The next two riders appeared like ghosts from the shadows as their horses leapt the ridge. Before they could land, I raised my hands and punched forward. Two cannonballs of wind slammed the horses mid-air, knocking them backward. They hit the ridge, dropped onto their riders with flailing heads and legs.
The final two riders swung wide around the mess of horses and fae. They leapt the ridge, landed on the other side, lances lowered.
Feralis quickened my movement. I crouched, grabbed my sword, and threw myself to the ground. I rolled beneaththe first lance’s tip, came up to my feet alongside the horse. I sliced through the saddle’s girth, metal through soft leather, and the rider went tumbling behind me.
The last rider swerved toward me, lance poised. Too close, too fast. No time to think.
I raised my sword, sent feralis sweeping toward the lance. I just needed it a few degrees off course. The lance slid along the sword, the two pieces of metal screeching, and cut through the leather of my sleeve in a jag of pain. He hadn’t gotten through the arm, but he’d drawn blood.
Close. Too fucking close.
He rode on, the horse galloping by. Before he disappeared into shadow, I clenched my fist. A root shot up, grasped the horse’s back leg. With a yank of my hand, the root pulled the creature backward. Bone cracked; the horse screamed. The rider toppled over the horse’s head, got caught in the stirrup, and ragdolled back with a crack of bones.
I dropped the sword and sprinted toward him. He’d landed on his back beside the horse, so heavily armored I couldn’t see even one part of him to cut. I leapt onto him, straddling his torso, and ripped my knife from my boot. Under that armor he wore Noctere’s chain mail, every part of him safe.
Except for one.
I raised my knife, drove it through the thin eye slit of his helmet. He screamed, arms flailing, body jerking. I wondered if I’d known him. Didn’t matter; I’d stopped letting it matter a long time ago.
The knife came free, slicked with blood. He died jerking beneath me.
I rose in the shadows, to the sounds of the horses flailing around me, their riders groaning. Elsewhere, echoing through the darkness, the clanging of metal on metal. Haskel was still alive, still fighting Liora’s riders.
I had enough magic left in me to save him. First Haskel, then Eury?—
Boots clinked behind me. Ten paces away.
“You’ve just killed the man who trained you to ride.”
That voice. Like gravel in a tin can.
Gawain.
I spun, knife gripped tight. Saw nothing and no one. Of course not; he was a fae of the winter court.
“Your queen is dead, Dorian.”
My chest squeezed tight as a vise; his words were sharper than any blade. Dead, dead, dead. It rang through me, percussive and all-encompassing. Eury, dead.
No, that wasn’t true. That was a Noctere lie. It had to be. They were all fucking liars.
Theveyrethread still tugged me toward the Fields. I had to fight like she was alive.
I closed my eyes and didn’t move. Eyes were useless now. The voice came from everywhere, nowhere. Shadow magic obscured sound like mist.
“But you don’t have to be,” he murmured from the darkness. More clinking of boots. “I don’t want to kill you. I never have.”
I shifted the knife underhand. Didn’t speak, only listened. His armor was as familiar to me as my father’s voice—the clinking, the pace, the heaviness of his step. A metronome, circling me.
Clink, clink, clink.
“Dorian—”
I spun, knife raised, and slashed into the darkness.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Eurydice