I remember. That’s what I said to Stellen when I first stood before him, shaken and heartbroken, my hair dripping, the Dragonstone Blade gripped in my fist.
The hard press of his lips softens. “Your fury was justified then, as it is justified now.” His chest rises and falls with a deep breath. “Your fury drove me then. As it will drive me now.”
With that, he presses a hard kiss to my lips. A kiss that softens. “Stay with Nara. Stay safe. You willnotjoin the fight. That is my condition.”
A condition I have no problem agreeing to. I won’t run senselessly into billowing smoke when I don’t have the power to fight it.
Stellen gives Nara a quick command to remain at a safe distance before he leaps from her back.
Landing lightly, he sprints toward the thick smoke, ice gathering around his hands, catching the light.
My belief in his strength and power is so absolute that only now do I consider the danger tohim.
In the last week, I haven’t seen any sign of the damage to his heart, but he hasn’t had to fight any battles like this, not ones that require him to use enormous amounts of power.
My heart is suddenly in my throat and I’m berating myself.
Was there an alternative? Other than to wait for the smoke to clear and collect thebodies?
Nara comes to a stop, staying in the open air, while I fight my suddenly reckless impulse to follow Stellen into the haze.
The fumes swallow him.
And then?—
Snow blasts across the air, a rippling explosion of icy powder bursting left and right.
The dark smoke parts and divides, great walls of it separated by a more powerful force.
Stellen runs through the middle, his arms outstretched, sending snowstorms to both sides as well as ahead of him.
Sparkling snowflakes dance and whirl, spiraling through the air while intense tornados of ice form, each one spinning across what I can now see are streams of blood-red oil still sliding across the snow, each stream spewing black smoke into the air.
With the clearing of darkness, I can also see eagles and wolves crouched low to the ground, and they’re…
They’re sheltering each other.
One of the eagles has its wing over a wolf, whose face is pressed to the eagle’s side, while the eagle’s beak is nestled in the wolf’s fur.
As soon as the air clears around them, the animals jolt upright. The eagle takes to the air, shooting through the clear patch and away. The wolf spears toward me and Nara, its eyes wild.
Behind them, Frost Fae and Iron Fae are hunched low, some of them still with weapons to each other’s throats while their other arms are thrown across their noses and mouths.
My heart sinks when some of them start fighting again. But lifts when others scramble for the open ground, following the stream of wolves escaping through the clear tunnel of air. Airsparkling with snowflakes.
A moment later, another eagle soars through the darkness above the nearest tower, and I expect it to land in the open ground, where it can breathe.
My brow furrows when the bird soars straight toward me, head-on.
It doesn’t slow down.
In that heartbeat, I make out something on its head, some sort of covering.
The rider’s face is also covered.
A moment later, the rider draws an iron dagger, the blade catching the light as brilliantly as the snowflakes filling the air behind him.
Nara’s menacing growl matches my own instinctive snarl.
