Luna Brightwood's Arc

Chapter 17 of 22

Luna pushed the card into the inner pocket of her dress and pressed her palm flat against the cloth. The owl still clung to her sleeve. Silvain kept the sword raised, but the light in the blade was thinning. At the far edge of the field, a shape stepped out of the pines. The cloaked man walked toward them across the open grass. He was not running. He did not need to. There was no fence, no tree, no ditch between him and Luna, and the hut was too far behind her to reach before he closed the gap. "Get behind me," Silvain said. He shifted his boots in the grass. "I can hold him one pass. Not two." Luna did not move behind him. She turned her camera on instead. The lens was already set for the field. She lifted it, framed the cloaked man in the center, and held her thumb on the shutter. She had done this before. It had made him retreat before. He kept walking. He had learned. The fairy lifted off the owl's back. She flew low across the grass toward the cloaked man, and in her small hands she carried a pale lily, petals folded tight, a thin curl of smoke rising from its center. Luna had seen the flower once, in the tree, when it put a beast to sleep until sunrise. The fairy had said it was her only one. She was carrying it out anyway. The cloaked man saw the fairy and raised a hand. A dark line began to form in the air between his fingers. Then the ground behind Luna went bright. The silver wyrm came over the hut in a low pass, wings wide, and breathed a straight bar of white fire across the field. It did not touch the cloaked man. It cut the grass in front of him, black and smoking, a line he would have to step over. He stopped. In the same moment the smaller white wyrm poured down from above and coiled between him and Luna, silver tail trailing light along the burnt line. The fairy reached him. She opened her hands. The lily unfolded and the smoke bloomed up into his hood. He took one step back, then another. His knees bent. He sat down in the grass as if he had chosen to, and then he lay down, and did not get up. The dark line between his fingers came apart and blew away. Silvain lowered the sword. He walked to the sleeping man, knelt, and took a folded cloth from inside the cloak. He held it up so Luna could see. It was a second collar mark, unused. "He was going to send another," Silvain said. He looked at the hut, at the eight small unicorns pressed in the doorway, pink and white manes together. "We have until sunrise. Then he wakes. We move them tonight."