Chapter 35
Chapter Thirty-Five
Elan soldiers tore through the humans like they were made of paper, their victims crumpling in heaps of grisly limbs and entrails.
Alvara hefted her spear, her arms shaking. This was all wrong. The witches said he would arrive when life returned, and yet it was barely nyr. What in Dalviri’s name was happening? And how had King Einar known to come on the day of the meeting with the chiefs?
“Traitor,” a tall, spindly elf spat in her direction as he stalked toward her. “I’m going to make you wish you’d—”
Alvara lunged, her spear to his throat choking off his words. Blood sprayed, and the metallic smell climbed into her spasming lungs. Breathe. Impossible when cries of aggression and agony pierced her ears from every direction.
A bristled vine wrapped around her neck and thrust her backward. Her skull cracked on the ground. She wheezed. Her vision tunneled, and the binds only squeezed tighter. Alvara wrenched the shoots away from her throat and sliced. Hot liquid dribbled down her chest.
She was the only legacy her family had left. She would not fade today.
One. Two. Three rapid rasps, and Alvara rolled through mud and dirt to her feet. She crafted an ice shield and plunged deep into her magic. A wave of frozen shards soared toward her attacker. A gurgle. A thud.
Alvara averted her gaze from the twitching body paces away and snatched her spear from the wet ground. Fire flickered at the edges of her view—a Valonian wielder hurling fireballs at a familiar wooden structure.
The chiefs.
She ran, hurling snow and ice to suppress the flames endangering those still inside.
A Nyrian elf stood near the building, arms crossed and face full of joy as if the Valonian’s roaring blaze was his definition of beauty.
Alvara chained his feet to the ground with ice, but he shifted into a brown and white owl, slipping free of her magic and flying away.
It was him. The owl she had seen in the town day in and day out, the one that had witnessed every meeting. He had brought every bit of information back to King Einar—
An invisible weight slammed into her, and she crashed to her hands and knees. Her spear was too far to reach, and another shield only evaporated under the weight of a searing blaze. She stabbed her dagger over her shoulder.
Vitharen be with me.
Metal sank into soft flesh. A warm body collapsed on top of her, soaking her back with hot blood and pinning her to the ground.
Gods damn it. She dragged herself forward, fingernails sinking into the earth, and climbed out from under her latest victim.
She staggered, grabbed her spear, and gulped the putrid air.
Corpses littered the street like garbage, most of them human.
Not so long ago, Alvara had prided herself on forging weapons.
Now, she forged fadings. Time dissolved into nothing but blood and bone as she moved through the town.
Boden was nowhere to be seen, and she mouthed a prayer for his safety and that of her friends as she drove her spear into the heart of yet another elf.
She wished she could say she remembered every life she took, but that would be a blatant lie.
The faces, the pain—it all blurred into a meaningless jumble of sight and sound she couldn’t comprehend.
Rage gutted her from the inside out with every innocent, faded soul she stumbled upon.
It helped fuel her even as her magic threatened to give out.
After hours or days, the guttural yells of battle morphed into the keening wails of loss.
Alvara slumped to the ground and let her spear slip from her grasp. Her hands had bathed in burgundy blood, caked in the drying evidence of the elves she had killed.
So many faded, and for what? Those in the battle of Ilmanir had chosen to fight, but here, this, it was slaughter of the ugliest kind.
Every wound and bruise started to pulse, the tide of numbness ebbing away in the face of pain. Wings flapped in the distance, but Alvara couldn’t even bring herself to look toward the animal or shifter responsible. She had nothing left.
A soft hand settled on her shoulder, a drop of kindness in a desert of carnage.
“Alvara.” Kat’s voice shook, and Alvara buried herself in her embrace. Violent shudders racked her body, but her friend held on, rubbing a soothing hand up and down her back.
Oh gods, her friends.
She ripped herself free and searched Kat’s face for any sign of grief. All she found was a pair of hazel eyes as hollow as her insides. “The others?”
“They’re all alive, somehow. The blacksmith took Pyry to safety. Aurilena held up pretty well, and so did Rav. But Boden, well, he protected the chief and was badly injured—”
No. “Where is he?” Alvara’s chest tightened. She forced her palms into the dirt to steady herself. He had to be all right.
“The chief’s meeting hall, but—”
Alvara shot to her feet, stumbling on unsteady legs. Boden. What if the injuries were too much? What if he…
She choked on a sob. The charred exterior of the chief’s hall was the only thing she could see as she pushed past anything and anyone in her way.
Alvara arrived in the hall and scoured every face for the one that might remind her to breathe. Where was he? If she was too late—
“Alvara?”
Tears welled in her eyes. She sagged, gripping a nearby table to keep her knees from buckling. Alive. He was alive.
Boden sat, propped up against a wall, surrounded by Lilja and his mother while a healer tended to the gruesome claw mark marring his skin from neck to navel. Blood seeped from the jagged wound that had ripped his tan skin apart, drenching it in a heart-stopping crimson.
They only had a handful of Elan elves gifted with healing. If they had chosen to help him, he had to have been in danger of fading.
Tremors started in her fingers and spread through her limbs, shaking every part of her body. She backed into the nearest wall and drove her hands into the coarse wood. Tiny slivers poked through her skin, and the light prickle of pain grounded her.
Boden leaned forward and pushed his palms into the ground as if he meant to stand, but his mother guided him back down. “Are you hurt?” His gaze darted over Alvara’s body, and she looked down at herself while Lilja panicked on her behalf, screeching in her ear.
Was she hurt? Gore and fire had discolored her clothes in a stomach-churning blend of red and black, leaving tears and holes in the fabric, along with jagged gashes and blistering burns.
It didn’t matter. None of it did. “You. The blood. You…” Her words dissolved into scorching rasps, and the room started to dim.
Boden ignored the healer’s squawks of protest, struggled to his feet, and limped toward Alvara. He pulled her away from the wall, hissing as he pressed her body into his and enveloped her in his arms.
She buried her face in his shoulder, not caring that his warm blood soaked through her tunic. She needed to feel his heartbeat—proof that he was real.
“I’m all right,” he whispered. “I’m all right.”
Blood and sweat had mangled the scent of the forest his bear was so fond of, but it still slowed her breathing, each inhale coming easier than the last.
Shit.
When had this happened? He had come to mean something to her, a part of her that she couldn’t lose without also losing a piece of her soul. He had become a weakness she couldn’t allow, not if she wanted to defeat King Einar. It was the only way to honor her family and become whole again.
Alvara tore herself free and backed away toward the door. The back of her legs rammed into tables and chairs, but she only stumbled faster.
“You need a healer!” Boden lurched forward, and the healer caught him before he collapsed to the ground with a moan.
That one little sound sent her pulse and feet racing. She needed to put distance between them. The more, the better.
“Alvara!” His voice, so godsdamned familiar now, disappeared into the cacophony of sounds from the town. Alvara weaved through the destruction and let the stench of fading pull her back to reality.
The staggering loss of life had left its scar on every spirit and surface.
Swirling plumes of smoke reached up into the sky, twisted and gnarled hands wishing for one last morsel of sunlight before fading, never to return.
The smell of scorched flesh tinged the salty air and branded itself on her mind.
Funeral fires. The same ones that had turned her mother’s and sister’s bodies to ash.
Elves and humans dug through corpses to find those that mattered, and their anguished moans shattered Alvara’s heart anew. Magic or no magic, ears pointed or round, they all met the same end. Helvati didn’t discriminate.
Melodies in the human tongue intertwined in the air, singing of love and loss in a way that could break anyone’s heart. If this invasion was any indication of the king’s strength, what hope did they have of winning?
Blocking out her pain and exhaustion, Alvara bent down and helped a human lift a body, if she could even call it that. It had been mutilated beyond recognition. She barely held down the contents of her stomach long enough to stack it on top of a wooden pyre next to other pillaged corpses.
She retched in the nearby bushes, only allowing herself a moment to dry her watery eyes on her shirt before helping with the next body that needed moving.
One thing was certain: Alvara would kill King Einar—she had to.
Whispers of the town’s devastation reached her as she worked, each one worse than the last. Their chief had survived, but three of the other visiting leaders hadn’t.
Only soot remained of the crops Lilja and a few others had planted under the watchful eye of Boden’s mother, along with the shelters that had begun to take shape as a more permanent solution for the refugees.
Rebuilding Gosibik and its wall would take weeks, if not months, and require shifting some of their focus from the coming war, which was something they couldn’t afford.
Even with the dark cloud of consequences from King Einar’s attack, Alvara’s mind kept wandering back to Boden. His mangled body, the wound that could have taken him from this world forever.
He had managed to find a home in her heart so effortlessly that she hadn’t even noticed. If she let it continue—
No. He had already become one more person King Einar could tear from her life, leaving a gaping hole that could never be filled.
Alvara wasn’t sure how much more she could lose.