Nothing. Elide halted Farasha. Gavriel had said he’d last seen him right here. Had he plunged behind their ally’s lines and moved on from there?
He might have walked off this field, she realized. Might currently be back at the keep, or in Oakwald, and she would have ridden here for nothing—
“Lorcan!” She screamed it, so loud it was a wonder her throat didn’t bleed. “Lorcan!”
The dam remained intact. Which of her breaths would be her last?
“LORCAN!”
A pained groan answered from behind.
Elide twisted in the saddle and scanned the path of Valg dead behind her.
A broad, tanned hand rose from beneath a thick pile of them, and fought for purchase on a soldier’s breastplate. Not twenty feet away.
A sob cracked from her, and Farasha cantered toward that straining, bloodied hand. The horse skidded to a halt, gore flying from her hooves. Elide threw herself from the saddle before scrambling toward him.
Armor and blades sliced into her, dead flesh slapping against her skin as she shoved away demon corpses, grunting at their weight. Lorcan met her halfway, that hand becoming an arm, then two—pushing off the bodies piled atop him.
Elide reached him just as he’d managed to dislodge a soldier sprawled over him.
Elide took one look at the injury to Lorcan’s middle and tried not to fall to her knees.
His blood leaked everywhere, the wound not closed—not in the way that Fae should be able to heal themselves. The injury that had felled him would have been catastrophic, if it had taken all his power to heal him this little.
But she did not say that. Did not say anything other than, “The dam is about to break.”
Black blood splattered Lorcan’s ashen face, his dark eyes fogged with pain. Elide braced her feet, swallowing her scream of pain, and gripped him under the shoulders. “We need to get you out of here.”
His breathing was a wet rasp as she tried to lift him. He might as well have been a boulder, might as well have been as immovable as the keep itself.
“Lorcan,” she begged, voice breaking. “We have to get you out of here.”
His legs shifted, drawing an agonized groan. She had never heard him so much as whimper. Had never seen him unable to rise.
“Get up,” she said. “Get up.”
Lorcan’s hands gripped her waist, and Elide couldn’t stop her cry of pain at the weight he placed on her, the bones in her foot and ankle grinding together. His legs not even kneeling beneath him, he paused.
“Do it,” she begged him. “Get up.”
But his dark eyes shifted to the horse.
Farasha approached, steps unsteady over the corpses. She did not so much as flinch as Lorcan grasped the bottom straps of the saddle, his other hand on Elide’s shoulder, and moved his legs under him again.
His breathing turned jagged. Fresh blood dribbled from his stomach, flowing over the crusted remains on his jacket and pants.
As he began to rise, Elide beheld the wound slicing up the left side of his back.
Flesh lay open—bone peeking through.
Oh gods. Oh gods.
Elide ducked further under him, until his arm was slung across her shoulders. Thighs burning, ankle shrieking, Elide pushed up.
Lorcan pulled at the same time, Farasha holding steady. He groaned again, his body teetering—
“Don’t stop,” Elide hissed. “Don’t you dare stop.”
His breath came in shallow gasps, but Lorcan got his feet under him, inch by inch. Slipping his arm from Elide’s shoulder, he lurched to grip the saddle. To cling to it.
He panted and panted, fresh blood sliding from his back, too.
This ride would be agony. But they had no choice. None at all.
“Now up.” She didn’t let him hear her terror and despair. “Get into that saddle.”
He leaned his brow against Farasha’s dark side. Swaying enough that Elide wrapped a careful arm around his waist.
“You didn’t rutting die,” she snapped. “And you’re not dead yet. We’re not dead yet. So get in that saddle.”
When Lorcan did nothing other than breathe and breathe and breathe, Elide spoke again.
“I promised to always find you. I promised you, and you promised me. I came for you because of it; I am here because of it. I am here for you, do you understand? And if we don’t get onto that horse now, we won’t stand a chance against that dam. We will die.”
Lorcan panted for another heartbeat. Then another. And then, gritting his teeth, his hands white-knuckled on the saddle, he lifted his leg enough to slide one foot into the stirrup.
Now would be the true test: that mighty push upward, the swinging of his leg over Farasha’s body, to the other side of the saddle.
Elide positioned herself at his back, so careful of the terrible slash down his body. Her feet sank ankle-deep into freezing mud. She didn’t dare look toward the dam. Not yet.
“Get up.” Her command barked over the panicked cries of the fleeing soldiers. “Get in that saddle now.”
Lorcan didn’t move, his body trembling.
Elide screamed, “Get up now!” And shoved him upward.
Lorcan let out a bellow that rang in her ears. The saddle groaned at his weight, and blood gushed from his wounds, but then he was rising into the air, toward the horse’s back.
Elide threw her weight into him, and something cracked in her ankle, so violently that pain burst through her, blinding and breathless. She stumbled, losing her grip. But Lorcan was up, his leg over the other side of the horse. He slouched over it, an arm cradling his abdomen, dark hair hanging low enough to brush Farasha’s back.
Clenching her jaw against the pain in her ankle, Elide straightened, and eyed the distance.
A long, bloodied arm dropped into her line of sight. An offer up.
She ignored it. She’d gotten him into the saddle. She wasn’t about to send him flying off it again.
Elide backed a step, limping.
Not allowing herself to register the pain, Elide ran the few steps to Farasha and leaped.
Lorcan’s hand gripped the back of her jacket, the breath going from her as her stomach hit the unforgiving lip of the saddle, and Elide clawed for purchase.
The strength in Lorcan’s arm didn’t waver as he pulled her almost across his lap. As he grunted in pain while she righted herself.
But she made it. Got her legs on either side of the horse, and took up the reins. Lorcan looped his arm around her waist, his brutalized body a solid mass at her back.
Elide at last dared to look at the dam. A ruk soared from it, frantically waving a golden banner.
Soon. It would break soon.
Elide gathered Farasha’s reins. “To the keep, friend,” she said, digging her heels into the horse’s side. “Faster than the wind.”
Farasha obeyed. Elide rocked back into Lorcan as the mare launched into a gallop, earning another groan of pain. But he remained in the saddle, despite the pounding steps that drew agonized breaths from him.
“Faster, Farasha!” Elide called to the horse as she steered her toward the keep, the mountain it had been built into.
Nothing had ever seemed so distant.
Far enough that she could not see if the keep’s lower gate was still open. If anyone held it, waited for them.
Hold the gate.
Hold the gate.
Every thunderous beat of Farasha’s hooves, over the corpses of the fallen, echoed Elide’s silent prayer as they raced across the endless plain.
Hold the gate.
CHAPTER 61
Agony was a song in Lorcan’s blood, his bones, his breath.
Every step of the horse, every leap she made over body and debris, sent it ringing afresh. There was no end, no mercy from it. It was all he could do to keep in the saddle, to cling to consciousness.
To keep his arm around Elide.
She had come for him. Had found him, somehow, on this endless battlefield.
>
His name on her lips had been a summons he could never deny, even when death had held him so gently, nestled beneath all those he’d felled, and waited for his last breaths.
And now, charging toward that too-distant keep, so far behind the droves of soldiers and riders racing for the gates, he wondered if these minutes would be his last. Her last.
She had come for him.
Lorcan managed to glance toward the dam on their right. Toward the ruk rider signaling that it was only a matter of minutes until it unleashed hell over the plain.
He didn’t know how it had become weakened. Didn’t care.
Farasha leaped over a pile of Valg bodies, and Lorcan couldn’t stop his moan as warm blood dribbled down his front and back.
Still Elide kept urging the horse onward, kept them on as straight a path toward the distant keep as possible.
No ruk would come to sweep them up. No, his luck had been spent in surviving this long, in her finding him. His power would do nothing against that water.
The farthest lines of panicked soldiers appeared, and Farasha charged past them.
Elide let out a sob, and he followed the line of her sight.
To the keep gate, still open.
“Faster, Farasha!” She didn’t hide the raw terror in her voice, the desperation.
Once the dam broke, it would take less than a minute for the tidal wave to reach them.
She had come for him. She had found him.
The world went quiet. The pain in his body faded into nothing. Into something secondary.
Lorcan slid his other arm around Elide, bringing his mouth close to her ear as he said, “You have to let me go.”
Each word was gravelly, his voice strained nearly to the point of uselessness.
Elide didn’t shift her focus from the keep ahead. “No.”
That gentle quiet flowed around him, clearing the fog of pain and battle. “You have to. You have to, Elide. I’m too heavy—and without my weight, you might make it to the keep in time.”
“No.” The salt of her tears filled his nose.
Lorcan brushed his mouth over her damp cheek, ignoring the roaring pain in his body. The horse galloped and galloped, as if she might outrace death itself.
“I love you,” he whispered in Elide’s ear. “I have loved you from the moment you picked up that axe to slay the ilken.” Her tears flowed past him in the wind. “And I will be with you …” His voice broke, but he made himself say the words, the truth in his heart. “I will be with you always.”
He was not frightened of what would come for him once he tumbled off the horse. He was not frightened at all, if it meant her reaching the keep.
So Lorcan kissed Elide’s cheek again, allowed himself to breathe in her scent one last time. “I love you,” he repeated, and began to withdraw his arms from around her waist.
Elide slapped a hand onto his forearm. Dug in her nails, right into his skin, fierce as any ruk.
“No.”
There were no tears in her voice. Nothing but solid, unwavering steel.
“No,” she said again. The voice of the Lady of Perranth.
Lorcan tried to move his arm, but her grip would not be dislodged.
If he tumbled off the horse, she would go with him.
Together. They would either outrun this or die together.
“Elide—”
But Elide slammed her heels into the horse’s sides.
Slammed her heels into the dark flank and screamed, “FLY, FARASHA.” She cracked the reins. “FLY, FLY, FLY!”
And gods help her, that horse did.
As if the god that had crafted her filled the mare’s lungs with his own breath, Farasha gave a surge of speed.
Faster than the wind. Faster than death.
Farasha cleared the first of the fleeing Darghan cavalry. Passed desperate horses and riders at an all-out gallop for the gates.
Her mighty heart did not falter, even when Lorcan knew it was raging to the point of bursting.
Less than a mile stood between them and the keep.
But a thunderous, groaning crack cleaved the world, echoing off the lake, the mountains.
There was nothing he could do, nothing that brave, unfaltering horse could do, as the dam ruptured.
Rowan began praying for those on the plain, for the army about to be wiped away, as the dam broke.
Standing a few feet away, Yrene was whispering her prayers, too. To Silba, the goddess of gentle deaths. May it be quick, may it be painless.
A wall of water, large as a mountain, broke free. And rushed toward the city, the plain, with the wrath of a thousand years of confinement.
“They’re not going to make it,” Fenrys hissed, eyes on Lorcan and Elide, galloping toward them. So close—so close, and yet that wave would arrive in a matter of seconds.
Rowan made himself stand there, to watch the last moments of the Lady of Perranth and his former commander. It was all he could offer: witnessing their deaths, so he might tell the story to those he encountered. So they would not be forgotten.
The roaring of the oncoming wave became deafening, even from miles away.
Still Elide and Lorcan raced, Farasha passing horse after horse after horse.
Even up here, would they escape the wave’s reach? Rowan dared to survey the battlements, to assess if he needed to get the others, needed to get Aelin, to higher ground.
But Aelin was not at his side.
She was not on the battlement at all.
Rowan’s heart halted. Simply stopped beating as a ruddy-brown ruk dropped from the skies, spearing for the center of the plain.
Arcas, Borte’s ruk. A golden-haired woman dangling from his talons.
Aelin. Aelin was—
Arcas neared the earth, talons splaying. Aelin hit the ground, rolling, rolling, until she uncoiled to her feet.
Right in the path of that wave.
“Oh gods,” Fenrys breathed, seeing her, too.
They all saw her.
The queen on the plain.
The endless wall of water surging for her.
The keep stones began shuddering. Rowan threw out a hand to brace himself, fear like nothing he had known ripping through him as Aelin lifted her arms above her head.
A pillar of fire shot up around her, lifting her hair with it.
The wave roared and roared for her, for the army behind her.
The shaking in the keep was not from the wave.
It was not from that wall of water at all.
Cracks formed in the earth, splintering across it. Spiderwebbing from Aelin.
“The hot springs,” Chaol breathed. “The valley floor is full of veins into the earth itself.”
Into the burning heart of the world.
The keep shook, more violently this time.
The pillar of fire sucked back into Aelin. She held out a hand before her, her fist closed.
As if it would halt the wave in its tracks.
He knew then. Either as her mate or carranam, he knew.
“Three months,” Rowan breathed.
The others stilled.
“Three months,” he said again, his knees wobbling. “She’s been making the descent into her power for three months.”
Every day she had been with Maeve, bound in iron, she had gone deeper. And she had not tapped too far into that power since they’d freed her because she had kept making the plunge.
To gather up the full might of her magic. Not for the Lock, not for Erawan.
But for Maeve’s death blow.
A few weeks of descent had taken her powers to devastating levels. Three months of it …
Holy gods. Holy rutting gods.
And when her fire hit the wall of water now towering over her, when they collided—
“GET DOWN!” Rowan bellowed, over the screaming waters. “GET DOWN NOW!”
His companions dropped to the stones, any within earshot doing the same.
Rowan plummeted into his powe
r. Plummeted into it fast and hard, ripping out any remaining shred of magic.
Elide and Lorcan were still too far from the gates. Thousands of soldiers were still too far from the gates as the wave crested above them.
As Aelin opened her hand toward it.
Fire erupted.
Cobalt fire. The raging soul of a flame.
A tidal wave of it.
Taller than the raging waters, it blasted from her, flaring wide.
The wave slammed into it. And where water met a wall of fire, where a thousand years of confinement met three months of it, the world exploded.
Blistering steam, capable of melting flesh from bone, shot across the plain.
With a roar, Rowan threw all that remained of his magic toward the onslaught of steam, a wall of wind that shoved it toward the lake, the mountains.
Still the waters came, breaking against the flames that did not so much as yield an inch.
Maeve’s death blow. Spent here, to save the army that might mean Terrasen’s salvation. To spare the lives on the plain.
Rowan gritted his teeth, panting against his fraying power. A burnout lurked, deadly close.
The raging wave threw itself over and over and over into the wall of flame.
Rowan didn’t see if Elide and Lorcan made it into the keep. If the other soldiers and riders on the plain stopped to gape.
Princess Hasar said, rising beside him, “That power is no blessing.”
“Tell that to your soldiers,” Fenrys snarled, standing, too.
“I did not mean it that way,” Hasar snipped, and awe was indeed stark on her face.
Rowan leaned against the battlements, panting hard as he fought to keep the lethal steam from flowing toward the army. As he cooled and sent it whisking away.
Solid hands slid under his arms, and then Fenrys and Gavriel were there, propping him up between them.
A minute passed. Then another.
The wave began to lower. Still the fire burned.
Rowan’s head pounded, his mouth going dry.
Time slipped from him. A coppery tang filled his mouth.
The wave lowered farther, raging waters quieting.
Then roaring turned to lapping, rapids into eddies.
Until the wall of flame began to lower, too. Tracking the waters down and down and down. Letting them seep into the cracks of the earth.
Kingdom of Ash Page 48