I felt sick.
All along the edge of camp, Obsidian helmets snapped toward it like a field of flowers turning to the sun.
The cloaked figure on the ridge held the lantern high, illuminating his face. I was close enough to see it all. The hard set of his aged jaw. The hate glittering in his hollow eyes. Brist.
I watched as he angled the lantern toward the valley, low and left, as if pointing at us.
Horns split the night.
At our backs, the sentries we’d evaded erupted in shouts.
And from the ridge, the traitor’s lantern burned steady as a small, treacherous sun.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Rydian
Lesha’s body was all bone and torn flesh, wrapped in rags that smelled of sweat and rot. Her back was bandaged, thick with dried blood where her wings had once been. Every breath shuddered through her like it might be her last. She weighed almost nothing, especially compared to the dread that filled me as I watched Brist betray us all.
“We have to move,” I said.
“What about the others?” Aurelia asked, stricken.
I knew the horrible fear that gripped her because it gripped me too. Slade, Thorne, Keres, Daegel. My family. They’d never make it out in time.
At our backs, a group of sentries approached—a trio of Obsidians and a trio of… something else. They wore white leather armor, reinforced with straps of bone and plates of ice that didn’t melt under the torchlight. Masks of carved ice-bone covered where faces should have been—smooth, featureless ovals strapped to emptiness. Nothing moved beneath those masks. No breath, no flicker of eyes. Just a hollow cold that rolled ahead of them.
Frostwights.
I’d heard stories, mostly scary tales told to children to keep them from venturing too far into the northern mountains. But even those stories hadn’t conveyed the true horror of seeing the creatures advancing toward us now.
The air dropped ten degrees in an instant.
Aurelia stilled. I felt her power bunch beneath the surface of her skin, ready to explode.
I stepped in front of her and let my shadows swell. Let the nightmarish illusion take the place of our true faces. Let them see what they wanted to see. Two fellow soldiers, also relieved of our fae souls and made into something enslaved to Heliconia’s darkness.
“Soldier,” one of the soldiers barked. “Report. Have you found the traitors we were warned about?”
“Not yet,” I said, pitching my voice low and dull. “We were ordered to sweep the hillside.”
One of the Frostwights tilted its mask as if smelling the air. Frost smoke drifted from the seams in its armor. For a heartbeat, I thought we might slip past. Then the Frostwight’s head snapped toward Aurelia.
The hollowness behind that masknoticedher.
A hiss of cold rushed through the tent-rows. The Frostwight raised its hand, fingers gnarled into icicles.
My shadows tore under the pressure of that ancient, unnatural cold. The illusion faltered.
“It isss her,” the Frostwight hissed. “The traitor. We mussst kill her.”
“Run,” I snarled—and dropped the illusion.
The closest Obsidian reached for his horn.
I didn’t give him the chance to sound it. A blade of shadow shoved through his ribs, cracking bone, slamming into his heart. I ripped it free and turned, but the second soldier was already raising his axe.
Aurelia moved faster.
