Lala nudged her shoulder and handed her a cup of tea. Her people had started a fire while she worked. She was never so grateful.
“My good girl,” Grandmother said wearily. She hugged Lala’s shoulders. “Now would you fetch me my special bowl?”
Lala nodded and skipped away to where their packs lay. Gubba came over and chirped in admiration at the knots. Meanwhile, Grandmother sipped her tea, letting it warm her. Lala brought over the earthenware bowl and set it at Grandmother’s feet.
Grandmother did not move, she just rested, enjoying the tea and the respite, and knowing that everything came down to this. She knew everyone watched her to see what would come next. God had not spoken to her of late, had not given her any indication of what was supposed to be done, except that she was to awaken the Sleepers.
So she’d constructed a spell the best way she knew how. The Sleepers, she assumed, were in a state akin to death, or at least as close to death as many of that immortal race would ever get. Therefore, she’d devised a spell similar to—though definitely not the same as—one that would raise the dead. This was a major undertaking considering the size of the grove, and she thought of how proud her own grandmother would be that she had used the art on a scale that had not been seen for centuries. How proud all of those along her maternal line would be; all their knowledge passed down the generations for this one moment in the service of Second Empire and God.
The spell required one more element before she could summon the awakening. She drained the last of her tea, looked mournfully at the leaves settled on the cup’s bottom, and sighed. Lala took it from her and helped her rise.
“Gubba,” Grandmother said, placing her hand on the old groundmite’s furry shoulder. “I need another favor.”
Gubba chirped a query, and Grandmother gazed into that rheumy eye. Grandmother smiled in reassurance, then slashed her knife into Gubba’s throat. She sawed through the groundmite’s tough flesh until she hit the vital vein.
Gubba fell with shock in her eye, arms flailing. Grandmother grabbed her bowl to catch as much of the spurting blood as possible.
The remaining groundmites, those not still fruitlessly pounding on the castle doors, did not retaliate at Gubba’s sacrifice. Their eyes filled with horror, but they recognized Grandmother’s strength in the art and understood Gubba had become part of a larger working. No, instead of retaliating, they fled yipping and barking into the woods and out of her ken.
The earthenware bowl looked ordinary enough, but it contained the power to preserve blood, even keeping it warm, and Gubba’s blood was special, for she’d an innate ability to use the art. That made it a strong additive to the spell Grandmother was weaving.
Gubba’s heart had been added to the pot with the others. Grandmother cut it out herself.
“Won’t be using that pot again,” Min muttered. “No, by God. Not for soup or anything.”
Grandmother’s knotted yarn stewed among the hearts in the pot. Not that the pot had been placed over a fire, but the words of power she invoked, drawn from the ancient language of the art, boiled among the organs making them sizzle and pop with magical heat. She paced. The grove filled not only with the scent of cooking meat, but with potential. Her people, even Lala, stood well away. She’d used some clippings of yarn to create wards to protect them, if such a meager spell could do so against the larger.
When she deemed the knots had spent enough time among the hearts, she lifted them from the pot with a spoon, which Min also declared no longer suitable for cooking, and transferred them into the bowl filled with Gubba’s blood. Blood overflowed the brim, dribbling down the sides of the bowl.
Grandmother spoke softly and slowly as she swished the yarn in the blood with her fingers, making sure it absorbed as much as possible. Soon the blood started to boil.
She stepped back, her fingertips dripping crimson. The spell was not as malevolent as one for waking the dead, but she felt the shadows eating at her soul. It was, after all, blood magic. The entire forest seemed to lean in on her, eager for the spell to be loosed.
She licked her lips. “Rise!” she commanded. A sphere arose from the bowl, dull and mud colored, and hovered in the air. No blood dripped from it for it had absorbed all of it.
“Awaken the Sleepers,” she said, repeating the words in the ancient tongue.
The sphere pulsed, then darted through the grove, circling the trunks of the great trees, trailing a subtle glow that settled into the bark. A keening arose among the branches as they swayed in an unnatural wind, wood splintering, shattering, cracking so loudly that Grandmother thought it was her own mind that was breaking. She covered her ears. Even the corpses nearby jerked and trembled with the force she had unleashed.
Bark exploded, peeled back. Ocher sap oozed in runnels. Enormous limbs fell around her. Trees struck the earth like thunder, shuddering the ground.
Then she saw them, the figures pushing out of the rotten hearts of the vast trees, wailing, hungry, angry, dark. Grandmother smiled. The light that had once been the natural essence of these Eletians had been extinguished by centuries immersed in the evil of Blackveil.
They resembled Eletians except for the dark that shone through them. They were like wraiths, thin and feral, rags that had once been the finery of Argenthyne flowing from their limbs.
She felt their hunger and their interest in her and her people. She pointed at the corpses and pot of hearts. “Feed,” she commanded in the ancient tongue.
The Eletians swarmed the meat, but there would never be enough. She could not count how many she’d awakened—a hundred? Two hundred? Three?