Chapter 9 #2
“Don’t rush. Plan first. That was your strategy.” Lykor drove a finger into Vesryn’s armor. “That’s what Jassyn would tell us to do, remember?”
Vesryn’s pupils sliced draconic, slitted against the dawn. “Yesterday, I could still pretend we had time. But every hour we spend standing here is an hour Serenna could be tortured. An hour Jassyn spends—”
“Don’t.”
“—in enemy hands because you won’t—”
Lykor snatched the front of Vesryn’s leathers, frost racing up his arm. “I know exactly what’s happening to them.”
Vesryn shoved him back. “Then we strike now. Before it’s too late. You have a legion of wraith armed with talents. You have me. You have yourself. The two strongest Essence-wielders on this side of the war. We need to act before we’re hunting bodies instead of prisoners.”
Every word out of the prince’s mouth was a thought Lykor had already strangled.
“What I have is an alliance one argument from collapse,” he said.
“Kaedryn’s druids only trust their children of earth and starlight.
Daeryn’s people don’t trust anyone. Half the guildmasters want to scatter into caves and pray to the stars.
” He bared his fangs. “I’ve spent hours in councils that make me want to claw my own ears off, listening to every faction argue over which disaster should kill us first.”
Frost crawled over his talons and shattered as fast as it formed. He flexed his fingers like he could wring the city into obedience if he only found the right throat.
“And that fire-breathing whelp still hasn’t granted his boon to Daeryn’s soldiers who bled beside us in the Maw. If I can’t drag Cinderax into action today, the next council is the one where Bhreena walks and takes half the shamans with her.”
Lykor’s breath came ragged, snow billowing around him.
“You think I don’t want to portal into the capital right now and tear it apart? Every hour I spend holding Asharyn together is an hour I’m not looking for him. I know that.”
The recklessness in Vesryn’s eyes glinted feral in the rising sun. “Then stop waiting. We take the fight to them. Now.”
The word yes lodged behind Lykor’s teeth.
Every instinct he’d honed wanted to spit it out and be done. Open the portal. Raid the capital. Teach Kyansari what grief could do with claws.
But the wraith needed another day. Flying in blind before they were ready meant throwing his people into the jaws of a city they didn’t know. And the ones who’d pay with their lives wouldn’t be him or Vesryn.
Lykor held the line because Jassyn would have.
And that was the only leash still strong enough to make him wait.
“No.”
Vesryn scoffed. “You’re not a diplomat. You’re a killer. You drained ten soldiers before dawn. Stop sitting in councils pretending you’re him.” His voice dropped. “Jassyn would’ve never—”
The ice wreathing Lykor’s arms shattered. Shadows erupted from his fists. They hammered the stone at Vesryn’s feet, splitting the ledge in a spray of broken rock.
Vesryn launched, shifting into wings. Fire flared from the clawed tips as he shot into the air. The updraft slammed into Lykor’s face like a furnace door swinging open.
Scales ripped down Lykor’s arms.
Involuntary.
The prince punched skyward out of reach, and Lykor’s instincts responded with pursuit. Worse, some feral, grief-mad part of him wanted to strike Vesryn from the sky.
Lykor’s wings tore free next, membranes snapping wide as he hurled himself off the crumbling ledge after the prince.
They collided above the lake.
Vesryn’s fist cracked into Lykor’s jaw. The impact spun him sideways, and Lykor used the momentum, driving a wing into the prince’s shoulder. His talons sliced through leather, biting deep.
Vesryn snarled. Flames poured from his palms as he slammed both hands into Lykor’s chest.
Heat detonated between them. Lykor’s ice hissed against the blast, but the backlash sent them both plummeting, wings tangled, the lake wheeling below.
They hit a lower shelf of stone hard enough to crater it, dust devouring them both.
Vesryn rolled free first and came up swinging, fire spilling from his knuckles.
Lykor warped and met him head-on. Fist to jaw. Knee to ribs. Vesryn’s fire scorched across his scales, but Lykor hammered a slab of ice into the prince’s middle and drove him across the ledge.
Vesryn skidded to a stop, boots grinding through loose rock, then charged.
They traded blows without art. Without strategy. A brawl on a spur of stone above a city neither of them knew how to save.
Lykor drove his shoulder into Vesryn’s sternum, felt ribs flex under the impact, and took an elbow to the spine that buckled him to one knee. He surged up, slamming a fist of ice beneath Vesryn’s chin.
The prince’s head snapped back, but he didn’t slow. He seized Lykor’s wing and wrenched.
The world spun—stone, sky, lake—before pain ruptured through the joint. Lykor twisted free, launching a spike of ice that shattered against Vesryn’s chest and drove him back a step.
Vesryn didn’t seem to feel it. Or chose not to.
The prince buried a knee in his ribs and Lykor raked a claw across Vesryn’s scales.
He could end this. Pin the prince with ice and shadows and walk away.
Instead, Lykor swung again.
He’d punished his own warriors for less, flaying hides and stripping rank from those who struck without thinking.
But every hit spent a little more of the fury festering in him since Kal’s death. Since Jassyn vanished behind enemy lines.
Lykor reached for Aesar’s memories, hunting for the prince’s tells, his patterns, which side he guarded after a blow.
Nothing answered, the absence hitting harder than Vesryn.
Lykor paid for the lapse.
Vesryn’s elbow cracked against his temple. Lykor’s vision strobed, stars erupting behind his eyes.
He hit the ground.
Warped.
Sheathed his fist in ice and smashed it across Vesryn’s mouth.
Vesryn staggered. Spat blood. Bared his teeth and flew back burning.
Lykor let him.
This solved nothing, and they both knew it. Neither of them could strike what was actually killing them, and that was enough to keep them swinging.
The sun had crested the distant dunes by the time Vesryn’s knees gave out. Lykor didn’t have enough strength left to press the advantage. He went down with the prince, hitting stone, the impact jarring through every bone.
Fire guttered from Vesryn’s fists, smoke curling around his fingers. Frost pooled beneath Lykor’s palms, melting into the ridge.
Below, Asharyn stirred while they gasped for breath.
Vesryn collapsed on his back, wings splayed beneath him, staring at the sky.
For a while, only the wind moved.
“We can’t hold this city the way Jassyn did,” Vesryn said, chest heaving around the words.
Lykor’s ribs cracked when he inhaled. “I know.”
He watched as druids unbarred shopfronts in the market. Smoke thinned from cookfires lit for bread no one had enough flour to make.
A morning that didn’t know it was borrowed.
“But if I let any of this fall apart,” Lykor added, “Jassyn comes back to nothing. And I refuse to hand him ashes.”
The wind carried the words off the ridge. For once, the prince didn’t argue. Instead, he rose, his right eye already swelling shut. He didn’t offer a hand.
Lykor didn’t need one.
They stood on opposite sides of the wreckage bleeding in the dawn.
“Tomorrow, then,” Vesryn said, opening a portal.
“Tomorrow.”
Vesryn stepped toward the rift, then stopped. “How is Aesar? After Kal…”
Lykor’s throat closed around the answer.
He shook his head.
Vesryn nodded and vanished without looking back.
Lykor remained alone on the ridge with frost melting off his knuckles and a fang loose against his tongue. He probed it once and left it be, wiping sweat from his brow and blood from his mouth.
Aesar offered no dry correction. No warning. No voice at all.
Lykor portaled to the council chamber. Standing still had become more dangerous than moving.
The assault waited on the war table, maps of Kyansari spread across the stone in Vesryn’s scrawling hand. Ink marked the estates, Stardust dens, storehouses—every place the capital kept its wealth fat while the realms starved. Lykor braced his palms on the edge and stared until the lines blurred.
The wraith would fan through hidden alleys, drop from the rooftops, and strike from the sky, turning each district into a separate pocket of chaos and panic.
But Elashor wouldn’t be in the streets bleeding with his soldiers. If he was in the city at all, he’d be in the palace, behind walls that had never been breached.
Lykor and Vesryn would go directly. If Elashor was there, they would seize him.
If Galaeryn was waiting, the raid would end at the gates.
Others filed into the chamber. Lykor rolled his shoulders, cracked the reforming ice from his knuckles, and began assigning sectors to the wraith lieutenants whose names Koln had scratched into the maps’ margins.
The capital would burn tomorrow.
He’d find Jassyn. Or die on the way.