She would’ve liked to know who the girl was and how she’d died, but there was no time. Anything could be happening.
“We haven’t decided—” said the hawk-nosed woman.
“When you summon our power,” said a man with a thin gray mustache, “your own spells will be stronger.”
“Great,” said Chantel. It was taking all her deportment not to actually hop with impatience. “Thank you.”
“What other spells can you do?” asked the hawk-nosed woman, in a nice leisurely tone, as if nobody’s friends were stuck on any rooftops in front of attacking armies.
“There’s no time!” said Chantel.
“There has to be,” said Queen Haywith. “We must be prepared to do the spells too, when you summon. Tell us quickly.”
“Oh,” said Chantel. “Um, okay, levitation. Light-globes.” Would there be a use for that? “Ice. Adhesion. Wards. Shrinking. Making plants grow. Kindling fire. Abnegation. Inversion.”
“Ah, inversion.” A man chuckled. “That’s a good one. Do you remember the time—”
He broke off when Chantel shot him an absolutely frantic Look.
“Very well,” said the hawk-nosed woman. “You may summon our power for all of these things, when your need is great. But only then.”
“You will also need to summon courage,” said Queen Haywith. “But that, of course, is your own.”
“Thank you,” said Chantel. “Really. And I need to get back right now. So can you please send me?”
“Us? Send you back?”
“We can’t send you.”
“Silly girl.”
“Summon the city.”
26
IN WHICH SOME THINGS CHANGE, AFTER ALL
It wasn’t too difficult. It was a bit like summoning Lightning, and asking him to bring his city with him.
Chantel emerged into a blast of cold wind. She was high in the air, on Lightning’s back. She ached abominably. That was from being caught in the deluge. Every part of her was bruised, possibly even her hair. But there was no time to think of herself as she surveyed the destruction below.
All six of the seven buttons had collapsed. The rest of the wall, and the front gate, had held firm. The water level in the city was much lower now, and the first terrible flood was over, but the wreckage of it lay in wide alluvia outside the tumble-down gaps in the walls. Slabs of wall, and rocks, and smashed wood, and . . . bodies. It looked like a lot of Sunbiters had been killed when the buttons came down. And a lot of Lightning Pass soldiers. Frantically, Chantel looked around for the people she knew. Bowser, was Bowser all right? He’d been in that boat. And Anna, and the other girls on the rooftop, and . . . and Franklin . . .
Too small.
Chantel had a whole city to fight for.
Lightning flew lower. The invaders were pouring through Dimswitch. Chantel did not see the red-horned helmet of Karl the Bloody. No, there it was, lying on the ground beside a heap of bodies . . .
A couple of sorceresses clambered through the rubble in the gap that had been Dimswitch, slipping and sliding on wet rock, struggling to raise a ward. One of them was Miss Ellicott. Chantel saw her furiously making ward signs with both thumbs as she climbed. Chantel urged Lightning on, but before she could get any closer, the invaders closed in. Chantel saw Miss Ellicott’s tall form just once more, over a crowd of soldiers’ heads, and then the battle intervened.
And Chantel couldn’t decide what to do. It was already too late. The Sunbiters were in the city and there were far too many of them, and she couldn’t ask Lightning to breathe fire because there were Lightning Pass people mixed in with them, and . . .
Right. So the first thing was to stop any more from getting in.
Ice.
Chantel did the ice spell, and she summoned the power of the Circle of Mages. Some of the power came easily, from people who had been used to giving. And some of it Chantel really had to struggle to get ahold of. Once she had it, though, she didn’t need anything else to do the spell. No ingredients, no signs. She just thought
ice
and it happened.
Ice covered the rocks, and the Sunbiters slipped, slid and fell. The water flowing out of the city froze. It froze around boats, and around the legs of people sloshing through the flood.
This was not ideal, but it would do for now.
Everyone who tried to cross the gap slipped and fell. Dimswitch was a sea of waving arms and legs.
Chantel summoned more of the Circle of Mages’ power.
The battle in the lower city needed her attention, fast.
It was a boiling mass of raging humans, and it poured from Dimswitch up through the square called Traitor’s Neck, and all the way to the square in front of the Hall of Patriarchs. With the remaining water in the lower city turned to ice, the enemy had stopped moving forward.
There was steel and blood. The steel, she could do something about. Chantel drew on the Mages’ power hard, and thought
shrink
And the people below her were clutching weapons the size of toothpicks.
For a moment, the fighting stopped. The whole crowd was stilled and astonished.
Then they began punching, kicking, and trying to strangle each other.
Chantel thought
inversion
Everyone in the battle was suddenly seeing everything upside down, and they couldn’t figure out which way to swing their fists. The trouble was some people adjusted to the change quickly, and—
“Frozen legs,” Lightning remarked laconically.
What—oh! Chantel had forgotten that most of these people were standing with their legs encased in ice. Others had climbed out of boats and were sliding atop the ice, which made them taller than the frozen people and capable of doing serious damage to them. The people who’d been standing in the now-shallow water were in danger of losing their legs to frostbite. Chantel had to take the ice away.
While she was doing that, huge rocks began flying into the melee from above.
The invaders’ catapults! Chantel had forgotten about them. And the first few rocks landed before she could remember which spells to use. Shrinking, levitation—she did both furiously, and the rocks began rising as softly as autumn leaves, caught in an updraft. Meanwhile she and Lightning flew over Seven Buttons and set fire to the Marauders’ catapults.
Just as the last one was erupting in dragonflame, Chantel heard the clash of weapons from behind her. Lightning wheeled and flew back over the city. With Chantel’s back turned, the shrunken weapons had regained their former size. The battle was on again.
“Lightning, what do I do?” Chantel yelled.
The dragon seemed to think about this for an unconscionably long time. Meanwhile people were killing each other.
At last he turned his head in midflight and suggested, “Tell them to stop?”
Why would they listen to me? Chantel almost asked.
Wrong question, she chided herself. “All right. Land on top of the tower on the Hall of . . . of Whoever, please,” she said.