Audric turned away from the sight of his people fleeing in terror. These streets had been their home. Now, they burned with the fires of war.

“Help them get out,” he said hoarsely. “Take them south, help them hide. As many as you can.”

Obritsa did not hesitate. She exchanged a sharp look with the pale woman, the other marque. Immediately, they summoned threads, waited for Artem and the woman with northern braids to hurry through, and followed soon after. The rings of light snapped closed.

Audric went to Atheria. He held her long face in his hands, pressed his brow against her velvet snout.

“You can do more good out there than you can with me,” he told her quietly.

For a moment, she was still. Her ageless black eyes watched him gravely. Then she snorted and stepped away from him. Her wings brushed like silk against his cheek. She launched herself into the air and flew fast for the battlefield. She gave a sharp cry, hawk-like and terrible, as she disappeared over the wall.

Audric turned away, blinking hard, and faced the castle. No more words were said. None were needed. Miren and Sloane on his right, and Kamayin, Evyline, and the two Sun Guards on his left—Fara, he was pleased to see, and Maylis, two of Rielle’s favorites.

Together, they raced through the city. Audric stifled his power, kept Illumenor dim. For now, he would let the others fight for him. Eyes focused on the streets ahead, he heard the crash of his friends’ magic, the whip of their swords.

He was, perhaps, running to meet his doom.

But he would not meet it alone.

43

   Eliana

“Feel the earth beneath your feet

and the wind that moves the trees

See the shadows shift across the fields,

the tide that pulls the seas

Hear the whip of metal forged in prayer

The crack and spit of flame

Watch the sun climb up the sky and burn—

A fire no sword can tame!”

—“The Glory of the Seven,” traditional Celdarian war hymn

Bodies marked the path toward the city of Âme de la Terre. Armored bodies abandoned by their angels. Adatrox, disposable infantry, their armor crude and their faces frozen in expressions of horror. Steaming elementals, their magic slower to die than their bodies. Horses and archers, and the beasts that fought for the angels, creatures that looked like perverse imitations of the cruciata Eliana knew.

Many more still lived. They fought on foot on the battlefield wet with mud and blood, crashed together in the air. And hundreds, perhaps more than a thousand, flooded the city in churning waves of hide and steel. The defensive wall had fallen, its thick stone bashed clean through.

Eliana raced to join them, Remy at her side. They used the fallen as shelters, running from corpse to corpse. At each one, they knelt, watching for a break in the fight, then ran on, slipping on the slick, trampled ground. A dragon swooped by, chasing after a pack of beasts that scrambled toward the wall. The dragon’s mighty wings turned the air to thunder, knocking Eliana and Remy to the ground.

Remy, his face splattered with mud, stared after the dragon. Eliana let him stare as she ripped helmets from two angelic bodies lying nearby. She shoved hers on, trying not to gag from the vile scents coating the helmet, the ground, herself.

Eliana tugged on Remy’s arm, yanked him up, shoved the second helmet at him. They ran. At the wall, they didn’t hesitate. Hesitation would draw angelic eyes. They brandished their weapons—the sword Remy had retrieved from a fallen adatrox, and Katell’s sword, dimmed to look like any other weapon. Eliana gritted her teeth as they joined the angelic companies streaming through the shattered stone. Beside her, Remy mimicked their battle cries. Eliana didn’t dare. She bore down hard on every muscle in her body. The air was ripe with magic, the empirium wide awake and watching. Her bones ached with the effort of stifling her castings, ensuring Katell’s sword stayed dark.

She ducked the swinging blade of a young, wide-eyed soldier—not an angel but a human, trying in vain to defend his city. He was clumsy; she pushed past him easily and tripped him with her sword.

They were through the doors, clambering across a plaza that was perhaps, in times of peace, a sprawling marketplace. Now, it was chaos. Beasts scrambled up the walls of buildings; gray-eyed adatrox marched up the plaza’s wide stairs and poured into the narrower neighborhood streets. Angels with bright wings punched through high windows and dove inside.

Eliana glanced up toward the mountain that loomed over the city. At its base was Baingarde, now marked by a pair of enormous golden wings half as large as the castle itself. Whenever Eliana looked at them, her blood surged dangerously, and she had to clench her fists tighter to keep her castings from bursting to life.

There was no question of who had made those wings or how desperately Eliana’s power wanted her to reach them.

Remy panted as they ran, his helmet painted with fresh blood. When they reached a swarming intersection on the city’s second level, he darted behind a large square pillar, pulled off the helmet, and tossed it toward a doorway of arched stone where a gate stood smashed open, its ruined ironwork half-melted and sizzling. The helmet rolled across the path of two girls running hand-in-hand. Even the shadows teemed with people desperate for escape. One of the girls jumped over the helmet and screamed. The other yanked on her arm, let out a harsh sob. They ran on.

“I had to kill a child to get through the wall,” Remy said dully, watching them flee. His fists opened and shut. “Some idiot boy with no armor and a knife as big as his face. He wouldn’t get out of the way.”

Eliana couldn’t find the words to comfort him. Her throat closed in anguish; the air was hot and rotten with death. She pressed herself flat against the pillar and looked past it at the carnage beyond.

People of the city, arms laden with wailing children, tore screaming through the streets. They fled toward the castle, for it was the only place left to run. Angelic troops marched relentlessly up from the city’s lower neighborhoods. They unleashed arrows; they charged with swords raised high. Dozens of citizens fell, though no weapon had hit them. They dropped like shot birds from the sky, rolled down the stairs, knocked others off their feet.

A company of elementals in robes of charcoal and orange, scarlet and gold, rushed out from a side road, planted themselves between the angels and the fleeing humans. Fire snapped from their gleaming shields. Abandoned weapons flew up from the ground and whipped through the air at the angelic troops, slicing open necks.

Eliana searched for the best route to the castle. But every street and alleyway, every set of stairs and parapet seemed to crawl with more enemies by the second. A dark beastly shape jumped from rooftop to rooftop, then slithered down a wall and barreled into a crowd of people rushing toward a building for shelter.