“You don’t understand. The Red Sentinel wants you dead. They—”
“I’ve been dead for four fucking years!”
Four years of repressed anger. Four years of anguish. Four years of torment, it all came out in a single fury-filled shout that startled birds from branches and competed with the loudest clashing steel. Frozen, Sikras clung to his scythe, unable to do anything other than stare at Benjamin with wide unmoving eyes.
“I’m sick of this stagnancy, Sikras. What is my second chance for if I continue to do nothing with it?” Benjamin wiped the blood from his blade on his cloak. “I took an oath to aid my kingdom. Our queen. Saelihn is our friend. If you want to run, then go, but I can’t sit back another four years and pretend a life of boardgames and playing music to empty rooms is worth living.”
Around them, Red Sentinels screamed. The manipulated men and women of Stow’s Peak screamed with them. Blades found flesh, bodies hit the earth, and suddenly the pain in his shoulder was secondary to that in his chest.
But who was more masterful at suppressing unwelcome feelings than Sikras ‘Catseye’ Nikabod? Wordless, he stood beside Benjamin, one hand on his scythe, the other poised to start a spell.
“What are you doing?” Benjamin asked, a sudden sheepishness in his tone.
“What’s it look like? I’m killing peasants with my brother-in-law.”
“Just like that?”
“Assuming I don’t pass out.”
“You do look horrifyingly pale,” Benjamin admitted. “And is that an arrow sticking out of your shoulder?”
Sikras faced him with a confident smirk. “A sea of arrows couldn’t stop me from standing beside you.”
A low rumbling laugh echoed from Benjamin’s jaw. “I appreciate the gesture, but maybe you should stand behind me instead.”
The snow vibrated all around them, and a wave of buried corpses emerged from beneath the blanket of white powder like seedlings—maniacal, bloodthirsty seedlings.
“How is he raising so many?” Sikras snarled, muttering the spell for shadow blades as he stepped backward to avoid the lazy swing of a half-dead woman. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“We may be outnumbered, and they may have the element of surprise”—Benjamin slashed a civilian’s torso with one fluid swing—“but we still have them bested in skill.”
Hopefully Benjamin was right. As Sikras peered across the growing number of enemies, it seemed skill was all they had in their favor. As the battle waged on, and the rolling wave of magical recoil zapped through his frame, Sikras grimaced through the pain, teeth grinding.
Any confidence of Vessik surrendering faded with each body that fell. Much as it pained him, he had to face the facts; if he had been wrong about Helspira, maybe he was wrong about Vessik too. Wherever the kindhearted version of his dear childhood friend had fallen, it was apparently too deep for Sikras to pull him back up.
Chapter Fifteen
