50 #2
The first woman wore a coffee-brown mantle layered over a moss-dyed frock, the palette blending in with the forest. By contrast, thickets of red hair gleamed around her head, the locks woven into a braided bun, which sagged in disarray at her nape.
Violet puddles lurked beneath her eyes, and violent desperation contorted her face as she scoured the area.
A tall male physique stormed to her side, his high-collared coat void of its normal splendor, the material wrinkled and stained with grime.
His dark hair had always been an intended mess, artfully strewn around his head; yet today, it seemed less of a show.
Whereas dark kohl customarily lined his eyes, no such embellishment painted his raw features.
The mask had fallen. Furious terror dominated his countenance, the deadly expression blasting a hole through the woods.
Briar. Poet.
Beside them, a towering man dismounted, a dark blue mane lashing around his sharp, pale visage. Next, a petite female with olive skin hopped from her saddle, her golden irises burning through the shadows, her fingers gripping a whip-like rope.
Jeryn. Flare.
The princess and jester consumed the scenery to a hazardous degree, their gazes ransacking every stairway and promontory for their son. The howling knights drew their focus, the stunned clan watching as the trees picked apart segments of the troop.
Nicu gasped. Somehow, his father heard it.
Poet’s head snapped toward his son. The man’s pupils exploded with blinding light.
Briar’s distraught gaze followed her husband’s. A strangled noise ripped from her throat.
As one, our clan broke into motion. Poet rocketed up the closest stairs, a steel rod windmilling across his fingers.
Briar plucked thorn quills from her braid and fired.
Jeryn withdrew a scalpel blade. Flare swung her rope like a lasso.
We ran, flying through the complex and colliding with the knights.
With deadly precision, the jester sprang from one platform to another, vaulting a dozen feet across a chasm. Flipping his staff upon landing, Poet boosted his enemies into the air.
Briar’s thorn quills pinned figures to the trunks.
Cool detachment masked Jeryn’s expression as he dismembered two soldiers at once.
Flare flicked her rope, dislocating joints.
The hawks screeched, the chorus of noise ringing, their feathered outlines skewering bodies. This, despite the troop’s armor.
I whirled my swords against a group of three. Aspen’s retractable blades simultaneously took down a set of cleavers, the trick capturing Briar’s attention, the princess’s expression narrowing.
A company of warriors swarmed one of the bridges, their longbows nocked. In front of them, an object launched skyward, then hit the bridge and slid across the planks. The slender cylinder came into focus, a tail of smoke coiling from one end.
In slow motion, the apparatus stopped at their feet.
Shit. My eyes tapered as a murky silhouette grabbed my bicep.
“Might want to close your eyes,” Lyrik drawled. “Like, now.”
Hissing, I snared Aspen and hauled her behind me. Lyrik did the same to Nicu.
The cylinder exploded. A mushroom cloud inflated, the scalding conflagration prompting the knights to shriek. As the vapors dissipated, their flesh bubbled and popped as if someone had cooked them on a spit.
Then the bridge gave, one end fraying. The crossway’s tail disengaged, swung like Flare’s rope, and collapsed on the left side.
The airborne knights plummeted, all but a few who clung to the bridge as it struck a tree trunk.
Their effort proved futile, their grips slipping, bodies falling.
As they smacked the ground, their forms disintegrated to ash, the trees impervious to whatever the explosive had contained.
From his vantage point, Jeryn’s eyebrows knitted. Coated in more blood than anyone, the Winter King tracked the blast’s source, his attention focusing on Lyrik.
Breaking from our horrified stupor, we bounded to a spiral staircase. At the ground level, another circle of knights descended. Aspen gained my side. Like magnets, we moved in cadence to one another, her axe and my swords carving through the traitors.
Snarling, Poet moved with the agility of a panther. Leaping from the upper story, his boots pounded into the earth as a figure rotated a sword in Nicu’s direction. His staff thwarted the blow—as did Nicu’s knife.
Father and son pivoted, their gazes snapping to one another. For a second, love seized them in place, the sentiment flashing across their features like twin bolts of lightning.
Spared no time for more, Poet and Nicu’s expressions mirrored the same vital determination. Whirling in unison, their backs aligned. As one, they fought. The jester’s staff lashed, and Nicu’s blade thrust, slicing through their enemies.
Protecting each other.
In the midst of shadows and lantern light, the pair combatted like two halves of the same soul, the vision over a decade in the making.
Briar turned figures into pincushions, Flare choked her opponents, and Jeryn severed limbs with methodical efficiency.
An eternity passed. Or perhaps minutes.
As Lyrik’s dagger jabbed into the gullet of a silhouette, the rogue’s attention caught on something. Savagery flashed in his pupils. I knew that look of fury, the obscene grip of it during warfare. Emitting a barbaric noise, he flung himself toward someone.
Poet and Nicu must have been wrenched apart. The jester now battled several feet away, while Nicu seemed to have vanished from sight.
I prayed as much. Until his agonized scream rent the air.