An odd reaction to a question many would see as offensive.
“I’ve more than one,” he said. “Why do you ask?”
A non-answer, but I’d not expected one.
“It seems to me, supporting a Thalassari queen would take a human of exceptional skill.”
My brother had told me little of Sir Rowan, though it was clear he held the man in high regard. Especially for a human.
“From what I’ve been told, you have little regard, much less admiration, for any human.”
“You are not one to mince words. My brother mentioned as much.”
We watched the women pace, practicing their skills like caged trexan having been cornered. How could the failure of an action I never intended to aid weigh so heavily?
Lyra.
She’d not stormed into my life but slipped in as gently as any Aetherian. I’d seen her coming, but it mattered not. And the repercussions would be many, perhaps lasting for centuries.
But ’twas done. I’d no sooner see any other touch her than?—
“They’ve breached the palace defenses.”
Those five words, impossible as they seemed, had to be true. Shouted by a guard nearby, and supported by evidence of chaos surrounding us— from the women below, who all began running at the same time— to Rowan’s expression, they were a catalyst like any other.
We both took off in the same direction: toward Nerys and Lyra and Mev.
The alarm bells clanged in my skull, and Rowan and I sprinted toward the platform. The air vibrated with the queen’s water magic, waves surging through the stone channels as she tried to fortify the walls.
“How in the hell did they breach undetected?” Rowan yelled.
“Cloaked ships,” I called to him, somehow knowing even though I hadn’t detected as much before now. “The Aetherian whispers can’t pierce iron and shadow. Someone inside must have helped them.”
The first wave of my father’s men crashed into the courtyard like a tide, shields raised, eyes gleaming with the kind of hate only bred in Gyoria. I met them head-on, magic pulsing through my fingertips and then flagstones. Buckling the ground beneath their boots as a tidal wave washed an entire contingency away. When a fissure formed, I knew without seeing him it was my brother. Only Kael, and my father, could create one so precise as that.
One Gyorian warrior fell screaming into the fissure. Another staggered as a strike of wind from the north side of the courtyard saw him join his comrade.
This was my clan Father was destroying.
A roar of frustration at my father for forcing such a clash followed another fissure, this one circular in pattern.
Lyra darted forward, my heart sticking in my throat watching her enter the fray. Wind magic lashing into a cyclone that threw two soldiers back against the wall. Even in the chaos, I felt her fury tethered to mine. But then another joined it, one so powerful, I knew it must have come from King Galfrid.
Except, when the wind subsided, it was his daughter who stood amid the carnage.
“Terran!” Kael’s voice thundered from behind me, my brother now at my side.
Cries of pain rose as our warriors moved with purpose. Gyorians in obsidian leathers met Aetherian power in bursts of wind and stone. Archers filled the terraces above, their volleys vanishing into a storm of magic. Queen Nerys’s water had begun to flood stone channels as she attempted to hold fires at bay. Palace guards tried to drive a wedge through the Gyorian flank and failed.
This was not a skirmish at a border post. This was the kind of fight that rewrote songs.
And then I felt it. His presence.
My father.
King Balthor pushed through the chaos as though the battle parted for him, his great black ax in hand. He had little use for it, but cherished the weapon. The world seemed to hold its breath as he advanced. Magic rippled out from him… dark, heavy, ancient, as if the mountain itself remembered what it was to fear a king. Lightning flickered through the clouds, turning the palace spires into jagged silhouettes. Below, hundreds clashed as stone and screaming wind unleashed immortals’ power.
I’d faced monsters, traitors, and gods. None of them compared to this. Balthor’s very presence bent the world around him, his will a storm that sought to break us all. The power that sealed a gate between worlds was within him.
