Chapter 33
Chapter Thirty-Three
Rydian
Lesha’s body was all bone and torn flesh, wrapped in rags that smelled of sweat and rot.
Her back was bandaged, thick with dried blood where her wings had once been.
Every breath shuddered through her like it might be her last. She weighed almost nothing, especially compared to the dread that filled me as I watched Brist betray us all.
“We have to move,” I said.
“What about the others?” Aurelia asked, stricken.
I knew the horrible fear that gripped her because it gripped me too. Slade, Thorne, Keres, Daegel. My family. They’d never make it out in time.
At our backs, a group of sentries approached—a trio of Obsidians and a trio of…
something else. They wore white leather armor, reinforced with straps of bone and plates of ice that didn’t melt under the torchlight.
Masks of carved ice-bone covered where faces should have been—smooth, featureless ovals strapped to emptiness.
Nothing moved beneath those masks. No breath, no flicker of eyes.
Just a hollow cold that rolled ahead of them.
Frostwights.
I’d heard stories, mostly scary tales told to children to keep them from venturing too far into the northern mountains. But even those stories hadn’t conveyed the true horror of seeing the creatures advancing toward us now.
The air dropped ten degrees in an instant.
Aurelia stilled. I felt her power bunch beneath the surface of her skin, ready to explode.
I stepped in front of her and let my shadows swell. Let the nightmarish illusion take the place of our true faces. Let them see what they wanted to see. Two fellow soldiers, also relieved of our fae souls and made into something enslaved to Heliconia’s darkness.
“Soldier,” one of the soldiers barked. “Report. Have you found the traitors we were warned about?”
“Not yet,” I said, pitching my voice low and dull. “We were ordered to sweep the hillside.”
One of the Frostwights tilted its mask as if smelling the air. Frost smoke drifted from the seams in its armor. For a heartbeat, I thought we might slip past. Then the Frostwight’s head snapped toward Aurelia.
The hollowness behind that mask noticed her.
A hiss of cold rushed through the tent-rows. The Frostwight raised its hand, fingers gnarled into icicles.
My shadows tore under the pressure of that ancient, unnatural cold. The illusion faltered.
“It isss her,” the Frostwight hissed. “The traitor. We mussst kill her.”
“Run,” I snarled—and dropped the illusion.
The closest Obsidian reached for his horn.
I didn’t give him the chance to sound it. A blade of shadow shoved through his ribs, cracking bone, slamming into his heart. I ripped it free and turned, but the second soldier was already raising his axe.
Aurelia moved faster.
Furyfire erupted from her palm, bright and wild, engulfing the soldier. His scream was brief. When the fire died, only blackened armor and smoking bone remained.
The Frostwight did not scream.
Flames licked across its armor and guttered. Frost crawled over the fire, devouring it, leaving scorched ice in its wake. The thing kept coming.
“What in the—” Aurelia began.
“Frostwight,” I snapped. “It’s made of bone, which won’t burn. Don’t let it touch you—”
It lunged.
Cold like a god’s last breath slammed into me. I twisted, throwing myself sideways with Lesha clutched tight to my chest. The blast hit the thick brush behind us. Thorny branches froze solid, then shattered into a rain of frozen shards.
Aurelia didn’t flinch away.
She moved through it.
Flame roared out of her, the heat singeing the hairs on my hands. The Frostwight met it head-on. Ice and fire collided, power shrieking, throwing sparks and shards across the frozen ground.
Her rune flared, bright as a brand at the hollow of her throat. I felt the pulse of it from where I stood—old, deep, dangerous.
The Frostwight’s armor began to melt.
Not from heat.
From a draining of whatever magic held it together.
Furyfire climbed its body, but beneath the snapping bone and cracking ice, something else was happening. I felt it like a current in the air. A pull. A siphon.
Life force—whatever Heliconia had tethered inside that corpse of bones—ripped free.
The Frostwight staggered, knees buckling. Frosted smoke poured out from the seams in its leather armor, racing toward Aurelia, drawn like breath to her mark. Her eyes widened. For a second, she looked like she might push it away.
Instead, she took it in.
The last of the light in the Frostwight’s body went out. Its armor crumpled in on itself, collapsing like an empty shell. Aurelia’s breath caught, shoulders jerking as warmth flooded her skin. The exhaustion in her gaze cleared like fog burned away at dawn.
She hadn’t just burned it.
She’d drained it.
Drank it in and let it strengthen her.
Makarios.
The word thudded through me like a warning. Suddenly, I wondered if it wasn’t such a good thing after all. If she took too much, like the gates to the Midnight Court—
“Aurelia.”
Her head snapped toward me. For a terrifying heartbeat, her eyes were wrong—the blue too bright, pupils blown wide, something ancient and hungry looking out through her face.
Then she blinked, and the woman I knew was back.
“I’m fine,” she said, voice rough. “Get Lesha to the cave. Now.”
We ran.
Lesha’s body was a dead weight against my chest, but I held her like she was made of glass. Aurelia kept pace, flames low now but ready, a barely-contained inferno under her skin.
We made it across the river and onto the far bank when the camp erupted behind us. From the far side, a plume of fire and smoke shot into the sky—their communications tent, by the looks of it, going up in a controlled explosion.
Thorne and Slade.
I felt the pulse of Slade’s shadow-walking tug, distant but unmistakable, as he blinked someone—several someones—out of that firestorm. Relief slammed into me as hard as fear.
They were alive.
For now.
“Keep going,” Aurelia said. “We can’t help them if we get ambushed on this hill.”
I kept running, uphill, zigzagging around the thick brush that blocked a straight ascent.
We were almost to the far slope.
Another horn blared, ahead of us, not behind.
“Patrol on the outer ring,” Aurelia said. “We’re going to run through them.”
Lesha stirred weakly in my arms, a faint sound scraping from her throat.
“Almost there,” I murmured to her. “Stay with us.”
We slid through a narrow opening in the brush—and nearly collided with a wall of pale leather and ice.
A line of Frostwights, moving in eerie, perfect unison. White armor, masks like featureless moons, blades of blue-white ice burning in their hands. Behind them, a handful of Obsidians stood, eyes black and eager for our deaths. Thanks to Brist, they’d likely been waiting for us here all along.
One of the Frostwights lifted its arm, pulling its ice-spear back and aiming its sharpened tip at us.
“Get down,” I called.
I dropped, twisting my body to shield Lesha as a spear of ice screamed through the space where our heads had been.
It landed impaled in the hardened ground behind us.
Aurelia rolled away, coming up on one knee. Flame spiraled from her hand, flaring into a wide arc that forced the nearest Frostwights to halt. The fire didn’t burn as quickly as it should have—it clung to their armor, eating at it slowly, hungrily.
Her mark flared bright, pulling.
I felt it again.
“Leave them!” I shouted. “We don’t have time—”
A Frostwight stepped through the fire.
It reached for her.
I surged to my feet, shadows whipping out like chains. They wrapped around the thing’s arm, trying to pull it off course, but the cold that met my power was like nothing I’d felt before. It crawled up my shadows, burning them away in shards of frozen darkness.
“Rydian.” Aurelia’s voice snapped through my head like a whip. “Go! Get her to the cave. I’ll hold them.”
I looked at the slope, at the line of Frostwights, at the obsidian-eyed soldiers moving in a tightening circle.
Leaving her here went against every instinct I had.
“I won’t—”
She turned on me, furyfire roaring up her arms, eyes gone molten. “Go,” she growled. “I’ll be right behind you.”
Our gazes locked.
She’d accused me of not believing in her once before.
I wouldn’t make that same mistake again.
“Don’t die,” I said.
Her mouth curved; not quite a smile, too feral for that. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”
Then she turned back to the Frostwights and unleashed Hel.
In one hand, she swung her sword, its metal gleaming in the light of dawn. From her other hand, flame poured out in waves—onyx-black and inferno-hot, rolling up and down the slope, devouring Obsidian soldiers in its path.
Frostwights cracked and screamed. The air became a living furnace, heat slamming into my face even as I turned away.
Even as I ran.
The climb to the cave mouth felt like scaling the side of a nightmare. The slope was slick beneath my boots, patches of ice hidden under loose rock. I used my shadows to steady my footing, focusing every shred of attention I had on staying upright, on not dropping the fragile life I carried.
Two Withered soldiers pounded up the hill, breath rasping, faces drawn and determined. I recognized them from Slade’s hunting party. They bypassed the cave’s mouth, going higher still, and I knew they had their orders from Slade.
Get to Brist.
End him.
Whatever death he met today wouldn’t be merciful enough.
The cave mouth loomed ahead—a jagged crack in the cliffside, dark as a swallow of midnight. Obsidian soldiers swarmed it, each one knocked back by a Withered soldier’s sword.
As I got closer, Daegel appeared beside the opening, shadows up like a wall, deflecting a rain of ice shards that hammered down from somewhere below.
His eyes widened when he saw me, then again when he noticed what I carried. “The Aine?”
“Alive,” I said, staggering the last few steps. “For now. And Slade?”
“He’s gone back for the others,” he said. “Keres and Thorne among them.”