Rakon grunted his agreement. “Loudly overruled.”
Leif raised up from his crouch just long enough to shoot a glance over the rocks they were using as cover. “All clear. Let’s go.”
“Wait.” Aldric seized Calix’s vambrace, dragging him close. “Where is my wife?”
His half-Kunishi Son’s jaw worked. His gaze slid away, back toward the camp. The crash of steel. The howls. The screams. “Doing something you won’t like.”
Aldric’s breath left him in a single, lethal hiss. “Sera.”
She was here. Forging straight into the Underworld forhim.
Leif cut a look back their way and hissed, “We have to go. Back out into the water. We’ll swim around and—”
“No.” The word was a growl, vibrating deep in Aldric’s chest. He planted his feet.
Calix frowned and seized him about the wrist as if he could possibly haul him away against his will. “Your Majesty, you can barely stand. You have no armor. We need to get you outnow.”
“I saidno!” Aldric wrenched his arm free with a surge of strength he shouldn’t have possessed, nearly toppling over from the effort. He steadied himself, breathing hard, his one eye wild as he looked from the safety of the ocean lapping in the distance to the inferno of the camp.
To whereshewas.
“You let my wife walk into a trap,” he rasped, thrusting out his hand toward Rakon. “Give me a blade. I am going to get her, whether you help me or not.”
His men shared a look. With a sigh, Rakon unbuckled his secondary blade from his waist—a hunting knife as long as Aldric’s forearm. “You’ll get yourself killed, boss,” the big man rumbled, passing over the weapon, belt and all.
He gripped that belt tight and set to strapping it about his own waist, grateful to have a bit of steel in close reach once more. “Better to die at my wife’s side,” he rumbled, already staggering back out into the fray, “than to be the sort of man who would run, leaving her face a witch alone.”
Chapter sixty-eight
Seraphina
The valley had descended into madness.
Thick, oily plumes of black smoke roiled up from the cove, obscuring the shoreline and stinging her eyes even from this distance. The air tasted of ash and copper—the flavor of ruin. Seraphina sat astride Mourn halfway up the slope of the western hill, her position precarious, held just before the incline became too steep for a destrier to manage at speed.
Her gloved hands tightened on the reins until the leather creaked, straining against the urge to move. Somewhere in that chokinggloom was Aldric.
The golden cord in her chest thrummed, a frantic, vibrating wire pulling her toward the smoke. Every instinct she possessed screamed at her to turn Mourn’s head, to drive him down into the inferno and find her husband. To burn if it meant burning together.
Peace,she commanded her racing heart, forcing her breath to come slow and deep.The Sons will find him. Calix, Rakon, and Leif will not fail.
She had to believe that. She had to believe that the plan would hold, that she would lead these witches away, and that tonight—Lord willing—she would meet Aldric at the rendezvous point to the west.
There were so many things she needed to say to him. So many apologies waiting to be voiced, so many truths she had been too afraid to whisper in the quiet of the Dawnspire. She would speak them all tonight.
High above, twin shadows swept over the undulating grass. Seraphina glanced up to see Alyx and Soot banking sharply against the wind, their wings shimmering in the weak, gray morning light. They moved in tandem, circling the battlefield, two halves of a whole.
Just like us.
A roar rose from the cove, distinct from the rhythmic crash of the waves. The Arathian line was breaking. Like water bursting through a dam, soldiers in foreign steel spilled from the mouth of the cove, driven back by the ferocity of the varhounds and therelentless advance of her infantry. They were scattering, retreating toward the pass.
Seraphina tensed, her eyes narrowing as she scanned the chaotic tide of bodies. She had never laid eyes on a witch before. She wasn’t entirely sure what she was looking for—a withered hag? A giant wreathed in shadow?
Muscles coiled, she sat there, waiting for someone to finally notice her. But the chaos of the Arathian retreat was too thick; the enemy soldiers were too busy fighting for their lives against her pursuing men to notice the solitary figure on the hill.
They needed a beacon.
With a sharp intake of breath that filled her lungs with the scent of pine and slaughter, Seraphina reached up and unbuckled her helm. She pulled the steel from her head, shaking her hair free so that it tumbled around her shoulders—a banner of red-touched brown against the gray stone of the hill.
