“Mom,” I warned.
“Mom?” Stoney sneered. “Baudoin’s whore, here in the flesh?” He laughed, but Mom didn’t so much as flinch.
“Don’t you dare talk about my mother that way!” I shouted. As Stoney opened his mouth for one of those “who do you think you are” retorts, the warriors before him melted. And when I say melted I mean melted, as if they were butter left out on a hot day. The pain behind my eyes told me that I was the one responsible, and that I was about to faint.
“Sara,” Micah began, catching me about the waist. I shook my head in reply; I wanted his focus to remain on Old Stoney, not shift to me.
“You’ve no one left to hide behind,” Mom observed. “So, Greymalkin, why don’t you tell me everything you know about my Beau, and I’ll consider letting you live.”
Instead of speaking, Old Stoney grinned. Later, I understood that melted metal is similar to magma, the even hotter, liquid rock that flows beneath the earth’s surface, the stuff that’s called lava once it erupts from volcanoes. I would also understand that my reducing the iron warriors to their liquid states had given Stoney an idea, and that he was a diabolical man, more than a bit crazy, and that he had gone into this meeting knowing that he wasn’t coming out alive.
Old Stoney raised his arms, and stone caps grew over the pools of cooling metal, far out of our reach. Stoney cackled, chilling my blood despite the great geysers of lava bursting from his feet. Max shouted something about not being able to reach the metal below the bedrock, and I felt Micah’s influence tug at the sword in my hand, saw his armor rattle against his limbs. Then Micah grabbed my shoulders and threw me behind him amidst a gale of oppressive heat and impossible loudness. I passed out before I hit the ground.
25
Black ash rained around me, like a dusting of dry, dirty snow. I brushed it away from my face, coughed a bit, then took a few deep breaths. I explored the ground with my fingertips, feeling for my sword; when I found it, the hilt didn’t seem right. Sluggishly, I realized that it was the sword Micah had fashioned from the iron manacles, not the beautiful weapon Ash had made especially for me.
Micah. My last memory was of him shoving me away, and then…
I struggled to a sitting position, shaking off more cinders in the process, and took in the scene around me. There was Sadie, lying on her side, but alive and breathing. Behind her, Max was helping Mom to her feet. Before us lay cooling puddles of iron and lava, belching great billowing clouds of steam, and beyond that was Old Stoney’s body, his chest cleaved in two by a mass of white metal. By a mass of silver.
Where is Micah?
“Micah?” No answer. “Micah? Micah Micah Micah Micah MICAH!”
I remembered him standing on my left side, shoving me behind him and shouting. Now, all I could see was ash, blanketing the ground, no shapes that resembled bodies. I crawled forward, feeling with my hands, my feet, searching for any sign of him. At last, after far too long, I came upon a small heap of stones mixed in with the ash. I pushed the topmost layer aside, and found a hand.
Gods, it could have been a corpse for how cold it was; the skin had already gone bluish. Still, I knew it was Micah, my Micah, and as I dug him out, my skin and nails tearing against the stones and cinders, I knew he wasn’t dead. He could not be dead. He was not allowed to be dead. When I unearthed his face, eyes closed and mouth slack, my heart almost stopped.
“Silverkin!” I shrieked. If anyone knew how to help him, it would be the silverkin. Shep always knew what to do.
“Sara.” I looked at the hand on my shoulder, unsure why it was there, and followed the attached arm up to Max’s face. His eyes were sad, resigned. “He’s gone. Let him rest.”
“Not gone,” I said, holding Micah’s cold cheek against my neck. “He promised me he would be okay. He promised me we would leave together.”
“Sara—”
“Silverkin!” And then they were there, crowding around Micah and me like a diminutive cavalry. “Shep!” I called, finding their leader amongst the masses. “Shep, I don’t know how he’s hurt. Can you tell me?”
“He’s sacrificed himself for you,” answered a gravelly voice. I turned and saw the crone hobble toward us through the clouds of steam. “He had nothing left, no weapons he could use against so great a foe, so he used his silver in your defense.”
Her gray head nodded toward Micah’s chest; I looked and saw that his armor had melted away, leaving behind a bare expanse of skin. Then I looked to Old Stoney’s corpse, and the mass of silver that had killed him. I was awed by Micah’s sacrifice.