Chapter 28
Twenty-Eight
Dare
Ididn’t look back.
If I had, I would’ve seen Kaelan on the ice. Thorne standing alone. The moment splintering open inside my chest. I couldn’t afford that. Not now.
The peasants were running behind me. I could see boots slipping on frost, breath tearing out of lungs, a ragged yell that caught fire and rose into something fierce.
I threw myself forward and let the shift take me.
Pain ripped through me as bone broke and reformed, white-hot and merciless. My spine arched, splitting outward as wings tore free, vast and snapping into the cold air. Frost flooded my veins, roaring, ancient and absolute. I launched skyward with a scream that tore itself into a dragon’s roar.
The wind slammed into my scales. Ice crusted along my wings as I climbed, higher and higher, my wings spreading over my people. They raced along in my shadow, and Hanna’s shadows followed, whipping over us. Ready to fight. The people knew they weren’t alone. Not with us.
And then I saw the archers.
Lined along the ridge, bows already rising. Strings drawing back. A dark cloud of death aimed straight at the mass of bodies behind me.
“No,” I snarled.
I dove.
The ground rushed up, banners snapping, faces lifting in sudden terror as my shadow swallowed them whole. I opened my jaws and let the cold loose.
Ice rushed from my mouth in a white-hot rush. It hit the archers mid-draw. Bows shattered. Fingers snapped like brittle twigs. Men froze where they stood, screams cut off as ice climbed their throats, sealed their eyes, locked them in place forever.
The ridge became a graveyard of statues.
I wheeled hard, wings screaming in protest, and climbed just long enough to look back.
The peasants had reached the enemy line.
Steel met steel. Wood splintered. Bodies crashed together in chaos and blood and desperation. Edric’s front lines were the people he valued least, the peasants who had been pushed ahead of their lords.
Both lines fought ugly. Close. Like people who knew there was nothing behind them worth retreating to.
My chest tightened.
I hit the ground like an avalanche.
The impact sent enemy soldiers flying, bodies flung aside like broken dolls.
Ice blasted outward from my claws, flash-freezing the ground, locking boots in place, stealing balance and breath.
I roared again, the sound ripping through the melee, and swung my tail in a brutal arc that cleared space around me.
A sword glanced off my scales. Another man tried to run.
I breathed. Cold poured out in a focused blast, turning armor to ice and the flesh beneath it to something that shattered when I moved. I stalked forward, every step cracking frozen ground, every motion lethal.
Though I was a dragon now, though I had magic that the nobles believed was above any common man, I fought side by side with my people.
I lowered my head so they could dart past my legs. I froze enemies mid-swing so a farmer with shaking hands could finish them. I shielded them with my wings, arrows splintering uselessly against my scales.
A boy—barely more than that—slipped beside me, blood slicking the ice beneath his boots. An enemy raised a blade over him.
Then I snapped, and the soldier vanished between my jaws.
The boy stared up at me, eyes wide, face splattered red.
I growled, nudging him back with my snout. To the back of our lines. He was just a boy. He could help pull the wounded and dying from the field.
The battle became noise and motion and cold. My frost spread in sharp, deliberate bursts—freezing shields together, locking weapons to hands, turning discipline into a liability. They couldn’t move fast enough. Couldn’t adapt.
Because this wasn’t a clean war.
This was a reckoning.
Above it all, I felt her.
Hanna.
Her shadows coiled at the edge of my awareness, vast and watching, and something fierce and unbreakable settled in my chest. We weren’t winning because of a crown.
We were winning because we refused to break.
I reared back and roared again, frost and fury tearing from my lungs, and the peasants screamed with me, not in fear, but in defiance.
And the enemy line began to break.
Hanna
The rebels didn’t hesitate.
They’d broken into a run as one, a raw, furious surge that slammed forward behind Dare. Fear was still there—I could see it in the tight mouths, the wide eyes—but it was drowned beneath something hotter. Rage. Grief. A lifetime of being ground down and told to endure.
The armies collided with a sound like the world splitting open.
Steel rang against steel in shrieking clashes.
Horses reared and screamed, eyes white, hooves striking sparks from the frozen ground.
Men went down beneath trampling feet, breath knocked from their lungs in wet, broken sounds.
The air filled with blood and smoke and the sharp, biting sting of frost magic detonating somewhere ahead.
Thorne stood frozen for half a heartbeat longer, watching the line buckle, watching peasants throw themselves into a war between royal crowns.
“Will you be cowards?” he roared, turning on the lords.
They flinched.
“Will you let peasants fight for their kingdom while you cower behind banners and bloodlines?” His voice cut through the chaos, sharp as a blade. “Is this the legacy you’ll leave?”
A lord opened his mouth. Shut it again.
Thorne swore and turned back toward me, desperation naked on his face. His eyes flicked to Kaelan’s unmoving body, to the crown gleaming white against the ice.
“Hanna—”
“I’m all right,” I said quickly, gripping his arm. My fingers came away numb with cold. “I’ll take care of Kaelan. Go.”
For a second, he didn’t believe me.
Then the enemy line surged again, and the decision ripped through him like a wound.
Thorne nodded. “Bring him back, Hanna. No one knows better than you how to fight the darkness.”
Then he turned to the lords, to the masses that they commanded that still waited for their orders.
“You were born into power and privilege and look at you, shying away from battle. The men you think you’re worthy to command and ride to fight!
” he roared at them. “Edric knows you’re not standing at his side.
You still have the chance to be heroes—but that’s your only chance.
Stand with us as warriors now or die lower than any of those peasants who have run into battle! ”
“Stand with us!” he shouted again as he moved toward them. He ran and shifted mid-stride, armor tearing away as wings exploded from his back. Ice blasted outward as he launched skyward, a roar ripping from his throat that made men stumble and look up in terror.
The lords followed.
Horses thundered forward, hooves shaking the ground, banners snapping as the noble armies finally moved, drawn after a dragon they could not afford to abandon.
The goddess pressed eagerly against my mind.
“Now,” she whispered, her voice sliding through my bones. “Let me finish this.”
The shadows at my feet twisted, thickening, rising in heavy coils that blotted the ice beneath them. They stretched outward, reaching, tasting the air. Power surged through me, burning hot beneath my skin, pressing against my ribs, my spine, my teeth.
“Give me control,” she urged. “I will crush them. I will end this war in moments.”
A scream tore through the battlefield as her shadows lashed out on instinct, dragging an enemy soldier into the dark. His cry cut off abruptly.
I staggered, breath hitching, my feet slipping on the ice.
I wasn’t sure when I’d landed again on solid ground.
It didn’t matter now. Dare was leading the peasants who had come freely to our fight, the shadow of his wings the only shadows they needed now.
Thorne had control of the lords and their men, and his dragon led them into battle.
I stood over Kaelan, watching the war wage, searching for Edric among the masses.
I could feel the terrible ease of it. One surrender, and the battlefield would fall silent. No more blood. No more screams. Just shadow and stillness.
And nothing left of me.
My hands shook.
I turned away from the carnage and back to Kaelan.
He lay where they’d left him, rigid beneath the crown, frost clinging to his lashes. His breath barely stirred his chest. His eyes stared ahead, unseeing.
He was trapped. He must think he was alone.
“No,” I whispered, not to the goddess, not to the war, but to the crown.
I dropped to my knees beside him and seized the helmet, fingers slipping on ice and blood. The bonesteel burned cold against my palms, thrumming with sealed magic, with finality.
I wrenched.
The crown tore free with a sound like cracking ice.
Kaelan gasped—a shallow, broken breath—but his eyes still didn’t move. His body didn’t follow.
The door was open.
But he had vanished deep inside.
“I’m coming,” I whispered, pressing my forehead to his. “You’re not alone. Not now. Not ever.”
The shadows surged behind me, furious, clawing at my back.
“You could tear apart this battlefield,” the goddess hissed. “You could be worshipped.”
“Yes,” I said, and meant it with everything I was. “But he worships me, in his own way, and that’s all I need.”
I closed my eyes.
And plunged into the dark.