I would drag her into the dark with me before I let her have us. I would keep what was mine breathing—my brothers, my people.
Max.
The dragon came down hard in the center of the field, his wings throwing up a storm of ash and blood, and Max rolled off his back and found her feet. For a moment I forgot the war around me.
She stood in the wrecked field, soaked in blood—the mutants’, mostly—red and green across her fatigues, matted through her hair until the single white thread had gone green and wet. She didn’t sway. Her chin was up, her chakrams still loose in her hands, and the wild glint in those midnight eyes hadn’t faded.
The sight of her drove joy through me, bright over all the grimness and the grief.
She was glorious. She was alive.
I stepped off the high wall, dropped the long fall to the bloodied ground, and went to her.
Chapter 31
Max
The buzz of the battle still moved through the base like a current the next day, a low hum no one could shake off. It ran louder in me. I’d ridden a dragon to the front of it, fought back-to-back with Caspian while the sky came apart around us, and some part of me hadn’t fully come back down.
My demon passenger had fed me strategy beat by beat, and Coldiron had made my aim true when my hands might have shaken. But the rest was mine. Twelve years underground had hammered something into me that no academy could teach and no enemy could shake.
Without the heirs and our Spartans holding the line below while the dragon and Caspian fought for the sky, the losses would have been a slaughter. It set me worrying about the smaller forts. No wonder the heirs had stretched their elite thin across the whole Covenant. We needed more Spartans. Far more than we had.
The funeral would have to wait until the foreign delegates were gone. They arrived tomorrow. If everything broke right, if I got my sister out and got us both home, we might make it back in time to stand with the rest and say what we owed the dead.
They’d called a combat review for the first- and second-years in the grand hall. I didn’t go. Word of me riding the dragon into the swarm had gone through the whole camp by morning, and I wanted no part of standing at the center of the attention.
I wanted to see all four heirs before I left, but there wasn’t a version of tonight where I could go to all four. So I’d have to choose one.
Tomorrow Xander the Collector would arrive. Tomorrow night I’d be gone with the Nightingale team. If I didn’t come back—and there was every chance I wouldn’t—I couldn’t leave without seeing Aelindor.
I wouldn’t let a lie continue to sit between us.
I laced the skate shoes on and slipped out into the dark, speeding west toward Elenmoor.
The fortress lay hushed around me. Fires banked. Night patrols doubled, sentries paired at every wall and gate, Stormglass light catching the edges of drawn steel. A fortress struck twice didn’t sleep easy.
A few sentries marked me as I blurred past, a streak of motion in the dark, midnight hair flying loose. None of them called out. Not anymore. Not since the outpost, not since I’d carried my blades into the sky on a dragon’s back while they held the walls. Whatever I’d been when I first arrived—a witch, a curiosity, a freak, the heirs’ strange little project—I was something else to them now.
They let me pass into the dark.
I let the darkness and skates carry me west, toward him.
Chapter 32
Aelindor
Ihad been pacing for hours. The moon hung silver beyond the glass. I let it in, but it offered no comfort tonight.
The Pallid Court had thrown another wave of mutants at us two days before the delegations were due. A message, and not a subtle one.
I needed Xander to come. Everything depended on it. I could not bear to watch Max’s hope shatter.
And there was the root of my sleeplessness.
Max.
During the battle, I hadn’t been able to take to the sky. I’d had to hold the center of the fortress and watch through a Stormglass scope, its lens dragging the battle close enough that I could count every wing, every fire, every fall.