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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.
“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 hint 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
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.