Chapter Forty
THE AERIAL FIGHT ENDED SWIFTLY ONCE THE Nkita could fight to their full potential.
Although she’d issued the order and had resolved not to grieve the losses while they’d been fighting, there was a hollowness inside her when she and Zahzah landed on the ground alongside the rest of her squadron.
The two armies were intermingled now, soldiers on both sides fighting and tangled up in a mishmash of clashing weapons, sizzling magic, and flying blood and bodies.
There was no way to have the kongamatos spew flames across the battlefield without claiming Apollyon lives too.
So, she gave her Nkita the order to form a ground fighting unit while Zahzah and the other kongamatos flew back to the palace to stand sentinel in case any of Rishaud’s soldiers managed to make their way there.
Malachi had his own sentinels—archers—posted on the turrets and along the outer wall, but the kongamatos would be an added layer of protection for those Trystin was escorting to safety, Yashira being among them.
Once that was decided, Kadeesha didn’t bother reaching for actual steel.
Fighting with her flames and her flames alone was second nature and much more effective.
She, Leisha, and Samira worked in a unit as they always did.
She and Leisha leveled lethal assaults with aether fire and Samira tore a path through enemy soldiers using her blade, the three of them creating a sea of corpses.
The battlefield was the one place where she didn’t need to hold back or feel bad for the utter destruction her flames could wreak.
And while she was holding it together still, witnessing Rassa’s death had left her leaning into her destructive urges in full.
She hadn’t correctly adjusted for losing the allegiance of the vassal kings before, or for Rishaud having taken command of her court after Sylas’s death.
Even those she faced in purple-and-black uniforms wouldn’t see her as a fellow Aether fae on this battlefield, let alone their queen.
No, they’d see her as exactly what the flyer who’d murdered Rassa had screamed: a traitor.
An enemy to be eviscerated. And there was no time to convince them that they, in fact, were the ones betraying her and their own court.
So, she needed to pay them the same regard back unless she wanted to get more of her sisters killed.
Kadeesha gave herself over to the fiery blaze that perpetually pressed up against her skin …
then let it detonate out of her and roil forth, consuming everything she’d tagged as enemy in her path.
The only sense she retained of anything beyond the wild, destructive rhythm she’d fallen into was the tingle emanating from her Marking.
It was as if something outside of her own body tugged her to where she needed to be on the battlefield, and with each step she took, each forward inch she gained by cutting down foes in her path, her Marking vibrated with greater intensity.
That sensation morphed into a searing brand that yanked her fully out of the killing haze.
She blinked, grounding herself, and spotted Malachi a few feet away, he and Rishaud locked in a fierce battle.
Twin tornadoes formed of Malachi’s shadows ripped up the ground beneath the two fae kings and flew toward Rishaud at the same time that Malachi’s void scimitars arced through the air from opposite sides in line with his neck.
Rishaud teleported out of striking range, only to appear right behind Malachi with a sunfire sword in hand.
Malachi sensed the threat at his back before Kadeesha could call out a warning and was already spinning around to meet it, but the fiery sword was moving now with a speed that made Kadeesha’s heart stop.
Malachi spun out of its path a hairsbreadth before the sword would’ve severed his head from his body.
He blocked the Hyperion king’s next swing with a speed that matched Rishaud’s.
Malachi’s scimitars crossed in the center and formed an X as they halted the trajectory of Rishaud’s sword.
Fragments of shadows and sparks of sunfire ricocheted from the spot where the two kings’ blades met and the blowback of the two ancient magics rumbled through the air.
For a moment, all she could do was watch as the two kings—the undisputed two most powerful fae alive—thrust and parried and dodged each other’s killing blows with well-timed teleportation, incredible agility, and blinding speed.
Malachi was impressive. More than impressive.
Kadeesha had thought she’d taken his measure when he’d battled Rishaud’s soldiers and then Rishaud himself during her wedding back in Aether territory.
But the ferocity he fought with then was nothing compared to now.
Wielding the void blades, locs wild and unbound, his broad, tall form clad in battle leathers and ceremonial armor, his grille gleaming, Malachi looked every inch an entity that was more than mere fae.
He looked like a god born of darkness and shadows and nightmares—he might be on par with the great Celestials themselves.
It was a good thing she wasn’t overly religious, because that thought was certainly blasphemous.
She pried her gaze away from Malachi and Rishaud to quickly assess the raging battle beyond.
None of her Nkita she spotted close by were mortally injured, thank the skies.
They hadn’t lost anyone else. In addition, Malachi’s forces were holding the line and keeping the majority of Rishaud’s army from advancing toward the palace by wielding a well-coordinated combination of void attacks and assault with conventional weaponry.
But the Apollyon soldiers weren’t stopping every foe.
Especially when they faced those who wielded myriad magics.
And that’s when she finally, truly, saw where the strength of a united Six Kingdoms army lay: It wasn’t about the massive number of soldiers; it was about the strategic advantage that lobbing numerous kinds of magical assaults—those born of fire and wind and water and solar energy and aether and the very earth itself—at your enemy.
Rishaud’s forces only needed to assess and then strategically counter the threat of mostly one kind of magic, while Malachi’s army had to battle six different kinds at once and remain alive while doing it.
She told herself that mattered little and that any of Rishaud’s soldiers who managed to get near the castle would either be shot dead by the archers or incinerated by the kongamatos.
But then she spotted a Hyperion soldier atop a white horse who held his mount motionless in the center of the field.
About a dozen soldiers on horseback clad in white and gold surrounded him and faced outward, forming a clear protective barrier.
A wrong feeling settled in the pit of her stomach.
The rider inside the circle raised his hand in the air.
Dozens of arcs of sunfire shot from his palm and cracked across the sky like lightning.
Each golden streak raced straight for the palace, then streaked upward, meeting at a point above the Apollyon Court’s seat of power.
The rapid booms she’d heard right before the market attack resounded and golden flames sprayed down on the palace.
An ethereal blaze broke out along the front and sides of it for as far as Kadeesha could see.
More golden streaks flew upward and the fresh ones raced straight toward the war serpents in the skies around the palace.
She might’ve screamed in fury and horror out loud. It might’ve been a thing that got stuck in her throat. She wasn’t sure.
All she knew was that suddenly she was running for the rider, alternating between watching the skies and watching the battlefield around her, cutting down anybody who presented an obstacle.
She dimly noted Leisha and Samira at her side, tearing toward the rider who was aiming for her squadron too.
So far she’d seen no kongamato hurtle to the earth, thank the skies.
Zahzah and the others were dodging each calamitous golden streak, the kongamatos blurs against the sky.
Still … the thought of her Zahzah—her friend—getting hurt …
It was almost too much.
She closed the distance. Two hundred paces out.
Then a hundred. Eighty. Seventy. When she got to fifty and there were no Apollyon soldiers between her and the cavalry forming a circle around the male in the middle, she sent a torrent of flames roiling toward them.
Leisha added her own magic to the assault.
Apparently all of the cavalry had solar magic and they unleashed a tidal wave of sunfire that shot toward Kadeesha’s and Leisha’s aether flames.
The combined solar magic of twelve Hyperion warriors might’ve been enough to overpower the magical assault of two Aether fae. But Kadeesha was a royal.
No—I am a high queen.
And these lesser men are going to have to bring a lot more firepower to keep themselves from being incinerated.
Her flames engulfed the wave of sunfire, snuffing it out even as Kadeesha, Leisha, and Samira continued forward.
Thirty paces. Molten purple flowed over the circle of cavalry soldiers, melting them to nothing between one heartbeat and the next, and then continued to race toward the male shooting the golden flares into the sky.
With one hand still raised in the air—and eyes wide at the loss of his bodyguards—he now angled the other hand toward Kadeesha.
Fifteen paces—close enough that he couldn’t dodge or outrun her next strike.