Yann strode back to the house, went inside, and found his father and Rainier Terriau in the Watch Commander’s office. Yvan looked up when his son walked in. “Did she say anything—anything she didn’t say last night?”

“She says she doesn’t know the other two wizards she came in with. She says she just met them yesterday and they traveled together before they got caught in the battle. I believe her.”

“You’d believe anything she told you,” Rainier countered. “You’re soft on her.”

Yann bit his tongue. “You’ll find out she’s telling the truth. She’s a wanderer. She has no family. She doesn’t know those men. She wouldn’t travel with them if she did. She prefers to travel alone.”

“We have more important business to attend to right now,” Yvan interrupted. “You come with us, son. We’re going to interrogate the wizards.”

Yann hung back and let his father and Rainier leave first. Rien joined them on the way out of the building. The men went down into the basement on the other side of the house.

They found Wesh and Mael locked in two adjoining cells. A stone wall separated them from Eliska’s side of the jail.

Wesh sat up on his bench and squared his shoulders when the Watchmen entered.

Mael lay stretched out on his bench. He didn’t even bother to raise his head when the Watchmen lined up outside his cell.

“What can I do for you, Commander?” Wesh asked.

“What can you tell us about that girl you came in with last night?” Yvan asked.

“I can’t tell you anything except her name and that she has incredible magic. I’ve never seen anything like it before. She can destroy Darklings….but you saw that yourself. She might be one in a million. She says she’s been alone in the Coil for as long as she can remember. She must have unbelievable magic to survive alone for that long.”

“How do you know she was telling the truth about being alone in the Coil?”

Wesh made a face. “You’ve been behind the wall for too long, Commander. A girl her age doesn’t become so hard and unfeeling and wary of people without going alone in the most dangerous environments. She traveled with us for maybe ten hours. In that time, I saw enough to convince me that she’d been in the Coil for a long, long time. There is nothing out there she can’t handle and she prefers to handle it alone. She shuns people and I don’t blame her. Anyone less powerful than herself would be a liability to her and likely to get her killed.”

“Why did she stay with you, then? Why did she travel in your company?”

Wesh shrugged. “We told her we were coming to this town. She thought she might get work here or maybe supplies. She didn’t say outright that she had nothing else to do and nowhere else to go, but she implied it with her careless attitude.”

“Why did you come to Middleborough? You suggested last night that you came here on purpose.”

“I told you already. The Darklings were sent here to raze this town.”

“Sent by whom? The Darklings are unruly and attack without any direction at all.”

Wesh raised one bony index finger. “Ah, yes! That’s what we all think, isn’t it? You saw for yourselves that they didn’t do that last night. They attacked with a definite purpose. They coordinated their attack to get behind us so they could breach your barricade. Someone was directing them.”

“Who would do something like that? Who could do something like that?” Yvan’s eyes popped wide open. “Did the girl do it? Would she have enough power to do it?”

Wesh smacked his lips. “Use your head, Commander. If she wanted to coordinate the Darklings to wipe out your town, she wouldn’t have risked her neck to defend you. She could have just stood off to the side and let them kill you all and then taken what she wanted.”

“Wanted!” Yvan exclaimed. “Wanted what?”

“That’s what I’m telling you. The Darklings came here for something. The Voyant Mendicat wants…..”

“The what?” Rainier cut in.

“The Voyant Mendicat,” Wesh repeated. “He’s a sorcerer who lives in the White Spire. He’s said to hold the power to direct the Coil where he wants it to go. They say he can cause it to ripple in one direction or another. He can use the Coil to erase towns and dimensions and even entire lands in one place while he creates Islands somewhere else that give rise to new civilizations.”

“Do you believe that’s true?” Yann blurted out before he thought to stop himself. “How could anyone hold that much power?”

Wesh shrugged again. “I don’t know if it’s true or not.”

“How do you know the Voyant Mendicat sent the Darklings to attack us?” Yvan asked.

“My brothers in the Guardian Templars foresaw it in their scrying visions. They sent me, Mael, Ramon, and Ines to warn you and to defend you if we could, but we left the Temple more than two years ago. We’ve been traveling through the Coil ever since, but it keeps changing and shifting on us. Maybe the Voyant keeps moving it around to slow us down.”

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Yvan glanced over at Rainier. “Two years. That’s when the Darkling attacks started to escalate.”

“The Voyant thinks there is a certain element in this town that he wants,” Wesh went on. “He sent the Darklings here to get it for him. He won’t stop until he reclaims it.”

“What is this element?” Rainier asked.

“I don’t know that,” Wesh replied. “I don’t think anyone knows….except the Voyant himself.”

“How are we supposed to stop him from taking it, then?” Rien asked. “We can’t even stop the Darklings from invading this town.”

“We’ll do what we can to help you,” Wesh replied, “but as you can see, it’s just Mael and me now. Two of us won’t be able to do anything.”

“What about the girl?” Rainier asked. “She can defeat the Darklings.”

“She won’t help us,” Yann interjected. “She’s furious that you locked her up. As soon as you let her out, she’ll leave.”

“She wouldn’t be able to help you anyway,” Mael muttered from his bench. “She might have power, but she’s only one person. She couldn’t defeat them last night and the Voyant will send a bigger attack next time. She won’t be able to defeat them and we’ll all die. She’s smart to leave and save her own life.”

“How can you speak so highly of a useless Coil rat?” Rien growled. “She’s as good as a Darkling herself if she walks away and leaves a whole town to die.”

“She’s no Darkling,” Wesh replied. “I don’t know what she is, but she doesn’t belong to the Dark. She fears the Dark as much as we do.”

“You say that,” Rien countered. “She’s nothing but a….”

Yvan stopped him by laying a hand on Rien’s arm. “She’s blameless. She had nothing to do with this. Maybe she’s right to hate me for locking her up instead of listening to her.”

He walked forward, pulled out his keys, and unlocked Wesh’s cell. “You’re free to go, old man. I would appreciate it if you helped us against the Darklings, but I would appreciate it even more if you could convince that girl to help us, too.”

“Eliska,” Yann interjected. “Her name is Eliska.”

“Right.” Yvan went over to Mael’s cell and unlocked that, too. “I’m grateful for your help, both the help that you’ve already given me and any help you give me in the future, though I don’t know what good it will do any of us.”

“Go tell her,” Wesh replied. “If you can’t convince her, I’ll come with you and try myself, but I don’t think she’ll listen to any of us. She’ll say she’s better off alone and I’m afraid she’s right.”

Yann agreed with him, but he didn’t say so. Eliska would be more than happy to tell the Watch Commander to his face.

Yvan climbed the stairs and paused in the street outside the storm doors. “Rainier, you take Rien back to my office and wait for me there.” Yvan gave Yann a sharp look. “You come with me, son. She listens to you.”

Yann didn’t ask why his father thought that. Eliska wouldn’t listen to Yann any more than she would listen to any other Watchman, but he didn’t argue.

Yvan pinched his lips together the way he always did when he had to do something unpleasant. He marched around the building and pulled open the other storm doors.

He climbed down and stopped outside Eliska’s cell. She sat with one knee drawn up and her other leg stretched out on her bench. She glanced at Yvan and then her dark eyes sliced sideways to Yann.

“I am Yvan Dilnao, Eliska,” he began. “I am Commander of the Middleborough Black Watch.”

“Do you think I give a damn who you are?” she fired back. “You’re nothing to me.”

He held up his keys. “I’m the person who can release you from this cell.”

“You can’t hold me here. You don’t have any power over me.”

“Your friend Wesh tells me that you only met him and Mael yesterday,” Yvan told her.

She allowed her eyebrows to lift slightly. “Wesh told you that? Not….him?” She glanced over at Yann again.

“I realize now that you didn’t bring the Darklings here,” Yvan went on.

She snorted in his face. “What did you do with my staff?”

“It’s in my office. I’m here to release you.”

“Really?” She glanced around her cell. “And yet I’m still in here.”

“I came to ask you to help us defend this town against the Darklings. Prove to me that I’m not making a mistake by releasing you.”

“If you’re releasing me, then you already made a mistake by locking me up when you had enough information to know I never did anything wrong…..unless I was the one who made a mistake by helping you the first time. You punished me for helping you. I would be stupid to do it again.”

Yvan sighed heavily. “You don’t make it easy to help you, girl.”

“You can’t help me. I can help myself just fine. Just let me out of here and leave me alone.” She turned her head away and pretended to look at the wall.

Yann’s heart went out to her. He agreed with everything she said.

Why should she help the Black Watch? The Commander made a serious mistake by locking her up like this. He had no reason at all to do that. Now he would pay the price for it.

Yvan unlocked the cell. The door creaked open and he propped it aside. “There you go. You can leave now.”

She refused to look at him. “Where’s my staff?”

He compressed his lips even tighter and scowled at her, but Yann felt no sympathy for his father. The Watch Commander asked for this.

Yvan nodded at Yann and Yann bolted out of the basement. He ran back to his father’s office.

Rien and Rainier both glanced up when Yann looked around for Elisa’s staff, snatched it from the corner, and dashed back outside.

He slowed down when he spotted his father and Eliska standing outside the building talking to Wesh and Mael. Yann could just imagine how much success Wesh and Mael were having convincing Eliska to stay.

Her eyes lit up when she saw Yann coming back, but she didn’t look at the staff. She was looking at him. Could she soften that much just because of him?

His spirits lifted and he held out the staff to her when, at that moment, another bone-crushing blow struck him across the back of the head. He felt himself going down and a sickening wave of cold nausea swept over him.

He stretched out his hand to Eliska, but she leapt away from him instead of coming toward him. He tried to call out to her to take her staff. She would need that when she left Middleborough and returned to wandering the Coil.

She spun away from him and her hair whipped out from her head. Yann’s blood crashed in his ears and he collapsed onto his knees.

He tried to call out to anyone, but he couldn’t move. All his limbs turned to water and he felt himself falling over.

He toppled onto his shoulder and stared in blank horror at a dozen absolutely massive Darklings surrounding Middleborough.

He had never seen Darklings this big before. Each one dwarfed the town by many times. They faced inward with their gargantuan fanged mouths gaping to swallow the town.

Howling winds blasted into town….except there was no town anymore. The barricade evaporated and the buildings and houses around the town’s perimeter dissolved in the hazy cloud of chaos.

Shingles, windows, siding boards, water troughs, furniture, and bodies twirled in the wind, cartwheeled past the Watch standing in the middle of the street, and vanished into the whirling darkness.

Dark Layers rotated through town disintegrating everything in their path. The Darklings remained in position facing inward at the points of the compass.

They didn’t dive in to attack. They didn’t have to. Middleborough was finished. The Coil wiped it out of existence along with everyone in it.

End of Chapter 4.