Once, they had been easy to kill.
Now they came in hordes, tireless and unafraid, closing in wave after wave. Fire killed them best, though Colsar had avoided using his breath for years. The memory of what it could do to living flesh still lingered too vividly for his liking.
But during the last months he had been forced to use it more than once, sending sheets of flame through crowds of corpses when their numbers grew too great to fight otherwise.
Even that had barely been enough. The bites were worse. Their teeth carried some foul corruption that worked slowly through the blood. The wounds did not always kill, but they left a deep sickness behind, draining strength until even standing felt like a battle.
Colsar carried many of those wounds now.
His hind legs ached with every step, several bites along the muscle already swollen and dark with infection. Two of his toes had long since gone numb, and he suspected at least one had been lost somewhere along the frozen shore weeks ago.
Hunger rode him hard, a constant pull beneath everything else. Game had grown scarce as the dead spread across the land, driving living creatures deeper into hiding, but the lack of it had not thinned him. It had only made him harder to kill.
Exhaustion pressed against him just as heavily. Six months of fighting. Six months of bleeding. Six months of chasing the faintest hope she might still be waiting.
Now, at last, he stood within sight of Alarna. The city rose across the water like something half remembered from a dream. Pale towers broke through the gray sky beyond a shimmer of light that surrounded the island in a perfect ring.
The wards.
They glowed faintly even through the drifting snow, a barrier that no outsider had ever crossed by force. Between him andthose distant walls stretched a narrow island path of ice and stone that connected the mainland to the ward line.
And every inch of it crawled with the dead.
Colsar had already tried twice through the Broken Pass. The cliffs nearly took him. The eastern shore broke beneath him as the dead rose through the ice. Both times he had been forced back. So he turned south. Through the Eastern Reach. Through what remained of Tearsar, where the roads were empty and the dead were not.
Now he stood at the last stretch that had not yet killed him.
A corpse lurched from the snow and seized his hind leg. Colsar twisted violently, tearing the creature apart with his jaws, but two more were already climbing toward him across the ice.
Their teeth found his flank. Pain flared hot through his side as he ripped himself free, blood splattering across the white ground. Another corpse lunged from behind, claws raking across his abdomen hard enough to split flesh. Something warm slid down his stomach. He looked down just long enough to see a loop of his own intestine slipping through the wound.
For a moment he simply stared. Then, with a tired grunt, he shoved it back inside. Blood bubbled up his throat when he coughed.
He lifted his head slowly and looked past the swarm of corpses toward the distant shimmer of Alarna’s wards. If he turned around now, he might still survive. He could retreat into the mountains. Wait out the winter. Wait for the war to burn itself down and the undead to thin.
He could return stronger. Later.
The thought lingered for only an instant. Because when he glanced behind him, movement stirred across the frozen valley.
Another army of the dead poured through the mist.
Thousands of them.
If he left now, he might never reach Alarna again. Colsar closed his eyes briefly as another corpse clawed at his side.
Asharin’s face rose immediately in his mind. He remembered the first time she had hidden beneath the bed in his countryside room, convinced she had escaped him entirely. The shriek she had given when he dragged her out by the ankle still echoed in his memory, bright and full of life.
He remembered the way she had laughed afterward.
Most women would have taken the king. Sevrin could give her a crown, power, protection. He was the obvious choice. But Asharin had never been obvious. Somehow, she loved him, enough to defy kings and brothers alike. She had chosen him even after her own brother beat her bloody. She had tried to stay. Tried to wait for him. Had even gone to Sevrin for help.
Beaten by her brother. Starved by his brother. The memory turned his stomach. There were so many people he still needed to kill.
He should never have left her alone. He hoped she would forgive him one day. He didn't know if he'd ever forgive himself.
Another memory surfaced then, quieter but no less real.
The maid’s whisper before he fled.She is with child.
