Page 60 of Realm of Crows (Wings of Ink #5)

Forty-Four

Myron

Be careful, little Crow. I don’t send my thought into the mind link. Everyone connected through Kaira’s power is aware that chances are we’ll lose someone in this endeavor. It just can’t be Ayna. Anyone but Ayna.

I’m about to beg Shaelak to keep her safe when another crack splits the air—another one of the trebuchets unloads its charge on our soldiers, and while Tavras has rendered a good portion of the first half of the Askarean army useless, we still haven’t decimated much of theirs.

Rogue has the second half lying in wait so they can step in and bolster our ranks once we tire.

A smart move, considering that we can’t risk having all of them un-magicked with that cursed rain .

I’ve got to give it to Erina and Ephegos: the two of them are an inventive pair, their strategies effective and their collaboration near-flawless.

I say near because, whatever happens here today, however much the army is carrying the Tavrasian banner, in the end, Ephegos will take the victory from the false king, and Tavras will be his.

My dark powers shoot up, locating the sphere soaring for the fairies, and I ship a gust of wind ahead, blocking it as best I can before it explodes at the touch of an arrow.

Liquid streams down the wall of air I’ve created, my magic safely stored behind it, and for a moment, I think I can hold it off, even push it back a little, so our soldiers won’t be hit as hard.

But the rain eats through the air, hitting my armor and my bare hands and face, nipping at my powers, and I need to pull back.

The resulting splash of magic-nullifying serum goes down a few rows in front of me, showering allies and enemies alike, and I’m not proud to admit I relish the sight of a few Fire Fairies going down alongside the Askarean fairies.

My power wants to cut their throats, but I reel it in, preventing any direct contact with the serum.

In my mind, I listen to any thought Ayna sends our way, any hint of what’s going on.

Even Silas or Clio’s thoughts would be welcome, but the three of them seem to be so focused they completely forgot the rest of the world exists.

All but the trebuchet at the left of the battlefield, threatening to send another sphere flying.

If they manage to cut the rope used to tie down the arm before it fires, that would go a long way.

If they can dislocate a piece of wood to make it unstable, even better.

The best would be to destroy the ammunition altogether.

That would eliminate any chances of another drug rain—at least from the one siege weapon.

“Don’t worry,” Tori says through gritted teeth, his blade half stuck in a soldier’s abdomen. “Clio is with her. If anyone is more stubborn than our enemy, it’s my mate.”

There is nothing I can say to that. Stubbornness won’t decide the outcome of this battle or the fate of our mates when they throw themselves into harm’s way, but I give him a grim smile anyway.

“I remember.” The day Princess Cliophera of Askarea was promised to my father as a bride.

The day she disappeared and the day she was captured.

I remember vividly the days she spent in a cell beneath the palace in the Seeing Forest.

Wielding our swords and magic, we continue against the endless onslaught of soldiers while our hearts fly with Ayna, Clio, and Silas, who have made it to the trebuchet.

My power is right there with them, testing the air for danger while it cautiously keeps away from any traces of the drug splattered across the ground and the front of the Tavrasian army.

“There’s a net filled with spheres a few feet from the trebuchet,” Silas reports through the mind link. “We’ll try to destroy that first before we go for the actual tower.”

“Be careful,” Kaira whispers, but all of us second her thought. We can’t lose any of them for so many different reasons I can’t even begin to think about them. I’d lose focus on slaying those Tavrasian bastards.

So far, none of them has landed more than a scratch on my armor, but if we keep going at this pace, it’s only a matter of time until my strength fades and I’ll make a mistake—potentially a fatal one.

Through my magic, I sense the presence of more fairy soldiers flanking Ayna, Silas, and Clio as they make their way around the trebuchet.

They are holding the humans at bay—for now.

But one encounter with the magic-nullifying drug, and they’ll be useless, and my mate will be alone out there in a sea of enemies.

“Approaching the net,” Silas narrates as he slits the throat of one of the soldiers guarding the trebuchet.

The images he sends us are vivid enough to hear the song of his axe as he swings it at another soldier, and another.

Ayna and Clio are a few steps behind him, shooting daggers of ice and drowning soldiers with the liquid Ayna draws from the men’s blood.

She’s careful not to use the liquid the spheres spilled over the battlefield.

How her power distinguishes between the different forms of liquid is a mystery to me, perhaps the same way my dark power knows how to tell friend from foe, but I’m grateful it does.

A few more feet and they are under the arm of the trebuchet, Silas’s axe severing the head of a guard while?—

“Watch out!” Tori shouts into the mind link, and I sense the rest of the connected presences freeze as my onyx smoke reacts to the threat on instinct and coils around the throat of a man breaking through the line of fairies shielding them.

I didn’t notice him, too busy watching over Ayna, but he’s perhaps two steps away from ramming his blade into Clio’s back. With a crack, his neck breaks, legs buckling beneath him, and he falls face first into the icy mud .

The breath lodged in my lungs escapes me on a collective exhale as the rest of us realize the close call, and Tori’s hand lands on my shoulder, squeezing his thanks while he doesn’t seem to find words.

“Don’t stop,” Rogue’s voice cuts through the moment of petrification. “You’re so close.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, brother.” Clio’s grin sounds through the mind link, brightening her voice, even when the shock is obvious.

Beside her, Ayna pulls up more liquid, forming a web of water, but that’s not all.

The strings weaving into a shield around them shimmer bright silver, her Crow powers reinforcing the individual strands.

It’s beautiful and terrifying—and utterly nerve-calming to watch her power come to life between the enemy lines.

Focusing on the battlefield, I spot a silver glow in the distance at the left flank of our army—and my nerves fall apart as I realize what that means.

If I can see it, so can every single soldier reporting to Ephegos, be it human, Flame, Crow, or Askarean fairy. Her shield is a beacon luring whoever aims to find her, and we know for certain Ephegos is somewhere nearby.

“She’ll be all right.” Royad uses his bodily voice to reassure me as he stumbles closer from where he’s been fighting alongside fairies a few feet away, but it doesn’t change the racing of my heart as I wait for something to happen.

“If Ephegos gets his hands on her, there is nothing we can do.” Not even hope, but I don’t add that. We all know that we won’t be fast enough to hack our path through the enemy lines to get to her. And shifting and flying across the masses of soldiers is a death sentence.

“Clio is there to site-hop them out.”

Royad has a point, but—“What if they get hit by the drug? She won’t be able to site-hop, let alone wield her sword if what we’ve seen so far applies to the rest of us.”

“Stop shouting your thoughts through the mind link,” Kaira warns us, and I realize I dropped all mental shields in my eagerness to see what’s going on by the trebuchet. Beginner’s mistake. My father would have long tied me to a post and had ordered thirty lashes with an iron-tipped whip.

“Stop it, Myron,” Kaira repeats, and I draw up my shields so fast, I lose sight of Silas’s images for a split second.

That moment is enough to miss the reason for the explosion happening right by the trebuchet, and my knees wobble as the ground shakes beneath my feet.

A scream runs through the Tavrasian army as soldiers drop like flies around where the siege weapon was before.

Farther and farther the circle of impact spreads.

By the gods, how many spheres detonated there?

And more importantly: where is Ayna?

I shout her name into the mind link, dropping all mental shields once more so I won’t miss any sign of her, but silence is all I find—thick, tense silence.

“Ayna!” Tears burn in my throat at the horror of what might have happened. “AYNA!”

“Shhh—” Tori’s hand lands on my shoulder once more, squeezing, this time not in thanks but to keep me from panicking. “Wait a moment.” I’m pretty certain my panic is not the only one he intends to ease. “Listen. ”

So I do.

I watch as more and more soldiers fall, the circle of destruction spreading so far it must have taken out over a thousand men, Tavrasians and fairies alike. And my mate was right there, at the source of it.

I don’t care that the opponents closest to us take our stunned stillness as an invitation to come for us with their swords—I’m ready to fall to my knees and weep.

If it weren’t for that soft flicker in the bond connecting Ayna and me, I’d invite them to go straight for my heart, but something tells me this isn’t over, and wherever Ayna is, she isn’t ready to die.

So I don’t, either.

I pick up the sword I dropped and grasp it hard enough to bend steel.

The first Tavrasian soldier stepping into my path dies from a cut of my blade through his throat, as does the next and the next as Royad and Tori join me.

Like Galloris himself infused us with his battle rage, we sweep across the field, slaying one opponent after the other until somewhere, like from a distance, Clio’s voice drifts across spraying blood and sweaty bodies.

“Get your fucking asses back here. Silas needs your help.”

I nearly choke on relief and a half-baked laugh as both Tori and Royad turn on their heels after a final sweep, and join me sprinting toward the middle of the Tavrasian army where the Fairy Princess stands side by side with Ayna, Silas’s arms slung over their shoulders.

Clio must have site-hopped them out of the danger-zone.

I’m so happy to see them that I barely notice my power dragging like a limp leg, but when I wrap Ayna in my arms a few heartbeats later, Royad taking Silas’s weight from her and sending his healing power into the male, the familiar nausea makes itself known.

“You’re all right.” I reassure myself by running my hands over Ayna’s face, searching her storm gray eyes for any sign she isn’t, but the small wound on her thigh and the blood smeared across her face and dripping from her near-white braid are the only proof I find she just battled her path across this field.

“Not my blood,” she murmurs, fingers locking around mine and guiding my hands down between us until they rest atop my heart. “I’m all right. We both are.”

Swallowing my nausea, I nod. “We will be.”

“I already ordered troops to mimic your attack on the trebuchets,” Tori tells Clio, Ayna, and drowsily blinking Silas, who is flexing his leg where his leathers are sliced open along the side of his thigh.

“If we’re lucky, we can neutralize all of the trebuchets by site-hopping in and detonating the ammunition before they can spot us or get rid of us. ”

“Too many,” Silas murmurs, his gaze fixated on the fighting lines not fifty feet from where we stand.

“We lost too many to the drug.” And by that, he means too many were killed after losing control over their own bodies through that cursed serum.

Not to speak of the initial explosions where fairies were blown out of our army like insects in a flare of fire.

“And they haven’t even properly started their attack.

So far, they are testing the waters and thinning our lines.

” He flexes his leg again, readying to shift his full weight onto it, and curses the moment he does .

Royad supports him to a boulder a few paces to the side, where he sits down, gritting his teeth. Whoever got him, got him bad.

Just as I intend to ask if he’ll be all right to fight or if he needs to be taken back to Aceleau to see a real healer, a flash of silver zooms across the battlefield, and we all duck under what is clearly an assault of Crow power.

A flood of Tavrasian soldiers storms our untouched segment of the field, and all hell breaks loose as we slice and swing through thin air where projections fill the gaps between real soldiers.

Tori and Clio’s magic cuts right through the projections, hitting our own soldiers in the lines behind, and my own power roils in my veins, straining to break free of the drug, which hasn’t made me vomit yet but is definitely decimating my strength.

“We can’t win like this,” Ayna says into the mind link, but her voice is weak with the progressing effect of the drug settling in my system. “If we keep battling projections this way, we’ll deplete our strength and magic and kill our own men in the process.”

No one corrects her because we all know she’s right.

No matter how many of the trebuchets we destroy, Erina will keep sending his projections to lock us in battle, while Ephegos will hunt Ayna and me.

No matter the horned and winged Askarean creatures who have joined the battle to defend their homes, their antlers rip through the projections right into their allies beyond, their arrows of magic fail when hitting the drug-coated armor of a real soldier, and their hooves knock out friends rather than foes.

This is a battle we’re fighting with ourselves—Tavras merely needs to wait to pick off what’s left of us once our strength fails.