15. WAR SONG
Chapter fifteen
WAR SONG
LEON
We get her stable. That is all I can call it, stable, a word that promises nothing at all.
The bleeding slows. The little second warmth she has been hiding from me, the one I understood an hour ago in a robbed tomb without her ever saying the word, is still there.
Faint. Fighting. The bond tells me it is fighting and tells me nothing whatever about whether it will win, and I have never hated the bond until this moment, this thing that hands me every one of her pains and none of her outcomes.
She will not let me carry her. Of course she will not.
She walks out of that nursery on her own feet with her hand in mine and her jaw set like a sea wall, and somewhere in that walk the ice queen comes back online, not because the fear is gone but because she has decided the fear is a thing she will deal with after, and there may not be an after unless she does.
I make a decision in the dark behind her that I do not tell her, because she would forbid it.
I am done waiting for the perfect plan. The clock Kael talked about was never his.
It is hers. It is ticking inside her body, and I can hear it through the bond, and I will not let it run out.
"You're planning something," she says, not looking at me, as we climb. "I can feel it. It's loud."
"I'm planning a great many things," I say. "Pick one and I'll lie to you about it."
She almost laughs. It is the worst almost-laugh I have ever heard, because there is blood under her nails and a child in the balance and she still finds the half second to give it to me. I love her so much in that moment that it frightens me more than the fight did.
We make the surface near where the advance party went to ground, and I gather them in the lee of the broken watchtower, Keith's quiet people and the first of the tour crew who were never crew, and I tell them what we are going to do. I watch them realize I mean now.
Because this is the part I am, against all my own expectations, good at.
I have stood in front of a hundred thousand people and made them feel like one thing.
I have walked onto a dark stage as nobody and walked off as somebody they would follow into traffic, and I used to think it was a cheap trick, the cheapest, smoke and lights and a good chorus.
Standing in the ash of Portia's country, I understand it was never cheap.
It was practice. A crowd and an army are the same animal asked a different question, and I have spent ten years learning the animal's language, and tonight I am going to ask it the only question that matters.
"They have made my mate a traitor on every wall in this city," I tell them, and I do not raise my voice, because the thing I learned about a real crowd is that you make them lean in, you do not push them back.
"They have made her father into fuel. They are breaking a cradle a thousand years old to power a storm.
And they did it quietly, while better people told themselves it was a story for frightening children.
" I let that sit. "I am the singing prince.
The papers say so. So let me sing them one thing they will hear all the way to the palace.
The cradle is not empty while one of its line is still standing.
And one of its line is standing right here, and she is mine, and I am hers, and we are coming. "
It is not a long speech. The best ones never are.
But I feel it land, feel it move through them and change the temperature of the air, and the bond carries Portia's reaction to me sideways, a complicated heat that is part exasperation and part something she will deny later.
You absolute spectacle of a man. And underneath it, helplessly, thank you.
Then the line breaks open from the wrong side, and Keith is there.
I do not know how he crossed. I find out later that he came through the gate hours behind us with a second column, that he was never going to let his son walk into a dragon war alone no matter how many years of silence stood between us.
But in the moment all I know is that my father is suddenly in front of me in the ember-light, gray-faced, road-worn, looking at me the way he looked at me across the chapel aisle, like a debt he cannot pay.
We have met many times in my life. We have never once reached for each other.
"You shouldn't be here," I say, because the wolf does not know what else to do with the size of it.
"Neither should you," Keith says. "And yet.
" He looks past me at the wolves at my back, the ones I have just turned from uncertain to certain, and something moves in that stone face, something that has been locked a long time.
"I heard your declaration come up the channels.
The old form. Witnessed." His jaw works.
"You said Alpha Keith's blood. In front of all of them.
You claimed me, boy, in the same breath you claimed her. "
"I claimed the truth," I say. "You happen to be in it."
For a moment I think he will say nothing, the way he has said nothing my whole returned life.
Then he reaches out, and he grips the back of my neck the way an alpha grips a son, rough and brief and final, the gesture I did not know I had been starving for until it arrives.
And he says, low, just for me, "Then your father stands with you.
All the way to the throne room. We finish this together. "
And the wolf in me, the one that has never had a pack it was sure of, settles into something it has been missing since the sea, and I have to look away so the army does not see the heir's eyes shine.
There is no time for more. There is never time. But it is enough. It will have to be enough, because the gate is ahead and the storm is turning and we move.
The assault is not glory. I promised myself I would not pretend it is.
It is noise and dark and the ember-eyed soldiers pouring out to meet us, and the Havoc overhead twisting tighter the more violence we feed it, exactly as Portia warned, the storm drinking the fight like the Cup drinks blood.
I stay at the edge of the wolf the whole time, the man holding the leash, choosing every target, refusing the red drop into pure rage that the storm is trying to coax out of me.
Because the storm wants me mindless, and a mindless alpha is just more fuel.
Keith fights at my shoulder and we do not have to speak, the pack-sense doing what twenty years of words could not, and it is the hardest discipline I have ever held, and I hold it, and I hold it because she taught me how in a ruined street with two fingers on my wrist.
We break the outer gate. We are through. For one bright impossible second it is working, the plan is working, my father is beside me and we are inside the walls and closer to her father and the broken cradle than anyone has been in nine years.
And then the bond tears.
There is no other word and I have searched for one since.
It does not stretch. It does not thin. It tears, a rip straight down the center of me, a sound I feel rather than hear, and the part of me that has been holding her presence like a second sun goes suddenly, horribly dark on one side, the way a room goes dark when half the lights die at once.
The strength runs out of my legs. I am on one knee in the broken gate with the fight still raging around me and I cannot feel her, I cannot feel her, the place where she has lived in my chest since the moonstone is full of static and falling away.
"Portia." I say it into the noise. I say it into the bond, down the torn cable, and nothing comes back but the cold. "Portia."
She was supposed to be behind the line safe.
The clock inside her was already running and I let her come because she would not be left, and now the bond is screaming on a frequency that means only one thing, and the storm overhead turns and turns, and I am up and running toward the dark side of myself before I have decided anything at all.
Keith is shouting my name behind me, the man and the wolf for once in total agreement, and the agreement is the worst thing I have ever felt.
I have lost her. The bond is telling me I have lost her.
I refuse it. I run toward her anyway. And the war song I sang an hour ago turns to ash in my mouth, because there is no chorus for this, there is only the falling-dark and my own feet and the one thing I swore in a robbed tomb I would never do, which was stand in a room and lose her.
And I will not. I will not. I will not.
Dearest Readers,
"You claimed me, boy, in the same breath you claimed her."
Twenty years. Three meetings. Not once did those two men reach for each other, and then a hard man crosses a continent into a war he did not have to fight, and grips the back of his son's neck, and says the words he could not say in a chapel.
I hope you have someone who will cross a war for you. I hope you know who they are before it is too late to tell them.
Because it is about to be too late for someone, loves.
The bond did not stretch. It did not thin.
It tore.
Turn the page. I am so sorry.
Your author.