Chapter 27
Sebastian
I may have wished to go after Snow, but not like this. Not with Isla right here in the thick of it.
It was supposed to be me. My fight. My death, if it came to that. A king’s reckoning for what was done to his kingdom.
Not this.
Never this.
Isla sits in my arms, her back warm against my chest, her fingers laced through mine where they rest on her stomach. The thornback rolls beneath us with each lumbering stride, and every step carries us closer to the very thing I tried to keep her from.
I tighten my arm around her. She doesn’t say anything, but her thumb traces a small circle over my knuckle.
The formation has been moving at a steady pace for some time now. The hy-weres run in loose columns along the flanks, back and forth in a tireless fashion. Two dragons fly toward us, their wings turning in slow, sweeping arcs. As they reach us, they swoop low.
The wind from their descent hits us in a wall of displaced air. Isla ducks instinctively, pressing back against me as they hover just above our marching column. Their scales are a deep, oily black. Each one could swallow a horse whole.
They make a sound I’ve never heard before. A series of rapid clicks followed by a guttural rumbling deep in their throats. The noise vibrates through my ribs.
The female hy-were who shifted earlier appears from somewhere to the side of the column. She slows, lifts her head toward them, and answers with yipping sounds. The cadence is deliberate. There are pauses, inflections.
They’re communicating like they did with each other before.
The dragons respond with more of those clicking growls, then bank hard to the left and beat their wings hard, gaining altitude fast before disappearing into the murk.
The female leader turns, and the column shifts direction by a few degrees to the east.
“It must be Snow,” I say against Isla’s hair. “I think she’s here and that this is it.”
She nods. “I think so too.” She turns to look me in the eye. Hers are filled with fear. I also see strength there.
“You need to stay out of harm’s way, if you can,” I tell her.
“That goes for you, too.” She smiles.
I know it’s wrong, since what we had was just a quick tryst, but I cup her cheek and taste her lips anyway. Just for the briefest of moments.
She turns away as soon as we break apart, but not before I see the pink of her cheeks and how she licks her lips.
We crest a low ridge, and the ground opens up before us into a wide, flat expanse of dead earth. The mud here is lighter than what we’ve been slogging through. Dried and cracked in places, still wet in others. And there, cutting across the waste, is Snow’s procession.
My eyes are drawn to the carriage in the middle. It’s made entirely from ice. Spires of frozen crystal rise from the roof. It must be taking enormous amounts of magic to keep it from melting, since this part of the deadlands is cold but not freezing.
Isla gasps. “It’s her,” she whispers.
The hy-weres yip, and the others make odd sounds back. The thornback growls low, his body vibrating beneath us.
Around the carriage, icefae soldiers march in tight formation. Their armor is pale. They carry long spears tipped with sharp ice crystals. Their shields are round and edged with frost.
Several smaller troops flank the procession at intervals. I count them as we draw closer. Three clusters to the left, two on the right, one bringing up the rear.
It’s far less than I expected.
“That’s her only guard?” Isla whispers, her thoughts mirroring mine.
“I think so.” My mouth is dry. “I knew she would have to travel light, but this is absurd.”
“She must be just as powerful as I feared,” Isla says.
“Maybe she’s just overconfident,” I mutter.
“I doubt it.”
“Or there is something else at play. Something we don’t know about. Some trap or weapon or reinforcement we can’t see,” I say, keeping my voice low.
“I hope not.”
I squeeze Isla’s hand.
The shifterfae don’t slow. If anything, the column picks up speed.
The thornbacks break into a heavy, ground-shaking trot that has me gripping the bony protrusion tighter.
The hy-weres stretch into long, loping strides, eating up the distance.
I can feel the energy shifting through the entire formation. The hunt is on. This is it.
I pull in a deep breath, wishing I could find a way to turn this thornback around.
“Be ready to fight,” I tell Isla, who nods.
A horn sounds from the icefae procession. High and piercing, it cuts across the flatland and seems to hang in the still air. Then another horn answers. And another.
The formation around the carriage shifts. It’s fast and disciplined. The smaller troop clusters collapse inward, pulling tight around the carriage. Shields come up. Spears angle forward. Within the span of ten heartbeats, they’ve transformed from a traveling procession into a defensive wall.
They’re ready for us.
“Hold on,” I tell Isla.
She grips the bone spike in front of her with both hands.
Other shifterfae emerge from two other directions.
They pour in from the east, a second column of hy-weres and smaller, faster creatures.
From the west, more still. Lean, catlike things the size of ponies, running in pairs.
Behind them, large boars covered in armored plates, their tusks as long as my forearm.
As we draw closer, the dragons move in. They descend from the sky in a broad, wheeling spiral, and what little muted light remains vanishes behind the span of their wings.
A wave of white erupts from the icefae line.
It tears across the open ground, turning the mud into frozen shards that shatter and reform, then shatter again.
Snow fills the air, not the gentle kind that drifts from winter skies, but hard, biting flakes driven sideways with enough force to strip skin.
The shifterfae hit the ice line like a battering ram.
Isla cries out as the first wave of hy-weres crashes into the icefae shields, and the sound is like nothing I’ve heard in my life.
Metal shrieks. Bones snap. Bodies go flying, tumbling across the frozen mud in tangles of fur and armor.
It’s red and white as blood runs.
“Goddess help us,” Isla whispers.
A dragon drops from above, raking its talons across a cluster of icefae guards, scattering them like straw dolls.
Another dragon opens its jaws and unleashes a torrent of fire that meets a wall of ice midair.
The collision produces a deafening crack and a cloud of steam that billows fifty feet in every direction.
The battle swallows us whole.
To my dismay, our thornback charges straight into the thick of it, and suddenly we’re in the middle of a slaughter.
Hy-weres tear through icefae soldiers with tooth and claw.
The six-legged serpent creatures coil around armored guards and crush them.
The catlike shifterfae dart between the larger combatants, using fang and claw.
But the guards fight back hard. A shifterfae takes an ice shard through the throat and goes down screaming, its blood steaming on the frozen ground.
Two hy-weres charge a particularly powerful icefae guard, and he raises both hands, turning the moisture in the air around them into a cage of interlocking ice spikes. They’re impaled where they stand.
Blood runs like water. The coppery scent fills the air.
Isla is silent, but her breath comes in hard pants.
The ground is churned into a mess of mud and ice and blood. There’s roaring, screaming, the crash of magic, and the wet thud of bodies hitting earth.
Isla elbows me and points. “Look.”
I turn toward the carriage, to where the top of the ice is beginning to melt from within.
The frozen walls soften and run like candle wax: the spires collapsing in on themselves.
But the ice doesn’t puddle and drain away.
It reforms. Reshaping, restructuring, pulling itself into something new.
The enclosed carriage dissolves, becoming open, the sides dropping away to reveal the interior.
It’s been drawn by ten white steeds, their coats so pale they seem to glow.
Their manes stream behind them, untouched by the filth of the battlefield. They stamp and toss their heads.
And standing in the center of the open carriage, with magic twisting around her in ribbons of pale blue and white, is Snow.
She’s beautiful.
That’s what hits me first, and I hate myself for thinking it.
Her hair is as dark as a raven’s wing, falling past her shoulders in waves that the wind catches and lifts.
Her skin is porcelain white, flawless, untouched by sun or age or hardship.
Her eyes are the blue of a winter sky just before the light dies.
She wears a gown of silver and frost that moves around her as if it’s alive, shifting and glittering with every turn of her body.
She is the most exquisite creature I have ever laid eyes on, but she radiates wrongness. It comes off her in waves. A cold that has nothing to do with temperature. A beauty that sits on top of something rotten, like gilt paint over a coffin.
Her lips curve. She looks out over the battlefield the way a child might look at insects drowning in a rain puddle.
The dragons hit her guard line again. Two of them dive in tandem, their combined fire turning an entire section of the icefae defense to steam and rubble. Shifterfae pour through the gap, and for a moment, it looks like the icefae line will collapse entirely.
Snow lifts one hand.
A wall of ice explodes from the ground, twenty feet high and stretching the full width of the gap.
Three shifterfae that were mid-charge slam into it and don’t get back up.
The ice holds for two heartbeats, then shatters outward in a hail of frozen shrapnel that cuts through everyone in its path, both icefae and shifterfae alike.
I try to shield Isla, even though her attack is away from us.
“Gods,” Isla shouts, turning and burying her head in my chest for a moment.