Island of Dragons (Unwanteds #7)(77)
“Should I take the girls to the lounge?” said Crow nervously.
Alex peered outside. “It looks like storm clouds are rolling in. I don’t see anything else.” He turned and walked back to the stairs. “But I suppose we should say good-bye now,” he said reluctantly. He propped his sword against the banister and planted a kiss on Fifer’s cheek, and then leaned over Thisbe and kissed her, too. “It was very good to see you,” he said softly to the girls, and brushed Thisbe’s hair out of her face. “Thanks, Crow.”
Crow smiled, and then he hugged Sky and took Fifer from Alex. “Stay strong,” Crow said. “We need you.”
Alex and Sky nodded solemnly. As Lani returned from the kitchen with a tray overflowing with food, Crow turned to let the girls pick up their toast so they could go back to safety.
From outside, Florence shouted. “Look out!” she yelled. “Incoming!”
Everyone turned to look outside, where the sky had turned dark as night again. Before anyone could run for cover, a silent sea of black poured in through all the windows, filling the mansion.
Crow gasped and his face filled with horror. Everyone ducked and began yelling. The black mass separated into individual creatures that began flying all around Artimé and throughout the mansion, filling nearly every corner and space.
Lani’s tray of food went flying. Sky, Alex, and Samheed grabbed their swords and began swinging them wildly through the air, trying to hit whatever it was that was flying at them. Crow dropped to the ground with the girls, trying to protect them, and then he began to scream in panic.
“It’s the birds!” screeched Crow, his eyes filled with pure terror. “It’s Queen Eagala’s birds! They’re here for us!”
The Birds
There were thousands of black ravens, and they were eerily silent, opening their mouths to screech but no sound ever coming out. Each wore a tiny gold collar of thorns.
Crow shook and cried hysterically, unable to do anything in his fear except crouch on the floor, covering his face. Thisbe escaped from his numb grasp and ran screaming to Alex, who hastily scooped her up and slipped her inside his robe, while Fifer stared at the birds, mesmerized, oblivious to the shouts and screams around her. She didn’t make a sound. The ravens didn’t touch her.
Sky battled the attacking birds with her sword, and Lani dove for the pile of shields, doling them out so the others could protect themselves from the pecking.
“Outside!” Samheed shouted. “Everyone, come on! They’ll be less concentrated out there!” He picked up Crow and carried him out the front door. Alex, with Thisbe, grabbed Fifer and followed, hoping Samheed was right.
It was dark as pitch outside, though the sun had been rising thirty minutes before. The air was thick with ravens circling Artimé and diving down to peck at anything they saw moving. Florence was fighting off a hundred or more, and Simber was flying erratically above, trying to get them off him. Only Fifer continued to watch them, unaffected.
Soon the birds permeated the residential hallways, pecking at the doors until curious Artiméans opened them to see what was happening. They were pelted by seas of ravens swarming in. The birds filled the tubes and pecked at the buttons, which sent them to all sorts of places the pirates hadn’t discovered yet. They flooded the lounge and the theater and library, sending the nonfighters running for the tubes to escape the confines of the mansion.
Over the course of the next hour, every last Artiméan who was able to move found his way outside to the lawn, trying to get some reprieve from the attacking birds. Most found that there was little they could do to stop it, so they crouched on the ground like Crow had done, making themselves as small as possible. But then the ravens began to try to lift the orange-eyed Warbler children into the air.
“Help!” the children cried, wresting themselves free. “They’re taking us away!”
Aaron dashed out of the mansion, his wounds and pain so vastly improved from a night of sleep that he was almost like new. Desperately he searched the crowd. Finally he found Alex and his sisters amid the chaos. “This way!” he said. He guided them toward the rock, taking Crow from Samheed along the way. When there was a moment of peace, the rock opened his mouth, and Alex and Aaron quickly shoved Crow and the girls inside before any birds got in. Then they set out to gather up the smallest of the Warbler children and put them inside the rock’s mouth too before they got carried off to the ships.
Sky and her mother, Copper, refused to go into the rock, preferring instead to fight, though they were being harshly attacked. Thatcher and Scarlet stayed outside of the rock as well. They beat off the ravens quite desperately at times to keep the birds from lifting and carrying them off.
On Artimé’s ship, Sean and Ms. Octavia and the rest of their team took on the fewest ravens, for they’d hidden their orange-eyed Warbler fighters in the lower cabins overnight for safekeeping. But from their vantage point they could only watch helplessly and try to use freeze spells on as many of them as they could. It was such a small number of spells compared to the thousands of birds that it barely made a dent in the population. But they, too, had run out of deadly spells, leaving them with little in the way of ammunition.
Now that every Artiméan was fully occupied outside the mansion except for the helpless injured and nurses in the hospital ward, the ships emptied out into their tenders once more, and this time both pirates and Warbleran people filled them. They began rowing to shore without anybody in Artimé noticing. When they reached land, they streamed out of their boats and began to make a human wall all the way around the bird-fighting Artiméans.