Kora was on her knees now, the collar in her hands—in two pieces, as though it had snapped in half.
Skathis rose, unsteady, his eyes bleary. There was blood on the floor and on the back of his head. He fixed on Nova, struggling to focus. A snarl of incredulous anger turned his plain face terrible.
He had brought this out of her. This method seldom failed. As Solvay had said, it was against protocol, because it was dangerous. But Skathis had never feared it, because he had never met anyone more powerful than he.
Until now.
He lifted his hands to conduct the mesarthium, to retaliate, to end her.
And nothing happened. It was like reaching for a sword and finding an empty sheath. Skathis’s gift was gone.
“She’s not a smith,” he said, his voice thick with loathing, outrage, fear. “She’s a pirate.”
A pirate. The word penetrated Nova’s red haze, but it didn’t make any sense. Pirates were murdering thieves of the seas. She was not that. She was only trying to save Kora. She looked to her sister, who was out of danger, but she couldn’t calm down. Power was rampaging through her, new and loud, unleashed and huge, screaming through every vein, every nerve. She didn’t know even what power it was. It was just spilling out of her, grabbing whatever it could.
If astral was a rare gift, pirate was rarer still.
But where astral was a welcome gift, pirate was anything but.
It was the term for those whose gift was to steal gifts. It had seldom ever arisen, and was a kind of Mesarthim bogeyman story that sent chills down Servants’ spines. Imagine a person who could reach out with their mind, snatch away your gift, and use it themselves. Such was Nova, and her magnitude was shattering.
In his outrage, Skathis was hideous, his countenance mad-dog vicious. He took a step toward her and she acted on instinct. Godsmetal surged up around him with neither elegance nor control. It reached his neck. It formed a collar.
The collar tightened.
“Stop her!” Skathis choked.
And the others tried. Well, Ren could not. The telepath was still holding his head with both hands as though it might burst apart. His face had gone violet. His eyes were squeezed shut. The chaos of Nova’s mind amplified in his.
Solvay and Antal both tried to subdue her. Antal’s gift was control of kinetic energy. He could take it away, depriving subjects of mobility, or amplify it, to make them faster, stronger. He tried to immobilize Nova. Solvay was a soporif, able to put people to sleep at will. Both were chosen for this duty for their ability to stop a subject whose gift went wild, and keep them from doing harm. But when they sharpened their minds toward Nova, they found their gifts snatched away and redoubled on them—freezing Antal in place and sending Solvay instantly slumping to the floor.
She was only asleep, but Nova, seeing her fall, thought she’d killed her, and cried out. Whatever was happening, she couldn’t control it. The Servants could neither help her nor stop her, and the more her panic grew, the more her power did, too.
Outside in the village, the people of Rieva drew back from the wasp ship as it began to buck, wings scissoring—deadly godsmetal blades lashing out, skinning the roofs right off the nearest houses and swatting two children off their feet to land in a tangled heap. There were screams of horror. Villagers fled. The wasp lurched, crushed a house, and foundered halfway through the village before finally slowing and falling still.
Inside, Kora held Nova in her arms, saying over and over in her ear, “I’ve got you, I’ve got you, it’s all right, my Nova, calm down, my darling, my sister,” until the familiar and soothing sound of her voice began to cut through the whirlwind in Nova’s mind. It was like a rope thrown into a churning sea. Nova grabbed it, and it saved her from drowning. The whirlwind, the sea, they began to abate—enough that the Servants’ gifts, which she hardly knew she’d snatched, began to flow back to them in dribbles of power until, having just enough of his own back, Skathis was able to act.
Merciless, he drew a mass of metal from the wall behind the girls. It shaped into a club. They never saw it coming. It hit the side of Nova’s head with a terrible resonant thud. Her eyes went wide, then dim. She slumped in Kora’s arms, and the last of her stolen power flowed back to its rightful owners.
Ren was able to lift his head and open his eyes again. They were a gruesome sight, the whites full red from burst blood vessels. Solvay stirred on the floor and groaned, and Antal was released from his paralysis. Skathis wrenched the collar from his neck and hurled it aside. He stripped the godsmetal glove from Nova’s hand. He did not shape it into a diadem or collar, but only repossessed it.
Kora was crying, cradling Nova. They were a pathetic sight in their torn and dingy smallclothes, faces wet—Kora’s fearful, Nova’s slack.
Solvay rose to her feet, shaking her head to clear it. Antal helped Ren up to his. “That was…unexpected,” the telepath said weakly.
“That is why there are protocols,” said Solvay.
Skathis didn’t even look at them. His eyes remained fixed on the girls. Dread possessed Kora. She wondered how she could ever have found his plain face benign. Something dark and wild burned in him. She had never been so afraid.
“What are you going to do with us?” she managed to ask in a shadow of a voice.
The other Servants shrank inwardly. They knew the answer. Of course Skathis would kill this girl who had made him as helpless as a mortal.
But he did not lash out unthinking. If Skathis’s wrath had been purely volatile, he might have been less deadly. Instead, he was calculating. Of course he wanted to kill the girl, but he understood that if he did, he would render Kora useless—a leftover piece of something broken, and no good to him at all. He wanted her power. He was young and rising in the imperial ranks. His ship was small, only corvette class, which meant being assigned to duties like this one, recruiting in backwaters. If he hoped to one day command a battleship, he had to win the godsmetal to grow it, which meant outsmarting and outmaneuvering all the other smiths in the fleet. It was a treacherous game, played with cunning and without mercy, and a spy would greatly help his cause.
What finer spy than an astral, he mused, particularly one bound to him by obligation. It was decided. He would make it clear to her later: that her sister’s life depended on her own obedience. Now he wanted only to be away from this wretched place.
“You are no longer an us,” he told Kora.
The bottom of the ship melted open to make a hole under Nova, whose limp form sagged right through it. Kora cried out and tried to hold on to her, but the mesarthium was against her, locking her in place as it dragged Nova down. She fell a good four feet to land hard on the ground below, her inert limbs splayed wide. The metal pooled back like a turned tide and Nova was gone.
“No!” Kora screamed, scrabbling futilely at the floor.
“You’re mine now,” said Skathis. “Your only ‘us’ is with me.”
They did not stay to test the rest of the hopefuls of Rieva. They did not take their leave of the village elder, Shergesh. The wasp simply launched, bending its metal legs, flicking its wings that had caused so much damage to the village, and casting itself skyward, taking Kora with it, and leaving Nova, unconscious in the dirt.
…
Nova awakened slowly.
Her eyes ached. Her head ached. Her mouth was dust-dry. She couldn’t swallow. She was in her house—her father and Skoy?’s house—lying on her pallet on the floor. It was daytime, the house empty, and this was a wrongness. She and Kora were always up at first light—when there was light—their pallets rolled and stowed. For a moment, blinking, aching, parched, unwell, she forgot…everything. Even from here she could smell the ripe stench of uul husks rotting on the beach. The Slaughter. In her memory: the beach, a flash of blue in the sky.