Sira circles him, her vaporous skirt casting shadows across his face. “Oh yes, all those decades of your life out here in the cold and wind and barren solitude. Such a waste. Your plans…overrun in a matter of minutes.”
“Not while I still live!” Irahn roars, then charges her with an arcing swing. She whips past him, his sword catching the edges of her shadows. Again, he surges at her with a series of strikes. But she’s as fast as a blinking star.
Irahn backs up, hitting the flagpole. The ten-foot pike shakes, but the flag never wavers. It continues its valiant flapping, bearing the sigil of Winter. My sigil.
I’m thrust up in the air by Rosalina’s briars. My sword comes down, catching an underfae right at the neck, severing arteries. My feet find purchase again, muscles straining as I run. Almost there. I’m almost at him.
Irahn yells as he thrusts out with his sword. Sira whips around him, switching places. Irahn’s back is now to the guard tower. Sira’s like a damned phantom. There’s no fighting her with a blade.
At least not a normal blade.
I look down at the Sword of the Protector, this divine weapon forged with holy ore of the Above. Sira is darkness and shadow and a void where things go to die. This blade was made to save the Vale.
I’m going to start by saving the best man in it.
Beside me, Rosalina’s fallen behind, blocked by a spear-wielding underfae. She shouts at me to keep running, then shoots out another briar, wrapping around my waist and boosting me forward. I draw the sword over my head, so close to Sira now. I see her pale neck?—
Sira grabs the flagpole. With a horriblesnap, she breaks it off near the base, then admires the sharpened wooden point.
“Goodbye, warden,” Sira rasps. “Winter will fall. Die, knowing your entire life was a waste.”
“No!” I scream.
Sira rams the sharp point of the flagpole through my uncle’s chest. His final breaths whip into the wind, carrying the hope of Winter with them.
36
Rosalina
Ascream breaks out of my throat. The underfae blocking myway dies before he raises his spear. My briars act of their own accord, wrapping around his neck and twisting until it snaps. I leap over his dead body.
Irahn wheezes, clutching at the wooden pike in his chest. Sira lifts him up with inhumane strength, laughing as he slides farther down the pole. Blood spurts from his mouth. With a grunt, she shoves the pike up against the bridge house’s stone wall, making Irahn hang like a horrifying puppet.
Kel’s roar is pure rage. He slams to the ground from the boosted leap my briars gave him, then immediately stands, sword drawn to attack. But there are so many underfae. They swarm him, and it’s all he can do to keep their blades away from him. But I see the wrath in his eyes. One underfae falls beneath his blade. Then a second.
Even these trained warriors are no match for the Sword of the Protector wielded with such unchained fury.
I feel it growing in myself. I’m not sure if it’s Kel’s emotions seeping through the bond or my own, but a crazed buzzing fillsmy head. Sira thinks she’s unstoppable. Thinks she can keep taking what isours.
I am the fucking Princess of the Enchanted Vale.
This is myhome. Myfamily.
She will die for this. Die screaming for all the pain she’s brought me.
A roar of my own escapes, and I charge her like a lioness uncaged. My briars stab through the rib cage of one of the underfae attacking Kel, then snap the neck of another. I’ve never fought this way, never killed creatures that seem so human.
But I don’t care. Theydeserveto die. All of them!
Kel and I stand, chests heaving, amid a pile of corpses. We look up at Sira, matching gazes of fire.
Sira has the good fucking sense to back up.
A shape emerges from behind her. Straight-backed, hand on the hilt of his undrawn sword, Faustrius appears as if he’s observing a painting, not standing in the midst of a battle.
“It looks like things are under control here, Faustrius,” Sira says. “I shall leave the rest of the Deep Guard’s destruction in your capable hands.”
The shadows covering her legs, making her appear the height of a giantess, swirl around her, claiming her torso and arms. No. No, no, no. She’s running away!
