“Hold on,” I tell Isla.
She grips the bone spike in front of her with both hands.
Other shifterfae emerge from two other directions. They pour in from the east, a second column of hy-weres and smaller, faster creatures. From the west, more still. Lean, catlike things the size of ponies, running in pairs. Behind them, large boars covered in armored plates, their tusks as long as my forearm.
As we draw closer, the dragons move in. They descend from the sky in a broad, wheeling spiral, and what little muted light remains vanishes behind the span of their wings.
A wave of white erupts from the icefae line. It tears across the open ground, turning the mud into frozen shards that shatter and reform, then shatter again. Snow fills the air, not the gentle kind that drifts from winter skies, but hard, biting flakes driven sideways with enough force to strip skin.
The shifterfae hit the ice line like a battering ram.
Isla cries out as the first wave of hy-weres crashes into the icefae shields, and the sound is like nothing I’ve heard in my life.
Metal shrieks. Bones snap. Bodies go flying, tumbling across the frozen mud in tangles of fur and armor.
It’s red and white as blood runs.
“Goddess help us,” Isla whispers.
A dragon drops from above, raking its talons across a cluster of icefae guards, scattering them like straw dolls. Another dragon opens its jaws and unleashes a torrent of fire that meets a wall of ice midair. The collision produces a deafening crack and a cloud of steam that billows fifty feet in every direction.
The battle swallows us whole.
To my dismay, our thornback charges straight into the thick of it, and suddenly we’re in the middle of a slaughter. Hy-weres tear through icefae soldiers with tooth and claw. The six-legged serpent creatures coil around armored guards and crush them. The catlike shifterfae dart between the larger combatants, using fang and claw.
But the guards fight back hard. A shifterfae takes an ice shard through the throat and goes down screaming, its blood steaming on the frozen ground. Two hy-weres charge a particularly powerful icefae guard, and he raises both hands, turning the moisture in the air around them into a cage of interlocking ice spikes. They’re impaled where they stand.
Blood runs like water. The coppery scent fills the air.
Isla is silent, but her breath comes in hard pants.
The ground is churned into a mess of mud and ice and blood. There’s roaring, screaming, the crash of magic, and the wet thud of bodies hitting earth.
Isla elbows me and points. “Look.”
I turn toward the carriage, to where the top of the ice is beginning to melt from within. The frozen walls soften and run like candle wax: the spires collapsing in on themselves. But the ice doesn’t puddle and drain away. It reforms. Reshaping, restructuring, pulling itself into something new. The enclosed carriage dissolves, becoming open, the sides dropping away to reveal the interior. It’s been drawn by ten white steeds, their coats so pale they seem to glow. Their manes stream behindthem, untouched by the filth of the battlefield. They stamp and toss their heads.
And standing in the center of the open carriage, with magic twisting around her in ribbons of pale blue and white, is Snow.
She’s beautiful.
That’s what hits me first, and I hate myself for thinking it. Her hair is as dark as a raven’s wing, falling past her shoulders in waves that the wind catches and lifts. Her skin is porcelain white, flawless, untouched by sun or age or hardship. Her eyes are the blue of a winter sky just before the light dies. She wears a gown of silver and frost that moves around her as if it’s alive, shifting and glittering with every turn of her body.
She is the most exquisite creature I have ever laid eyes on, but she radiates wrongness. It comes off her in waves. A cold that has nothing to do with temperature. A beauty that sits on top of something rotten, like gilt paint over a coffin.
Her lips curve. She looks out over the battlefield the way a child might look at insects drowning in a rain puddle.
The dragons hit her guard line again. Two of them dive in tandem, their combined fire turning an entire section of the icefae defense to steam and rubble. Shifterfae pour through the gap, and for a moment, it looks like the icefae line will collapse entirely.
Snow lifts one hand.
A wall of ice explodes from the ground, twenty feet high and stretching the full width of the gap. Three shifterfae that were mid-charge slam into it and don’t get back up. The ice holds for two heartbeats, then shatters outward in a hail of frozen shrapnel that cuts through everyone in its path, both icefae and shifterfae alike.
I try to shield Isla, even though her attack is away from us.
“Gods,” Isla shouts, turning and burying her head in my chest for a moment.
Our thornback has carried us dangerously close to the fight. We’re no longer at the rear of the formation. The tide of battle has shifted the lines, and we’re in the thick of it now. An icefae soldier lunges at our mount with a spear. The thornback swats him aside with a swing of its armored head, sending the guard spinning through the air. Another comes at us from the right.
