Kingdom of Ash

Rock roared against rock, and Yrene braced a hand on the shuddering stones of Westfall Keep as the tower swayed. Down the hallway, people screamed, some wailing, some lunging over family members to cover them with their bodies while debris rained.

Dawn had barely broken, and the battle was already raging.

Yrene pressed herself into the stones, heart hammering, counting the breaths until the shaking stopped. The last assault, it had been six.

She got to three, mercifully.

Five days of this. Five days of this endless nightmare, with only the blackest hours of the night offering reprieve.

She had barely seen Chaol for more than a passing kiss and embrace. The first time, he’d been sporting a wound to the temple that she’d healed away. The next, he’d been leaning heavily on his cane, covered in dirt and blood, much of it not his own.

It was the black blood that had made her stomach turn. Valg. There were Valg out there. Infesting human hosts. Too many for her to cure. No, that part would come after the battle. If they survived.

Soon, too soon, the injured and dying had begun pouring in. Eretia had organized a sick bay in the great hall, and it was there that Yrene had spent most of her time. Where she’d been headed, after managing a few hours of dreamless sleep.

The tower steadied itself, and Yrene announced to no one in particular, “The ruks are still holding off the tide. Morath only fires the catapults because they cannot breach the keep walls.”

It was only partially true, but the families crouched in the hall, their bedrolls and precious few belongings with them, seemed to settle.

The ruks had indeed disabled many of the catapults that Morath had hauled here, but a few remained—just enough to hammer the keep, the city. And while the ruks might have been holding off the tide, it would not be for long.

Yrene didn’t want to know how many had fallen. She only saw the number of riders in the great hall and knew it would be too many. Eretia had ordered the injured ruks to take up residence in one of the interior courtyards, assigning five healers to oversee them, and the space was so full you could barely move through it.

Yrene hurried onward, mindful of the debris scattered on the tower stair. She’d nearly snapped her neck yesterday slipping on a piece of fallen wood.

The groans of the injured reached her long before she entered the great hall, the doors flung open to reveal row after row of soldiers, from the khaganate and Anielle alike. The healers didn’t have cots for all, so many had been laid on bedrolls. When those had run out, cloaks and blankets piled over cold stone had been used.

Not enough—not enough supplies, and not enough healers. They should have brought more from the rest of the host.

Yrene rolled up her sleeves, aiming for the wash station near the doors. Several of the children whose families sheltered in the keep had taken up the task of emptying dirty tubs and filling them with hot water every few minutes. Along with the basins by the wounded.

Yrene had balked to let children witness such bloodshed and pain, but there was no one else to do it. No one else so eager to help.

Anielle’s lord might have been a grand bastard, but its people were a brave, noble-hearted group. One that had left more of a mark on her husband than his hateful father.

Yrene scrubbed her hands, though she’d washed them before coming down here, and shook them dry. They couldn’t waste their precious few cloths on drying their hands.

Her magic had barely refilled, despite the sleep she’d gotten. She knew that if she looked to the battlements, she’d spy Chaol using his cane, perhaps even atop the battle-horse they’d outfitted with his brace. His limp had been deep when she’d last seen him, just yesterday afternoon.

He hadn’t complained, though—hadn’t asked her to stop expending her power. He’d fight whether he was standing or using the cane or the chair or a horse.

Eretia met Yrene halfway across the hall floor, her dark skin shining with sweat. “They’re bringing in a rider. Her throat’s been slashed by talons, but she’s still breathing.”

Yrene suppressed her shudder. “Poison on the talons?” So many of the Valg beasts possessed it.

“The scout who flew by to warn us of her arrival wasn’t sure.”

Yrene pulled her tool kit from the satchel at her hip, scanning the hall for a place to work on the incoming rider. Not much room—but there, by the washbasins where she’d just cleaned her hands. Enough space. “I’ll meet them at the doors.” Yrene made to hurry for the gaping entryway.

But Eretia gripped Yrene’s upper arm, her thin fingers digging gently into her skin. “You’ve rested enough?”

“Have you?” Yrene shot back. Eretia had still been here when Yrene had trudged to bed hours ago, and it seemed Eretia had either arrived well before Yrene this morning, or hadn’t left at all.

Eretia’s brown eyes narrowed. “I am not the one who needs to be careful of how much I push myself.”

Yrene knew Eretia didn’t mean in regard to Chaol and the link between their bodies.

“I know my limits,” Yrene said stiffly.

Eretia gave a knowing look to Yrene’s still-flat abdomen. “Many would not risk it at all.”

Yrene paused. “Is there a threat?”

“No, but any pregnancy, especially in the early months, is draining. That’s without the horrors of war, or using your magic to the brink every day.”

For a heartbeat, Yrene let the words settle in. “How long have you known?”

“A few weeks. My magic sensed it on you.”

Yrene swallowed. “I haven’t told Chaol.”

“I’d think if there were ever a time to do so,” the healer said, gesturing to the shuddering keep around them, “it would be now.”

Yrene knew that. She’d been trying to find a way to tell him for a while. But placing that burden on him, that worry for her safety and the safety of the life growing in her … She hadn’t wanted to distract him. To add to the fear she already knew he fought against, just in having her here, fighting beside him.

And for Chaol to know that if he fell, it would not be her life alone that now ended … She couldn’t bring herself to tell him. Not yet.

Perhaps it made her selfish, perhaps stupid, but she couldn’t. Even if the moment she’d realized it in the ship’s bathing chamber, when her cycle still had not come and she had begun counting the days, she had wept with joy. And then realized what, exactly, carrying a child during war would entail. That this war might very well be still raging, or in its final, horrible days, when she gave birth.

Yrene had decided that she’d do everything in her power to make sure it did not end with her child being born into a world of darkness.

“I’ll tell him when the time is right,” Yrene said a shade sharply.

From the open hall doors, shouts rose to “Clear the way! Clear the way for the injured!”

Eretia frowned, but rushed with Yrene to meet the townsfolk bearing an already-bloodied stretcher and the near-dead ruk rider atop it.

The horse beneath Chaol shifted but stayed firm where they stood along the lower battlements of the keep walls. Not as fine a horse as Farasha, but solid enough. A bravehearted beast who had taken well to his brace-equipped saddle, which was all he’d asked for.

Walking, Chaol knew, would not be an option when he dismounted. The strain in his spine told him enough about how hard Yrene was already working, the sun barely risen. But he could fight just as well from horseback—could lead these soldiers all the same.

Ahead, stretching too far for him to count, Erawan’s army launched at the city for another day of all-out assault on the walls.

The ruks soared, dodging arrows and spears, snatching soldiers from the ground and pulling them apart. Atop the birds, the rukhin unleashed their own torrent of fury in careful, clever passes organized by Sartaq and Nesryn.

But after five days, even the mighty ruks were slowing.

And Morath’s siege towers, which they had once easily shattered into scraps of metal and wood, were now making their way to the walls.

“Ready the men for impact,” Chaol ordered the grim-faced captain standing nearby. The captain shouted the command down the lines Chaol had gathered just before dawn.

A few bands of Morath soldiers had managed to get grappling hooks into the walls these past two days, hoisting up siege ladders and droves of soldiers with them. Chaol had cut them down, and though the warriors of Anielle had been unsure what to do with the demon-infested men who came to slay them, they’d obeyed his barked commands. Quickly staunched the flow of soldiers over the walls, severing the ties that held the ladders to them.

But the siege towers that approached … those would not be so easily dislodged. And neither would the soldiers who crossed the metal bridge that would span the tower and the keep walls.

Behind him, levels up, he knew his father watched. Had already signaled through the lantern system Sartaq had demonstrated how to use that they needed ruks to fly back—to knock the towers down.

But the ruks were making a pass at the far rear of Morath’s army, where the commanders had kept the Valg lines in order. It had been Nesryn’s idea last night: to stop going for the endless front lines and instead take out those who ordered them. Try to sow chaos and disarray.

The first siege tower neared, metal groaning as wyverns—chained to the ground and wings clipped—hauled it closer. Soldiers already lined up behind it in twin columns, ready to storm upward.

Today would hurt.

Chaol’s horse shifted beneath him again, and he patted a gauntlet-covered hand on the stallion’s armored neck. The thud of metal on metal was swallowed by the din. “Patience, friend.”

Far out, past the reach of the archers, the catapult was reloading. They’d launched a boulder only thirty minutes ago, and Chaol had ducked beneath an archway, praying the tower base it struck did not collapse.

Praying Yrene wasn’t near it.

He’d barely seen her during these days of bloodshed and exhaustion. Hadn’t had a chance to tell her what he knew. To tell her what was in his heart. He’d settled for a deep but brief kiss, and then rushed to whatever part of the battlements he’d been needed at.

Chaol drew his sword, the freshly polished metal whining as it came free of the sheath. The fingers of his other hand tightened around the handles of his shield. A ruk rider’s shield, light and meant for swift combat. The brace that held him in the saddle remained steady, its buckles secure.

The soldiers lining the battlements stirred at the nearing siege tower. The horrors inside.

“They were once men,” Chaol called, his voice carrying over the clamor of the battle beyond the keep walls, “they can still die like them.”

A few swords stopped quivering.

“You are people of Anielle,” Chaol went on, hefting his shield and angling his sword. “Let’s show them what that means.”

The siege tower slammed into the side of the keep, and the metal bridge at its uppermost level snapped down, crushing the battlement parapets beneath.

Chaol’s focus went cold and calculating.

His wife was in the keep behind him. Pregnant with their child.

He would not fail her.

A siege tower had reached the keep walls, and now unloaded soldier after soldier right into the ancient castle.

Despite the distance, Nesryn could see the chaos on the battlements. Just barely make out Chaol atop his gray horse, fighting in the thick of it.

Soaring over the army hurling arrows and spears at them, Nesryn banked left, the ruks behind her following suit.

Across the battlefield, Borte and Yeran, leading another faction of rukhin, banked right, the two groups of rukhin a mirror image swooping toward each other, then back to plow through the rear lines.

Just as Sartaq, leading a third group, slammed from the other direction.

They’d taken out two commanders, but three more remained. Not princes, thank the gods here and the thirty-six in the khaganate, but Valg all the same. Black blood coated Salkhi’s armored feathers, coated every ruk in the skies.

She’d spent hours cleaning it off Salkhi last night. All the rukhin had, not willing to risk the old blood interfering with how their feathers caught the wind.

Nesryn nocked an arrow and picked her target. Again.

The Valg commander had evaded her shot the last time. But he would not now.

Salkhi swept low, taking arrow after arrow against his breastplate, in his thick feathers and skin. Nesryn had almost vomited the first time an arrow had found its mark days ago. A lifetime ago. She now also spent hours picking them from his body each night—as if they were thorns from a prickly plant.

Sartaq had spent that time going from fire to fire, comforting those whose mounts were not so fortunate. Or soothing the ruks whose riders hadn’t lasted the day. Already, a wagon had been piled high with their sulde—awaiting the final journey home to be planted on Arundin’s barren slopes.

When Salkhi came close enough to rip several Valg off their horses and shred them apart in his talons, Nesryn fired at the commander.

She didn’t see if the shot landed.

Not as a horn cut through the din.

A cry rose from the rukhin, all glancing eastward. Toward the sea.

To where the Darghan cavalry and foot soldiers charged for the unprotected eastern flank of Morath’s army, Hasar atop her Muniqi horse, leading the khagan’s host herself.

Two armies clashed on the plain outside an ancient city, one dark and one golden.

They fought, brutal and bloody, for the long hours of the gray day.

Morath’s armies didn’t break, though. And no matter how Nesryn and the rukhin, led by Sartaq and Hasar’s orders, rallied behind their fresh troops, the Valg kept fighting.

And still Morath’s host lay between the khagan’s army and the besieged city, an ocean of darkness.

When night fell, too black for even the Valg to fight, the khagan’s army pulled back to assess. To ready for the attack at dawn.

Nesryn flew Yrene and Chaol, bloodied and exhausted, down from the again-secured keep walls, so they might join in the war council between the khagan’s royal children. All around, soldiers groaned and screamed in agony, healers led by Hafiza herself rushing to tend them before the night gave way to more fighting.

But when they reached Princess Hasar’s battle tent, when they had all gathered around a map of Anielle, they had only a few minutes of discussion before they were interrupted.

By the person Chaol least expected to walk through the flaps.