“Your murderous tyrant of a father missed one,” Talasyn spat at Alaric, and she surged up on her toes and—
—slammed her forehead into his.
Splinters of white-hot pain exploded across her vision. Amidst them, she saw the Kesathese prince recoil, the inky scythe vanishing from his grasp, his gauntleted hand coming up to nurse what she dearly hoped was a crack in his skull.
But she didn’t stay to find out. She reshaped the morningstar flail back into a dagger and plunged it clean through his shoulder and he let out a grunt. She whirled around, the radiant blade disappearing, and she ran—through her splitting headache, over the ice floes, through the moonlight, toward the trees.
Not once did she look back, afraid of what she might find.
Chapter Three
The mournful wail of a horn rang throughout the mountain just as Talasyn plunged into a thicket of longleaf pine and bramble. It was the signal to retreat, and she changed course, heading not for the city proper but the docks. With a bruised and blood-streaked face and cuts on her arms, a padded coat soaked through with sweat, and ears ringing from echoes of adrenaline and injury, she broke past the treeline.
The evening sky was tinted arterial red by the smoldering inferno of Frostplum’s remains. The great wooden carracks of the Sardovian Allfold unfurled their sails in the smoke-ridden breeze before her, their bilges already several feet above the ground while long rope ladders spilled from the sides of the decks. Fleeing soldiers and cityfolk were swarming up them like ants. Talasyn quickened her pace in the direction of the largest of the carracks, the Summerwind, and she clambered up the first rope ladder that she came to, engulfed by a mixture of relief and foreboding.
Her comrades hadn’t left her behind yet, but they were leaving, effectively ceding more ground to the Night Empire. Ground that they couldn’t afford to lose.
Talasyn landed on the deck on her hands and knees. It was chaos. People were rushing about; healers were tending to grisly wounds. Talasyn could only tell the soldiers from everyone else by patches of uniform amid the soot, grime, and blood.
The rope ladders were retracted as the carrack set sail over the snow-laden Highlands on emerald clouds of wind magic. Talasyn gazed upon Frostplum, its burning rooftops and broken walls growing ever smaller with distance. She turned, unable to keep looking at what was left of the place where they’d found a moment of peace and happiness, and she stopped dead as her gaze fell on a couple several feet away. And what was left of her world was pulled out from under her.
Huddled against the bulkhead, Khaede held Sol’s limp form in her arms, his head pillowed on her lap. Both their clothes were spattered with his blood, pouring out of a gaping hole in his chest. A crimson-drenched crossbow bolt lay across the wooden planks.
Talasyn knew, even before she walked over on unsteady legs, that Sol was gone. His blue-black eyes stared up at the heavens, unblinking. Tears streamed down Khaede’s cheeks as she stroked his dark hair, the wedding band that he’d slipped onto her finger only a few hours ago gleaming in a tangle of moonbeams and lamplight.
“He almost made it,” Khaede whispered once she realized that Talasyn had sat beside her. “Our wasps crash-landed and we fought our way to the docks. We went up the ladder—he made me go first—and when I turned around to help him climb over onto the deck, there was that”—she nodded jerkily at the crossbow bolt—“that thing sticking out of his chest. It happened so fast. I didn’t even see it actually happen. I . . .”
Khaede took a deep, shuddering breath. She fell silent, not so much as sniffling, although her tears continued to flow. Her hand dropped over Sol’s heart and stayed there, beside where the Kesathese bowman had hit true, her fingers running all the redder from his fatal wound.
Talasyn was at a loss what to do. She knew Khaede was the type of person who despised what she considered pity, who would brutally rebuff any attempt at comfort. Talasyn couldn’t even cry for Sol because her early years on the Great Steppe had dulled the part of her that wept, long before the Hurricane Wars. She had considered this a good thing in its own way—if she cried for everyone who fell in battle, she’d never be stopping—but now, looking at Sol’s lifeless body, remembering the kind smiles and good-natured jokes, remembering how happy he’d made her friend, her numbness sickened her. Surely he deserved the tears that she was too exhausted to give?
Her gaze strayed to Khaede’s midsection, and bile surged up her throat. “You have to tell Vela that you’re pregnant. So she can pull you off active duty.”
“I’m fighting until I can’t,” Khaede interrupted in a low growl. “Don’t you dare tell her, either. I’m the best helmsman in the Allfold. You need me.” The hand that wasn’t on Sol’s unmoving chest touched her stomach. “The baby will be all right.” Her bottom lip quivered before she pressed her mouth into a taut, resolute line. “They’re strong like their father.”
The mixture of sorrow and defiance on the other woman’s face made Talasyn decide to let it go. Now wasn’t the time. Instead, she looked around the busy decks for any sign of the cleric who had officiated at the wedding—only to see pale yellow robes peeking out from a makeshift shroud draped over a still, supine form.
She would have to do it, then. As she’d done for others on battlefields all across the Continent, when they’d been too far from god-shrines and healing houses.
Talasyn leaned over Sol and gently closed his sightless eyes, his skin devoid of life’s warmth beneath her fingertips. “May your soul find shelter in the willows,” she murmured, “until all lands sink beneath the Eversea and we meet again.”
Beside her, Khaede drew another harsh breath, one that was almost a sob. The carrack flew on, over the mountains and the valleys, on the oars of winter and of starlight.
“Why didn’t Kesath bring in a stormship?”
Talasyn’s question broke the tense silence that had settled over the Amirante’s office after her debriefing. She’d helped wrap Sol in a shroud and gotten Khaede settled in a spare berth half an hour ago. Now she was seated across from Vela, her damp and singed outerwear traded for a blanket draped over her cotton-clad shoulders.
“Given the terrain and the existing conditions, adding more weather would have been disastrous for all parties involved. Avalanches tend to put quite the damper on morale.” Vela spoke with calm authority from behind her desk. “Not to mention that, with Frostplum’s small size relative to cities on the plains or the coasts, the rate of civilian and allied casualties would have been too high.”
“That’s why we didn’t bring in a stormship,” Talasyn pointed out.
“Quite so.” A hint of a sardonic smile darted across the Amirante’s weathered bronze features. One of the Legion had gouged out her left eye the year before, and in its place was an intricately carved patch of copper and steel that only added to the redoubtable figure she cut among her troops. “In Kesath’s case, I suspect that they believed they didn’t need one to win. I also suspect that they were content to merely run us off instead of giving chase because they’d gotten what they came for.”