Enzo #3
“Tell her I tried.”
The words went through me worse than the cut at my ribs had. “I will.”
His hand trembled once. “My prince.”
“I have them,” I said, and my voice didn’t sound like mine. “Do you hear me? They are under my protection. Your family is mine now.”
His eyes found me. For one heartbeat, the blackness pulled back. Not enough to save him—enough to let him hear, to let him know.
The ruined smile touched his mouth again. Smaller this time. Almost peaceful, which made me want to tear the sky open with my hands.
“I... am sorry,” he whispered.
I wanted to forgive him. I wanted to hate him. I wanted fifteen years back. I wanted six months erased. I wanted the man who’d stood beside me in this keep and the traitor who’d opened its bones from the inside to be two different people so I could mourn one and kill the other.
They were not. There was only Aldric, dying with my coat in his fist.
“I know,” I said.
His grip loosened. His hand fell. The captain of Tharros died at my feet with my name still caught somewhere behind his teeth.
Across the wall, Nadia’s grief struck the bond. Fierce. Unexpected. Real.
She hadn't forgiven him and neither had I. But grief didn't require forgiveness.
For one breath, I stayed there with my hand on Aldric’s shoulder, feeling the last of him leave a body already being eyed by the wrong magic.
Then the wall shook under another impact.
The war didn’t care that a man had just paid for his treason with the only loyalty he had left.
I closed Aldric’s eyes. Then, because the working had entered him, because I had promised his family they were mine now, because I wouldn’t let the false queen wear one more loyal dead man like a weapon, I took his head.
The stroke was clean. It had to be. I didn't let myself look at what remained. I didn't have time.
The next wraith came over the parapet, dragging itself across the stones toward Aldric’s body with its tendrils lifting, tasting the air, reaching for the fresh dead.
No. Not him. Not ever.
I rose through the grief and met it before those pale cords could touch him. Its head came off beneath my blade.
After that, the battle stopped arriving in moments. It became impact.
Blood on stone. Smoke in my throat. The jar of steel against bone.
A wraith at my left, its mouth split open around a nest of pale tendrils; I took the head and drove my blade through the working in its chest before it fell.
Another came behind it. Nadia appeared in a spill of shadow at my side, opened it from spine to sternum, and vanished before the corpse hit the stones.
At the eastern flank, my father fought beside Geren. Not as a king. As a man. And gods, he could fight.
The personal blade I hadn’t seen in two centuries moved through Shadow Court regulars like it remembered wars his crown had forced him to abandon.
Geren guarded his blind side without hesitation, and my father accepted it without pride, without question, as if command and trust had finally found the same language between them.
I would remember that. If we lived.
The western wave broke first. Then the eastern.
The Shadow Court soldiers withdrew down the slope, leaving ladders, bodies, and black blood smoking against old Tharros stone. The wraiths retreated last.
Not routed. Not frightened. Called back.
That was worse.
The field below shifted as the crescent pulled away from the walls and reformed around the second rank. Smoke dragged itself between the bodies. The wraiths returned to the space beneath the banners like dogs answering a whistle none of us could hear.
The Shadow Court banner rose above the battlefield. Beside it, the antlers dipped once, then rose.
Nadia appeared beside me on the parapet, blood on her coat, smoke in her hair, the mark on her cheek bright as a blade in the dull light. Her gaze wasn’t on the deep-sigil banner.
It was on the antlers. Her father’s banner.
I reached for her hand. She let me take it.
Above us, the wards flickered yellow. Then yellow-white.
Vessa’s voice cut down from the upper gallery, sharp enough to reach through the groans of the wounded and the crackle of burning pitch.
“Middle wards have an hour if she keeps pushing.”
An hour.
Below us, the false queen’s banner moved forward through the smoke.
She was coming to the gate.
My father reached us from the eastern stair, blood on his sleeve, Geren at his side, both of them still standing. His gaze went once to the place where Aldric’s body had been drawn back from the parapet and laid beneath the wall.
He inclined his head, the gesture small and far too late to matter.
Not enough, but still something.
Then the wards screamed again.
Nadia’s fingers tightened around mine.
Across the field, the smoke parted. The false queen came into view beneath the deep-sigil banner, and beside her rode the man whose antlers flew over the dead.
Nadia didn’t move.
The bond went utterly still.
I raised my blade. Beside me, she drew both of hers.
The first wave had only been the knock.
Now the monsters had come to the door.