The buzzing flies and screaming survivors had long since replaced the beating war-drums.
The killing field was now a tangled sprawl of corpses, human and faerie alike, interrupted only by broken wings jutting toward the gray sky or the occasional bulk of a felled horse.
With the heat, despite the heavy cloud cover, the smell would soon be unbearable. Flies already crawled along eyes gazing unblinkingly upward. They didn’t differentiate between mortal and immortal flesh.
I picked my way across the once-grassy plain, marking the banners half-buried in mud and gore. It took most of my lingering strength to keep my wings from dragging over corpse and armor. My own power had been depleted well before the carnage had stopped.
I’d spent the final hours fighting as the mortals beside me had: with sword and fist and brute, unrelenting focus. We’d held the lines against Ravennia’s legions—hour after hour, we’d held the lines, as I had been ordered to do by my father, as I knew I must do. To falter here would have been the killing blow to our already-sundering resistance.
The keep looming at my back was too valuable to be yielded to the Loyalists. Not just for its location in the heart of the continent, but for the supplies it guarded. For the forges that smoldered day and night on its western side, toiling to stock our forces.
The smoke of those forges now blended with the pyres already being kindled behind me as I kept walking, scanning the faces of the dead. I made a note to dispatch any soldiers who could stomach it to claim weapons from either army. We needed them too desperately to bother with honor. Especially since the other side did not bother with it at all.𝘙𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘨𝘰𝘰𝘥𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯.𝘤𝘰𝘮
So still—the battlefield was so still, compared with the slaughter and chaos that had finally halted hours ago. The Loyalist army had retreated rather than surrender, leaving their dead for the crows.
I edged around a fallen bay gelding, the beautiful beast’s eyes still wide with terror, flies crusting his bloodied flank. The rider was twisted beneath it, the man’s head partially severed. Not from a sword blow. No, those brutal gashes were claws.
They wouldn’t yield easily. The kingdoms and territories that wanted their human slaves would not lose this war unless they had no other choice. And even then … We’d learned the hard way, very early on, that they had no regard for the ancient rules and rites of battle. And for the Fae territories that fought beside mortal warriors … We were to be stomped out like vermin.
I waved away a fly that buzzed in my ear, my hand caked with blood both my own and foreign.
I’d always thought death would be some sort of peaceful homecoming—a sweet, sad lullaby to usher me into whatever waited afterward.
I crunched down with an armored boot on the flagpole of a Loyalist standard-bearer, smearing red mud across the tusked boar embroidered on its emerald flag.
I now wondered if the lullaby of death was not a lovely song, but the droning of flies. If flies and maggots were all Death’s handmaidens.
The battlefield stretched toward the horizon in every direction save the keep at my back.
Three days, we had held them off; three days, we had fought and died here.
But we’d held the lines. Again and again, I’d rallied human and faerie, had refused to let the Loyalists break through, even when they’d hammered our vulnerable right flank with fresh troops on the second day.
I’d used my power until it was nothing but smoke in my veins, and then I’d used my Illyrian training until swinging my shield and sword was all I knew, all I could manage against the hordes.
A half-shredded Illyrian wing jutted from a cluster of High Fae corpses, as if it had taken all six of them to bring the warrior down. As if he’d taken them all out with him.
My heartbeat pounded through my battered body as I hauled away the piled corpses.
Reinforcements had arrived at dawn on the third and final day, sent by my father after my plea for aid. I had been too lost in battle-rage to note who they were beyond an Illyrian unit, especially when so many had been wielding Siphons.
But in the hours since they’d saved our asses and turned the tide of the battle, I had not spotted either of my brothers amongst the living. Did not know if Cassian or Azriel had even fought on the plain.
The latter was unlikely, as my father kept him close for spying, but Cassian … Cassian could have been reassigned. I wouldn’t have put it past my father to shift Cassian to a unit most likely to be slaughtered. As this one had been, barely half limping off the battlefield earlier.
My aching, bloodied fingers dug into dented armor and clammy, stiff flesh as I heaved away the last of the High Fae corpses piled atop the fallen Illyrian soldier.
The dark hair, the golden-brown skin … The same as Cassian’s.
But it was not Cassian’s death-gray face that gaped at the sky.
My breath whooshed from me, my lungs still raw from roaring, my lips dry and chapped.
I needed water—badly. But nearby, another set of Illyrian wings poked up from the piled dead.
I stumbled and lurched toward it, letting my mind drift someplace dark and quiet while I righted the twisted neck to peer at the face beneath the simple helm.
Not him.
I picked my way through the corpses to another Illyrian.
Then another. And another.
Some I knew. Some I didn’t. Still the killing field stretched onward under the sky.
Mile after mile. A kingdom of the rotting dead.
And still I looked.
