PROLOGUE
CENTURIES AGO
Lord Casric’shorse stamped its hooves beneath him, coat dark with sweat, and nostrils flared, scenting what was coming. Three hundred fae were gathering in the tree line across the Therison Vale, preparing for one final assault. Behind Casric, mortal mages chanted words that filled the air with a heaviness that made his teeth ache. It tasted like copper and salt. Blood and magic.
“How long?” His gaze stayed fixed on the forest ahead.
Maester Vennick knelt in the center of the salt circle, fingers black with iron filings, voice shaking from exhaustion. “Two hours. Maybe three. Don’t let them reach us.”
Casric turned in his saddle. One thousand men lined the ridge behind him. All that remained of the army he’d once commanded. Pike squares, archers, cavalry. He’d led them into battle after battle, watched half of them die, and still they fought. Because the alternative was the fae overtaking the land and turning mortals into nothing more than amusements to be toyed with.
This was the final stand. The mageshadto succeed and sealUnderhill shut for good. All the raids, the stolen children, the burned villages. It would stop. The fae would be trapped in their realm or stranded in this one, cut off from their power.
More importantly, humanity would win.
Dread stroked up Casric’s spine as the first fae broke from the trees, and came toward him at a run.
There were no war cries or horns. No advance warning. Just riders on steeds that weren’t horses, moving faster than anything human, closing the distance across the open ground. At their head, the Hell-Thorn of the Nightwild rode like darkness given form, its black armor chased with silver thorns, twin curved blades held steady. Its steed was a thing of moonlight and shadows, pale as bone, moving without sound.
Behind it came the Nightwild Guard—twelve warriors on mounts that flickered between solid and smoke, their hooves striking the earth without leaving marks. Mothers used them to frighten children into obedience.
If you heard their hoofbeats, you were already dead—that was the story.
No one outran them. No one hid from them. No one who saw them ride ever saw anything else again.
Casric knew they were more than just stories. He’d seen the proof in the villages they destroyed, and the body counts that marked their passing.
“Archers!” Casric drew his sword. Steel sang as it left its scabbard, the metal gleaming with the blessings placed on it by the mages. Sixteen fae had fallen to this blade. “On my mark!”
The fae warriors were two hundred yards out …
One-fifty …
One hundred …
“Loose!”
Two hundred bowstrings snapped as one, and the air turned black with salt-blessed, iron-tipped arrows. They arced high and fell in a sheet toward the oncoming fae.
Magic rippled through the fae ranks like a heat shimmer. Arrows veered and tumbled, burying themselves in the grass twenty feet from their targets. But not all failed. Iron punched through fae wards when the angle was right, and the blessings held. Casric saw a fae stumble, silver blood bright on her shoulder, but it didn’t stop her. It didn’t slow her down. She yanked the arrow out and pressed forward.
“Again!”
The archers raised their bows again, and the sky filled with iron. A man behind Casric screamed when the string on his bow snapped and cut his throat. He went down choking, hands grasping at the wound as blood poured over his fingers. The man beside him grabbed his quiver and kept shooting.
The fae hit the pike line at full speed.
Steel shrieked. Men screamed. The first rank disintegrated in seconds, pikes shattered and bodies thrown aside. The Hell-Thorn’s steed dissolved beneath it mid-stride, moonlight scattering like mist, and the fae hit the ground without breaking stride, already killing. Its blades moved in arcs too fast to follow, each stroke ending a life.
One pikeman managed to set his weapon and brace. The Hell-Thorn flowed around it and took his head. Another swung a mace, but the fae caught his wrist, snapped it backward, and opened his throat with its blade.
Behind it, the Nightwild Guard tore into the ranks. The earth split and swallowed men whole. Lightning arced between bodies. Screaming was followed by the smell of burning meat.
And the human line broke.
Men ran. Men died. The ones who stood their groundaccomplished nothing more than buying seconds for the ranks behind them.
But Casric held his position, shouting at his small band to hold. Behind him, the mages kept chanting, their voices rising and falling, magic building in the air until it made his skull ache.
