Those five words made no more sense the second time than they had the first.
Dacha squeezed his eyes shut again, shouted, and blasted so much power into the Wall that Fieran flinched at the feel of it scraping against his skin and into his throat when he breathed.
The Wall exploded.
Chapter
Twenty-Four
Pip watched as the train eased away from the station, gaining speed as it curved onto the track that would take it under the Hydalla River and into Tarenhiel.
She hugged her arms over her stomach. A part of her already missed her dacha and muka. They’d had so little time to catch up after not seeing each other for months.
And yet she gusted out a breath of relief that her parents were safely on their way, headed away from the dangers of living in an active war zone. Especially with whatever was happening on the front lines. Even as her parents had said their final farewells and climbed onto the train, Pip could taste the storm of magic building only a few miles away, her skin prickling with it.
No sooner had her parents’ train pulled away than another one screeched to a halt at one of the other stations, the one for unloading heavy equipment. Instead of large guns or crates, this train was made up of flatbeds, each one holding a large, armored vehicle with an artillery gun pointed out the front.
A contingent of dwarves and Escarlish military personnel met the train. This must be the shipment of dwarven vehicles she’d heard her Detmuk cousins discussing.
As she turned to Mak, that distant magical storm exploded, a wave of magical blowback sweeping over Fort Defense with such force that Pip staggered. She stumbled into Mak, who steadied her with a hand on her shoulder even though he was swaying on his feet too.
For a moment, she couldn’t breathe from the lashing pressure. Then Mak pounded her back, and she gasped in a breath. “What was that?”
Mak shook his head, gave a cough, and set out in the direction of the tram platform. “I don’t know. But it can’t be good.”
The two of them climbed onto the tram, and it shuddered its way up the side of the bluff toward the hangar. Pip slid into a seat, her gaze fixed ahead. If something bad was going down, she needed to get back to her flyboys.
“Pip…” With a strangely taut note to his voice, Mak was bent over as he peered out the windows on the left side of the tram as it rose above the rooftops of the buildings by the river.
Pip crossed the nearly empty tram car to join Mak peeking out the windows on that side. For a moment, she didn’t see what had caused that worried tone in her brother’s voice.
Then she realized that was exactly what was wrong. It wasn’t what she could see but what she couldn’t see.
The Wall—the crackling blue wall of power that had dominated the horizon for as long as she’d been at Fort Defense—was gone.
No, not entirely gone. She could see a blue glow on the horizon where the Wall still rose out of the Hydalla River along the Tarenhieli-Mongavarian border.
But the whole Escarlish-Mongavarian border for as far as she could see from the mouth of the Chibo River to the Whitehurst Mountains rising in the distance was empty and unprotected.
As the tram rose higher, the muddy expanse of what had once been a river came into view, an indistinct smudge of brown where once there had been glittering water.
“What’s going on?” She breathed the question, not really expecting an answer.
Mak just shook his head as the tram pulled into the station at the top of the bluff.
As soon as the tram doors opened, the two of them dashed off the tram and raced for the hangar.
Fieran groanedas he blinked awake. His shoulder hurt, a spot on the back of his head ached, and there was a strange ringing in his ears.
Cold stone pressed against his back and his shoulder. When he blinked again, he struggled to bring his eyes into focus.
He lay on his side on the half bridge, his back pressed against the low wall rising on one side. The bridge ended in mid-air, hanging a few feet over the empty mud of what had once been the Chibo River.
The Wall was gone. As was Dacha.
“Dacha?” Fieran shoved onto his elbow, then into a sitting position. His head swam for a moment, and when he touched the aching spot on his head, his fingers came away smeared with blood. He must have hit his head when the exploding magic had flung him backwards.
Now that he was sitting up, he could see the smoking wreckage of those vehicles, the machines blown apart. The Mongavarians who had accompanied the vehicles lay prone on the ground, dead or knocked out.
