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Calista gripped my arm, her fingernails dug into my skin, and for the first time I caught sight of the glassy tears she was trying not to shed. “What if. You’re. Wrong.”

I leaned down and pressed a kiss to her lips, slow and tender. My hand cupped the side of her face when I pulled back. “We’re bonded, Little Rose. To the soul, and that is key here. I am not leaving this battle without you, believe that.”

Calista closed her eyes and leaned into my touch for a few breaths before snatching her knives and leading us back to the clearing.

Midday was approaching. The last tolls of the night were spent plotting and marking the next moves. With Harald gone, we needed to act before Davorin grew frustrated with the boy king’s lack of enthusiasm for battle, and more obsession with hunting Valen.

Left too long, Davorin might try to overtake the whole of the sea fae by killing the king. Some of the plan depended on my suspicions about Erik Bloodsinger.

The sea fae were an obstacle, true, but Davorin was the head of the snake that brought them here. Cut it off, and the rest would die.

Seidr boiled in my blood. Calista feared the next steps, but I saw the flash in her gaze, I saw the way her body seemed to burn as much as mine with the pulse of our power.

This was the step. It had to work.

What would it be like to live . . . free at last?

The thought was almost too damn overwhelming to even imagine.

“All right.” The Nightrender rose from drawings in the dirt. A plan for movements, for marks, as he called them. Saga aided in the landscape. Ari and his knowledge of maps aided in distances and realistic expectations of movements. Kase glanced at the drawing again. “This will move fast. Our different magicks will be stretched. Do not exhaust yourselves before the right moment.”

The crowd nodded.

Halvar Atra and Raum from the Kryv would take the left and right flanks with the warriors. Hagen Strom, his son Dain, and daughter Laila were returning to Hus Rose to aid Herja and the archers.

Eryka kissed Gunnar. Glistening tears tracked her pale cheeks. “I will miss your scent while you are gone. Blood is such a wretched smell and somehow, when you are near, I only breathe in you.”

Gunnar kissed his wife, long and hard. “I will miss you. All of you. Stay down. Stay safe.”

“Make him pay.”

Gunnar added another tender kiss to her forehead. “I’ve been waiting to do just that since the day he put his hands on you.”

Calista had informed me of the beatings and torture Eryka had endured when she’d been captured by Davorin in the isles. There were personal debts the bastard owed us all. Somehow, we did what we could to fit them all in, to find a way for everyone to take their bit of blood today.

Eryka stood with Tova and Isak and Fiske. They would guard the wounded. Isak was added for his ability to blind any enemies who’d come close, and Fiske for his premonitions.

Gorm bid his son farewell. Cuyler was aggravated no one would let him join, despite a damn hole in his skull still bleeding where he was missing an eye.

He wasn’t alone. Most of the wounded who were asked to remain back had complaints. We’d all fought to be here. To sit out and be nursed tenderly while we fought to end this at long last, seemed wholly unfair.

Gunnar came to stand by me, a small knife hidden in his boot. The thieving prince flashed a grin. “Ready, Wraith?”

“No.”

He chuckled. “This is why I like you. Direct. To the point.”

“I am ready in some ways,” I admitted. “In others, I have a great deal of fear.”

Gunnar dipped his chin. “That’s the thing I learned when I ran with the Kryv—all of us are always afraid. Use it to bring you back to Cal. Out of all of us, if anyone could traipse into the Otherworld to shout at you for dying too soon, it’s her.”

I smirked. A new sort of ease was beginning to shape around these royals. One I never thought I’d fear. I still took comfort in solitude, but speaking a few words, sitting amongst them, wasn’t so taxing any longer.

Malin approached, a somber expression on her features. She unfurled her palm and held out the queen’s ring. “It will move swiftly once this is in play, Silas.”

I nodded and slid the ring on my smallest finger. Heat from the power within it burned into my skin.

“Keep up, Ari,” Gunnar said, tethering a silken scarf over his head. There was still blood in the fabric from one of the fallen sea fae who’d once worn it, but it would only aid us now.