Page 140 of With Wing And Claw

Somehow, he did not seem to need more than that.

For a moment, he was quiet, looking so eerilytidyagainst the background of rubble and dust – his spotless pale blue coat buttoned all the way up his throat, his silvery hair twisted into a meticulous braid. Not a scrap of mud on his boots. Not a fleck of blood on his hands. Only the small frown on his face betrayed what lay beneath the flawless composure – the smallest hint of the unending calculations always running through his mind.

‘Alright,’ he finally said, rising to his feet in a single elegant motion. ‘There’s something I need to show you.’

She blinked at the hand he held out to her. ‘Now?’

‘Yes. Now.’

She didn’t want to move. She just wanted to sit here, stacked away with the other forgotten rulers of times long past, until she and her utter failures faded from memory with them … but there was something reassuring about the sharpness of him. The cleanness of him. As if he existed in some parallel world where none of the violence and none of the chaos could touch him – as if she only needed to grasp that hand to join him there.

His fingers were cold to the touch when she laid her palm in his. He pulled her to her feet with effortless strength.

‘Proud of you,’ he said.

He sounded like he meant it, too.

She didn’t think she could fly, and so they walked – out of the hall, through the academy galleries, back into the heart of the court. The castle was unnervingly quiet once more. As if every single soul around had done exactly what she most wished to do: locked the doors behind them and hidden beneath their blankets … except that in the distance, louder and louder with every step forward, the clamour of voices could be heard.

Cheerful voices. Celebrating voices.

‘Don’t worry,’ Nicanor said as she faltered, those panicked moments in the gallery returning to her with an alarmed stutter of her heart. ‘It’s our army.’

Oh.

Of course.

Did she think he’d have walked so leisurely alongside her if those had been Bereas’s people lingering in their halls? Nicanor was many things, but careless wasn’t one of them.

She followed him numbly – closer and closer, she realised a few minutes later, to the training fields. The heart of the army’s territory at the Crimson Court. The place where she’d spent most of her first and second century, fighting and fighting and fighting, growing quietly stronger in the shadows while her brothers- and sisters-in-arms fawned over Creon fucking Hytherion and his unnerving skill in battle.

Stop whining, she heard Old Thysandra snap.

Bile welled in her throat.

It wasn’t the fields themselves that Nicanor led her to, it turned out. Instead, they made for the floor above, where an open gallery ran along the full length of the level – a simple, sturdy wooden passageway from where mentors would usually be hollering instructions at their pupils below.

There was no one to be seen inside the building on this morning. Only the red marble walls of the castle rose up around them as they stepped outside, the steep spires and arches between which wisps of clouds came drifting by. And before them, on the stretch of sand and grass where the soldiers would usually be sparring – an army.

She didn’t realise what she was looking at, at first.

They looked like any army in the minutes after a roaring victory – the boisterous laughter, the rough camaraderie, the display of weapons. She saw familiar faces among them, too. Imbros and the other commanders. Her own loyal warriors, the people by whose sides she’d fought so many times before. And—

The world seemed to stop in its tracks.

And Lyron?

The same Lyron she’d questioned after the attack on the archives. Who’d sneered that humans died anyway.

Whom she’d told Nicanor she never wanted to see again.

And by his side…

Gods help her – those were two of her captives, weren’t they? Two of the males who should still be sitting in that worn-down villa on Ilithia, waiting for the Alliance to come and get them?

As soon as she’d started seeing, she could not stop seeing anymore. More of Nicanor’s soldiers. More of her prisoners. And there were two brown-haired females she was very,verysure had been among the mob attacking her outside the archives –Bereas’smob – and how could they possibly stand here, chatting and drinking and laughing with the very same force that was supposed to keep them off the island at any cost?

What—