The Hell-Thorn was forty yards from the ritual circle and moving fast.
“Hold the line,” Casric told Captain Ehren, and spurred his horse forward. The animal was eight hundred pounds of muscle and fury, bred for war and trained to trample men beneath its hooves. Wards glimmered along its flanks as it moved. Casric couched his sword like a lance and aimed for the Hell-Thorn’s throat.
The fae didn’t slow. Its pale gold eyes found Casric’s across the chaos, and a smile curved its mouth—slow, cold, and utterly without mercy.
Casric’s blade cut through the air. One of the Hell-Thorn’s swords came up in a fluid motion, shearing through the horse’s wards as though they weren’t there and opening the beast’s throat. The horse went down, legs folding, eight hundred pounds of momentum turning into a tumbling mass of flesh and steel. Casric kicked free, hit the ground rolling, and came up with his sword ready.
But the Hell-Thorn was already moving. Its first strike went high. Casric got his blade up and blocked, the impact jarring up his arm and cracking something in his shoulder. The second strike was low and viper-fast. Casric managed to turn it aside with his blade, but the shock of it numbed his wrists. The third strike came from an angle that shouldn’t exist, defying physics and leverage and everything he’d learned in twenty-five years of swordwork.
It opened his throat.
Hot blood flooded his mouth and filled his lungs. He tried to breathe and choked. He tried to raise his sword and watched in horror as his hand fell away, still gripping the blessed steel, and landed in grass that was already soaked red.
The Hell-Thorn’s blade came for his face, and Lord Casric the Unbroken died, staring at the morning sky.
The Hell-Thorn stepped over him and kept going. It was twenty yards from the circle … fifteen … Men threw themselves in its path, and it cut through them without pause.
Ten yards.
It could see the mages now, kneeling in their salt and iron, their voices building to a crescendo that filled the air. It could feel what they were doing to the barrier between worlds.
Fiveyards.
It killed the last guard.
Three steps and it could scatter the salt, kill the mages, and stop this for good.
And in that second, the world fell silent.
Every fae on the battlefield froze. The Hell-Thorn stopped midstride, blade raised. Its head turned slowly west, toward where the entrance to Underhill had always been.
A white-haired female fae dropped to her knees, hands clutching her chest. “No! No! They wouldn’t. Theycouldn’t!”
A silver-eyed warrior stared at his hands, turning them over. “I can’t feel it. Where is it? Where—” His voice broke. “It’s gone. Underhill isgone.”
“The gates.” Another fae, this one with a face twisted with shock. “The gates are sealed.”
“Didweseal them?” The white-haired female looked at the others. “Did the Courts close the gates to save the realm, or did the humans—” She looked at the mages, at the ritual circle still glowing with power. “Didtheydo it? Did they seal us out?”
No one answered, because no one knew. The fae looked at each other, then toward the west, and finally at the battlefield around them. Hundreds of dead. Human and fae both.
The Hell-Thorn stood surrounded by a field of corpses, black armor sheeted with blood, both blades dripping red. It stared west. Its jaw worked and its hands flexed against its sword hilts.
On the ridge, Captain Ehren raised his blade with shaking hands. Blood ran down his arms and soaked into his sleeves. He didn’t know if it was his or something else’s.
“The ritual worked.” His voice carried across the silent battlefield. “Underhill is sealed. The fae are trapped.”
The Hell-Thorn’s head snapped toward him.
For a heartbeat, nothing moved.
Then the Hell-Thorn screamed. It raised its blades and charged.
The Nightwild Guard followed, full of fury and the desperation of animals backed into a corner. They threw themselves at the humans with everything they had left.
The Hell-Thorn tore through the ranks. Its blades moved faster than thought. Men fell in pieces. But something about its charge was different. It was slower than before. Only a fraction, but enough that when a spearman thrust at it, iron punched through the gap between shoulder and breastplate.
The Hell-Thorn staggered.
