What the hell have you done?
ENORA
“So, Maksym’s bride…” Matteo called back with a humored drawl.
Despite having limited personal experience with the shifter lord Malakai, his younger brother really was far more pleasant to deal with, and it had only been minutes since Gallan passed me off to him with strict instructions.
“Arm her, station her, and do not let her get hurt, so help you Mina.”
I had a stocked quiver slung over my shoulder now with the war bow I’d gotten back at the Keep, and we were climbing the narrow staircase up a tower dotted along the border wall.
From the ground, the thick, black stone battlements looked giant enough, but it was infinitely worse as I tried to make my way to the top.
Thank the goddess the thick cloud cover and trickle of rain left the air remarkably cool; it was too damned early to be breaking out in a sweat.
“Yes, Malakai’s brother?”
“Oh!” he laughed. “And here I was about to compliment you. I had a seat at the first trial, you know. A little miffed they whisked you all away for the second round, but it was a lovely view, spectating from the council box.”
I wasn’t sure if the shifter was just trying to make me feel more comfortable, or if this was his usual mode of operation, but I had no complaints.
When we arrived at the camp, I’d spent every ounce of masking energy I had putting on an eager face for Jasper, and I was thoroughly drained of keeping up any false pretense.
“Go on…”
“All I’m saying is, if your shot is as good as any of the displays you put on that day, we’re ecstatic to have you, strange circumstances aside.
” Oh, he was definitely trying to placate me.
“I’ll have to prod the old archivists someday, but I’m sure it’s been a hot millennia or two since we had a future Queen of Grimmoria lining the parapet with her lowly disciples.
Probably even longer since we last had a sitting king who’d even allow such a thing, so there’s that too.
Trailblazers, both of you. Really fortuitous that—”
“It’s a day for the books. Fantastic.” I’d done a half-decent job so far of keeping thoughts of Maksym bleeding out from his side wound to a minimum, but they were back in full force and were the entire driving force behind my quick interjection.
“And if my shot isn’t enough, we’ll just have them scrub the ledgers, right? ”
“Oh, no. We’ll write about how awful you were after we toss you over the wall and run for the hills. But I’ll shut up about that now.” He tossed a smile back over his shoulder, pale-green eyes glinting in the light filtering in from the open door at the top of the tower. “Your post.”
Matteo swept his arm through the doorway, and I headed out onto the wall walk ahead of him.
Goddess, it was a lot to take in.
Archers tucked every few feet along crenelations as tall as me, small braziers lit with flickering nytefire in between them all.
Most seemed to be shifters, if the sweep of different hair colors and tanned, warm skin was anything to judge.
It made sense to tuck me in amongst their masses, where I wouldn’t stand out like I did against the Umbrites, but I didn’t get to linger on that for long.
My eyes settled on the Odessan camp past the ridgeline, and a shaky breath tore out of my lungs.
It was sprawling.
Dotted with tents, the blur of moving bodies, and siege machines, I’d seen nothing like it in my life.
Even when we had our largest military forums, when days would be spent out in the Odessan wilderness, our formations never looked like that. And we’d been considered a formidable force then. The high fae left us alone. Our neighbors north of the Chasm never tried to cross.
But, clearly, my brother hadn’t been satisfied by that which had let our kingdom prosper comfortably.
What a fucking surprise.
“Just straight ahead.” Matteo pressed the faintest touch to my back, and it snapped me right out of my transfixion. “But mind. The. Feet.”
He bit out those last words and glared at several archers who had their legs sprawled out into the walkway. Some pulled them in right away, uttering embarrassed apologies, but a few of them were definitely dozing and jolted awake when he kicked their ankles as we passed.
“Hope you slept well last night, mistress,” Matteo sighed. “It can be boring work, this. Until it isn’t, of course. It’ll get really fucking exciting at some point, maybe in ten minutes, maybe in four hours. Could be two days. Who knows?”
My sleep definitely left something to be desired, between the aches of my beaten and rapidly healed body, Eilir’s frantic interruptions, and the sense of dread that ironically had nothing to do with what I’d actually woken up to.
“I’ll be alright.” We clung to a merlon as a soldier hustled by with a barrel-sized quiver of arrows. “It’s been quiet here, though?”
“Unfortunately, yes. No advances since their initial move on the stone this morning, but that means something is coming.” He kicked the legs of another sleeping archer and swore under his breath as he shot eye daggers at another lounging pair. “Here we go. Sasha?”
This archer was not relaxing.
With lengthy ebony hair tightly braided back, she was crouched on her haunches and meticulously polishing her bow with a small square of cloth.
She didn’t know or care that we were there, and I didn’t blame her.
The longbow in her hands had some of the most beautiful, meticulous carvings I’d ever seen.
“Sasha.”
Her eyebrow kicked up. “Hm?”
“Woman, I swear to the gods…” He sighed and cast me a sidelong pale green glance that carried so much exasperation. “Your partner is here.”
Sasha still hadn’t lifted her attention. “I told you already, I don’t need a partner. I’m fine manning this—oh.”
Her eyes finally flickered up, rich shades of russet and golden brown, and she stared with painfully obvious scrutiny. I offered her a tentative smile, and Sasha nodded slowly. Matteo seemed to take that as enough, and he gave my shoulder a quick squeeze before departing.
“Alright then.” She shifted over, patting the ground beside her. “Make yourself comfortable—er, what’s your name?”
“Enora.” I settled onto the stone walkway, back against the merlon, and considered a little too late if I should have said that.
Sasha’s eyebrows kicked up. “Oh, I see.” She let out a low whistle. “So those are your people out there, hey?”
What a simple yet unfathomably loaded question. She knew who I was—the name of the dark fae king’s betrothed was bound to travel at some point—even though that still caught me a little off guard. But my people?
The war camp sprawled beyond the ridgeline was that in a way—by ancestral blood and my thirty-one years of life, at least. I was having a hard time considering them mine in any tangible way now, not with my brother at their helm, leeching into the kingdom like black ichor.
“They…are, I guess. Or were, maybe.” I drew my lips into a line, sighing out of my nose. “It’s complicated.”
Sasha laughed. “You don’t say? I mean, I’ve got my own complicated family drama, sure, but not quite—”
“INCOMING! TO THE EIGHTH!”
The voice boomed across the wall, and I tucked my head between my knees, throwing my hands up to protect my neck. Magic so strong, I could taste its metallic edge crackling through the air as dark fae shouted out a distance away from us.
“It’s not us; we’re squad eleven. Look alive.”
Sasha grabbed my arm, and I lifted my head just in time to see a flaming projectile come crashing onto the wall a few hundred paces south of us. The archers there had scattered in time, but a section of the crenels they used for shelter crumbled from the impact.
I braved a glance through the opening beside me and struggled to process that there was no war machine in immediate range.
A massive trebuchet was steaming at the edge of the Odessan camp, but that was it. Thousands of feet away from us.
We never had weaponry of that power in all my years in the military.
What the fuck had my brother done?
“GET IT OUT OF HERE!” came another bellow.
The archers of the eighth were scrambling back to the still burning projectile, throwing bright orange flames I hadn’t seen in ages, when it exploded.
BOOM.
Screams and shouts barely registered in the explosion that left my right ear with a high-pitched whine and sent Sasha and I sheltering against each other as bits of flaming, tar-covered splinters shot past us.
“Holy shit,” she breathed.
My heart and stomach were both lodged in my throat, and I was moving before I’d processed much else. Sasha grabbed my arm, though, and wrenched me back. “Don’t break formation.” She winced at a blood-curdling scream. “We do not leave our posts unless the tenth or twelfth go down.”
Even though I understood formations well, I still despised them.
A few of the eighth’s archers had to be dead, with how devastatingly still their smoldering bodies were, while others screamed as they fought the burning tar off their bodies, oblivious to the aid trying to be rendered to them by their flanking squads.
Bile burned at the back of my tongue, and I took a deep breath. The smell of burned flesh was tapping into a place in my mind I wanted no part in visiting at that moment.
“I thought nothing could get through the ward?” I said between breaths that had turned more into gasps than anything. “Maksym said he secured it.”
“Nothing without his blood can.” Sasha hadn’t stopped surveying our surroundings, peeking through the crenel as she spoke with me. “But the projectiles from these fucking war machines are a different story.”
How awfully convenient that was.
“FIFTH AND TENTH BALISTAS!”
I braced myself as chains clanked from inside the battlements below us.
“FIRE!”