Chapter 48 #2
The chargers galloped in winter court formation: in pairs under cover of Maeronyx’s shadow.
Each rider held a sharpened lance, invisible in the darkness but no less real.
I had seen those lances a thousand times as a captive to the winter court.
Twelve feet long, their points sharper than arrowheads.
Once, from my window high up in the citadel, I’d seen a man die by one.
A slave had been brought out into the riding yards for practice.
A rider drove his weapon through the man’s chest like he was made of butter instead of sinew and bone; the point appeared out the other side in a spray of blood.
Took him off his feet and onto the lance, where he dangled as the charger galloped out of sight.
I’d vomited at that window until I gagged bile.
Now it was my turn. Black death… my adolescent nightmare.
The riders would come in waves; if the first pair failed to lance me down, the second pair would be ready. Then the third.
They had every advantage—except for one. The motherfuckers rode on my land.
Their hooves clopped loud over the earth, the vibrations rising through the soles of my boots. I had to wait, to be patient, to be sure. One error, and I was done.
I closed my eyes. Waited, waited—waited.
Even as my heart wanted to beat itself to the rhythm of those hooves.
Even as my knees shook. I pulled feralis toward me, a tornadic swirl of it.
For this, I would need all I could hold.
But feralis was wild magic, autumn magic—it answered to emotion the way a fire answers to air.
Feed it calm and it gave you control. Feed it grief and it gave you nothing but rain.
Feed it spite, and it gave you everything.
So I fed it.
I fed it Finch’s blood drying on my armor.
Fed it the weight of his body going slack against my chest, the way his fingers had uncurled one by one.
I fed it the stag’s indifference, that ancient, patient tilt of its head while my court died.
Fed it Gawain’s grim smile—the one he’d worn the night he’d killed my family, the one I still saw every time I closed my eyes.
I fed it the sound of Eury’s name in my mouth all the times I’d said it wrong—as a weapon, as a wall, as anything other than what it was.
I fed it every rotten, bitter, vicious thing I had ever swallowed and held and carried because I was too spiteful to let any of it kill me.
The feralis screamed into me. Not a trickle, not a surge—a flood.
More than I’d ever held. More than I should have been able to hold.
It tore at the edges of me, looking for seams, and I let it look because I didn’t care.
Let it crack me open. Let it unmake me. I’d stitch myself back together later or I wouldn’t.
It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except the six riders bearing down on me and the queen behind me who couldn’t see them coming.
The bellows of the lead horses’ breathing threaded into my ears, a sawing of air in and out through wide nostrils. My eyes opened. The whites of the horses’ eyes glowed in the shadow. Six in total, and the lead chargers only twenty paces away.
Death, I call on you.
I raised my foot, slammed it into the ground. Ahead of me, a ridge of hardened roots erupted from the earth, half as tall as me and four times as wide.
The lead horses couldn’t slow, couldn’t avoid, couldn’t leap in time. They crashed into the ridge, tumbled head-forward on their slender legs. The two riders dropped with them in a pile of screaming beasts and clanging metal.
Two down. Four more.
Already I felt the darkness spreading in me, the Unseelie magic working its way into my veins.
Didn’t matter; only Eury mattered.
The next two riders appeared like ghosts from the shadows as their horses leapt the ridge.
Before they could land, I raised my hands and punched forward.
Two cannonballs of wind slammed the horses mid-air, knocking them backward.
They hit the ridge, dropped onto their riders with flailing heads and legs.
The final two riders swung wide around the mess of horses and fae. They leapt the ridge, landed on the other side, lances lowered.
Feralis quickened my movement. I crouched, grabbed my sword, and threw myself to the ground. I rolled beneath the first lance’s tip, came up to my feet alongside the horse. I sliced through the saddle’s girth, metal through soft leather, and the rider went tumbling behind me.
The last rider swerved toward me, lance poised. Too close, too fast. No time to think.
I raised my sword, sent feralis sweeping toward the lance. I just needed it a few degrees off course. The lance slid along the sword, the two pieces of metal screeching, and cut through the leather of my sleeve in a jag of pain. He hadn’t gotten through the arm, but he’d drawn blood.
Close. Too fucking close.
He rode on, the horse galloping by. Before he disappeared into shadow, I clenched my fist. A root shot up, grasped the horse’s back leg.
With a yank of my hand, the root pulled the creature backward.
Bone cracked; the horse screamed. The rider toppled over the horse’s head, got caught in the stirrup, and ragdolled back with a crack of bones.
I dropped the sword and sprinted toward him. He’d landed on his back beside the horse, so heavily armored I couldn’t see even one part of him to cut. I leapt onto him, straddling his torso, and ripped my knife from my boot. Under that armor he wore Noctere’s chain mail, every part of him safe.
Except for one.
I raised my knife, drove it through the thin eye slit of his helmet. He screamed, arms flailing, body jerking. I wondered if I’d known him. Didn’t matter; I’d stopped letting it matter a long time ago.
The knife came free, slicked with blood. He died jerking beneath me.
I rose in the shadows, to the sounds of the horses flailing around me, their riders groaning. Elsewhere, echoing through the darkness, the clanging of metal on metal. Haskel was still alive, still fighting Liora’s riders.
I had enough magic left in me to save him. First Haskel, then Eury—
Boots clinked behind me. Ten paces away.
“You’ve just killed the man who trained you to ride.”
That voice. Like gravel in a tin can.
Gawain.
I spun, knife gripped tight. Saw nothing and no one. Of course not; he was a fae of the winter court.
“Your queen is dead, Dorian.”
My chest squeezed tight as a vise; his words were sharper than any blade. Dead, dead, dead. It rang through me, percussive and all-encompassing. Eury, dead.
No, that wasn’t true. That was a Noctere lie. It had to be. They were all fucking liars.
The veyre thread still tugged me toward the Fields. I had to fight like she was alive.
I closed my eyes and didn’t move. Eyes were useless now. The voice came from everywhere, nowhere. Shadow magic obscured sound like mist.
“But you don’t have to be,” he murmured from the darkness. More clinking of boots. “I don’t want to kill you. I never have.”
I shifted the knife underhand. Didn’t speak, only listened. His armor was as familiar to me as my father’s voice—the clinking, the pace, the heaviness of his step. A metronome, circling me.
Clink, clink, clink.
“Dorian—”
I spun, knife raised, and slashed into the darkness.