My dagger. Good enough. I grabbed it and managed to get to my feet. Atrius was already yanking his sword from the throat of his attacker. He turned to me for a moment, then his eyes widened as he grabbed me and skillfully drove his blade through another soldier’s gut, seconds before they would have been on me.
Weaver, I didn’t even sense it. How did I not sense that?
“Stay with me,” Atrius ground out. “Right here.”
A command. Firm and inarguable.
I couldn’t even take issue with his tone. I was mostly blind. Staying with Atrius was my only chance of making it out of this alive.
I could barely make out what was happening around us, but I knew that it was chaos. Soldiers—the Pythora King’s?—poured from the forest, mingling with Atrius’s in a chaotic, bloody mess. Atrius’s men were outnumbered, and I had no way of knowing how many of them might have been injured or killed with the initial round of explosives.
They were everywhere. Everywhere at once.
Atrius fought like an animal, like a force of nature. I couldn’t track his movements. Couldn’t even track my own.
And yet, when I finally managed to grasp onto a thread, it was that of a Pythora soldier—a soldier lunging for Atrius’s back.
I acted before I thought. Something I had been scolded for countless times in the Arachessen—an impulse I’d thought I’d ground out of myself.
Apparently not. Because when I saw that blade coming for Atrius, I simply moved.
It was clumsy. A bad shot. I could barely grasp my surroundings.
My dagger made contact with our attacker’s flesh somewhere—I couldn’t even tell where—but seconds later, nothing existed but pain.
It’s a strange feeling, when your body suddenly stopped obeying you. Mine was a tool I’d learned to wield to perfection.
Until, all at once, it wasn’t.
Distantly, as if in another world, I heard Atrius shout something—my name?
My palms were pressed to the dirt. I tried to get up. Failed. My hand went to my abdomen and felt warm blood bubbling between my fingers.
Shit.
I crawled over the sand, groping for my weapon. I couldn’t feel the threads. Couldn’t orient myself.
When I managed to grasp them, I sensed—
Sensed—
Atrius, standing over my attacker, hacking into him brutally, strike after unforgiving strike, long after flesh was beaten down into formless gore.
All around us, there was death. Death everywhere.
And yet when Atrius abandoned his very, very dead target and whirled around, he wasn’t looking at any of that—not his own warriors or the people he had lost.
Only me.
His presence was an anchor. I held onto it tight, like a raft in a stormy sea.
But I was slipping.
Atrius fell to his knees beside me. When he pressed his hands to my wound, it took me a moment to realize the keening whimper I was hearing was mine.
He let out a wordless sound through his teeth.
My brow furrowed.
Surely I was hallucinating, to think that Atrius’s presence, forever unbreakable, forever solid, forever silent, was now screaming—screaming in utter terror.
Over me.
Ridiculous.
I had the strange urge to tell him this, the way as a child I always wanted to tell my brother amusing or outlandish things, but when I opened my mouth, I felt as if liquid was flowing into my lungs.
Warmth surrounded me. It took me several long seconds of half-consciousness to realize Atrius had lifted me. The sound of the battle fell into a distant, fuzzy din.
“Sylina,” Atrius was saying to me. “Stay right here. Stay right here.”
And then, closer to my ear, “Vivi. Stay right here.”
Stop shouting at me, I’m trying, I wanted to tell him.
But I was falling farther and farther from the threads.
The last thing I heard was Atrius’s voice, screaming so loud it cracked, hurling three words of Obitraen to his men over the sound of the battlefield.
It was in Obitraen, and yet somehow I knew exactly what he was saying: Kill them all.
My fingers tightened around Atrius’s shirt fabric. A sudden wave of anger rolled over me.
In my fading consciousness, I thought of another explosion barely survived by a nine-year-old girl.
I thought of civilians thrust into tunnels to be used as human shields for a cowardly warlord.
I thought of my brother, once a teenager, now a man, sentenced to a slow inevitable death.
I thought of innocent vampire children hanging from trees.
I thought of the fucking Pythora King.
And I thought, Yes. Kill them all.
And I did not think of the Arachessen, or the Sightmother, or the blessed dagger—or Acaeja at all.