“Kill her,” Farah screeched.
Rage curled through Ellina. She did not know Balid’s history. She did not know if he had lost his tongue recently or long ago, if he had been born this way or deformed as an adult, or if he had bitten it off himself, as spies sometimes did to avoid being forced to speak their truths in elvish. None of it mattered. What mattered was that Balid knew the precise degree of pain he was inflicting when he stole her voice, the exact state of purgatory to which he had condemned her. The knowledge was like a brand to the skin. She seared with fury.
Ellina pulled her second dagger from her waist and launched towards Balid, but Raffan was already there, intercepting her attack. He turned her weapon away easily, their blades meeting in a clash of green glass. Ellina’s fury swelled. She doubled back, raged forward again. Dust began to swirl as their weapons met, hers a flurry of sharp little movements, his slower, more calculated. Not the style of fighting Raffan usually favored. Not aggressive, or forward, or sly. Ellina was just beginning to wonder if Raffan even wanted to win this fight when he caught her dagger’s cross guard with the tip of his blade and flicked it from her hands, then brought his sword to her neck.
Their gazes locked.
“Do it,” Farah snarled.
Raffan’s chest was rising and falling, his cheeks full of color. His face was not void of emotion, as he so often made it to be, but pooling with something stricken and angry and—hurt? Ellina could not tell. In all the years she had known Raffan, had trained beside him in the legion, had been his friend and later his enemy, she had never seen him like this.
“Raffan,” Farah snapped. Beside her, Balid continued to writhe. “What are you waiting—?”
The earth began to tremble. Little chips of rock jumped around their feet as the ground shook, swelling with the sound of a distant rumble. Ellina looked down, then up again.The Dark Army,she thought, except when she met Raffan’s bewildered gaze, she knew that could not be right.An earthquake, she thought instead, until Farah’s gasp made them both turn their heads.
A stampede of horses—hundreds of horses—was rushing through the narrow byway, heading their way.
Rocks began to topple. Nearby, a little tree shook so violently it shed all its needles. Farah pulled Balid onto one of her own black stallions, digging her heels into the animal’s sides as they swiftly galloped away. Raffan lowered his sword from Ellina’s neck. Their eyes both jumped to the only remaining steed.
Ellina moved. There was no time to ask questions, no time to understand where the stampede had come from. She had to make it to the stallion first, shehad to,because the boulders were sheer on all sides, impossible to climb, and the crevice through which she had come was now clogged with tumbling rocks. She would never be able to outrun the stampede on foot. If she did not ride out of there, she would be trampled to death.
Raffan caught her arm and shoved her in a different direction. Ellina gave a silent cry, thinking that he meant to push her to the ground, but he only moved her into a small crack in the rocks that Ellina had not seen, wedging her out of the stampede’s incoming path.
“It has to be you,” he said. Ellina blinked up at him, dazed. “If you want your voice back, you have to be the one to kill Balid. Otherwise, the magic won’t be reversed.”
He gave her a last, haunted look before racing away.
Ellina wanted to follow him. She wanted to demand to know why,whyhad he saved her? Yet then the animals were upon them, and there was nothing for Ellina to do but close her eyes and hold her breath as the horses flew by, storming past with such ferocity that Ellina’s teeth chattered in her head.
???
Venick was lost in the gore. He couldn’t tell how many undead had appeared around him—three? Four?—only that as soon as he spun to engage one, the corpse would go limp, dropping lifelessly to the earth just as another corpse rose up from behind to take its place. Venick had the vivid image of a demon jumping from body to body. The conjurors were switching their puppets at frightening speed, leaving the resistance befuddled and exposed, unable to focus on a single target.
Venick ground his teeth. Just as he was about to behead his nearest foe—an elf whose guts were spilling from the stomach—thatbody crumpled, and a new one sprang to life beside it, sword swinging. Venick didn’t have time to reorient. The blade caught his shoulder, the green glass glancing harmlessly off his armor. Close to his neck. Too close.
Venick struggled to contain himself. This was an unexpected development, one they hadn’t planned for. They needed to regroup, to devise a strategy that involvednot dyingso that their soldiers couldn’t be reanimated and used against them.
Good plan, Venick.
A surge of frustration, bitter in his mouth. He knew what he had to do, even if he hated to do it.
He gave the signal.
It took several moments for his command to register. But then: the sound of a distant horn, calling for the resistance to retreat.
???
The rumbling slowed to a stop.
Ellina’s forehead was pressed to the cool wall of her rocky crevice. It was exactly her size, just large enough for one. She had the wild thought that it had been made for her, like a coffin for a body. Yet she was alive.
She peeled her eyes open.
Dust covered everything. The air smelled like chalk, the ground churned to such a degree that it resembled a sandy beach. The little tree was reduced to splinters.
It took three tries before Ellina could make her legs move. She maneuvered off the crevice wall, steadied herself, then let go. Outside, more dust hung in the air. The stampede was gone, the horses having run deeper into the rock formation…save for one.
A pure white stallion, unmarred by the dust. Braided mane. Bright black eyes. Atop that horse: a rider. Ellina saw him there as the air cleared. His face, as familiar as her own. Long hair, the arch of his eyebrows, that pouting mouth.
