“No,” Rhys said. “His armada was scattered along the coast.” A glance at Azriel.
“Half is in Adriata—the other dispersed,” the shadowsinger supplied. “His terrestrial army was moved to the Spring Court border … after Feyre. The closest legion is perhaps three days’ march away. Very few can winnow.”
“How many ships?” Rhys asked.
“Twenty in Adriata, fully armed.”
A calculating look at Amren. “Numbers on Hybern?”
“I don’t know. Many. It—I think they are overwhelmed.”
“What was the exact message?” Pure, unrelenting command laced every word.
Amren’s eyes glittered like fresh silver. “It was a warning. From Varian. To prepare our own defenses.”
Utter silence.
“Prince Varian sent you a warning?” Cassian asked a bit quietly.
Amren glared at him. “It is a thing that friends do.”
More silence.
I met Rhys’s stare, sensed the weight and dread and anger simmering behind the cool features. “We cannot leave Tarquin to face them alone,” I said. Perhaps Hybern had sent the Ravens yesterday to distract us from looking beyond our own borders. To have our focus on Hybern, not our own shores.
Rhys’s attention cut to Cassian. “Keir and his Darkbringer army are nowhere near ready to march. How soon can the Illyrian legions fly?”
Rhys immediately winnowed Cassian into the war-camps to give the orders himself. Azriel had vanished with them, going ahead to scout Adriata, taking his most trusted spies with him.
Nausea had churned in my gut as Cassian and Azriel tapped the Siphons atop their hands and that scaled armor unfurled across their body. As seven Siphons appeared on each. As the shadowsinger’s scarred hands checked the buckles on his knife belts and his quiver, while Rhys summoned extra Illyrian blades for Cassian—two at his back, one at each side.
Then they were gone—stone-faced and steady. Ready for bloodshed.
Mor arrived moments later, heavily armed, her hair braided back and every inch of her thrumming with impatience.
But Mor and I waited—for the order to go. To join them. Cassian had positioned the Illyrian legions closer to the southern border the weeks I’d been away, but even so, they wouldn’t be able to fly without a few hours of preparation. And it would require Rhys to winnow them in. All of them. To Adriata.
“Will you fight?”
Nesta was now standing a few steps up the staircase of the town house, watching as Mor and I readied. Soon—Azriel or Rhys would contact us soon with the all-clear to winnow to Adriata.
“We’ll fight if it’s required,” I said, checking once more that the belt of knives was secure at my hips.
Mor wore Illyrian leathers as well, but the blades on her were different. Slimmer, lighter, some of their tips slightly curved. Like lightning given flesh. Seraphim blades, she told me. Gifted to her by Prince Drakon himself during the War.
“What do you know of battle?”
I couldn’t tell if my sister’s tone was insulting or merely inquisitive.
“We know plenty,” Mor said tightly, arranging her long braid between the blades crossed over her back. Elain and Nesta would remain here, with Amren watching over them. And watching over Velaris, along with a small legion of Illyrians Cassian had ordered to camp in the mountains above the city. Mor had passed Amren on her way in, the small female apparently heading to the butcher to fill up on provisions before she’d return to stay here—for however long we’d be in Adriata. If we returned at all.
I met Nesta’s gaze again. Only wary distance greeted me. “We’ll send word when we can.”
A rumble of midnight thunder brushed against the walls of my mind. A silent signal, speared over land and mountains. As if Rhys’s concentration was now wholly focused elsewhere—and he did not dare break it.
My heart stumbled a beat. I gripped Mor’s arm, the leather scales cutting into my palm. “They’ve arrived. Let’s go.”
Mor turned to my sister, and I had never seen her seem so … warriorlike. I’d known it lurked beneath the surface, but here was the Morrigan. The female who had fought in the War. Who knew how to end lives with blade and magic.
“It’s nothing we can’t handle,” Mor said to Nesta with a cocky smile, and then we were gone.
Black wind roared and tore at me, and I clung to Mor as she winnowed us through the courts, her breath a ragged beat in my ear—
Then blinding light and suffocating heat and screams and thunderous booming and metal on metal—
I swayed, bracing my feet apart as I blinked. As I took in my surroundings.
Rhys and the Illyrians had already joined the fray.
Mor had winnowed us to the barren top of one of the hills flanking the half-moon bay of Adriata, offering perfect views of the island-city in its center and the city on the mainland below.
The waters of the bay were red.
Smoke rose in gnarled black columns from buildings and foundering ships.
People screamed, soldiers shouted—
So many.
I had not anticipated the scope of how many soldiers there would be. On either side.
I’d thought it would be neat lines. Not chaos everywhere. Not Illyrians in the skies above the city and the harbor, blasting their power and arrows into the Hybern army that rained hell upon the city. Ship after ship squatted toward the horizon, hemming either entrance to the bay. And in the bay …
“Those are Tarquin’s ships,” Mor said, her face taut as she pointed to the white sails colliding with terrible force against the gray sails of Hybern’s fleet. Utterly outnumbered, and yet plumes of magic—water and wind and whips of vines—kept attacking any boat that neared. And those that broke through the magic faced soldiers armed with spears and bows and swords.
And ahead of them, pushing against the fleet … the Illyrian lines.
So many. Rhys had winnowed them in—all of them. The drain on his power …
Mor’s throat bobbed. “No one else has come,” she murmured. “No other courts.”
No sign of Tamlin and the Spring Court on Hybern’s side, either.
A thunderous boom of dark power blasted into Hybern’s fleet, scattering ships—but not many. As if … “Rhys’s power is either already nearly spent or … they’ve got something working against it,” I said. “More of that faebane?”
“Hybern would be stupid not to use it.” Her fingers curled and uncurled at her sides. Sweat beaded on her temple.
“Mor?”
“I knew it was coming,” she murmured. “Another war, at some point. I knew battles would come for this war. But … I forgot how terrible it is. The sounds. The smells.”
Indeed, even from the rocky outcropping so high above, it was … overwhelming. The tang of blood, the pleading and screaming … Getting into the midst of it …
Alis. Alis had left the Spring Court, fearing the hell I’d unleash there—only to come here. To this. I prayed she was not in the city proper, prayed she and her nephews were keeping safe.
“We’re to go to the palace,” Mor said, squaring her shoulders. I hadn’t dared break Rhysand’s concentration by opening up a channel in the bond, but it seemed he was still capable of giving orders. “Soldiers have reached its northern side, and their defenses are surrounded.”
I nodded once, and Mor drew her slender, curving blade. It gleamed as brightly as Amren’s eyes, that Seraphim steel.
I unsheathed my Illyrian blade from across my back, the metal dark and ancient by comparison to the living silver flame in her hand.
“We stick close—you don’t get out of sight,” Mor said, smoothly and precisely. “We don’t go down a hall or stairwell without assessing first.”
I nodded again, at a loss for words. My heart beat at a gallop, my palms turning sweaty. Water—I wished I’d had some water. My mouth had gone bone-dry.
“If you can’t bring yourself to make the kill,” she added without a h
int of judgment, “then shield me from behind.”
“I can do it—the … killing,” I rasped. I’d done plenty of it that day in Velaris.
Mor assessed the grip I maintained on my blade, the set of my shoulders. “Don’t stop, and don’t linger. We press forward until I say we retreat. Leave the wounded to the healers.”
None of them enjoyed this, I realized. My friends—they had gone to war and back and had not found it worthy of glorification, had not let its memory become rose-tinted in the centuries following. But they were willing to dive into its hell once again for the sake of Prythian.
“Let’s go,” I said. Every moment we wasted here could spell someone’s doom in that gleaming palace in the bay.
Mor swallowed once and winnowed us into the palace.
She must have visited a few times throughout the centuries, because she knew where to arrive.
The middle levels of Tarquin’s palace had been communal space between the lower floors that the servants and lesser faeries were shoved into and the shining residential quarters for the High Fae above. When I had last seen the vast greeting hall, the light had been clear and white, flitting off the seashell-encrusted walls, dancing along the running rivers built into the floor. The sea beyond the towering windows had been turquoise mottled with vibrant sapphire.
Now that sea was choked with mighty ships and blood, the clear skies full of Illyrian warriors swooping down upon them in determined, unflinching lines. Thick metal shields glinted as the Illyrians dove and rose, emerging each time covered in blood. If they returned to the skies at all.
But my task was here. This building.
We scanned the floor, listening.
Frantic murmurs echoed from the stairwells leading upward, along with heavy thudding.
“They’re barricading themselves into the upper levels,” Mor observed as my brows narrowed.
Leaving the lesser fae trapped below. With no aid.
“Bastards,” I breathed.
The lesser fae did not have as much magic between them—not in the way the High Fae did.
“This way,” Mor said, jerking her chin toward the descending stairs. “They’re three levels down, and climbing. Fifty of them.”
A ship’s worth.
CHAPTER
36
The first and second kills were the hardest. I didn’t waste physical strength on the cluster of five Hybern soldiers—High Fae, not Attor-like underlings—forcing their way into a barricaded room full of terrified servants.
No, even as my body hesitated at the kills, my magic did not.
The two soldiers nearest me had feeble shields. I tore through them with a sizzling wall of fire. Fire that then found its way down their throats and burned every inch of the way.
And then sizzled through skin and tendon and bone and severed the heads from their bodies.
Mor just killed the soldier nearest her with good old-fashioned beheading.
She whirled, the soldier’s head still falling, and sliced off the head of the one just nearing us.
The fifth and final soldier stopped his assault on the battered door.
Looked between us with flat, hate-bright eyes.
“Do it, then,” he said, his accent so like that of the Ravens.
His thick sword rose, blood sliding down the groove of the fuller.
Someone was sobbing in terror on the other side of that door.
The soldier lunged for us, and Mor’s blade flashed.
But I struck first, an asp of pure water striking his face—stunning him. Then shoving down his open mouth, his throat, up his nose. Sealing off any air.
He slumped to the ground, clawing at his neck as if he’d free a passage for the water now drowning him.
We left him without looking back, the grunting of his choking soon turning to silence.
Mor slid me a sidelong glance. “Remind me not to get on your bad side.”
I appreciated the attempt at humor, but … laughter was foreign. There was only the breath in my heaving lungs and the roiling of magic through my veins and the clear, unyielding crispness of my vision, assessing all.
We found eight more in the midst of killing and hurting, a dormitory turned into Hybern’s own sick pleasure hall. I did not care to linger on what they did, and only marked it so that I knew how fast and easily to kill.
The ones merely slaughtering died fast.
The others … Mor and I lingered. Not much, but those deaths were slower.
We left two of them alive—hurt and disarmed but alive—for the surviving faeries to kill.
I gave them two Illyrian knives to do it.
The Hybern soldiers began screaming before we cleared the level.
The hallway on the floor below was splattered in blood. The din was deafening. A dozen soldiers in the silver-and-blue armor of Tarquin’s court battled against the bulk of the Hybern force, holding the corridor.
They were nearly pushed back to the stairs we’d just exited, steadily overwhelmed by the solid numbers against them, the Hybern soldiers stepping over—stepping on—the bodies of the fallen Summer Court warriors.
Tarquin’s soldiers were flagging, even as they kept swinging, kept fighting. The closest one beheld us—opened his mouth to order us to run. But then he noted the armor, the blood on us and our blades.
“Don’t be afraid,” Mor said—as I stretched out a hand and darkness fell.
Soldiers on both sides shouted, scrambling back, armor clanging.
But I shifted my eyes, made them night-seeing. As I had done in that Illyrian forest, when I had first drawn Hybern blood.
Mor, I think, was born able to see in the darkness.
We winnowed through the ebon-veiled corridor in short bursts.
I could see their terror as I killed them. But they could not see me.
Every time we appeared in front of Hybern soldiers, frantic in the impenetrable dark, their heads fell. One after another. Winnow; slash. Winnow; thump.
Until there were none left, only the mounds of their bodies, the puddles of their blood.
I banished the darkness from the corridor, finding the Summer Court soldiers panting and gaping. At us. At what we had done in a matter of a minute.
I didn’t look too long at the carnage. Mor didn’t, either.
“Where else?” was all I asked.
We cleared the palace to its lowest levels. Then we took to the city streets, the steep hill leading down to the water rampant with Hybern soldiers.
The morning sun rose higher, beating down on us, making our skin slick and swollen with sweat beneath our leathers. I stopped discerning the sweat on my palms from the blood coating it.
I stopped being able to feel a great many things as we killed and killed, sometimes engaging in outright combat, sometimes with magic, sometimes earning our own bruises and small wounds.
But the sun continued its arc across the sky, and the battle continued in the bay, the Illyrian lines battering the Hybern fleet from above while Tarquin’s armada pushed from behind.
Slowly, we purged the streets of Hybern soldiers. All I knew was the sun baking the blood coating my skin, the coppery tang of it clinging to my nostrils.
We had just cleared a narrow street, Mor striding through the felled Hybern soldiers to make sure any survivors … stopped surviving. I leaned against a blood-bathed stone wall just outside the shattered front window of a clothier, watching Mor’s quicksilver blade rise and fall in lightning-bright flashes.
Beyond us, all around us, the screams of the dying were like the never-ending pealing of the city’s warning bells.
Water—I needed water. If only to wash the blood from my mouth.
Not my own blood, but that of the soldiers we’d cut down. Blood that had sprayed into my mouth, up my nose, into my eyes, when we’d ended them.
Mor reached the last of the dead, and terrified High Fae and faeries finally poked their heads out of the doorways and windows flanking the cobblestoned street.
No sign of Alis, her nephews, or cousin—or anyone who looked like them, amongst the living or the fallen. A small blessing.
We had to keep moving. There were more—so many more.
As Mor began striding back to me, boots sloshing through puddles of blood, I reached a mental hand toward the bond. Toward Rhys—toward anything that was solid and familiar.
Wind and darkness answered me.
I became only half-aware of the narrow street and the blood and the sun as I peered down the bridge between us. Rhys.
Nothing.
I speared myself along it, stumbling blindly through that raging tempest of night and shadow. If the bond sometimes felt like a living band of light, it now had turned into a bridge of ice-kissed obsidian.
And rising up on its other end … his mind. The walls—his shields … They had turned into a fortress.
I laid a mental hand to the black adamant, my heart thundering. What was he facing—what was he seeing to have made his shields so impenetrable?
I couldn’t feel him on the other side.
There was only the stone and the dark and the wind.
Rhys.
Mor had nearly reached me when his answer came.
A crack in the shield—so swift that I did not have time to do anything more than lunge for it before it had closed behind me. Sealing me inside with him.
The streets, the sun, the city vanished.
There was only here—only him. And the battle.
Looking through Rhysand’s eyes as I once had that day Under the Mountain … I felt the heat of the sun, the sweat and blood sliding down his face, slipping beneath the neck of his black Illyrian armor—smelled the brine of the sea and the tang of blood all around me. Felt the exhaustion ripping at him, in his muscles and in his magic.
Felt the Hybern warship shudder beneath him as he landed on its main deck, an Illyrian blade in each hand.
Six soldiers died instantly, their armor and bodies turning into red-and-silver mist.
The others halted, realizing who’d landed amongst them, in the heart of their fleet.
Slowly, Rhys surveyed the helmeted heads before him, counted the weapons. Not that it mattered. All of them would soon be crimson mist or food for the beasts circling the waters around the clashing armada. And then this ship would be splinters on the waves.
A Court of Wings and Ruin Page 33