Samheed whistled like a bird. “The coast is clear, everybody. Let’s go help out Alex.”
Seven or eight Artiméans dropped from the trees and gathered around Samheed, and they all began jogging toward Artimé, picking up a few of Lani’s hiding teammates along the way. Samheed slipped his arm around Lani’s neck as they fell in step. He wore a mischievous smile on his face and said, “Did you hear Eagala’s deathly scream? I’d know that horrible sound anywhere. I wonder what that was all about.”
“Hmm,” said Lani with a grin. “I wonder.”
Aaron Fights His Battles
On the west side of Quill, not far from the base of the new lighthouse where the palace used to stand, Aaron watched and waited with his mishmash team of Necessaries, displaced Wanteds, and a handful of Artiméan spell casters. Those with makeshift weapons stood at the top of the steep rise of rocky land, finding they had better footing there to stop the pirates from getting past them, and a better chance of knocking them off balance on the rocks.
The squirrelicorns had been by to deliver the news about the protective workings of the shields, so the spell casters set themselves up in trees and in the windows of the lighthouse in hopes of staying out of range of the swords and perhaps having a better angle at which to fire their spells.
Seeing the pirate ship stationed in the water with the smaller tenders full of pirates coming toward them gave Aaron a particular sense of dread, for he’d witnessed this scene before—on the way out of the palace before the pirates had thrown him face-first into the smaller boat.
Aaron cringed, remembering the pain. He didn’t want revenge. The truth was that he wanted to hide. It didn’t matter that Aaron was immortal now—he could still feel pain. And with the number of pirates coming toward shore, Aaron assumed the worst.
He also expected the worst from his team. While they had grown to over fifty in number and were the largest of any team fighting for Quill and Artimé, many of the members had never fought before. True, Alex had given Aaron some especially strong spell casters, which was great. But if the spells were having as little effect as the squirrelicorns reported, Aaron wasn’t sure what he was going to do.
The pirates reached the shore and climbed the rocky hillside. Aaron gripped his dagger tightly in one hand and some components in the other, and willed his hands not to sweat. When the enemy grew close, Aaron gathered his courage and rushed forward, tossing heart attack components and scatterclips and shouting the verbal components that went with them, trying to hit the pirate men and women before they had a chance to block the components with their shields.
He knocked down two with lethal components, and several others with the single component version of the heart attack, figuring he’d better conserve components and just try to stop the enemy first. He could kill them later.
His plan served to infuriate the mass of pirates, and several of them changed direction and came charging up the hill toward Aaron, determined to stop him. Aaron cast as many spells as he could, but aiming and throwing them individually and calling out the verbal part of the spell took more seconds than he had before the pirates reached the top of the hill. With one last “Die a thousand deaths!” Aaron turned his back and ran to the lighthouse, ducking inside as his team members came to his aid, swinging rusty makeshift swords, clubs, and even the water buckets that they’d been using all night to douse the flaming tar balls.
The pirates slashed and hollered, charged and stabbed, swung and connected, and soon the Necessaries and Wanteds who had joined Aaron either ran away in fear or lay dead on the road. Aaron and the other spell casters barred the door to the lighthouse and began pelting the pirates with spells from the windows above, taking out a few of them in the process. After concerted efforts to break through the door failed, the pirates grew annoyed by their thinning ranks, and most of them gave up.
“To the mansion!” one of the pirates cried. All but two turned and headed in the direction of Artimé’s mansion, the roof of which was barely discernable through the trees, shining golden in the morning sunlight.
With the pirates fleeing, Aaron’s confidence surged. Feeling emboldened and remembering his immortality, Aaron recklessly jumped from the window and landed on top of one of the two remaining pirates. She staggered and dropped to one knee. Aaron pummeled the woman until she flopped to the ground, then flung three heart attack spells at the other pirate’s back, felling him.