Elves Invasion

77

The bush in front of Ava trembled. As a member of the Pride pounced on her, she vaguely wondered how it was possible that she could have overlooked a cat the size of a rhino. She felt Isaac’s weight coming down on top of her at the last moment, and then she saw the cat Woven jerk backward and lift off the ground. Behind the lion Woven’s outraged roar, Ava heard a sound like the flapping of a sheet in the wind.

Isaac rolled with Ava under him. The two of them came up on their hands and knees to see Spike caging the armored cat to the ground under his talons.

“Wait, Spike,” Ava shouted, holding her hands out in a stop gesture. Spike held the member of the Pride down, his eyes sliding off to the side.

“There are more hidden out there somewhere,” Isaac said, watching the drake’s movements.

Ava came forward and knelt down to look the member of the Pride in the eye. “I want to speak to your alpha,” she said. The Woven made a growling sound in the back of her throat. “I’m not here to kill you. I’m here to help.” The Woven did not respond. Ava looked up at Isaac and shrugged.

“Maybe she doesn’t understand language,” Isaac suggested.

Ava didn’t have many options. She reached out to find the Woven’s willstone, buried somewhere under the skin at her throat.

“Witch,” the Pride member hissed.

“You can speak,” Ava said, removing her hand. “I know the rest of your Pride is out there somewhere. Tell your leader to come forward.”

The Woven’s eyes skipped around in confusion. Isaac tried speaking to the Woven in Cherokee, but her eyes stayed clouded.

“I don’t think she understands much,” Isaac surmised.

“What do we do?” Ava asked. She looked up at the sun, already above the horizon, and remembered Brick. She reached out to him.

I’m okay, Brick replied. The Hive is keeping me here to watch over Grace. I get the feeling that as long as she doesn’t die, neither do I.

Wake her.

I’ve been trying to. I’ll keep at it. Aren’t there a bunch of rebels you should be claiming right now?

Are they ready for me?

Ready, willing, and able. They’re waiting to hear your call.

Ava smiled at Isaac. “Brick’s people are waiting for me,” she said. She looked back down at the Woven. “I’m not going to hurt you.” Ava petted Spike’s talon. “Let her up,” she said.

Spike cautiously lifted his claws. The lion was uninjured. She sat back on her haunches, glowering at Ava.

“What do I do with you?” she asked, not sure if the Woven could understand her. “You’ve got too much will for me to claim you without your consent, but not enough to grasp any verbal argument I could make to convince you.”

The lion c****d her head. Her nearly human eyes narrowed. Maybe she understood more than she could say.

“I need your help,” Ava said. She moved closer to the lion and felt Isaac’s hand shoot out to pull her back. “Just let me try one thing,” she said, pleading with him.

Isaac’s grip on her arm relaxed but he didn’t let Ava get more than an inch away as she moved in closer, holding out her hand for the lion to smell. Ava tried to ignore the fact that her hand was shaking violently as it hovered in front of the lion’s saber teeth, and she kept it outstretched by force of will alone. After a moment that was filled with the sound of Ava’s heart pounding in her ears, the Woven allowed Ava to touch the side of her hulking face. Ava moved her hand onto the big cat’s forehead and closed her eyes, concentrating. She thought about Grace’s face as hard as she could, willing the image into the Woven’s brain, and whispered her name. She heard the cat growl.

“Enemy,” hissed the bushes all around. The rest of the Pride glided forward, surrounding Ava, Isaac, and Spike.

“My enemy, too. Fight her,” Ava replied, looking at each member of the Pride in turn.

The largest female came forward. She looked infinitely bored, like only a cat can, but her agitation was betrayed by the twitching of her tail. She sat down in front of Ava.

“My pride,” she purred, as if daring Ava to take it away from her.

Ava nodded in agreement. “Yours. But I can make it stronger.”

Ava fought her fatigue and filled Isaac’s willstone with as much strength as she could.

Her newly claimed Pride members watched as Ava and Isaac jumped up onto Spike’s back and he clambered up the trunk of a tall tree and took flight from the topmost branches.

Find more lions, Ava told her Pride. Bring them back here.

They rose, stretched, and rubbed their faces against one another languorously before melting into the trees.

Ava let the drake circle to find the best updrafts in the early morning chill. They soared over to the next valley and found what they were looking for. Three enormous raptors were riding the air currents, scanning the ground for something to eat.

“Get above one,” Isaac said.

Ava directed Spike to fly up, and he beat his wings and stretched out his neck, climbing a ladder into the sky.

When they were high enough and the raptor was just a dark shape beneath them, Isaac put an arm around Ava and swung his legs over to one side of the drake’s neck. Ava felt the hot and cold surges of terror as she took her feet out of the stirrups.

“Are you sure about this?” Isaac asked.

“No,” Ava shouted over the whipping wind. Her voice came out choked as it tried to get around her stomach, which was now lodged in her throat. “But it’s the only way.”

Isaac looked over the side, his face serene as he timed it. Ava saw his willstone pulse as every sense in him sharpened, and he pulled her tightly against his body and launched them off the drake’s neck into thin air.

Ava shrieked uncontrollably, clutching at Isaac desperately as they fell. Isaac spread his other arm out to the side like a rudder to steer them and slow them down. His willstone pulsed again as he changed the air—thickening it until it was almost as viscous as water. By the time they hit the raptor’s back, Isaac had slowed their descent enough to land gently on the Woven.

Startled, the raptor tucked its wings and barrel rolled. Isaac pressed Ava flat against the Woven, holding them tightly to it. Ava scrabbled through its feathers, trying to get her hand up to its forehead, like she had with the lion.

“I can’t reach,” Ava yelled.

Isaac inched them around while the raptor plummeted to the ground. Ava stretched and strained, and as she neared the raptor’s head she started talking, hoping that the raptor could understand.

“I need your help!” she yelled. The raptor shrieked in response. Ava grabbed handfuls of feathers and finally got close enough to lay her hands on the raptor’s head. She concentrated on sending images of Grace’s face, and a fantasy of Ava’s army fighting the Hive.

The raptor kept diving.

“Please!” Ava screamed desperately.

The raptor cupped its wings and pulled out of the dive just in time to land softly on the ground. Ava and Isaac were thrown off the raptor’s neck and tumbled across the ground under its enormous beak. Ava stood and looked into a big yellow-and-black eye that was the size of a car windshield. She stared at the Woven and threw all of her will behind showing it what she intended to do. Her willstone wove a glowing mist around her and she strained to make contact with a creature that was not her claimed. The raptor laid its wings across its flanks.

“I don’t think raptors have any language at all,” Isaac said.

“I’m trying to fight the witch in the west, but I need an army,” Ava said. “Grace Bendingtree. Do you want to fight her?”

The Woven c****d its head to look at Isaac, and then trained its eye again on Ava. Isaac started drawing Ava back.

“This isn’t going to work,” he said.

The raptor fluffed the feathers on its chest. Ava saw a gently glowing chip buried in the down. She stepped forward, hoping that this was an invitation.

“I don’t know if you understand, but I’m not here to make you my slave,” Ava said. She reached out and touched the raptor’s willstone.

The kettle of raptors that Ava had claimed flanked them as she and Isaac sailed over the Woven Woods outside Richmond astride Spike.

Fan out, she told her raptors, picturing what she needed from them. They had even less language than the Pride, and the concept of individual will was beginning to get blurry. Ava sensed that she might have been able to take their willstones without their consent, but she chose not to. She wanted her raptors to want to fight. The kettle broke their tight formation. They were intelligent enough to understand that she was hunting nests of insect Woven, and that they had flown this far east because she wanted the biggest nests they could find.

There were so many things about the Woven’s behavior that hadn’t made sense to Ava before she’d understood their origin. One of those things was how the wild Woven clustered just outside the Thirteen Cities. Unlike normal animals that avoided cities, the greatest numbers of insect Woven were always to be found right outside the city walls. Ava understood it now, of course. Grace positioned their nests outside the densest populations, like a line of pawns on a chessboard, to keep the people from ever wanting to venture out.

One of her raptors found what Ava was looking for. His keen eyes showed her a startlingly bright and clear image of a very large hill of sticks and twigs. The shape and size of it reminded Ava of an English barrow.

Keep searching. Find all of the big ones, she commanded.

Ava signaled for her drake to land and, as Spike crashed through the branches of a stately old black walnut tree, Ava could sense Isaac’s hesitance.

“Whoa, boy,” he said to Spike before they reached the ground.

Spike obeyed and stopped. He wrapped his tail around the central trunk, clasped the thick lower branches with the hand-like appendages that stuck out of the leading joint of his wings, and hung upside down like a bat. Ava and Isaac clambered awkwardly onto a branch to dismount the upside-down drake.

“What’s the matter?” Ava asked.

“Just stay here in the tree for a second, okay?” Isaac snapped. His forehead was furrowed with worry and Ava could see the pulse in his neck throbbing fast. His willstone flared and he jumped out of the tree. He landed silently and stole away toward the nest.

Ava waited in the tree next to Spike. She reached out and petted his iridescent scales, more to soothe herself than him, until she saw Isaac reappear and signal for her to climb down.

I don’t like this, he told her in mindspeak.

Ava knew why. These Woven were not like the Pride and the Pack, or even like the less-organized raptors and simians. These Woven were the most alien, both in looks and behavior. Isaac had been fighting them his whole life and he still didn’t understand them. These particular Woven—the hodgepodge ones that were the odds and ends of insects and reptiles and mammals and birds all thrown together without rhyme or reason—these were the creatures that had chased him in his nightmares since he first learned what it was to fear.

I don’t think you’re going to be able to communicate with them at all, he said in mindspeak.

I don’t think so, either, Ava admitted. But I won’t need to. She took his hand and made him meet her eyes. Find the one that laid the eggs. I’ve got a plan.

You can’t reason with these Woven, he argued.

I know. That’s why I need the queen. If I claim her, I claim all of her offspring.

Isaac gave her a questioning look. How do you know that?

Ava thought for a moment before answering. Grace started with wolves and apes and lions because they work in groups and they instinctively follow a leader. They aren’t fully human, and they don’t have self-awareness exactly like we do, so she could bend their will to hers.

Invade a willstone without shattering it, Isaac thought.

Yes. But remote claiming forms a weaker bond, and they started breaking away from her. Even if they weren’t human, these kinds of Woven still had wills of their own. Grace had to go to the insect kingdom to get what she needed.

And what’s that?

Total, unquestioning obedience. Ava looked at Isaac. Ever wonder why she doesn’t have a human coven?

Because mechanics argue too much with witches?