She didn’t think.
Shelunged.
Throwing herself from Mourn’s saddle, Seraphina dove toward the danger, towardhim. Her arms wrapped around his chest. Her body collided with his. The heat wave slammed into them both, knocking the breath from her lungs. Flinging her backward in a tangle of desperate limbs.
She crashed hard to the ground and skidded several feet, steel plate rattling, jarring her bones. But she had him. Arms locked around his chest. His back crushed to her breastplate. She had Aldric.
The air above them incinerated. A roar like a collapsing mountain shook the earth. The heat was a physical weight, pressing her into the dirt as she tried to roll atop her husband to protect him from the worst of it. The man was half-naked. He did not even have shoes.
Horses screamed—terrible, high-pitched sounds of panic. Smoke choked the air overhead, filling her lungs. She coughed, her eyes stinging. Beneath her, Aldric shifted, clawing his way out from beneath the press of her body.
“Kirei!” His voice was nearly lost in the chaos, swallowed up by the fire, the smoke, the sounds of battle, the screams. But still she heard it. Still, it hummed along the cord binding her heart to him like the sweetest song. “We have to move!”
Out of the acrid smoke, his hand emerged, wrapping around hers.
She clung to his fingers like a lifeline, letting her Crow lead her out.
On hands and knees, they crawled, scrambling across grass and dirt—inelegant, desperate. Someone nearly tripped over her, slamming into her torso with such force it stole the breath from her lungs all over again. Her hand nearly slipped from Aldric’s grasp.
But his grip on her tightened, refusing to let her go.
Around them, the battle had devolved into absolute madness. What northmen still lived formed a ragged wall of fur and steel between them and the witches. Mourn was nowhere to be seen. Beyond the fire wall still blocking the end of the pass, more shouts of men erupted.
Not shouts of pain, but frustration. Panic.
Cyneric and his forces could not get to her through the flame.
She searched the air instinctively for the winged shapes that so rarely left her or her Crow’s side—Alyx, Soot—but the smoke was too thick, the chaos too blinding.
Out of the smoke, Wulfston’s masked form loomed, his axe swinging in a deadly arc. Straight toward the second witch still spouting flame. The blade of his weapon connected. The unbearable heat ceased.
The Arathian woman collapsed—dead—right beside her.
But Seraphina didn’t look. She couldn’t look. She just scrambled to her feet alongside Aldric and raced with him away from the worst of the fight. From the scents of smoke and death.
The thunder of hooves on stone sounded in the near distance, tearing through the ravine straight toward them. More friends? Foes?
She scanned the pass, hunting for a way out of this nightmare. But there wasnothing. Nothing that she could see. Merely the wall of fire blocking the way forward. The steep faces of the hills framing the ravine.
This wasn’t exactly going according to plan. They would have to retreat back the way they had just come, straight into the unknown forces approaching—
Something clanged against her pauldron, shattering in a spray of wood. Too close to her exposed face for comfort. Seraphina froze. She looked up, through the swirling gray haze, to the eastern ridge.
To the Arathian archers still there, aiming their bows straight at her.
“Get down!” her Crow roared, wrenching her arm with such force, he nearly ripped the limb straight from its socket.
“Aldric—” She collapsed to her knees, lifting her armored arm to shield her face.
But before she could draw another breath, he moved. Hands shoving at her shoulders as he launched himself at her, tackling her into the grass and dirt.
He covered her, his body a heavy, warm cage pressing her against the earth, shielding her face with his form.No.Her heart seized. Her hands fisted in his filthy shirt, trying to shove him off of her.
But she couldn’t. He was too heavy. Just like that night in her bedchamber.
“Aldric! Get off—” Panic rose like bile in the back of her throat as she stared up into her husband’s one-eyed gaze and found naught but determination shining there. And something else.
A feeling burning in her own chest.
