We watched the fight for what seemed like an hour, first from the ramparts, then as we hustled down those steps and around the front of the castle, then from our defensive position in front of the enormous doors, bolted tightly closed.
“Well, at least they’re buying us more time,” Ryland winced as another Grimbeast’s pained yelp echoed across the flat frozen plane, carried on the shifting winds, now coming straight at us.
“Hopefully they’ve taken a few hundred soldiers with them,” I added, squinting into the cutting wind. “But I doubt we’re that lucky. They’re moving again.”
The dark horde spread out along the edge of the ice, and then, in the distance, the sound of cracking rang like distant thunder. The entire army ground to a halt, a black smudge at the edge of a band of solid white.
“Maybe they will go through,” Ryland observed coldly. “Maybe Rooke’s wrong, or the Grimbeasts killed off all those Fae who wield ice magic.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“What?” He looked completely offended. “Itcouldhappen. I mean, stranger things have happened, right?”
“Wish in one hand and shit in the other, right?” I murmured. “See which one fills up faster. Here they come.” I held my breath as the first squad of soldiers swarmed across the ice, that deep, eerie creaking echoing off Frostveil’s walls.
Hope surged in my chest when a few of them went through, their panicked shouts ringing loudly, replaced by horror when they climbed out and the broken ice reformed beneath their feet.
“Well, that was disappointing,” Ryland sighed.
“We’re up.” I shivered when I took my first, tentative step out onto the ice, despising the way it crackled beneath my boot. “Let’s hope we don’t fucking drown before we even get to draw our blades.”
45
ROOKE
While Lyrae was a powerhouse of intensity and purpose, her sister was a wraith.
“Give me the Triune,” Ariel repeated in Gravelock’s raspy voice, her unseeing eyes fixed hypnotically on the Triune, small, pale hands slowly clenching and unclenching at her side.
Silvery hair floated around her head like a cloud of spiderwebs, her dress—if you could even call it that—hung in gauzy slivers, her stick-like body moving jerkily toward me, surrounded by that soft glow of power.
Wyrdtracker.
No, she wasn’t moving toward me. I was irrelevant in this scenario.
Toward the relics.
The air in the throne room was already over-saturated with magic, thick and soupy, waiting for what came next, for the power to finally be combined into one purpose. Even the moonlight seemed to bend oddly, refracted by the blood circle, the spell pulsing inside this cylinder of power.
I clamped my mouth shut, the rest of the spell aching to escape, to complete the binding, but if I spoke the words now…I had no idea what might happen. The ritual called for absolute silence, and if Ariel touched the blood circle, or gods help me, the relics, she might kill us all, by tearing a hole in the fabric of the universe.
If the old tales were to be believed.
But I couldn’t delay much longer.
The ritual should be happening, right this second, and where the fuck was Varian?
Ariel drifted closer, like she was carried on the wind, stopping just in front of me, our eyes meeting through the shimmer of magic, nothing else separating us except a nearly invisible layer of power that might not keep someone like her out.
Her eyes were fogged by an opaque mist, bare toes already brushing the edge of the painted circle as she craned her neck, searching for a way through.
“You’re too late, Venmir,” I muttered, shaking my head in disgust at her skeletal condition. “And sending a girl to do your dirty work. You’re nothing but a coward.”
“Those relics will bemine. You’ll never succeed. I’ll kill you, like I killed your father before you, and my only regret will be that you won’t get to watch me bend the Rooke magic to my will.”
I ignored him.
Every second mattered now; there was no room for error.
