Time dilated. Seconds had passed, but also an eternity. My court was gone. The attack had been so quick, so efficient, soplanned. The truth sank in like a stone: this was an ambush. A slaughter.
Liora. This was Liora.
The Dawnmaker. The pragmatist.
She had never intended to ally. She didn’t intend to make me bend the knee. She intended to destroy me and my entire court.
I’d been betrayed before I’d even touched the dagger. Maybe before I’d even left Highmark.
Despair flowed in. It came like water through a broken dam, cold and fast, flooding my chest until I couldn’t breathe. I had brought them here. Faun. Haskel. Finch. Mirek. Eleyrie. The handmaidens who had braided their hair this morning like it was a ceremony and not a grave. Every one of them was here because of me, because I had stood before them and said follow me and they had, they had, and now?—
Shadow fell over me like a hand across my eyes. Cold, thick, absolute. Not the absence of light—heavier, alive. The last scraps of shape and movement I’d been clinging to vanished.
The hawk had taken my sight; the black maw took what was left.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Dorian
The dawn hawk’scry pierced the daylight like a spear. Quick, intentional, deadly.
My body moved before my mind could react. Years of training had beaten it into me: if you heard the dawn hawk’s cry, you moved. You survived however you could.
That cry meant death.
I threw myself toward the armor rack, reaching for a shield?—
Something hit me from the side. Not an arrow… a body. Arms locked around my chest and weight slammed into me, bearing me down. I hit the ground hard on my back and the sky wheeled above me and there was Finch—Finch, who should have been back at Highmark, who should have been nowhere near the Killing Fields—pressed flat on top of me, his face inches from mine, his brown eyes wide and terrified and absolutely certain.
“Stay down, ser?—”
The arrows struck.
I heard them before I felt them. The wet, heavy punch of broadheads finding flesh. One. Two. A third that made Finch’s whole body jerk, that drove his forehead into my collarbone and pushed a sound out of him that I would hear for the rest of my life. Not a scream, not a cry—a breath. Small and startled, like he hadn’t expected it to hurt that much.
His fingers still gripped my armor. Tight, then tighter, then not tight at all.
Blood on my hands, my neck, my chest. Not mine. All of it not mine. It came from everywhere. His back was a ruin, a thing I couldn’t look at and couldn’t stop looking at, three shafts buried deep between his shoulder blades in a cluster so tight they could have been aimed.
They’d been meant for me. Every single one of them had been meant for me, theveyre, and he had known,he had known, and he had put himself between me and them like it was simple, like it was easy, like I was something worth dying for.
Finch’s fingers uncurled from my armor, one by one, like a decision. And then he was gone.
The arrows kept falling. One hit the ground beside my head. Another drove itself into Finch’s body. Pain pierced my calf like fire. From somewhere, a handmaiden cried out—a sickly, dying sound. Bodies dropped.
Fuck,I couldn’t move the boy. Not until the arrows stopped. Theythwickedinto the ground. They tore into the tent. They clanged off metal.
Then, they stopped.
My breath sawed in and out, suddenly loud. My calf burned like it had been split open.
Vibrations under my spine. Vibrations through the earth.
Horses’ hooves.
I pushed the two of us upright, holding Finch by the jerkin, and the world came back into brilliant view. Around me, bodies. Dead handmaidens, sprawled across the grass, arrows jutting from their bodies like needles from a pincushion. Faun lay moaning on the ground with an arrow lodged in her breast. Mirek stared dead-eyed at the Killing Fields with an arrow straight through one ear and out the other.
And Haskel. Haskel with an arrow in the thigh, halberd raised. He faced down half a dozen charging horses, all of them bedecked in summer court regalia.