The soldiers from Second and First Kingdom have reached Fourth and Third’s Elites, backing them up and pushing at the influx of fae.
In the air, timberwings swoop down in deadly arcs, talons snatching fae and tossing them down again, making them plummet to their deaths. Snow pirates fight, fire claws rampage, and my heart beats so fast in my chest I think I might pass out.
But I don’t dare miss a thing because the fae…the fae arelosing.
“It’s happened, Lady Rissa,” Manu says beside me, his voice strangled.
“What’s happening?” I ask, just as tightly.
“We don’t need a rotting ground,” he tells me as he looks over with the ghost of a watery smile. “Because Orea has finally united. We’re fighting…together.”
The guards don’t let us leave until the battle horn blows.
As soon as they deem it safe, I tear out of the noble’s estate with Manu right behind me. We head out onto the slick street, all of us racing toward the castle.
The battle is over.
A bit of sunlight has pierced through the clouds, and it’s stopped snowing, but I’m still frozen.
Cold fear has taken root.
My body trembles, but I say a silent prayer to the Divine as I race down Ranhold’s empty streets. We pass corpses and charred buildings, but my eyes stay straight ahead.
We won the battle. Manu and I watched as our forces took out the fae, but this noose around my throat won’t loosen. Not until I see if Osrik is okay.
If helives.
When we get out of the city and come to the stretch of land in front of the castle’s destroyed outer walls, I skid to a stop, my breath panting in and out.
It’s so much worse seeing a battleground up close than it is from a tower window.
Placing my hand over my nose and mouth, I gag at the sight and smell of bloodied bodies and entrails spread around and staining the snow. Seeing the faces of the dead is probably going to haunt me forever.
But I look.
I look for every armored soldier clad in black metal chest plates and fierce helmets. I search through them, while Manu breaks away, running to a soldier from Third.
Cran sticks to my side, but we stop when we find a Fourth soldier. He sinks down to his knees and turns the man over and then yanks off his helmet. Unseeing eyes stare up at the sky, and Cran lets out a shaky breath, his face going pale.
I kneel down in the snow next to him. “What was his name?” I ask quietly.
“We called him Tipper,” he chokes out. “Never could hold down his henade. Always tipped over whenever he tried to walk home from the taverns.”
Even though I didn’t know him, I feel my chest tighten. “I’m sorry.”
Cran shoots out a breath and stands, gaze scanning the battleground where so many more bodies lie. “We fight, Lady Rissa. But even if we win, we still lose.”
My jaw aches with emotion and I want to sob, because he’s right. I’m terrified I’m going to lose too. I’m terrified to keep searching the bodies.
But I have to face it. I have to know.
So together, we keep looking, while groups of Second and Third soldiers seem to be doing the same. Cran and I find another six of Fourth’s Elites dead.
None of them are Osrik.
We pass by so much gruesome death that once my tears start falling, they won’t stop. Timberwings, Elites, soldiers from every kingdom, pirates, and fire claws. They all lie here amongst the bodies of the fae in a terrible ice-cold graveyard.
My heart feels ripped apart and stomped on by the time we make it to Ranhold’s outer wall. Only a small part still stands, the rest of it left in rubbled pieces along the snow.
