Kingdom of Ash

Manon didn’t waste time arguing. Snapping Abraxos’s reins, Manon sent him flying over the city walls, his blood raining on the soldiers fighting there.

He made it to the castle battlements before his strength gave out.

Before he hit the stones and slid, the boom of impact ringing across Orynth.

He slammed into the side of the castle itself, wings limp, and Manon was instantly freeing herself from the saddle as she screamed for a healer.

The wound to his neck was so much worse than she’d thought.

And still he’d fought for her. Stayed in the skies.

Manon shoved her hands against the deep bite wound, blood rushing past her fingers like water through a cracked dam. “Help is coming,” she told him, and found her voice to be a broken rasp. “They’re coming.”

The Thirteen landed, Sorrel sprinting into the castle to no doubt drag a healer out if she had to, and then there were eleven pairs of hands on Abraxos’s neck.

Staunching the flow of his blood. Pressing as one, to keep that precious blood inside him while the healer was found.

Manon couldn’t look at them, couldn’t do anything but close her eyes and pray to the Darkness, to the Three-Faced Mother as she held her hands over the bleeding gashes.

Racing footsteps sounded over the battlement stones, and then Sorrel was there beside Manon, her hands rising to cover his wounds, too.

An older woman unpacked a kit, warning them to keep applying pressure.

Manon didn’t bother to tell her that they weren’t going anywhere. None of them were.

Even while the battle raged in the skies and on the land below.

 

Lysandra could barely draw in breath, each flap of her wings heavier than the last as she aimed for the place where she’d seen Manon Blackbeak and her coven go crashing to the castle battlements.

She’d shifted into a wyvern herself, using the chaos of the Ironteeth rebels’ arrival as a distraction, but the draining of her magic had taken its toll. And the fighting, the wounds that even she could not staunch …

Lysandra spied the two figures hauling a familiar golden-haired warrior up the castle stairs just as she hit the battlements, the witches whirling toward her.

But Lysandra willed herself to shift, forcing her body to do it one last time, to return to that human form. She’d barely finished shoving on the pants and shirt she’d stashed in a pack by the castle wall when Ren Allsbrook and a Bane soldier reached the top of the battlements, a half-conscious Aedion between them.

There was so much blood on him.

Lysandra ran for them, ignoring her deep limp, the splintering pain rippling in her left leg, in her right shoulder. Down the battlements, a healer worked on the injured Abraxos, the Thirteen, coated in his blood, now standing vigil.

“What happened?” Lysandra skidded to a halt before Aedion, who managed to lift his head to give her a grim smile.

“Valg prince,” Ren said, his own body coated in blood, face pale with exhaustion.

Oh gods.

“He didn’t walk away,” Aedion rasped.

Ren snapped, “And you didn’t rest long enough, you stupid bastard. You tore your stitches.”

Lysandra ran her hands over Aedion’s face, his brow. “Let’s get you to a healer—”

“I’ve already seen one,” Aedion grunted, setting his feet on the ground and trying to straighten. “They brought me up here to rest.” As if such a thing was a ridiculous idea.

Ren indeed unlooped Aedion’s arm from around his shoulder. “Sit down, before you fall and crack your head on the stones.” Lysandra was inclined to agree, but then Ren said, “I’m heading back to the walls.”

“Wait.”

Ren turned toward her, but Lysandra didn’t speak until the Bane soldier helped Aedion to sit against the side of the castle itself.

“Wait,” she said again to Ren when he opened his mouth, her heart thundering, nausea coiling in her gut. She whistled, and Manon Blackbeak and the Thirteen looked her way. She waved them over, her arm barking in pain.

“You’re hurt,” Aedion growled.

Lysandra ignored him as the witches stalked over, so much blood and gore on all of them.

She asked Manon, “Will Abraxos live?”

A shallow nod, the Witch-Queen’s golden eyes dull.

Lysandra didn’t have it in her for relief. Not with the news she’d flown back so desperately to deliver. She swallowed the bile in her throat, then pointed to the battlefield. To its dark, misty heart. “They have the witch tower up again. It’s moving this way. I just saw it myself. The witches have gathered atop it.”

Absolute silence.

And as if in answer, the tower erupted.

Not toward them, but skyward. A flash of light, a boom louder than thunder, and then a portion of the sky became empty.

Where Ironteeth, rebels and the faithful alike, had been fighting, where Crochans had been weaving between them, there was nothing.

Just ash.

Lysandra’s voice broke as the tower continued moving. A straight, unbreakable line toward Orynth. “They mean to blast apart the city.”

 

Hands and arms coated in Abraxos’s blood, Manon stared at the battlefield. Stared at where all those witches, Ironteeth and Crochan fighting for either army, had just … vanished.

Everything her grandmother had claimed about the witch towers was true.

And it was not Kaltain and her shadowfire that fueled that blast of destruction, but Ironteeth witches.

Young Ironteeth witches who offered themselves up. Who made the Yielding as they leaped into the mirror-lined pit within the tower.

An ordinary Yielding might take out twenty, thirty witches around her. Maybe more, if she was older and more powerful.

But a Yielding amplified by the power of those witch mirrors … One blast, and the castle looming above them would be rubble. Another blast, maybe two, and Orynth would follow it.

Ironteeth swarmed the tower, a vicious wall keeping the Crochans and rebel Ironteeth out.

A few Crochans indeed tried to break through those defenses.

Their red-clad bodies fell to the earth in pieces.

Petrah, now within the confines of her coven, even made a run for the tower. To rip it down.

They were beaten back by a swarm of Ironteeth.

The tower advanced. Closer and closer.

It would be within range soon. Another few minutes, and that tower would be close enough for its blast to reach the castle. To wipe away this army, this remnant of resistance, forever.

There would be no survivors. No second chances.

Manon turned to Asterin and said quietly, “I need another wyvern.”

Her Second only stared at her.

Manon repeated, “I need another wyvern.”

Abraxos was in no shape to fly. Wouldn’t be for hours or days.

Aedion Ashryver rasped, “No one is getting through that wall of Ironteeth.”

Manon bared her teeth. “I am.” She pointed at the shape-shifter. “You can carry me.”

Aedion snarled, “No.”

But Lysandra shook her head, sorrow and despair in her green eyes. “I can’t—the magic is drained. If I had an hour—”

“We have five minutes,” Manon snapped. She whirled to the Thirteen. “We have trained for this. To break apart enemy ranks. We can get through them. Take apart that tower.”