Chapter 30
Thirty
Thorne
The lords hit the enemy line like a wave.
Metal shrieked. Shields slammed together. Spears snapped. Men shouted until their voices broke. The sound didn’t echo. The wind swallowed their voices like the battle swallowed their lives.
I circled, searching for the weak point, where enemy lines thinned, where fear showed, where the command structure held them together like sinew.
Then I saw it.
Edric’s banner snapping in the wind. A banner I’d rode under, a banner that had adorned the walls of the castle where I grew up, far from home and love.
Memories rose up with that banner, hard and cold and glittering as the ice itself.
A boy kneeling on a stone while a king smiled.
A hand on my shoulder that was never meant as comfort.
An endless wave of monsters rushing us from the front, flying and crawling and thundering, filling the air—as we rode forward under that damned banner, at the command of a man who was always more monstrous than any of those things we fought and beheaded and burnt.
I angled toward the banner, dropping lower until the wind tore at my eyes. The enemy knights clustered around their king, armor polished, horses bred for war, their discipline a wall of its own.
The battlefield shifted beneath me.
A surge from the flank, messy and fast, too many bodies without armor.
The peasants.
They poured into the gap like floodwater, faces grim. They’d die in droves if no one gave them cover.
A dragon, emerald-green and lethal, hung over the enemy lines and blasted them with frost before he landed among them with the force of an avalanche.
Dare.
He fought like he lived, reckless and bright. His frost magic erupted in jagged bursts, freezing enemies before him so the peasants could rush in and shatter them. He moved with brutal precision, swinging his tail to clear space, and they surged past his legs.
In a heartbeat, I took in the way the enemy had sighted him as a threat.
The way the king’s elite were moving to attack Dare, cutting through the peasants in a carefully-planned formation.
They were trying to flank Dare, and the wild men around him were fighting their best, but they couldn’t see what was coming. Not from the ground.
But I remembered where everybody was that had sought to kill my friend. The king’s guards were still fighting toward him, but they’d soon find they were just dead men whose bodies hadn’t stopped moving yet.
I shifted midair, the dragon tearing away as my bones snapped back into place. Human limbs returned with a violent jolt, pain flaring through my shoulders and spine. I hit the ground hard, boots skidding on ice, knees absorbing impact. My sword was in my hand before the world finished settling.
An enemy soldier lunged at Dare.
I pivoted, caught his blade with mine, and shoved. Metal shrieked, sparks flashing bright against the snow. He overbalanced. I drove my elbow into his throat and felt cartilage give. He dropped, choking, hands clawing at his neck.
Another came at me, spear aimed for my ribs. I stepped inside the reach, grabbed the shaft, and yanked. He stumbled forward. I slammed my pommel into his face. Blood sprayed warm across my glove.
I moved through bodies like a blade through cloth, fast, efficient, merciless.
I cut down one man, then another, then another. My breath came hard in a harsh rhythm. Sweat ran down my back and froze along my spine. My muscles burned. My grip tightened on my sword until my knuckles ached.
The peasants pressed behind me, surging and stalling like a living thing trying to learn how to fight.
“Hold!” I barked, voice raw. “Stay behind the shields. Move when I move!”
A farmer—broad shoulders, terrified eyes—raised his shield and nodded once, jaw clenched.
Dare’s dragon form loomed to my left, scales glistening, breath steaming. He snapped at a soldier trying to flank us, jaws closing around the man’s shoulder. The scream cut off in a wet crunch. Dare flung the body aside and swung his head toward me, eyes bright with fury.
Even as a dragon, he looked like he was smiling.
We fought side by side, Dare and I—in every form we took. He positioned his body to block arrows meant for peasants. He carved a path that made space for them to be brave.
He’d always been like that.
Not noble by blood, but by choice.
My throat tightened.
Kaelan should’ve been here.
Kaelan should’ve been roaring at the front line, his presence snapping men into unity the way only he could. He should’ve been the symbol they rallied around. Instead, he was somewhere else, locked behind his own eyes, fighting a battle no one could see.
And Hanna…leaving her behind had destroyed me, but she needed me to trust her now. To let her fight for Kaelan.
I shoved the thought away as I drove my blade into a soldier’s gut and ripped it free. Blood steamed in the cold. The man fell with a gurgle.
No time.
But Edric’s banner still held.
His knights fought like men who believed they were protected by a god.
And maybe they were.
A horn sounded from their center, deep and commanding. Their line tightened again, reforming. Their horses stepped forward in unison. A wedge began to form, aimed straight at our flank, meant to drive into the peasants and break them.
“Dare!” I shouted, even as I raised my ice magic to block this coordinated attack. “On their flank!”
His dragon collapsed inward in a rush of motion, flesh and scale becoming man again. He hit the ice in a crouch, breath steaming, hair plastered to his forehead. His eyes locked on the approaching wedge.
He lifted both hands.
Frost surged from the ground, a jagged wall erupting between the peasants and the enemy cavalry. Horses screamed as they slammed into it. Men toppled, trampled. Spears snapped against the ice.
For a heartbeat, the wedge stalled.
Then a figure at its center raised a sword, and the ice began to crack, not from impact but from something darker.
Edric’s magic.
My vision tunneled.
There—on a massive black horse, armor pristine, cloak snapping in the wind—Edric rode like the battlefield couldn’t touch him. His helmet was off, silver hair whipping around a face carved into calm contempt.
He looked pleased.
As if this was exactly what he’d wanted. Exactly how he’d planned for it to look.
I pushed forward through bodies, shoving past peasants and soldiers alike. “Dare, with me!”
Dare moved instantly, falling into step at my side, blades in both hands. We cut through the chaos, carving a path toward Edric’s center.
His knights saw us coming.
They closed ranks.
We hit them anyway.
A sword flashed toward Dare’s throat. Dare ducked and slid under it, coming up inside the man’s guard to drive a blade into his ribs. Another soldier lunged at me. I met him with a brutal parry and stepped in close, my shoulder slamming into his chest. He staggered, and I took his head.
Dare glanced at me, breath ragged. “I thought you’d be staying with the fancy idiots.”
“I did. They followed. Eventually.” I drove my sword into another man.
We were ten paces from Edric when the world changed.
It wasn’t the sound first. It was the light.
The snow beneath Edric’s horse darkened, as if ink had spilled across it. Shadows thickened, not cast by anything in the sky, but rising from the ground itself. They moved like living smoke, curling around the horse’s legs.
The animal screamed and reared.
Edric’s calm faltered for the first time. His head snapped down, eyes narrowing.
The shadows surged higher.
They wrapped around his waist, his arms, his throat.
And they yanked.
Edric was ripped from his saddle so violently his crown clattered against the ice. He hit the ground hard, breath knocked out of him. His horse bolted, wild-eyed, nearly trampling his own soldiers as it fled.
For one stunned heartbeat, no one moved.
Edric’s gloved hands clawed at the shadows strangling him. His face twisted, not with fear, but with furious disbelief.
The shadows tightened.
They lifted him an inch off the ground, his boots scraping ice. His eyes rolled toward us, burning, searching for a weapon. But there was no weapon that could stand against the shadows.
Just shadows, hungry, absolute.
Edric tried to speak again. The shadows poured into his mouth.
He choked.
His body convulsed once, twice, the motion ugly and human and humiliating. A sound came out of him—a wet, broken gasp—and then his limbs went slack.
The shadows didn’t drop him gently.
They let him fall.
Edric hit the ice with a dull finality, his head lolling to one side. His eyes stared, unseeing, at the white sky.
A king dead in the snow.
A silence swept the battlefield, so complete it was like the world held its breath.
Then the enemy line cracked.
Instantly.
Their knights looked at Edric’s body, then at each other. Someone shouted a panicked order. Someone else screamed. Horses spun. Men turned and ran, fear finally erupting through discipline like fire through dry grass.
“They’re breaking!” Dare shouted.
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t.
My gaze stayed on Edric’s corpse, on the shadows still coiled around it.
Hanna.
My chest tightened hard enough to hurt. I looked back over the battlefield, but she and Kaelan were left so far behind us that I couldn’t see them anymore.
The rebels surged forward with a roar, chasing the fleeing enemy, cutting them down as they scattered. Lords shouted commands, voices suddenly eager now that victory smelled possible. The sound of pursuit rose, loud and hungry.
But I didn’t move.
Neither did Dare.
We stood in the wreckage, breath steaming, blood slicking our blades, and watched the shadows pull away from Edric’s body like a tide receding.
They didn’t disperse.
They gathered.
They thickened, folding over themselves, shaping into something that made my skin prickle beneath my armor.
A silhouette formed in the air in front of us, petite and slender, with a familiar tilt of the head. The impression of eyes that had always been too sharp to lie to.
Hanna.