Ember Rising (The Green Ember Series Book 3) Read online

  Copyright © 2018 by S. D. Smith

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. Bunny discretion advised: May contain scenes of violence against rabbits. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at [email protected].

  eBook edition ISBN: 978-0-9996553-4-4

  Also available in trade paperback, hardcover, and audiobook.

  Story Warren Books

  www.storywarren.com

  Cover and interior illustrations by Zach Franzen,

  www.zachfranzen.com.

  Maps created by Will Smith and Zach Franzen.

  For Dad and Mom

  Iustus qui ambulat in simplicitate sua

  beatos post se filios derelinquet.

  PROLOGUE

  You’ve seen the ghost too?” Prince Lander asked, edging near Massie as they slowed to pick their way through a tangled patch of brush.

  “The ghost, Your Highness?”

  “Something’s out there,” Lander said, “and it’s hard to spot.”

  “Don’t give in to fearful fancy. It’s probably nothing.”

  “I’m not as experienced as you are, Lieutenant Massie,” Lander said, “but in my short life I’ve found it’s almost never nothing. It’s something. Monsters are real; I know that. Ghosts probably are too.”

  “Just be ready with that sword, sir,” Massie said. “I’d wager our steel will find more than mist if this ghost attacks.”

  “I’m ready. Whoever took my mother will answer for it.”

  Massie nodded. The two emerged through the tangled thicket, and their path was clear for a few minutes. They neither saw nor heard anything unusual. They hurried on.

  Massie ducked a dangling limb and emerged into another small clearing, slowing to examine tracks and allow the prince to catch up. He paused over a troubling set of footprints, again trying to determine what might have made such a mark. The prince drew near, breathing hard.

  “Are you all right, Your Highness?”

  “I’m…completely…fine,” Lander managed to say between gasps.

  Massie smiled. “What do you make of these tracks? Our ghost?”

  Lander, still breathing hard, bent to examine the strange shapes. “It looks like a monster, but not the monsters we’ve seen.”

  “Not the monsters we’ve seen,” Massie mused, his brow wrinkled. “If there’s anything worse than the monsters you know…” he began.

  “It’s them you don’t,” Lander finished.

  “Are you scared?” Massie asked.

  “Yes,” Lander admitted, “but I remember what Captain Blackstar told me. He said we have to keep loving what’s on the other side of this fight—the other side of this rescue— and that will have to make us brave.”

  from The Wreck and Rise of Whitson Mariner

  Chapter One

  THE SLAVE WHO SANG

  Heather closed her eyes, wincing as she lurched forward. Her uncle shoved her roughly toward the hangar at the far end of Morbin’s lair.

  “Now you’ll join the slaves,” Garten Longtreader growled. “You’ll see what it means to defy Lord Morbin.”

  Barbed retorts formed in her mouth, but she swallowed them down. I need to stay alive now.

  Heather glanced back at the frenzied scene. Chaos reigned in Morbin Blackhawk’s lair. A slave had sung a song of defiant beauty in the dark heart of the Preylords’ kingdom. Lord Gern was scouring the palace for her. For the slave who dared to defy them.

  For the slave who sang.

  Gern didn’t know who it was. Nor did Morbin know the secret singer’s name.

  But Heather knew. Heather had heard that voice a thousand times.

  The singer was Sween Longtreader, her beloved mother.

  “Here!” Garten shouted, signaling for a waiting bird to stoop. Heather followed her uncle onto the raptor’s back. At Garten’s command, the eagle leapt free of the platform and dropped, descending into the predawn darkness. Heather’s heart was in her throat, both because of the sudden drop and because she feared for her mother.

  The bird extended his wings, caught a current of wind, and sailed forward through the vast area of uncountable trees. Heather saw, by the light of perched torches, that the trees were honeycombed with elaborate structures of various sizes and shapes. These all clung to the trees, dwellings nestled in the curve of huge limbs. She had never seen structures of this size. Though the sun still slept, there was a buzz of humming industry and innumerable lamps illuminating a busy hive of hurry all around. Silhouetted forms scurried in and out and all along dimly lit paths. Many were rabbit forms. She streaked by in dizzy flight, wondering a thousand things about those lives lived among the enemy’s trees. Did these rabbits even see the raptors as enemies?

  The bird twisted through the massive heights of the High Bleaks, the historic home of the Lords of Prey. Heather was seeing what no free rabbit had ever seen, the swollen base from which the Preylords hatched their hateful scheme of conquest and enslavement on all of Natalia.

  And it had worked. She was, she realized with a pang, joining the slaves. She was no longer free.

  But Emma, the princess and heir of King Jupiter, was free. And so the cause for which Heather had traded her liberty, and very likely her life, was alive.

  That truth was like a flint strike in her heart. A spark of hope.

  They broke through the corridor of tall trees, and Heather gasped at the sudden gaping space. In the middle of the high forest lay a barren area, a giant crater in the hard stone of the mountain. A river ran down the mountain and spilled down the high wall in a waterfall. A heap of trash, impossibly wide, rested against the lip of the plunging pit. The vast dump was burning, and scatterings of ash wafted into the acrid air. Ash floated over the pit and drifted, like snow, down and down on a small city at its rocky bottom.

  “This is Akolan,” Garten called above the howling wind. “It’s one of two cities I superintend. The other is First Warren, the former stronghold of the old king. Akolan, here in the High Bleaks, is your home now. If you can stay alive. Your family has a bad habit of trying to get killed.”

  Did he mean Mother? Did he know she was the slave who sang?

  “Of course I know,” he said, reading her face. He looked away. “I would know that voice anywhere.”

  “Is she…?” Heather began.

  “She put herself in great danger, of course.” There was a look of mixed appreciation and anger on her uncle’s face. “But she has a knack for getting away.”

  “She does?”

  “She escaped from my trap all those years ago,” he said, eyes staring off into a hazy past. Then he shook his head and went on. “She’s no helpless doe. Like you, there’s far more to her than what’s obvious.”

  “Is your brother—Is my father here?” she asked, suddenly desperate to know. “And Jacks?”

  Uncle Garten’s eyes flashed. “We will not speak of him!”

  She fell silent.

  They were circling the great pit now, avoiding the worst of the falling ash. Heather saw a thousand firelights below and the outlines of neighborhoods sprawled across the bottom of the city cut from stone. She could see a circle in the center, with several distinct groupings of light surrounding this wall in the middle of the city. For that is what it was, a wall. And within that wall blazed the mos
t light.

  “For Sween’s sake,” Uncle Garten went on, calmer, as they began to drop into the massive cavern, “I do not acknowledge any connection. She knows I won’t go out of my way to hurt her, but neither will I assure her safety. I am, after all, Morbin’s ambassador. That is my first duty.”

  Heather wanted to say so much, ask so much, yet she knew she must choose her words carefully. But her own anger was beginning to boil.

  “To whom are you an ambassador, Uncle?”

  “To Bleston—now Kylen, I suppose,” he said, “to First Warren, and to everyone here,” he pointed at the grim city below, “in Akolan.”

  “To this prison camp of a city?”

  “Yes.”

  “To these rabbits you helped enslave?”

  “Yes,” he said, his words growing harder.

  “I’m sure Grandfather would be proud,” she said.

  “You should know, oh great Scribe of the Cause, that we each tell ourselves a story about our place in the world.”

  “But the story needs to be true,” she said.

  “Who is to say what’s true?” he asked. “All who claim to know it are only seeking power. Which side is right? History will decide in a hundred years.”

  “If you’re on the side that murders, betrays, and enslaves,” she said, “that might give a hint.”

  “To the Lepers’ District!” Garten shouted forward, enraged. The bird swooped hard left and dipped down, finally gliding above the far northern edge of the city. They flew past the moonlit waterfall, heard its constant roar and rumble in the otherwise quiet night. There were few lights to be seen here on the edge of the pit, and a foul stench rose from the mangled hovels below. She couldn’t make out the ground but could feel that they weren’t quite near enough to land. “Here’s where you get off,” Garten said bitterly. He rammed his elbow into her head, knocking her back to roll off the bird’s back.

  She fell into the dank, foul darkness below.

  Chapter Two

  AN EMERALD GEM INSIDE

  Heather screamed. Panic rose as she fell, limbs flailing, hands grasping for anything in the putrid air. There was nothing to grab, nothing to hold. There was only the air, the night, and a wild, terrific fear.

  She struck a canvas sheet, slung taut and pegged in the rock. It gave way against her force, first stretching, then tearing in two in a spray of ash, spilling her into a hard-floored hovel. Heather crunched onto the stone, her shoulder bearing much of the impact. She screamed again, this time from pain. Her eyes bolted wide with fright, and she rolled to an awkward crouch, scanning her surroundings.

  Heather was in a dingy tent, further wrecked by her graceless entrance. A foul stench filled her nostrils, and she gagged. A fire blazed in the center of the tent, over which hung a giant pot. Retching repeatedly, she tried to think clearly. Her uncle had called this the “Lepers’ District,” and she was beginning to understand why.

  She heard moaning outside but could only see the jumbled squalor inside the tent, illuminated by the fire and the pale glow of distant stars through the ash falling above the torn canvas.

  The moaning grew louder. Muffled whispers and groaning grumbles rose to an angry pitch. She didn’t know what to do. Feeling for the satchel that was always strapped over her neck and shoulder, she thought of her duty as a healer. She felt compassion for any rabbit set apart as a leper in this foul, putrid prison. But this bag held far more than medicine. There was an emerald gem inside. Her satchel suddenly felt so heavy that it was hard to hold up.

  She needed to eat. She needed to sleep. She needed to get away from whoever was groaning outside this tent.

  She had to survive. For Mother. For…did she dare hope? It had been so long since that awful day in Nick Hollow when last she saw her father, a dim grey blur in a haze of smoke, surrounded by countless prowling wolves. To have any hope of seeing him and Jacks again, she had to act now. No matter how tired, wounded, and afraid she was.

  Now. Now!

  Heather crossed the stone floor and grabbed at a half-lit log, catching it up and spinning to face the first of the surging forms breaking through the tent flap opposite her. She didn’t hesitate. Heather flung the fiery brand.

  The burning log sailed into the corner, striking the rope tied to the peg, splitting the knot and collapsing that side of the tent. Energized to find her feet were still as fleet as ever, in three strides she bounded through the split canvas and into the night. She sped through a dark street, kicking up a thin chalky residue of ash, while the crowd was left behind, confounded.

  Heather had no idea where to go, but she thought anywhere that took her far away from the stench of the Lepers’ District was the right direction. She sped on.

  The streets were only narrow stone-bottomed paths between tattered tents and ramshackle sheds. She heard the groaning crowd behind as she ran on. After a hard run of several minutes, cutting unpredictable patterns through the shanty-packed blocks of streets, she paused to catch her breath. She looked to the impenetrable sky, obscured by the falling ash, not knowing whether the sunrise was something to hope for or not. Does the sun even shine in this forsaken crater?

  She heard a muffled curse around the corner, answered by an angry retort. This sent her running again. Glancing back at the pit wall, she shifted her pattern of escape to take her as far from the edge of the high pit as possible. Breaking through the narrow streets, she found she was running free of the hovels and into a rock-strewn waste. In the distance she saw, by moonlight, the vague curve of the high central wall she had spotted from above. She jogged on, forward toward a faint glow in the distance. Soon she saw the outline of more buildings, and, getting closer, she saw by scattered lamplights a neat neighborhood of modest stone houses. Here the ash was mostly cleared away, swept into heaps at the street corners.

  She slowed a moment, taking in the stunning contrast between this flickering vision and what she had just escaped. This neighborhood, which seemed to stretch for miles and miles, was only remarkable in contrast to the tract of squalid shacks she had left behind.

  She entered a wide street lined on both sides by two-story homes. Stone staircases were cut into the sides of the houses. Hearing footsteps and harsh whispers, she darted up the stairway on the side of the nearest home. Reaching the top, she dropped down, crawled through a film of grey dust to the rooftop edge, and peered over at the moonlit street below.

  Three shadowy figures emerged on the far side of the block, walking fast. Then another group rounded the corner, and the two halted some ten steps apart.

  “What’s o’clock, friends?” an older rabbit asked.

  “’Tis seven, I think,” a younger replied. “What’s the word?” he asked as the groups merged. Heather watched them warily. It can’t be seven o’clock. What can they mean? A code, perhaps?

  “Preylords spotted,” the older rabbit replied. “Dropped a package in the L.D.”

  “They didn’t land, did they?”

  “No,” the older rabbit said, “our scout says it was a drop-off. He was dropped pretty hard.”

  “Did the Ls get him?”

  “No, they did the usual routine. But he bolted before they could close in.”

  “Great,” he said, grumbling. “Stretch.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Get your bucks together. We’ve got to find this interloper, and quick.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “When you find him, bring him to the L.T.’s.”

  “Aye, sir,” Stretch said. “Wisp, Gripple, and Dote, let’s go.” She heard quick footsteps fading into the night, and the group thinned.

  “Speaking of L.T.,” the younger rabbit said, “did she make it back?”

  “Not yet. That’s why he’s still at home. Waiting for her.”

  “I’m headed that way.”

  “May your feet find the next stone,” the older rabbit said, then hurried off.

  “Aye,” the younger said. He heaved a long sigh and headed back the w
ay he had come.

  The group broke up, and Heather remained motionless.

  What was she supposed to do? There were bands of rabbits looking for her, and she didn’t know who to trust. She was hungry, frightened, and exhausted.

  Heather glanced up and down the street, then crouched to creep along the wall. She paused to gaze across the rooftops toward the massive cliff at the pit’s edge and the long, thin waterfall that left the crater’s lip high above and fell into a reservoir beyond the Lepers’ District. She could see movement in the “L.D.,” as the rabbits below had called it, torches darting through the streets between ramshackle sheds. Even here, she could still catch the faintest whiff of that horrific smell. She looked around, taking in the spreading rooftops in every direction, separated sometimes by a larger road that gathered the threads of several lanes. The tops were caked with ash. Then she saw the curving wall in the middle distance, higher than her rooftop, so it was impossible to see what was on the other side. She crept down the steps and leaned back into a patch of darkness against the house wall. She felt the need to move, but she didn’t know where to go. Surely not to that tall wall that seemed to stretch on and on into the night. But where?

  She decided she would head toward the reservoir and try to get some water. That would at least satisfy her thirst, and then she could decide where to turn. Looking carefully back and forth, she stepped into the street and began to jog.

  “Hold it!” she heard from behind her. She stopped, glancing around for possible avenues of escape. “Arms where I can see them!” Heather obeyed, her mind screaming at her to run, run, run!

  “Got something here,” she heard. It was a gruff voice, similar to those she had heard earlier.

  “Good work.” Another voice. Older.

  “Who are you, and what are you doing out after curfew?” the older one asked.

  “I’m Mags,” she said slowly, “and I was with Stretch. We’re looking for the package that fell in the L.D.”

  “A nightpad, huh?”