Page 61 of A Bond so Fierce and Fragile (Compelling Fates Saga #3)

Frelina

H er pulse beat in rhythm with the drums that struck across the calm sea, and she didn’t know what to do with her hands when the ships came into view, one terrifying sail at a time.

Frelina had asked for a few daggers, not that she was exceptionally skilled with them, but she didn’t want to go entirely without weapons even if she wasn’t in the midst of the fighting.

They all hung by her waist for now, the blades bumping against her thighs whenever she moved, which was a lot, since she couldn’t seem to stop shifting from foot to foot.

She caught the eyes of the white-haired half-Fae she’d heard was called Kalia before she turned them forward again, but she didn’t miss the apprehension simmering in the woman’s light eyes as she did so.

She, Kalia, and the other Faelings without offensive skills were huddled together by the cliff’s edge—the one farthest away from the stairs leading down to the bay with the ships.

To her side, she knew Raine stood beside Kerym, the two of them instructing the human archers, the Faelings, and Raine’s friends, who’d use their magic to fight from up here.

Thud .

Thud .

Thud.

Her heart hammered against her ribs as the drumming grew louder, and Frelina pressed both hands against her chest as the ships began sailing toward them. Sailing way too fast toward their own ships, which just seemed to become smaller and smaller below.

There were so many of them ahead. She’d counted that there were thirty-two ships of their own keeping steady on the sea in the cove, but crossing the sea were at least as many.

Ripped flags trailed from every mast—a mixture of Ellow’s and Vastala’s—some of them sparking from embers as the rebels on the ships set them aflame.

She had to seek out the hazel eyes she, for some reason, found soothing when her pulse continued to pound in her ears, and Frelina was grateful when Raine turned away from his sharp-eyed brother to face her fully.

He didn’t say or mouth anything, but he didn’t need to.

She could tell he wanted her to focus on what he and Merrick had asked of her: keep track of Lessia at all costs.

She hadn’t protested. Frelina wasn’t a fighter, not like the Fae and humans around her, who stood tall, their faces growing more and more focused as those ships neared.

Not even like Lessia and Amalise, who didn’t want but had learned to survive—to kill—because they had to.

She’d gotten lucky that one time she’d killed the soldiers who had found their home—they’d been careless, and she’d been close enough that driving a dagger into each of their backs hadn’t proved too difficult.

So if she could keep her sister safe somehow by ensuring Rioner or anyone else couldn’t sneak up on her, she would.

Frelina nodded, and Raine broke their stare.

Taking a step forward, Frelina made sure Lessia was in full view. She wouldn’t be able to hear her from up here, but down below, her sister’s golden-brown hair reflected the sun, and Merrick’s distinctive silver hair was even easier to find amid the crowd of brown and black and blond scalps.

Staring from Lessia to the ships, Frelina shuddered.

If she thought their own ships looked small compared to those ahead, her sister seemed… tiny. Tiny and fragile.

“She’ll be all right.”

Frelina looked to the side when Amalise spoke, and she tried to give the blonde a smile when she settled beside her, her small hands waving toward her sister.

“She’s a fighter,” Amalise continued. “I think she’s always been.

You should have seen her when she arrived in Ellow…

she was hardly more than a whisper of a person, but she clawed herself back to life.

Fought every day to stay alive and every night not to succumb to the darkness that seems to follow her around. ”

Frelina nodded, the knot in her throat preventing her from replying.

Thankfully, a deeper voice broke in as Kerym approached them, the girl with the long copper hair trailing in his wake. “She really is.”

Kerym leaned over the edge of the cliff, much farther out than Frelina ever would dare. “And she has Thissian and Merrick. Neither will allow anything to happen to her.”

Frelina nodded again, as if it were the only thing she could do, when Amalise’s face whitened, her eyes flying to the south.

Snapping her head the same way, Frelina had to hold on to Kerym’s arm when Vastala’s ships—the ones she’d seen drawings of in her father’s study growing up—sailed toward them, keeping far away from where the wyverns formed a barrier against Ellow but still straight for the ships beneath them.

A sound of terror, one she might have been embarrassed about in another setting, betrayed her, and there wasn’t much more than sheer willpower keeping her standing by the edge as the ships flew toward them.

“It’s not Rioner.” Raine’s warm presence came up behind her, and she didn’t care that they were surrounded by people as she spun around, releasing Kerym to take his outstretched hand.

“How do you know?” Amalise demanded, her voice shaking in the way Frelina would have expected her own to.

“The sails,” Kerym murmured as he pulled the small woman behind him to his side, something stirring between them before his gaze sliced back to Raine. “It’s the Reinsdors. And behind them… that’s the Hjelmsons and the Driksters.”

“Who are they?” Pellie asked softly.

“Some of the most prominent noble families in Vastala,” Kerym said as he placed a hand over his brow to see better. “Seems they might have brought some friends too.”

“They came for her,” Raine breathed. “They really came for her.”

Pride swelled in Frelina’s chest, and she could tell even the mighty Fae warriors were touched by how Raine held on to her hand and Kerym blinked rapidly.

More of that pride worked its way into her limbs when Amalise took her other hand, and Kerym and Pellie shifted so they all stood in a row, with curious humans and other Fae shuffling forward behind them.

While they were fighting for Ellow, for a world where those who tried to rule with fear would not succeed, where Rioner and the rebels couldn’t force their way to power, her sister had had a hand in how these groups came together—made people believe in something.

Frelina laughed as hesitant calls began rising behind and beneath her when more humans noticed the ships coming to their aid.

But that laugh faded as the ships slowed, then halted completely, a safe distance away from their cove and the wyverns waiting an equal distance from them, but to the north.

“Why are they stopping?” Venko, Ardow’s man, stepped up to the ledge, his light eyes near slits as they stared into the sun.

Worried whispers rushed through the crowd behind her, and Frelina couldn’t do anything but stare at the group surrounding her sister—watch how their hands fell to their sides and their faces dropped to the ship’s deck.

“They’re not fighting.” Kerym tensed beside her, before he jerked his head backward, eyes flying up to the blue sky. “The fucking cowards.”

Frelina gave him a quick glance but then focused on Lessia, who, unlike the others, hadn’t backed away from leaning over the railing, her arm still outstretched in greeting.

Frelina’s thumping heart slowed with the pain lacing her chest, and she didn’t know why she made herself continue looking at the painful scene beneath her, the small hand reaching for help that wouldn’t come.

Raine, who’d also been watching their friends below, slowly lifted his gaze. “She’s thanking them.”

“Why the fuck is she thanking them!” Amalise’s eyes could have killed someone when they swept past Frelina. “They’re just… standing there.”

“It’s a warning,” Raine said quietly. “They came to warn her.”

“That Rioner is coming, right?” Frelina added when Amalise continued her choppy breathing, holding back an anger she was justified in letting free. “They’re warning her he’s coming today as well.”

Raine didn’t say anything, nor did anyone else, as they all looked out over the vast sea and the armada of rebel ships spreading out threateningly across it.

They’d known Rioner was coming. But… like herself, she guessed the others had held out hope that maybe, just maybe, they’d be able to quell one threat at a time. But the ships now moving with the slow waves had eradicated what was left of that fragile hope.

“So we fight,” Kerym said in that voice she knew he wanted to sound playful—to drum up some bravery in the men and women around him—but that sounded mostly hollow to her ears.

“You all know what you need to be doing,” Raine declared as he slapped his friend on the back.

Releasing Frelina’s hand, he raised his to touch her cheek. “So do you. Don’t let her out of your sight, little Rantzier. And I won’t let you out of mine. Whatever happens… I’ll look out for you.”

She leaned into his warm hand for a second, allowing herself a moment of stupid wishful thinking.

That they could win this.

That they’d all get out alive.

That she and Raine… that there might be some kind of future for them.

He seemed to read too much into her eyes, even with her mind carefully closed, because he leaned down to kiss her, and the entire time, his eyes swam with emotions.

The kiss was brief, barely more than his lips pressing against the corner of her mouth, but it still made the ball of apprehension in her gut grow.

When Raine opened his mouth, that tension still filling his eyes, she placed a finger on it. “Don’t. Don’t make me a promise you won’t be able to keep.”

Raine stared at her, and it felt like it always did, like he truly saw her, for a second. Then he nodded, and with another quick touch of her face, he moved back to his position, starting to scream out orders to the archers, telling them where to aim and where not to bother.

She didn’t look behind her as she approached the edge again, forcing her mind only to focus on the sister that had tilted her head Frelina’s way, and she tried with everything in her to get her lips to curl upward as she raised a hand toward Elessia.

The sun lit only half her sister’s face, but Frelina thought it looked like she mouthed something, perhaps even called it out, but the words were taken by the wind.

Frelina squinted as she moved closer to the edge, cupping her lips and mouthing, “What?”

Elessia’s eyes looked… Frelina sliced her eyes farther when Elessia’s lips formed two words, and it wasn’t blood anymore that ran through her veins when she realized what they were.

“Behind you!”

Whirling around, Frelina noted the dark cloud rushing for them, and she wasn’t the only one, based on the screams and taste of terror that the wind whipped all around them.

She blinked at the cloud, the darkness so impenetrable it looked like the night itself was making its way toward them, but then Amalise screamed, “It’s birds!”

With shaking hands, Frelina reached for her small blades as people began shuffling in panic around her.

Amalise was right. Massive birds flew in a huge formation, their black feathers blocking any bit of light that tried to shine through them, and she was about to step back when she realized at the last second that she stood on a cliff.

“It’s a trap,” she said to herself.

“It’s a trap!” she screamed when people around her ignored Raine and Kerym’s orders and began running down the stairs, down to the vessels that would soon be surrounded by those ships.

But her words were drowned in the stomping of feet and clinking of weapons, and few followed Raine’s bellow to “Shoot them! Shoot them down!” when blades and rocks and other things Frelina couldn’t see but that cut into their skin when they hit began raining down from the sky, dropped from the birds’ lethal claws.

Something smacked into her forehead, and she pressed the back of her hand against it when her skin split open, using her other one to throw a blade upward, praying it wouldn’t come tumbling down and kill one of their own.

In the next second the birds were upon them, and wherever she spun, the cliff was in complete turmoil, birds and humans and Fae alike fighting for their lives, blood splattering onto stones with bodies falling off the cliff to her side, while others received daggers in their backs, dead bodies slamming into those trying to run, taking them with them into the depths of the seas.

“Frelina!”

She heard Raine’s cry somewhere in the chaos, but she didn’t dare search for him.

Not when one of those lethal birds, the ones that looked like live versions of the masks Loche’s men wore—surely not a coincidence, Frelina thought as her heart began pounding in her ears—stalked toward her, crowding her against the edge while it snapped its sharp beak at her.

Opening her mind, she sent a fast goodbye, hoping that Raine would live to convey it to Elessia. Then she gripped the daggers in her hand, knowing they’d do little, being about half the size of that damned razor-sharp beak.