Balid stood on the river-most edge of the fight, battling a human resistance member. The man—a hulking giant of a person—windmilled his sword through the air, then brought the blade down with an audibleswoosh. The weapon cut close enough to sever the end of Balid’s outstretched sleeve. A slice of fabric fluttered to the wet road.
Ellina’s stomach took a hard twist. She tossed her torch into the river. Pulled a dagger into each hand.
The giant surged towards Balid. His sword was steel, double-edged, etched with ancient human symbols. It came up and then down, cutting perilously close to Balid’s neck. As Ellina moved towards them, she wanted to say,stop.She wanted to say,mine.
Balid’s cloak spiraled around his ankles. His fingers came together. The giant dropped his sword with a raucous clatter and covered his face with his hands. Ellina did not have to see his eyes to know that he had been conjured blind.
Balid pulled a little knife from his sleeve, stepped forward, and drove it through the man’s jaw.
???
When Venick was a boy, his father had taken him to see the traveling circus. He still remembered the red and white striped tent, the garish costumes, the oily slip of buttered corn on his fingers and around his mouth. As part of the final stunt, the ringmaster had set fire to his ring. He stood in its center, waving his baton as the flames rose, dancers twirling long ribbons around him in intricate circles. But one of the ribbons came too close to the blaze. It caught fire. The other dancers tried using their own ribbons to bat it out, which only helped the flames spread.
It was like that.
The catapults were set aflame. They created a ring of fire. The heat was instantly suffocating, trapping both the resistance and the Dark Army against the river. In the chaos, the flames began to spread, leaping onto the bodies of the dead, eating their way through the ranks. It was as the young soldier had said—they weretrapped, with only one way out.
Humans dove into the river. The sounds of splashing mixed with the rumble of the fire, the screams. The southern elves watched, masks falling away to reveal blatant shock as their northern brethren did what elves simply did not do, and followed the humans into the water.
Though only about a third of the Dark Army was captured on the wrong side of the catapults, it was more than enough to shift the battle. As the fire blazed, everyone tripping and rushing to escape the heat, Venick stayed back, ushering his soldiers to safety. Soon, however, the smoke became too thick. Venick’s eyes burned. He’d waited too long; it was time to join his troops in the river.
A slice of pain, hot through his skull.
Venick fell to his knees. His vision spotted. It took him a moment to understand—he’d been hit with something from behind.
He glanced back to see a southerner holding a shield, which she was using like a club, swinging in blind, haphazard circles. She had the wild look of someone who knew they were doomed and was intent on taking as many victims as she could down with her.
Venick swayed. Something warm trickled down the nape of his neck.
Get up.
He closed his eyes.
Get up, Venick.
He frowned at the voice in his head. Gruff tones, brusque, edged in disapproval. That voice had always been a part of him, always lurking around his mind, but it no longer felt quite like his.
Don’t give up now, you hear me?
Venick pressed a palm to the road. Blinked. When he looked up again, he found himself hunting for that blue light. He wanted to see it one more time. He thought, if he saw it, he might have the strength to understand why the voice in his head sounded like his, yet wasn’t.
The world closed over, and everything went black.
???
Flames sprang to life in the distance. There was a clamor of running feet, the hollers reaching a previously unmatched pitch. Then, bodies to match those feet and those hollers, a host of southerners speeding by.
Ellina was aware of this without really understanding that she was aware. The greater scope of the war had ceased to matter, fading like mountaintops into the fog. Her focus was much more singular.
Balid had climbed onto a low stone wall near a rocky section of the river. He craned his neck towards the fire, his expression indiscernible. He seemed to understand something about the fire that Ellina did not, his eyes pressing back to it again and again. Ellina wondered if maybe the heat and the light were close enough to hinder Balid’s conjuring. Maybe thatwas why he was so preoccupied.
It wasn’t. He spotted Ellina, marking her weapons, her expression, the lithe slide and step of her feet. His face changed again, turning hungry, almost luminous as he drew his fingers together and lifted them above his head. Ellina could see his bandaged wrist from where he had intercepted her dagger. The wound had missed the hand.
There would be no monologues between them. No insults or exchanging of threats. Then again, the silence was its own exchange, loaded with all the words they could not speak.
Ellina saw the corpse rise to life in her periphery. Though conjurors were masters of shadows and storms, they had no magic that could kill an opponent directly. Balid’s best weapon, besides that little knife up his sleeve, was his corpse-bending.
And yet, Ellina felt a tingle of something, that same sense of being aware without understanding that she was aware. Instinct told her to keep her eyes on Balid, not to allow him out of her sight, but another, stronger instinct told her to look at the corpse, so she did.
