“Stop!” I shout at them. “We have to help the king!”
They blow past me, one of them colliding with my shoulder sharply.Some of them have blood streaming from open wounds. But none of them stop.
A younger soldier stumbles as he runs past me, and I grab hold of his armor, recognizing the single mark on his shoulder that signifies him as a recruit.
“The king!” I snap as other soldiers stream past us. “We have to help—”
“They want a magesmith,” he gasps. “So we’re letting them have him.”
I stare at him, sure I couldn’t have heard that correctly. “What?”
He jerks at my hold. “General’s orders. We’re to run—”
Another soldier sees that I’m holding the recruit in place, and he knocks him free. “Come on!” he snaps.
They bolt away toward the trees. My blood goes ice cold.
They want a magesmith.
So we’re letting them have him.
General’s orders.
I dig my boots into the turf and run again. As I near the training fields, I begin to pass bodies, every one lying in a pool of blood, most bearing claw marks that sliced armor free to find the flesh below.
But there, just past the gardens, I see a man in black with a sword in one hand, and a dagger in the other. He’s driving scravers away, one at a time, though he must have magic, because they can’t all descend on him at once.
Grey.
A few Emberish soldiers must have tried to defend him, but they lie in crumpled heaps of gold and red all over the battlefield. My heart drops as I think of Malin—just as I notice a soldier tucked in a stone alcove of the garden, arrows firing wildly.
Before I can squint to see if it’s Malin, a screech overhead draws my focus. I barely have time to draw a blade and swing before the scraverswipes for my throat. I see blue feathers and a flash of fangs, and then it’s bleeding and falling to the ground.
I keep running, but another dives from above. Sparks and stars glitter in my vision, but I spin and stab and this one falls, too. Another one attacks at my back, and claws latch into my armor. I don’t think I’ll be able to spin in time, but I hear thethwickof an arrow, and the scraver jerks, falling away.
I shoot my gaze toward that stone alcove. Definitely Malin.
I don’t have time for relief. A light-winged scraver is diving for Grey, and his back is open, unguarded. Malin is shooting away a scraver that’s aiming for him, and the king’s sword is busy driving away a scraver that’s attacked from the front.
I slip a throwing knife out of my bracer, and it spins free of my hand. I don’t even wait to see it land, I just throw another. One goes into the light-winged scraver’s back, and I lose track of the other.
It doesn’t matter. The scraver falls to the ground behind the king, shrieking.
Grey whirls, and he doesn’t hesitate. He thrusts his blade into the creature, a killing blow.
His eyes are already lifting, questioning, seeking, and they settle on me.
“Tycho!” he calls, pulling his blade free. “Get to cover.”
“You’rewelcome,” I say, jerking another knife out of my bracer to throw it. “Right shoulder.Now.”
He spins without looking, blade already arcing, blood spraying when he makes contact.
It gives me time to reach him, and anotherthwicksounds from above. The scraver shrieks are nearly deafening, but I draw my sword and shout over them.
“I’ve got your back,” I say—and that’s all I have time for, because more descend, and my entire being dissolves into nothing more than a fightfor my life—and his. We barely speak, but we don’t need to. Much like the way I could feel his anguish, I’ve trained by his side for years. When he says, “Left,” I don’t need to look, I just stab. When I say, “Drop,” I don’t wait for him to move; I just swing my sword because I know Grey will get out of the way.
This is nothing like the time I fought Nakiis in the arena. That wasonescraver, and I don’t think he was trying to kill me. Here, I can feel Grey’s magic in the air, but I can feel theirs, too, and there are so very many of them. The air is biting cold and hard to breathe, and frost keeps forming on my blade. Every time I kill one, it seems that another appears.
