Because Ican’tbe caught. If I am, then it’s over. If I am,Oreais over, and I can’t let that happen.
Suddenly, the terrible roaring we first heard inside the castle erupts again, coming from the bridge. From inside the thick fog.
I can taste bitter fear at the back of my throat.
I must go faster.
The woman’s warning pounds beneath my temples.
The fae coming next are monsters. They will pick the muscles from your bones and eat your flesh while you’re still alive. They will defile everything. There will be no escaping it once they’re unleashed into your world.
That’s what’s coming. An evil that celebrates its own vileness by roaring threats into the air.
Shouts sound to my right and I see soldiers running for me, their feet slipping in the snow. Yet my steps are steady, my arms pumping, gaze determinedly set.
I make it to the entrance of the bridge before anyone can get to me. Hand curling around the white pillar, I swing myself down the path of the bridge.
The fog swallows me whole.
As thick as the wool of my dress, it envelops me, closing me into its shrouded embrace. I look over my shoulder at the shadows of soldiers who start to follow me in, but I keep running despite the thick air. Despite the terror in my wide-open eyes.
Then that chilling sound of a thousand joined voices in vicious roaring erupts again, and the other fae soldiers scatter, leaving me behind. Abandoning me to the mercy of whatever kinds of monsters are making those terrible noises.
If the Stone Swords won’t even risk meeting up with the fae coming down this bridge, then Orea truly is doomed.
Unless I stop them.
CHAPTER 55
COMMANDER RYATT
I haven’t been all theway to the end of the world before this, but Seventh Kingdom is just as vast and desolate as the stories.
I ride a borrowed timberwing from Second Kingdom’s fleet, while everyone else rides around me like a flock. The Wrath take up the front, King Thold and Kaila in the middle, and Second Kingdom takes up the rear.
Fifth and Sixth Kingdoms are cold, but Seventh? It’s fucking arctic. So frigid that it even hurts to breathe. Like ice just slices down my throat with every inhale.
At first, I’m so focused on trying to get my desert-native beast to keep flying despite the elements, that I don’t notice anything else other than the freezing clouds we fly above.
But the closer we get, the more I feel it. A buzz in the air, like when you accidentally walk right in the middle of a swarm of bees. A hum that vibrates against my skin with threat.
I can see the other soldiers and even timberwings growing antsy and confused. But none of the Wrath does, and neither does Kaila or Thold. Because we recognize what that buzz in the air is.
Magic.Powerfulmagic.
My pulse climbs as high as our altitude as we continue on. I don’t know what kind of magic we might be flying toward, if what I’m feeling has to do with the fae or the bridge, but it sets my teeth on edge.
A shout has me whipping my head around. It’s Tyde, mouthing something at me from the back of Gideon’s timberwing, but I can’t hear what he’s trying to say. He rips off his face covering and points down as he shouts again, but I can’t hear a word. Not with how fast we’re going, not with the whipping wind tearing away his words.
But a second later, a blast of light shoots up at us from the sky below, startling the shit out of my bird and me both.
I have time to jerk my head forward and hear timberwings screeching, and then the light breaks apart into hundreds of crisscrossing lines and slams into us.
It’s a net of lightning. An electrocuting, blinding web that catches nearly a fourth of our group. I’m one of them.
I’m jolted from the flare that’s both solid and not, both passing through us and catching hold. My body goes rigid, my skin crackling with light and pain.
Beneath me, the timberwing goes stiff too, wings paralyzed, and we fall. We fuckingplummet.
