Queen Yavara Ch. 22

"Why did you do that?!" I screamed, heaving panicked breaths.

She looked at me and smiled with a set of red teeth. Then she collapsed. I stared at her limp form, my lower lip quivering. Outside, I could hear the clash of steel and the screams of battle. A cacophony of rumbles sounded as missiles struck the fortress walls, turned around to fire from the tiers below. The tower shook as Yavara excavated its bowels, searching for me in the catacombs below. All I had to do was call for her, and she'd come. Leveria whimpered, her delicate back rising to sound a rattling breath, the yawning hole between her shoulders dripping. That missile had been destined for me since the moment it was made. It had had been forged with my name writ in the fibers, cast with my name etched in the mold, packaged and stored with my name cording its iron-spiraled shaft, waiting, waiting, waiting for years just to fulfill its singular purpose, to cut through the fabric of chance and circumstance and meet me at the end of both our lives. Until Leveria stepped in its way, and changed its course with her own. Why? Why?!

"God fucking damn it, Leveria." I growled, and hoisted her onto my back. She murmured something in her dying delirium as I carried her along the perimeter of the hole, and into the mage's office. Glendian was cursing wildly and shooting spells out the window, his bald head shining with sweat. He dropped to the ground as a salvo of ballista shot blasted through the room. Shrapnel cut through the air, and I dove with Leveria atop me. She shuddered against me, and I realized that I had just unknowingly used the queen of the Highlands as a meat shield.

"Glendian!" I yelled at the mage.

Glendian turned around and looked at Leveria, and then at me. "She died bravely."

"She's still alive." I groaned, getting back onto my feet.

Glendian looked purposefully at me. "She died bravely, Ranger Straltaira, in the service of her country."

"My mother will die if she does."

"If she dies, Lord Ternias becomes king." Glendian said, "I have contacts, Ranger, I can get your mother to safety before anyone knows of this. Ternias would protect her afterward."

Leveria hacked blood onto my shoulder. I looked from her, to Glendian. "Just open the fucking portal, old man."

ROSE

I charged headlong into the backs of the rangers, taking out three of them before they knew what happened. I spun just in time to catch the blade of a fourth on my cross-guard, the vibrations stinging through my hands. He snarled in my face, and forced me back, bringing his sword around for a second blow. I put up my blade, and it was blasted from my hands, clattering on the stonework behind me. I scrambled back, but he was too quick, his feet trained for combat, his motions expressing a ferocity I'd never faced before. I barely sucked my gut in before he split it open, and my knees buckled, sending me tumbling before him, landing on hands and knees. I raised my head, and felt mortal terror crawl beneath my flesh. His grin was that of a wolf when he raised his blade, his eyes bulging and inhuman. I began forming the words, 'no, please!' but fear had paralyzed my tongue completely. All I could do was watch as- there was a blade sticking through his neck, and he spat blood and dropped to his knees, then to his face, the knife wagging at the base of his skull. Buttercup gaped at the weapon that had been wrenched from her hands, then at me. Then her head was split in two, and she caved in on herself, the sword shearing to her chest. I screamed, and the man kicked my beloved sister's unrecognizable corpse before me, pink brains spilling from her bisected skull. He sneered at me, then turned just in time to be impaled by five different swords. The rest of my sisters came screaming down the steps, virgin mania in their eyes. I turned Buttercup over, some irrational part of me hoping that the outcome would be different, but no. She was gone, and there was no peace in the passing. Only the void. It didn't matter that Buttercup was the youngest of us, or the sweetest, or the most fearful. She'd been turned into meat with one swift swing by someone she never knew, nor never saw.

Violet stepped between me and the body, and extended her hand. I took it, and she pulled me up. "We're lost forever now, sister." She said in my ear.

"Yes." I said back, and turned to the others. "Juniper," I said to one of my captains, "take your squad around the outside of the courtyard wall and keep them pinned with arrows. How many bows did we pick up?"

"Around thirty."

"Shoot blindly over the wall; don't expose yourself."

Juniper took thirty sisters around the courtyard wall and lined them up. They fired a volley into the courtyard, yielding two screams. They rained arrows until the screaming stopped, and I held up a hand to conserve ammunition. I peeked around the threshold of the courtyard, and barely got my face out of the way before a dozen arrows whistled past me, and clattered against the wall behind me. I made a motion with my hand, and Daffodil came sprinting by me, rotating and skidding to a stop on the other side of the threshold.

"How many?" I asked.

"Twenty in there." Daffodil said, her chest heaving.

I nodded, turned to Juniper, and nodded. Her platoon loosed another volley, and I dashed in after it. The rangers were still in cover when I came screaming into the courtyard, hacking indiscriminately at anything that moved. I opened one woman's guts, slashed a man's throat, and imbedded my blade into the liver of a third ranger before I was forced behind a pillar by a flow of arrows. Two sisters screamed behind me; Dandelion and Lilac. The rest came at their heels, and swarmed the remaining rangers. Even without superior numbers, we were outmatched. I watched Carnation fall screaming, holding her spilling guts, a horror in her eyes so terrible it made her unrecognizable. Freesia was dragging herself away, and before I could reach her, her skull was bashed in. Iris was taking on two rangers, and holding her own admirably. But then one stuck her in the kidney, and the other slashed her breast, and she fell between them, screaming as they butchered her, every strike removing more of her. It didn't end until twenty-three of our sisters were dead. By then, we were beyond grief. We dully collected the weapons of the elves and our fallen, and distributed them among the living. There were two more courtyards on the first tier, each undoubtedly packed with enemies. But Yavara had made her orders clear. "Climb, Rose. If they pin you on the first tier with those ballistae, you'll lose ten sisters for every foot you gain."

I looked up at the second tier of the castle, where scores of elves were marshalling at the battlements, the ballista rotating with the tick of metal and groan of gears.

"Guard the courtyard entrance!" I yelled to Juniper, "Don't let them hit our flanks! Violet, take the rest and start to climb!"

"What are you going to do?"

I looked at the ballista on the first wall. "I'll cover you."

YAVARA

I looked up at the destruction I had wrought. Nearly a hundred broken bodies had come down with me to litter the catacomb atrium. Beams and wood planks rained down from the shattered floors above, the occasional stone plummeting to splatter one of the lifeless husks that surrounded me. Elena wasn't in the catacombs, but she also wasn't among the dead.

That was fucking reckless. I thought, wondering at what I would've done if I'd found her broken body.

I guided myself off the ground, rotating as I ascended, scanning the outturned guts of the tower. I killed dispassionately all the way up, crushing rangers against walls or sending them through windows. I cleared the tower floor by floor until I found the mage's office. The glimmering air before a smooth platform told me a portal had just been used.

I was too late.

The head-ranger's office was placed across the mage's. I walked through what was left of the room. The bed was balancing dangerously on three legs as the fourth hung over the abyss. There was an enchanted mirror on the wall. I pressed it, waiting to see Leveria's smug face appear. Nobody answered. I pressed it again, and still no answer. I heard a whimper and I turned to the sound of it. There was a fox trapped beneath a pile of rubble.

"April?" I mused. Adarian's pet fox. I was surprised the animal still lived; the last time I saw her was over ten years ago. Father and Adarian had been conversing in the next room, leaving eight-year-old me to play with the exuberant fox. I pondered dark thoughts for a moment, then shook them away. April was innocent, and I could never bring myself to harm a dog. I moved the rubble off her body and it immediately scampered around, sniffing and whining. A missile crashed through the wall, zipped past my head, and blasted through the far wall, giving the castle two new windows. The fox raced into my arms and shivered beneath me in terror. I put her in my bag and looked out the new window. Rose and her sisters had taken control of the ballista on the first wall, and were shooting up at the second. But they were missing high on almost every shot, and taking punishment with every failure.

ROSE

Juniper's squad had fallen back, and was now strictly providing support from the wall, giving the rangers back their courtyard, cutting off the climbers' escape. The rangers on the second wall thankfully didn't have tar, but they did have rubble. The rained beams and rocks onto my sisters as they climbed up the shear face, sending them screaming past their ascending brethren. The fifty of us that weren't climbing manned the ballistae on the first wall, and fired up on the second. It took us a few eternal minutes to figure out how to use the fucking things, and once we had the mechanics down, aiming was nearly impossible. We manned twenty ballista and shot them in salvo, but we missed high and blasted the tower three consecutive times. The rangers on the second wall did not miss. Every salvo we fired, they fired two, and with deadly accuracy. After our first shot, we were rained down with two blasts that took out four of our ballistae and ten sisters. Their bodies were shot to pieces with the force of the projectile, and their shrieks waned as what was left of them plummeted over the wall. A second salvo came down as we were loading the projectile, and one of our missiles misfired, pinning one of our sisters to the wall by the space between her shoulders. I couldn't know who it was; she was a splatter.

A mage was blasting fire spells at us from the high window at the top of the tower. I loaded dual-shot spear heads into the ballista and blasted it. Our high aim worked for us this time, as the two spears crashed into the high tower with a burst of dust and rock. Another salvo came down from the second wall and took out three of our ballistae and five of my sisters. The sisters scaling the wall weren't moving fast enough. We fired our last salvo as the second wall blasted us with theirs. My ballista rocketed backward, and I was thrown to the edge of the wall. Juniper grabbed my foot before I fell and hoisted me up right before another volley of ballista crashed into us. She was lurched from my hand and carried screaming over the edge, the iron haft propelling her further out then she fell.

The rest of the sisters manning the ballista routed, mindlessly abandoning their weapons to dive behind the battlements. Another salvo hit, and their cover was blown to pieces, two sisters flying off the wall and flailing to their deaths. I dove off my siege weapon just before it was shredded with metal poles that snapped the steel draw-cord and turned it into a deadly unweaving rope whose tendrils sliced Orchid and Dandelion into slabs.

"Get down!" I screamed at my panicking sisters, "Get down and draw you bows! We can't let them aim down the wall!"

I fumbled with my own bow, taking cover behind the mangled remains of my ballista.

"Ready..." I said to my terrified sisters. Their hands slipped trying to notch the arrows.

"Aim..." My sisters were holding the bows all wrong, we'd be lucky to even hit the wall. The ballista on the second wall adjusted their sites and aimed down at us.

"Fire!" I yelled. Our volley shot out as their salvo unloaded. I screamed and dove, futilely covering my head with my hands. Stones crumbled, shrapnel flew in the air, and screams sounded from all around. Only seven of us remained unhurt, and the climbers were still so far! The ballistae were extended outward from the ramparts by massive levers, then aimed downward. The metal black tips gleamed in the afternoon sun as they stared down the horrified faces of my climbing sisters, the draw-cords cranking back with tick-tick-tick of metal gears.

RANGER ADARIAN

The watch commander had done a commendable job breaking up the ballista strikes from the first wall, but he had failed to repel the advance up the wall. I'd rectified that problem, and now stared down the sites of a machine that could release tens of thousands of force-pounds in a second. A nymph girl that looked to be barely a woman stared up at me, a look of abject defeat in her eyes. Was there a plea for mercy on her lips? Maybe. I launched the missile, and speared five different women with one shot. I raised my fist, and the men at my sides cranked the bow back as the one behind slid the bolt into place. Then there was a deafening explosion, and I was sent sprawling out of the gunner's seat. All around me were mangled bodies, screaming wounded and moaning dying. An entire section of the tower wall had been ripped out, and the Dark Queen was using it like a massive club. She zipped along the second tier in a blur, turning the men and women in her way into pink and red mist. Then she spiraled to the first tier, and emptied the courtyards below. Bang, bang, bang; the sound of her swinging the club was sharp and brutal, each impact shaking the tower. I hoisted myself on shaking legs, and drew my sword. The nymphs were spilling over the wall, hacking and stabbing at anything that moved, their green eyes bulging with fury. I charged into them, raising my sword high, bringing it down on a woman with violet hair. My blade stopped an inch from her face. I couldn't move at all.

"Adarian," Yavara whispered in my ear, her hands gently coming down on my shoulders, "where is Elena?"