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I was already running.

Now theydidattack, a bright vermilion blooming on the edge of my sight – but I had my floor and my feet, and the magic whizzed past me without leaving a scratch. One of them had the presence of mind to swing a dagger at me. I countered reflexively, Beyla’s sword colliding with an unprotected forearm; its owner screamed out in pain as I tumbled through my newly created breach and onto the gleaming, many-hued courtyard outside.

Mother-of-pearl, as far as the eye could see.

I sent a quick prayer of thanks to whatever god or goddess might be listening and scrambled back to my feet, barely standing before the next wave of red magic washed over me from all sides. In the distance, an alvish voice I didn’t know criedout in shock. Around me, fae faltered as they too found that their powers bounced off of me without the faintest effect, their triumph fading as confusion sank in.

I grinned back at them as I began moving again. Whatever the hell I looked like now, I doubted human or powerless was part of it.

‘Little to the left!’ Tared’s voice shouted from somewhere above me – the battlements?

I adjusted my course without looking up, swinging my borrowed sword into a dagger someone threw at me. It clattered uselessly against the pearlescent tiles. There,thereI finally caught sight of Creon’s black-clad shape at the centre of the courtyard, surrounded but still moving, fending off attacks with what seemed to be a wing he’d cut off one of the bodies around him.

No more than fifty feet left between us. I ducked to avoid an arrow hissing my way and walked faster; around me, yellow magic blazed as Doralis restored the iridescent surface I was walking on.

Thirty feet.

Creon turned, eyes widening as he noticed me.

‘Behind you!’ an alvish voice I didn’t know cried out, and I whirled around just in time to swing my blade up between the legs of a fae sneaking up on me with daggers in both hands. He went down howling. Tared appeared out of thin air some twenty feet to my left – as close as he could come, presumably, with the limitation he could only fade to where he’d stood before.

Through the next surge of red magic, I could only barely make out his words – something about the position of my wrist and covering my back.

Answering required a level of coordination I could no longer muster, every muscle in my body drawn tight, the magic coursing through my veins in a wild storm of power. I walkedas fast as I could with one foot on the ground at all times, feeling like it was the magic that walkedmenow – trying to keep my balance as I made for Creon’s broken shape with that unnatural, swaying gait. Another arrow shot past me, missing me by mere inches. I lashed out without thinking, left hand in my sickly orange hair, two fingers of my sword hand aiming for the unfortunate archer – feeling the iridescent magic beneath my feet falter as red whizzed through me and smashed into his bow and face.

Three, four flares of magic bit into my skin in that single moment before I pulled my shield back in place. Warm, sticky blood dripped down my upper arm, my thigh, my back.

I barely felt the pain.

‘Stop her!’ a female voice howled in Faerie. ‘Keep her away from him!’

Had I been capable of talking, I would have told her others had tried that before.

But there was no time to talk, and no use to it, either. Before me, more and more fae landed inelegantly on the pearly tiles, faces contorted with unsettled bewilderment – a last wall between me and Creon. I raised Beyla’s sword. They tensed but stayed where they stood – knowing as well as I did that even if I took down two or three of them, I would never cut my way through three dozen of them.

I could try, though.

Frankly, I quite felt like trying.

My blade swung down as if it shared my lust for blood. This sun-drenched mayhem couldn’t be more different from the quiet, buried training hall in Orin’s quarter, the frenzied battle cries of my opponents equally far removed from Tared’s calm instructions … and yet it felt familiar, the lethal weight in my hand as I charged forward, blind to anything but unprotected wrists, throats, wings. They stopped being living creatures, thefae surrounding me. They were nothing but obstacles between Creon and me, nothing but targets to be destroyed, and if I had to kill every single one of them to reach him …

Well, so be it.

I did notenjoythe clean slide of sharp alf steel through the nearest wing in my way. But the fury driving me forward, that rush of battle … there was an addictive exhilaration to it.

With a fluency I could only attribute to months and months of training, I pushed forward past my falling victim, whirled around, swung again. Sunray collided with a fae female lunging forward, and the steel edge sank into her chest with a hollow squelch, sending her crumpling to the ground.

I was already moving again. Slashing, thrusting, slicing, until my arms ached and my hands were slippery with blood that could just as easily be mine as anyone else’s. A sharp, nagging pain radiated from my side up through my guts, and I barely registered it – as long as they didn’t reach my eyes or heart, was there anything a little blue magic couldn’t fix?

A familiar voice – Tared? – cried a warning.

I turned just a moment too late.

Time slowed to a syrupy crawl in that fraction of a second, as if my senses felt the need to check and double-check the sight of the purple-winged fae male jumping towards me, wings slamming against the air to launch him forward, hand raised with a glint of sharp metal.

I was too slow.

I knew it even as I wildly flung up my hands, even as Sunray whistled a violent arc towards his neck. If I dodged, I would drop myself into one of his comrades’ arms. If I stayed where I stood, his knife would lie buried in my chest before I could take another breath—