The Belle and the Blackbird (Guardians Cycle #2) by Sarah M. Cradit

Author:Sarah M. Cradit [Cradit, Sarah M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Storyville Press

When Ana returned to the main fairway of the market, it felt like she’d stepped into another reality. Men and women were screaming for help, howling for physicians, and leaning over a haphazard line of convulsing bodies. Some were covered in blood. Others had gone dangerously pale.

Some of the tents had already collapsed, and the rest were being pulled down to place under the dying and dead. Dead. Yes, she realized some had already succumbed to the unknown horror ripping through the market. She searched for signs of anything that might explain what was happening, but there was nothing.

Ana regarded them all in utter helplessness. Her legs tried to go one way, her head another.

“It’s the apples!” someone cried. The person ran through the crowd, her hands waving above her head. “Don’t eat the apples!”

Shrill, sharp pounding pulsed in Ana’s ears. The screams and cries turned into an ambient hum, like she’d been pulled away from the scene and was viewing it through the lens of a distant memory.

Several feet away, a little boy tore out of his parents’ arms and retched a spray of blood. It coated his father, who tilted his head back to the sky and begged for mercy.

A cart thundered down the road, knocking Ana into a tent. The cacophony of dread and despair climbed to a crescendo once more, and she started screaming herself, to drown out the terror that yet had no name.

But of course it had a name.

You only think you know regret.

Ana started moving through the crowd. She crouched near the boy, asking his parents for any information they had about what had happened , but the mother was incapacitated with sobs. She pulled her boy—her already-gone boy—to her chest and rocked him in the rawest grief Ana had ever witnessed.

If she’d only moved faster, she might have—

“It was the apple,” the father said, swaying on his knees with a soulless look in his eyes. Beside him she saw a honey-covered apple—or what had been one before the child had eaten it. Only the stick remained, coated in remnants of honey and dirt clumped around the discarded instrument of death. “It was the fucking apple!”

“We need physicians!” Tyreste cried, his voice rising momentarily over the din of terror. Ana couldn’t see him; her senses were too overloaded to place where he was. “Where are the physicians? The healers?”

Ana stumbled to her feet. She blinked the sweat and tears away and scanned the crowd. Magda’s words bored holes through her. How had she done it? Had she taken hold of a villager and turned them into a murderer?

She found Tyreste standing over another situation too far gone, his hands laced over his head. The helpless look on his face broke her.

“You’re a healer,” she whispered, low enough just for the two of them. “We can help people.”

“I tried... I...” He turned back toward her, wan-faced, and lowered his shaking hands so she could see them. “How do you know I can heal?”

“Does it matter?” Ana was too agitated to be concerned about the slipup.

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