Nico Morel
NICO COULDN’T UNDERSTAND what Talis was saying as the
painted soldiers approached them. He could hear the uncertainty in
his vatarh’s voice and the way he was speaking louder and faster,
holding the magical walking stick in front of him like a cudgel.
His matarh clutched Nico so fiercely that he could barely breathe
as the strange men surrounded them, impossibly large and
frightening and smelling of blood and death.
Nico could feel the
fear rising in him and with it, the strange coldness he’d felt in
the Archigos’ office, as it had when he’d run away from Ville
Paisli. It began to build inside him, and he muttered to himself
the strange words that came to his mind as his hands made small
motions under his matarh’s clinging embrace.
“Talis,” he heard his
matarh say, “what’s happening? I’m frightened . . .”
“It’s fine,” his
vatarh said, but his voice belied that. “I just need to talk to the
High Warrior. Let me do that. They’re my people; they just didn’t
expect to find me here . . .”
He turned back to one
of the painted men, the one with a red-tongued black lizard
crawling from the top of his skull, around his left eye, and down
the side of his head. As they half-shouted at each other, Talis
shaking his stick in the man’s face, Nico felt the cold growing and
growing inside, so intense that he knew he would burst if he tried
to contain it any longer. Nico cried out: the strange words. He
gestured.
There was no blue
fire this time. Instead, the air shivered around him, rippling
visibly outward, and where that fast-moving wave struck the painted
men, they were thrown backward as if a great fist had struck them.
“Come on, Matarh!” Nico yelled. He grabbed her hand, pulling her
away so that she stumbled after him as he fled in the direction
that Karl and Varina had gone. “Talis! Hurry!”
But Talis wasn’t
running with them; he’d also been felled by the wild burst from
Nico. The lizard-warrior had already regained his feet, and
Nico—glancing over his shoulder as he started to run—could see him
shouting to the others as Talis screamed something back at him and
raised his walking stick. Blinding light flashed from the stick and
one of the warriors howled. Nico pulled at his matarh harder.
“Run!”
She took a step with
him, but her hand dropped away from his. He took another step
before he realized that she wasn’t with him. He heard Talis
scream—“Sera!”—and turned back.
His matarh was lying
sprawled on the cobbles of the plaza, a spear in her back and blood
staining the paving stones. She was reaching toward Nico, crawling
after him, her face drawn with pain. “Matarh!” Nico screamed, and
ran back to her. He went down alongside her just as Talis reached
her also.
“Nico . . .” she
said. “I’m sorry . . .” Her head turned to Talis and she started to
speak, but he stroked her head, cradling her
carefully.
“No, don’t say
anything. We’ll get you to a healer, someone who can help . . .”
Talis looked up at the painted soldiers, who had gathered around
them. He spoke to them, sharply, in their own language. The
lizard-warrior scowled, but he gestured to his men. One pulled the
spear from his matarh’s back, and she screamed again. Nico hurled
himself at the lizard-warrior, pummeling at the man’s armor with
his fist. The man grabbed Nico in one muscular arm and grunted
something to Talis. “Nico!” Talis said. “They’re going to help her.
Please listen to me. You have to stop fighting them.”
All the energy left
him; he went limp in the lizard-warrior’s grasp.
Two of the warriors
crouched down; they tore strips from their clothing and bound it
around his matarh’s waist, around the wound. Then one of them
gathered up his matarh in his arms; she groaned and her eyes rolled
back in her head, but Nico could see that she was still breathing.
One of her hands dangled; Nico wriggled in the lizard-warrior’s
grasp, and the man let him go. He ran and took his matarh’s
hand.
He held it, sobbing,
as they walked quickly away from the plaza.