their heads at an angle and speed that instantaneously relieved both creatures of their agony. They fell limply to the earth with two heavy thumps.

  It was done, just like that. Done.

  “NO! NO! WHAT DID YOU DO! CLOVER!” Teela keened and tried to push past Mantis’s blocking body, her arms extended forward to the dead horse and jerking erratically in her attempts to free herself. When she finally ran out of will power after failing to move forward, her knees gave in and Teela fell down into a sobbing heap on the ground.

  Far behind them in the direction of the city, Arcos’s riders were making their way to the scene en masse. There were dozens of them, perhaps hundreds, Leroh could now see.

  Mantis spared not a moment. She arranged her face into icy determination and rapidly shedded her outer layer of clothing, then pulled out a knife from its scabbard which had been strapped to her leg.

  “Leave her alone,” Leroh said at last, suddenly freed from an imprisoning stupor he wasn’t aware he’d fallen into. He stepped forward and lowered himself to the mass of deafening bawls that was his sister.

  “Take your clothes off,” Mantis barked at him, bringing the knife to Teela’s back to slice open her dress. When she’d managed to pull off the scraps of torn fabric from his sister’s writhing body, she crouched for a moment and efficiently pulled off her shoes too, one at a time. “Come, both of you.” And she ran away in the direction of the water.

  Leroh only knew to obey. Barefoot, stupefied, and naked underneath his thin white shirt which only reached down to his upper thighs, he stooped to catch his sister under her shoulders to pull her to her feet. She was crying with a misery and sorrow that brought tears to his eyes and chilled him down to the bone. He steeled his spine and forced himself to carry her despite her reluctance to move away.

  “COME HERE NOW!” Mantis yelled, and Leroh started to run, dragging a limp Teela by force. Halfway to the shore, the woman came to find him and collected his sister in her arms like an infant.

  At the lip of the fast-flowing river stood Yilenn in her siren’s shift, with her fins extending over the grassy ground. She had the golden prince in a trance. Tem and Fala were only a few paces away looking nervous, half naked as well.

  Then, without a moment’s notice, the siren lifted her hands to the armoured man’s face. Leroh had seen her do this before. He wasn’t surprised when she turned him with his back to the water and made to kiss the part of his helmet where his mouth would be, all the while tilting him backward until he finally tipped over and fell into the gushing river.

  Hoofbeats that had increasingly gotten louder drowned out the noise of Teela’s crying, of Mantis’s orders, of the flowing water not ten feet away, and of the man violently dying on its surface as he was carried away by the current. Prince Arcos could only desperately fight to remain afloat for as long as he could, or let himself sink to the bottom while he futilely tried to remove the armour off his body, a task that would have, in normal circumstances, taken two other men and a generous amount of time to accomplish. In the end, he tried choosing the former and was forced to try the latter before ultimately giving up on both. He disappeared under the blue and white waters, a gleaming blur of yellow, like the Sun behind a thick blanket of clouds.

  “Leroh! Are you listening? FORM A LINE! Grab your sister!” Mantis yelled, seizing his attention again and slamming him back into the present moment.