She raised her arms higher, and the trees of the surrounding forest began to sway, a wailing sound coming from the clash of their branches that sounded like they were weeping for the sacrifice of the burned shrubbery. The breeze from the trees lifted the ashes and they began to float away, drifting past me like angry snowflakes.
When the last of the ashes had fallen away I stood and moved closer to Mercedes. I stared at the empty pool, the water in it dried up, the large rock in its center that had once been Queen Talia’s throne just sitting there alone. They were gone. All of them were gone.
“Allie?” Mercedes looked at me.
“What?”
“What do we do now?”
“I don’t know.” I let my hand come up to tug on the crystal of the Dragon’s Tear. “I really, really don’t know.”
…
As the sun went down over the forest I heard the snap of a branch. Mercedes and I just kept staring into the fading daylight, waiting. Somehow I was pretty sure whoever was coming up on us wasn’t with the Boy Scouts, but right now I couldn’t find it in me to care.
“Oh my God and all the stars,” Rhys said as he came into the clearing and found the remains of the burning lawn illuminating the horror in front of us.
“Rhys?” Mercedes struggled to her feet and then helped me up. “Oh, God, Rhys.”
“What happened to you?” He wrapped his arms around both of us, holding us to his broad chest. “Are you okay?”
“No.” My heart clenched and my stomach heaved as I started to sob again, deep, aching cries that scratched the back of my throat as my shoulders started to shake. I didn’t want to believe what I’d seen. I didn’t want it to be true, but I knew it was. I couldn’t pretend it hadn’t happened. “They’re gone.”
“Everyone?” His voice was soft as he clung to us, holding me up as my knees shook and I buried my head in his shoulder and cried. “Surely not all of them? Someone must have gotten away. They would have followed the army into the forest, retreated. Someone—”
“We don’t know if it’s everyone. But anyone who stayed to defend the palace—he killed them. He killed them all. Every single one of them.” Mercedes’s voice cracked on the last words and I looked up to see that she’d buried her head in his shoulder.
“In the name of the Pleiades,” he said, his eyes fixed on the carnage in front of us.
“All of them?” He looked at me, his eyes wide. “What about the mermaids?”
“We don’t know. None of the…” Mercedes lifted her head and her eyes lingered on the field in front of us. “There are no mermaids—their pool is empty.”
“The maze was on fire when we showed up,” I said, trying to keep from losing it right here in the middle of the still-smoldering field. “There was no way that any creature, even the mermaids, could have survived that kind of fire.”
“They were under ice, though,” Mercedes said. “They froze the pond. So maybe they were protected. They could be safe.”
I shook my head. “How? There’s no more water. They had nowhere to go.”
“I’ll go check. Just in case.” Rhys turned away from the two of us, striding off toward the embers, kicking them out of his way as he went. He stopped at the lip of the pool, staring into it with his hands clasped behind him. He stood there for another moment and shook his head before turning and returning to us.
“They aren’t there,” he said. “No sign of them having had been there, even. If they had been trapped inside the pool when it was on fire, there would be ashes or something. And there’s a rune on Talia’s throne. Maybe they used it to get away.”
“Where would they go?” I asked. “They’re mermaids, they couldn’t exactly run through the forest.”
“I don’t know where they’d go, but you can’t give up hope.” Rhys sat next to Mercedes, and I crumpled beside them, pulling my knees to my chest. He wrapped one hand around mine and snaked his other arm around Mercedes. “All we know is that there are no bodies and no ashes. And for now that means no mermaids. But we’ll find them.”
“Or they could have burned beyond all recognition. Their ashes could have blown away. The wizards could have taken them somewhere.”
“Don’t think like that.” Rhys squeezed my hand. “Wherever they are, we’ll find them. You can’t give up hope.”
“You said that already! But look around you!” I pulled my hand away from his and threw my arms in the air. “What here tells you we should hope? Everyone is dead, Rhys. They’re dead! They stayed here when I ran so that they could protect me, so they could protect a stupid house, and they died. For what?”
“Allie.” The calm in his voice just made me angrier.
“They died to protect what? This?” I waved my hand at the palace grounds, still smoldering around us. “Me? What? What sort of choice did I make that led to this? Tell me!”
“I don’t know.” He shook his head and looked at the burning hillside below us. “We chose to fight an evil wizard, and this is one of the consequences.”
“People died because of what we did today. We killed them. The choices I made killed them.”
“So what do you want to do?” Rhys asked. “Do you want to stop? To surrender? Because let me tell you—if you surrender, more people will die. Lots more people. Is that what you want?”
My entire body trembled as tears slipped down my cheeks. “No.”
“Good.” Rhys nodded, his jaw tight. “Then get a hold of yourself and remember that you’re supposed to be a queen.”
“Rhys,” Mercedes said, her voice dripping with warning.
“No.” He turned to glare at her and then back at me. “They stayed to give you time to get away. Timbago stayed to give you time to escape with the tear. They died protecting you because they believed in you.”
I swallowed and clutched the cool pendant. “I know.”
“So we finish this,” Rhys said, his voice low, almost a growl. He stood and threw a rock at the still-burning embers. “We bury our friends, and then we go back to Dramera, regroup our army, and we make the Fate Maker pay for what he did. Do you hear me, Allie? We make him pay for this.”
I nodded as he reached to help me up and gave my shoulder a brief squeeze. “We hunt him down and we end this. I end this. Once and for all.”
He kept his eyes on mine and nodded slowly as I reached up to touch the Dragon’s Tear. Timbago had told me generally what to do, but first I had to finish taking care of my friends. “We need to get shovels.”
“No, we don’t.” Mercedes said, her voice soft. “I can handle it.”
“It’s my…”
“I can handle it. Just… Rhys, keep her back turned.”
“I don’t need to keep my back turned.”
“Do it for me,” she said.
Instead of saying anything I lowered my head, resigned, and let Rhys turn me away from my best friend and the horror that would always be tattooed inside my mind.
“I’m so sorry,” Mercedes said. I could hear the world around me start to cry out a horrible heartbreaking song, the ground itself trembling like it was weeping. “I feel your pain, my sisters. I am so sorry.”
“What?” I tried to turn, but Rhys kept a tight hold on me, not letting me move.
“Come on,” Mercedes said as she wrapped her arm around my waist, and the two of them half carried, half dragged me up the hill and away from the maze. When we reached the top I stopped and shook myself loose, turning around.
Long vines had burst out of the ground, snaked across the grass, and covered the field, twined over anything and everything that lay in their paths. The field was now covered in dark-green leaves. It was like the vines had swallowed the field whole, eating it, destroying it. Like, if the vines were left alone, they would swallow the entire world.