They entered the swarm at a dead run. Sheer speed killed the first line of Workers on impact, but the Hive adjusted quickly and soon Lily felt the brush of furry bodies and the flutter of delicate wings against Tristan’s cheek. She suddenly felt a sharp stab on one of her brave’s throats. Pain and adrenaline shot through him. His heart pumped three times and stopped.
Lily felt his death and screamed. She sent a gust of searing-hot witch wind into the swarm—scalding her own warriors, but more importantly, singeing the edges of the Workers’ wings. They looked just like normal bees and their delicate wings were just as vulnerable to fire. Workers dropped out of the air by the thousands. Behind the front line of falling Worker bees, Lily saw larger shapes alighting on the battlefield and moving toward her braves. They were too far away from her Tristan for Lily to see them clearly yet, but she could make out the way they moved. The Warrior Sisters ran up to the front lines with a hopping, gliding motion that reminded Lily vaguely of an ostrich.
The Hive regrouped quickly against Lily’s scorching witch wind and sent the Workers out in thick clumps. The Workers on the outside of the tight balls of bee-bodies still fell from the air in droves, but the ones on the inside were able to land. The braves swatted at them, killing many, but in moments every inch of their skin was crawling with Workers. Lily sent energy coursing into her warriors. She thickened their skin to make them nearly impervious to the little stingers of the Workers. The Workers couldn’t penetrate deep enough to inject their toxin into the braves’ bloodstream. But sting after sting kept coming and finally the venom left on the surface of the skin started to eat its way in through the protection Lily supplied. Two more braves died as the Workers finally managed to sink their stingers in.
Lily needed to give her braves more strength—she needed to find a way to keep the Workers from stinging at all. She had to burn. She heard Breakfast’s voice in her head.
But there’s no stake. There will be nothing to hold you down in the fire.
I’ll hold myself down, Breakfast.
Lily positioned herself over the raging brush fire and dove down into the flames. Her skin began to burn, and she shrieked angrily at her own pain. She dug her fingers into the charred earth, gripping the ground to keep herself anchored there despite what her reflexes were urging her to do, and sucked heat into her smoke-colored willstone.
A moment of silence halted all motion on the battlefield, and for a heartbeat everything was still. Then a boom resounded across the burning prairie as a beam of light shot out of Lily and into the wheel of hurricane clouds above. Power pulsed across the blazing grass and the Worker bees were swept back. Her braves paused for a moment in ecstasy, drawing in a deep draft of pure power, and launched themselves at the Warrior Sisters as they entered the fray.
Through her Tristan’s eyes, Lily saw her first Warrior Sister head-on.
Her upper body was shaped like a woman’s and she had unnervingly human hands, but her legs were too long and they tapered at the bottom into insect barbs instead of feet. She had thick thighs and her knees were on the back, like those of an ostrich or a grasshopper, explaining her strange gait and breathtaking speed. The Sister’s skin was vaguely yellow and covered in plates of shiny black armor. As the Sister neared, Lily could see that the armor was a part of her, and it grew out of her skin in an exoskeleton.