Chapter 95
CHAPTER NINETY-FIVE
M y ears rang with the sound of dying men.
The addition of Elk’s forces was exactly what our enemies needed to renew their strength and to begin hammering the final nail in the coffin of my armies.
Each new onslaught of soldiers was like the weight of an iron chain tightening around my men a little more. It dragged at their arms, broke their stance, and smothered some of the fight in their eyes.
Still, they pressed on, not one of them willing to surrender just yet. Every last one of them would fight to the death, just as I would.
I spun, slicing through the neck of a Wolf soldier with one saber before bringing the other down across the face of one from Elk.
My eyes were stained crimson with their blood. It coated everything from the steel of my blades to the plates of my armor, before soaking the ground beneath my feet.
Distantly, I registered Kirill’s battle cry, Taras’s sharp warning to Yuriy, and Henrick’s call for help. All we could do was hold the line to the palace behind us, defend the women and children within our walls, and the injured soldiers who would be executed the moment we fell.
I threw everything into each strike, each parry, desperate to carve my way through the sea of navy and gray. There were so many of them. Too many. And though word had reached us that our troops in the West were on their way here, they were being chased by Ram’s soldiers.
And more Obsidian soldiers were heading up from the South.
Three soldiers charged toward me at once. I blocked the sword of one and dodged out of the way of another, just in time for the third man to land a hit with his shield.
I stumbled backward and used the momentum to spin around, dipping low to aim for the opening in their armor. All three cried out as I sliced through their calves, falling to their knees before I used the same move to free their heads from their bodies.
It didn’t seem to matter how many men I killed when there were so many more flooding in to take their place. This never-ending bloodshed, the constant need to kill again and again, adding more bodies to the frozen ground but never seeming to make any progress, was its own kind of hell. One we couldn’t seem to escape from.
But if we could just hold the line… A horn blew behind us. One loud, panicked note to alert us that the castle walls had been breached. I cursed under my breath.
I briefly caught sight of Taras and his contingent of men falling back toward the castle. Toward his wife and unborn child.
I swallowed down the bile rising in my throat, throwing myself into the fight with absolutely everything I had left. If I could slow them down, buy him a little more time before the armies flooded our halls, I would give him that.
Because, unfortunately, it wasn’t a matter of if we would lose this battle, but when.
For all of my strategy and my carefully laid plans, here we were, so close to the end of it all, where Iiro was going to get everything he had ever wanted.
Everything but her.
A bitter smile twisted my lips, spurring my exhausted limbs a little more. That was the one thing I had done right, at least.
I would die knowing I had given my all to protect my clan, and that my wife was safe. Safe. And alive.
And in the end, that was all my weary soul could care about. Maybe I had failed my duke by not being the heartless monster he raised me to be. Failed my people by not protecting them from my father or this war.
Mila’s words haunted me as I pushed forward, ducking out of reach of a Wolf soldier in time for one of his clansmen to run him through.
There are no good choices in war.
But with each swing of my blades, I couldn’t help but disagree with her. Couldn’t bring myself to regret this one thing I had done right. At the end, when it mattered, my wife would survive.
The sound of an explosion knocked me backwards, rattling my bones as a flash of bright violet light lit up the sky. Screams of pain erupted, the scent of charred flesh and burning leather choking the air from my lungs.
Panic swept through me for a single, heart-stopping moment. Had Ram’s armies finally made it to finish us off?
I glanced in the direction of the explosion, but there was no gray smoke. No fire or the scent of sulfur and charcoal that came with the powder they used in the mines.
Instead, fog covered the ground, like a storm cloud that had fallen from the sky to perfectly cover Elk’s and Wolf’s armies.
And with the storm, came lightning…bright, blinding, violet lightning. Lightning that, inexplicably, reminded me of my fiery, feral lemmikki.
I considered the impossibility of that, the improbability of this pseudo-miracle that had just fallen right into our laps. But I wasn’t willing to let it go to waste. There wasn’t time to question the hows or whys, there was only time to act.
The soldiers I’d been fighting only a few moments ago were turned around, confusion sweeping through their ranks as arrows rained down from above, coming from the opposite direction of my troops.
Adrenaline coursed through me, the fog weighing down my thoughts suddenly lifted by the unexpected turn of events.
Whoever was attacking them was on our side—or at the very least, was not on Iiro’s.
I immediately lunged forward, not willing to waste a single second of the winds that had shifted in our favor. After calling out a few quick commands, my men leapt into action as well, suddenly fighting with a renewed energy to push the line back.
Again and again, I brought my sabers down through my enemies, using every tool in my arsenal.
Bedlam erupted, Wolf and Elk soldiers tripping over the bodies of their comrades in an effort to regroup.
Commanders bellowed orders, their voices barely audible over the sound of clashing steel and the howls of the wounded.
Hours passed until the night sky was a hazy shade of silver. The sun began cresting over the mountains, chasing away the mists and revealing the graveyard of soldiers all around us.
It bolstered my men to keep fighting. To keep pushing back against our enemy, to destroy them.
When the rhythmic sound of a war horn bellowed out two long notes—the call for retreat—relief swelled in my chest.
Somehow, we hadn’t just survived the night, but we had won it.
Not just somehow, but with the help of a new wave of soldiers.
Men stormed the field, coming from the forest. They didn’t wave a banner or have the telltale colors of their clan on their armor. Instead, most of them wore tattered clothes and no helmets.
And right in the center of their foreheads was the telltale B for Besklanovvy .
Surely my eyes were playing tricks on me. Ava had hired them as mercenaries, used them for her own ends to try to kill my wife, but that didn’t explain why they were here now, fighting for Bear.
I blocked an oncoming sword, kicking the remaining soldier backwards and onto Henrick’s waiting sword.
When there was a break in the fighting, I sheathed my sabers and removed my helmet to run a hand over my face. I scanned the field again, taking in the sheer number of Unclanned who had come to our aid. But why?
Why would they help a clan that had turned its back on them so completely?
And then I saw her .
The dawning sun lit the courtyard in an ethereal glow, adding to the unreal feel of the figure striding across the battlefield in pitch-black armor, a saber in each of her hands.
And I knew it was Rowan, even with half of her face covered. Those soft lips, that pointed chin, and the verdant flames that danced in her bright eyes.
Hell, hadn’t I suspected it, felt her presence in my soul, impossible as it was, from the moment the lightning pierced the sky?
A flash of crimson whipped out behind her figure as she stormed her way across the battlefield. She didn’t stop to register the blood-soaked ground or the bodies littered at her feet; instead, she marched forward, and I saw that long hair I’d glimpsed was braided back and whipping out around her like a scarlet bolt of the lightning she had summoned.
I would know her anywhere.
My wife.
My feral little lemmikki.