Nikolai
The wall was mine, and I ran it like an instrument.
“Loose!”
Three hundred bowstrings sang at once. My archers drew warbows no human arm could bend, and the volley went up in a single dark sheet, iron heads trailing fire, then fell through the swarm. Wyverns shrieked. Three folded in the air and dropped.
“Reload! Scorpions, low line—the stragglers breaking left. Chain-shot.”
The crews hauled the great bolt-throwers around and let loose.
Lengths of spinning chain whipped out and wrapped wyvern wings, folding them, and the beasts dropped like stones into the rocks below the wall.
Behind me the war-mages worked in a row, hands raised, throwing fire and shattering the spells the enemy threw back.
I should have kept my eyes on my own field. I did not.
High above, the dragon wheeled black and gold through a churn of wings, and on his back rode Max.
Even at this distance my sight found her, the way it always found her—the thread between us drew taut, pulling my gaze up.
She was bleeding. Her shoulder, a dark wet bloom spreading down her sleeve, and the sight of it lit a cold fury in me.
Caspian fought at her back, favoring his right side.
The dragon bled from both shoulders where the Kharvox had opened him, and I would wager my House the wounds ran deeper than they showed.
That the three of them still lived, that high and that outnumbered, was a thing I did not have the leisure to marvel at.
From the front tower a horn called, long and low. Aelindor, ordering the dragon home.
My sight zoomed in on the made things shaped like my own kind, sent to mock us.
Rage pounded behind my ribs. Most were cut down by Caspian, Max, and the dragon.
The few that reached my archers’ range we put down without mercy.
One landed at the base of the wall and scaled the stone with inhuman speed, and I met it at the parapet and ended it before it crested the top. Its made body plummeted to the dirt.
“Nikolai—the gap, third quarter!”
I turned. More than a dozen wyverns had ridden out the arrow-storm, folded their wings, and dropped straight down into the fortress.
“Brace the courtyard! Forward!”
Some came down already dead, so studded with iron they should have fallen a mile back and fell anyway—through rooftops, into the armory, one into the east barracks in a burst of slate and bone.
A handful of the made vampires sprang free of their mounts before impact and hit the ranks at a sprint, magefire bombs blooming in their fists.
The blasts rippled across the courtyard. Men went down. Stone went up.
One stretch of the outer wall folded in on itself with a sound like the world cracking and took the scorpion crew standing on it down into the rubble.
Across the fortress, the line held. My commanders ran every quarter as its own killing ground.
Marco’s voice carried up from the southern yard, the generals barking orders from the armory district and the eastern gate, each of them turning their sector into a box the enemy could enter and not leave.
The soldiers moved the way the Spartans had trained them—no panic, no gap left open twice.
And the hundred Spartans still garrisoned here, the third we hadn’t sent to shore up the borders, anchored every weak point like iron set in mortar.
It broke, in the end, inevitably.
In the sky, the surviving witches and mages wheeled their wyverns and fled, screaming orders back at the rest: hold the dragon. Buy them the distance.
The dragon was already burning the wyverns left behind to stall him. Without their riders to cast the protection wards, dragon fire found them unshielded.
Then it was over, or at least it was over for us, the remains of the horde moved on to wreak their destruction somewhere else.
I lowered my arm. Along the wall, my archers stood down by ranks, smoke curling off the scorched fletching still in their hands.
The fortress smoked. Fires guttered along the eastern roofs. Mutant carcasses lay heaped across the training ground, green ichor gone black where it pooled. The burning details were already at work. The dead beasts had to be set on fire before they fouled the ground.
Over two hundred of our soldiers and officers had fallen.
By the cold arithmetic of war, it was a light price, bought by the commanders’ strategy and the nerve of soldiers who had fought like the Spartans who shaped them. I had stood through battles that cost ten times as much and called them victories.
It never felt light. It never had. Every name on the list to come would be someone else’s lover, parent, son, daughter, friend.
And this was only the beginning. I felt it the way I felt weather turning. The White Witch had thrown a probe at our walls, learned what she came to learn, and she wouldn’t stop—not until the Covenant was ash and the last of us was a story told somewhere cold. She meant to scour us from the earth.
I would not allow it.
I would drag her into the dark with me before I let her have us. I would keep what was mine breathing—my brothers, my people.
Max.
The dragon came down hard in the center of the field, his wings throwing up a storm of ash and blood, and Max rolled off his back and found her feet. For a moment I forgot the war around me.
She stood in the wrecked field, soaked in blood—the mutants’, mostly—red and green across her fatigues, matted through her hair until the single white thread had gone green and wet.
She didn’t sway. Her chin was up, her chakrams still loose in her hands, and the wild glint in those midnight eyes hadn’t faded.
The sight of her drove joy through me, bright over all the grimness and the grief.
She was glorious. She was alive.
I stepped off the high wall, dropped the long fall to the bloodied ground, and went to her.