What the hell have you done? #4
Tension banded around my chest and squeezed as the darkness passed over us in a brutally rolling wave, hitting the wall like a wicked gust and flowing out over the plateau.
Shouts and panic came from the Odessan squad, and they started running for their camp beyond the ridge.
Whoever had plane stepped them in had abandoned them to their own devices.
The air was palpable in its thickness, full of smoke and haze, but there was no smell or taste to it. No heaviness in my lungs, either, or burn in my eyes.
“It’s an illusion,” Sasha breathed, awestruck, and my jaw went slack.
Of course.
The simple, god-touched, but mostly magic-inept people of Odessa didn’t stand a chance at understanding that.
As real as it felt in my mind, it would be in theirs too.
Even if they had strong dark fae among their numbers now who could parse that it wasn’t real, most of their forces were susceptible.
And the rest of the Grimmorian military was prepared to take advantage of that.
Just behind the wall, orders were being shouted at dark fae infantry, all dressed in their black and gray standards. The sound was thunderous as they organized into formations—rows of cavalry on ethereal dyrehorses, spaced by pike and footmen, stretching back hundreds deep.
The militant in me should have been awestruck, but the fury of my cavalry-grasped heart won.
That was where I was supposed to be.
On the back of an equine, whatever the breed, dressed in chain or leather or plate, lance in hand, ready to ride out into the Wastes.
Whether or not it was against my people, that was where I belonged, not tucked in some insulting mixture of feigned safety veiled as usefulness atop the battlements, pretending like my arrows were worth a damn.
I no longer had any question over what instructions were on the paper Gallan delivered to Jasper, and I was ready to give them both a piece of my mind. Maksym would hear from me too, as soon as we were back at the Keep, injured or not.
“Come on.” I gave Sasha a tug, but she was as hard to coax as a fucking fencepost in knee-deep mud.
“Look.” She jerked her chin back at our camp, aside from where the infantry and cavalry had gathered. “His Majesty is here.”
Oh, good. I could give them all a piece of my mind at once. “Where? I don’t—”
My lungs filled with a gasp—I hadn’t been looking for wings.
Maksym, surrounded in a half circle by Elixia and Jasper, was at the back of the clearing. His dark, membranous wings were on full display—just like those of a bat, as Eilir had said, but a thousand times more magnificent.
Even in the dark haze my mind thought was real, I could see the strong limbs that swept up behind his shoulders, not fully extended, but still larger than I could have fathomed.
They were tipped with claws, too, that reflected even scant light in the same way his horns did. His raven-black hair was half-braided back, pulled away from his face, and he’d donned the same black and gray uniform as the rest of his soldiers.
I was utterly transfixed.
My future husband, the sitting King of Grimmoria, was standing there in all his dark fae—no, his Umbrite—glory. Awe seized me entirely, from my scalp to my toes, as it had the rest of the archers spread along the top of the wall.
I watched, enrapt, as Maksym’s wings extended and pulled back to his body twice, as naturally as if he were stretching any other muscle or limb on his body.
He turned his face to the sky, eyes closed, and the half-circle of Elixia backed away from him.
Energy crackled around Maksym like lightning, and he shot up into the air with a thunderous bang, his body a streak of blurry dark in the haze. I tracked him as best as my inferior eyes could manage as his form went up, up, up, disappearing into the darkness.
It was easy to assume what direction he’d be headed in, even though a foolish part of me was desperate that he wouldn’t.
So we could both lean back against the wall, I shuffled Sasha’s weight and scoured the darkness and haze that stretched out over the Odessan camp. I caught sight of him again just before the ridgeline, wings fully splayed as a magnificent streak of black.
Aside from the agonizing thundering of my blood rushing through my ears, Grimmoria’s camp was deathly silent.
I wasn’t sure if everyone else was holding their breath, but it certainly felt like it. Even Sasha was quiet at my side, her eyes wide as she watched on with me.
A horn blared in the Odessan camp, and fear squeezed my chest. Distant shouts picked up next, and sweat gathered at the nape of my neck. Maksym was almost there. His form became smaller and smaller, but it was as if my eyes were tethered to him, unable to look anywhere else.
I wished that hadn’t been the case.
A pillar of brilliant green light shot up from the camp—not down from the sky, as my heart said it needed to. With it came the echoing scrape and clank of metal, the thunderous noise of artillery.
A moment later, Maksym dropped from the sky in a streak of plummeting black.
A cloud of dust flew up into the air as he made impact in the Odessan camp, and my eyes burned furiously as his illusion vanished, letting in a violent burst of daylight.