Witch's Pyre (Worldwalker 3)

“Please!” Lily screamed desperately.

The raptor cupped its wings and pulled out of the dive just in time to land softly on the ground. Lily and Rowan were thrown off the raptor’s neck and tumbled across the ground under its enormous beak. Lily stood and looked into a big yellow-and-black eye that was the size of a car windshield. She stared at the Woven and threw all of her will behind showing it what she intended to do. Her willstone wove a glowing mist around her and she strained to make contact with a creature that was not her claimed. The raptor laid its wings across its flanks.

“I don’t think raptors have any language at all,” Rowan said.

“I’m trying to fight the witch in the west, but I need an army,” Lily said. “Grace Bendingtree. Do you want to fight her?”

The Woven cocked its head to look at Rowan, and then trained its eye again on Lily. Rowan started drawing Lily back.

“This isn’t going to work,” he said.

The raptor fluffed the feathers on its chest. Lily saw a gently glowing chip buried in the down. She stepped forward, hoping that this was an invitation.

“I don’t know if you understand, but I’m not here to make you my slave,” Lily said. She reached out and touched the raptor’s willstone.

The kettle of raptors that Lily had claimed flanked them as she and Rowan sailed over the Woven Woods outside Richmond astride Spike.

Fan out, she told her raptors, picturing what she needed from them. They had even less language than the Pride, and the concept of individual will was beginning to get blurry. Lily sensed that she might have been able to take their willstones without their consent, but she chose not to. She wanted her raptors to want to fight. The kettle broke their tight formation. They were intelligent enough to understand that she was hunting nests of insect Woven, and that they had flown this far east because she wanted the biggest nests they could find.

There were so many things about the Woven’s behavior that hadn’t made sense to Lily before she’d understood their origin. One of those things was how the wild Woven clustered just outside the Thirteen Cities. Unlike normal animals that avoided cities, the greatest numbers of insect Woven were always to be found right outside the city walls. Lily understood it now, of course. Grace positioned their nests outside the densest populations, like a line of pawns on a chessboard, to keep the people from ever wanting to venture out.

One of her raptors found what Lily was looking for. His keen eyes showed her a startlingly bright and clear image of a very large hill of sticks and twigs. The shape and size of it reminded Lily of an English barrow.

Keep searching. Find all of the big ones, she commanded.

Lily signaled for her drake to land and, as Spike crashed through the branches of a stately old black walnut tree, Lily could sense Rowan’s hesitance.

“Whoa, boy,” he said to Spike before they reached the ground.

Spike obeyed and stopped. He wrapped his tail around the central trunk, clasped the thick lower branches with the hand-like appendages that stuck out of the leading joint of his wings, and hung upside down like a bat. Lily and Rowan clambered awkwardly onto a branch to dismount the upside-down drake.

“What’s the matter?” Lily asked.

“Just stay here in the tree for a second, okay?” Rowan snapped. His forehead was furrowed with worry and Lily could see the pulse in his neck throbbing fast. His willstone flared and he jumped out of the tree. He landed silently and stole away toward the nest.

Lily waited in the tree next to Spike. She reached out and petted his iridescent scales, more to soothe herself than him, until she saw Rowan reappear and signal for her to climb down.

I don’t like this, he told her in mindspeak.

Lily knew why. These Woven were not like the Pride and the Pack, or even like the less-organized raptors and simians. These Woven were the most alien, both in looks and behavior. Rowan had been fighting them his whole life and he still didn’t understand them. These particular Woven—the hodgepodge ones that were the odds and ends of insects and reptiles and mammals and birds all thrown together without rhyme or reason—these were the creatures that had chased him in his nightmares since he first learned what it was to fear.

I don’t think you’re going to be able to communicate with them at all, he said in mindspeak.

I don’t think so, either, Lily admitted. But I won’t need to. She took his hand and made him meet her eyes. Find the one that laid the eggs. I’ve got a plan.

You can’t reason with these Woven, he argued.

I know. That’s why I need the queen. If I claim her, I claim all of her offspring.

Rowan gave her a questioning look. How do you know that?

Lily thought for a moment before answering. Grace started with wolves and ape

s and lions because they work in groups and they instinctively follow a leader. They aren’t fully human, and they don’t have self-awareness exactly like we do, so she could bend their will to hers.

Invade a willstone without shattering it, Rowan thought.

Yes. But remote claiming forms a weaker bond, and they started breaking away from her. Even if they weren’t human, these kinds of Woven still had wills of their own. Grace had to go to the insect kingdom to get what she needed.