25. Farron #2
Caspian only glances to the horizon, bored. “It appears all your ranks are well within the Briar now. As lovely as our time together has been, I have places to be. Princesses to fuck. Gladiators to manipulate. You know, important things.”
The Briar begins to scream.
Not with sound but with movement.
The earth beneath my boots lurches. Thorn walls twist and convulse, writhing like serpents disturbed. Above, violet brambles rupture, splintering skyward, then crashing down in jagged bursts, sharp as spears.
The Briar is alive.
And it’s hungry.
My soldiers cry out. One is impaled clean through the chest, lifted off the ground like a rag doll. Another disappears into the tangle, his golden armor vanishing in a sea of thorns. Blood mists the air.
The battlefield collapses into pandemonium.
“Shields!” I roar, though I know it’s useless. There’s no direction to defend against. The attack is coming from everywhere. Above, below, behind. What briars we burned earlier are immediately replaced with new ones, the brush springing up around us in violent bursts.
A thorn javelin rips through a young footman, and he crumples, mouth open in shock, already dead. He couldn’t have reached peak manhood. Couldn’t have been older than Dom or Billy.
Another wall of briars explodes up between my ranks, cutting off my vanguard from the rear guard. Dom. Billy. They were right beside me, weren’t they? But I can’t see them. Can’t hear them.
“Dom!” I shout, turning in a circle, lashing out with fire, trying to burn a path through the thorns. But for every thatch I destroy, five more rise in its place. “Billy!”
The Briar has become a battlefield of shifting corridors, transforming my army into scattered, panicked fragments.
A soldier crashes into me, his face shredded, blood pouring from gashes along his neck. He grabs my shoulder, gasping. “They’re coming from the thorns!”
Before he can finish, a hook-shaped vine pierces through his chest and yanks him backward into the dark.
I stagger, my heart rabid.
This isn’t a battle anymore.
It’s a massacre.
“Farron!”
One of my brother’s voices. I can’t tell which one, but I rush toward the sound. In the chaos, I smash into two of my soldiers. There’re hands on my shoulders, my face. I search beneath the helms. It’s them, Dom and Billy, their matching eyes mad with terror.
“We have to get out of here,” Billy yells. “Order the retreat before we’re all dead!”
My brothers’ fear is infectious, and I feel it stealing my breath, turning my legs to water. Looking around, I see soldier after soldier strung up like bloody banners, waving upon their thorn flag posts. Caspian, asserting his dominion over my realm with my own dead men and women.
No. I cannot give in to fear now. I must find my valor.
And to do that, I need to reach the most sacred space within my heart. The part of me that always gives me courage. That has given me hope and lit up even my darkest days.
The ember of the Green Flame.
I slam my hand to the ground. I do not fear death.
Green fire erupts from my palm, carving veins of flame into the earth like a thousand roots cracking through stone.
Death cannot touch those who stand by my side.
My vision narrows to a pinpoint of power—my heart, my breath, my very soul threading into the weave of life and death.
Come back to me.
I reach out to the bodies strung up on the thorns, the soldiers torn apart in the bramble’s maw. I feel them—thin, silken strands of their essence—frayed but still present.
With a cry, I pull.
Green flames explode across the battlefield. Every corpse I reach ignites in a fiery resurrection. One by one, they jerk upright, limbs twitching, armor clanking, eyes blazing with emerald fire. They pull themselves free of the thorns. Their wounds still gape. Blood still seeps from their mouths.
But they rise.
Dozens of them. Hundreds.
The Green Flame obeys me.
I do not fear death.
I’ve done it. I’ve done it. I’ve done—
One of them turns. It’s the boy, the one on the cusp of manhood.
His eyes are wide open—green and gleaming—but they do not see. They stare past me, blank and hollow. The soldier stumbles forward with a jolt, head cocking to one side like a broken doll.
One lets out a wet, gurgling moan.
Another snaps its own neck into place with a sharp, unnatural crack.
They are not the same as Dayton, who awoke with his heart still filled with sunshine.
These are…these are…
These are wrong.
“Farron!” Billy shouts. “What’s happening? It’s the Battle of Coppershire all over again! Perth Quellos…when he raised the dead…this is the same thing!”
“No, no, I’m not like him!” I shout, but my voice is lost in the growing din. How did this happen? Is it because I didn’t take enough care? Because I didn’t lovingly retie their threads as I did Dayton’s? There was no time, no time…
The risen turn, their bodies moving in staggered, jerky rhythm, arms reaching. Not for the enemy. For us.
The Green Flame surges in my chest, but something yanks at it, pulling it away from me.
A laugh slithers through the air. Caspian’s voice, silky and triumphant. “Oh, Farron. What a lovely gift. You really are too kind to offer your entire army as my thralls!”
I spin, but I can’t find him. A shadow casts over me. I look up.
There he is, above us, suspended in a cradle of thorns. Vines coil around his arms and legs, holding him aloft.
I feel it then—my connection to the soldiers unraveling, slipping through my fingers.
He’s taking them. Just like he took Dayton and me at Frostfang.
I scream and clutch at the flames burning in my soldiers’ hearts, trying to reel them back to me, but they won’t answer. The flame still burns, but the will driving it is no longer mine.
Baron! I cry in my mind. Help me!
There’s only a painful, echoing silence.
Dom swings his sword wildly at the encroaching horde of our own risen army. “They’re everywhere. We’re surrounded!”
Goblins pour in from behind the undead ranks, cackling and snarling, closing the circle. My brothers press against me back-to-back, blades up, panting.
Above us, Caspian lifts one elegant arm. A sword grows in his hand, long and gleaming, made of vines twisted around a thorned core. It hums with magic, bleeding shadow from its edge.
He levels it at me.
“Now,” he says, voice sharp with joy, “I will make you suffer.”
I don’t know what else to do, so I close my eyes. The last thing I see is Caspian arcing his sword down toward my neck.
A torrent of icy wind erupts at our side, followed by a shower of dagger-sharp icicles. Goblins and risen soldiers alike scream as they’re pummeled to the ground. Caspian is flung back amid the storm, landing in a heap at the base of his briar tower.
A massive shape leaps over me and the twins and lands in a spray of ice and ash before us.
Two ice knives form in Keldarion’s hand as he turns to face me, his long, white hair blowing, his eyes blazing with blue fire. “Farron,” he snarls, “you are a fucking idiot.”