A fractured voice replied, a mere breath of sound. “For you, my queen.”

Then, a slight tremor against Eliana’s skin. A soundless give, as if the air had previously held a great weight, a mammoth intelligence, and now held nothing but itself.

38

   Audric

“Rise with the dawn, my brothers, my sisters, my friends! Rise with the light! With the sun at our backs, we meet our enemies without fear or despair or doubt! We know only the rage blooming bright in our hearts! The love for those we have lost! The love for the home that has been taken from us! And love for the day we know will come tomorrow, and the next, and the next, until the sun rises and looks down upon a world of peace at last!”

—A speech delivered by Saint Katell of Celdaria to the elemental troops at the Battle of the Black Stars

Audric rode Atheria to the highest slopes of Mount Cibelline and stood in the quiet, thin air, watching the horizon. From such a height, the puny watchtower flames seemed laughable. Beyond them churned a relentless black sea—the angelic army, scattered with white starbursts of light that hovered and glided and sometimes soared.

Audric knew what those lights meant. He had read every account of the Angelic Wars he could find. He had seen the illustrations in his books and had drawn his own sketches when he was young. Angels in flight, wings of light and shadow carrying them past mountaintops and into the clouds. They could glide through an army and leave dozens of glassy-eyed, empty-minded soldiers in their wake.

Rielle had given them bodies, which was no surprise. But it seemed she had also given some of them wings.

Audric watched the distant angels fly until he could no longer stand on his own. He turned to Atheria and leaned hard against her, his knees unsteady. She watched the horizon, ears flat and teeth bared. She snapped her tail as if longing to whip it at someone.

He breathed hard and fast against her coat. When he returned to Baingarde, he would be not only a king but a commander. He would show no fear. He would neither balk nor cower.

But on Cibelline, sheltered by the ancient whispering pines, he clung to Atheria, seeking anchor in a storm. She covered him with her wing, and he gladly hid beneath it. Long moments passed. On the mountain, the world was quiet. A few bird calls, a whistle of wind. No marching boots, no crackle of elemental energy, no clank of angelic armor.

Evyline and the Sun Guard were waiting for him in the grid of armory courtyards. He would dress soon, and he would need their help to fasten the plates of his armor, secure his cloak of emerald green, violet, and amber.

And then, he would need to face this. Face her. He would need to show himself before his army, and the Mazabatian troops, and the elemental regiments sent from the temples, and somehow rally them to face their inevitable doom. How many thousands could they claim? And how many more could Corien?

He wrenched himself from the solid warmth of Atheria’s belly and climbed clumsily onto her back. Even kneeling, she towered, and he was too shaky for grace. He huddled there between her wings, then climbed off and tried again, and again, until he had shaken the nerves from his skin and could swing easily onto her broad back.

Long weeks ago, they had ridden out to meet the eye of a storm.

A storm, an army—one was not so different from the other.

He held the lie in his mind as Atheria shot down the slopes, swift and silent over the treetops. These were his last moments of peace. He knew somehow that he would never again be able to breathe without also drawing a sword or watching a soldier sworn to him cut down by an angelic blade.

As Atheria rode the wind, Audric tried once more to reach for Ludivine. Surely she would not leave him to this. She would reappear at the last moment with some great piece of information or brilliant strategy, or with Rielle on her arm. Ludivine, triumphant. Rielle, bright-eyed and giddy with relief to be home at last.

An embarrassing thing to imagine, like a child spinning fantasies.

Audric set his jaw. Ludivine? Are you there?

But she didn’t answer. In a city of thousands, in a country of millions, he was utterly, irrevocably alone.

• • •

It was night when he faced his soldiers. Ten thousand troops, mounted and on foot. Armored and cloaked, swords at their hips and castings aglow with waiting power. Metal bands and daggers, tridents and spears, shields and hammers, all scattering the city with light.

Throughout Âme de la Terre, those who had not fled the city, too young or old or weak to take up arms, gathered on rooftops and crowded at windows for a chance to see him and Atheria as they passed through the city on their way to the Flats.

The ground shook with the marching footsteps of the enemy, a storm unlike any that had ever darkened the sky. Soon, the angelic armies would breach the mountains. Earthshakers had been working for weeks to bolster the mountains themselves as a defense, blocking passes with avalanches, cutting through solid rock to create canyons, sheer cliffs, mazes of rock. The winged angels would be able to fly over such obstacles, the stolen elemental children would perhaps manage to flatten them, but his earthshakers were stationed at the pass, ready to reinforce the barriers as needed. He hoped this war of stone would slow the angels’ progress. Even the broad, sloping pass between Mount Taléa and Mount Sorenne, a huge gap in the encircling mountains, had been fortified. Audric glanced at the pass as Atheria flew. Almost two years ago, Audric had nearly died there during the Boon Chase. It was strange to recall a time when Borsvall was the enemy rather than a desperate ally. Even stranger to remember the chaos of that day—the earth flying apart around him, swift tongues of fire streaking across the Flats toward the city.

Rielle, wild with fear and glorious in her rage, tearing apart the world to save him.

He drew a breath and urged Atheria out onto the Flats, where his armies waited in orderly ranks. Archers, foot soldiers with pikes and spears, elementals holding fire and wind in the palms of their hands. They had erected a towering stone wall around the city proper, twenty feet thick and two hundred feet high. Archers and elementals were stationed atop them, arrows at the ready and fists crackling with power. Once the army had marched onto the Flats, earthshakers had demolished the city bridges spanning the lake that bordered most of the city. Now, the water gleamed unadorned, a deep and broad expanse curving around from one side of Mount Cibelline’s foothills to the other. If the angels managed to both traverse the lake and breach the wall, they would meet the second army—another thousand soldiers and elementals, ready to defend the streets of their city.

Audric’s traitorous mind fixed on the thought that it was not a matter of whether the angels would breach the wall. It was a matter of when. There was no hope of defeating the army marching on them. Not all of the angels had wings, but his surviving scouts had told him about the beasts among the angelic ranks—perverse creations, mutilated and malformed, just as Kamayin’s spy had reported. Elemental children rode atop these creatures, gray-eyed and deadly, their castings bound to the beasts’ forged armor. Monsters unholy, one of the scouts had called them before he burst into hysterical tears on his knees before Audric’s desk. Beasts in flaming armor. Children who stamped apart the earth without flinching.