CHAPTER 22: TWENTY TWO

"Fall back!" the Prince roars again and again.

All around me, bodies fall. Spears splitting skulls, arrows ripping bellies, heads rolling. Blood paints the snow faster than I can blink. And the Lycans haven’t even reached us yet. They give chase, swift and merciless, cutting down the stragglers as we race back towards Velryric’s gate.

Velryric’s impossibly high walls might give us a fighting chance to reform and make a stand.

If we ever get there.

My ear perks and I turn just in time to miss an arrow meant for my head. It cuts my cheek instead and flies past, ripping into Thadius’ skull.

He’s dead before he even hits the ground.

A soundless scream tears from my throat as my horse gets speared beneath me. I am thrown hard into the ground, bile and dirt filling my mouth, and my ears rings.

The world around me is wrapped with chaos and I scramble to my feet, searching for my fallen sword.

"Rotten whore’s son!" a familiar voice cries. And my head snaps up in time to see Leander struggling against a grinning beast. He misses a strike from its wicked looking scythe, but he turns too late at the sword aimed for his head.

My fingers find a bloodied spear instead. I don’t remember lifting it or throwing it. It goes clean through the beast’s temple.

It falls of its horse and Leander looks at me with something I never thought I’d see in his scarred eyes.

Tears of gratitude.

"Valerian!" Rafe roars. He’s far ahead, but I hear him anyway. "Get off the ground! It isn’t safe!"

I guess that means he won’t have me executed for faking my identity if we survive this. It’s the first time he’s spoken to me since the river. I was beginning to think I’d best die impaled on an enemy’s sword than returning to get beheaded later.

I start to nod but pain shoots through my back as something sharp and heavy slams against my armour. I whirl, meeting the next strike with my gauntlet.

Shock fills me as I see the face underneath the helmet.

A woman. Tears fill her black eyes. Fury draws her lips back and her fangs are just as bloody as her sword. "You killed my erasthai!" she screams at me and lunges again with the wrath of the heavens.

I cut left, dodging. I retrieve a dagger from my sleeve. "You look mad. What’s an erasthai?"

She shrieks again, angrier now, her next blow nearly taking off my head. It cleaves the legs of another soldier’s horse in half, sending him toppling forward and landing on his neck. I hear the crack as his spine snaps.

Good gods....

I blink at the dead man in horror. His room was next to mine. He was older than my father. A little senile with age. In his lucid moments he had been kind.

Had been...

When she strikes next, I am ready, moving with the steadiness of a dancer and the speed of the wind. She is skilled, her strength monstrous. But I’m smaller and faster. How many stabs does it take to severe the she-beast’s cateroid?

Five.

"Valka."

I peer over my shoulder as she lays on the ground, choking on her blood. Thane stands behind me, his face grim with sorrow as he takes in the deaths around us, the blood that runs down my face.

My rage roars to life again. "You said this war could be won. Look around you. We’re dying! You’re as much a liar and a heartless being as the Goddess is."

I lift the fallen woman’s sword and drag my feet, raising my sword to protect and kill.

But it doesn’t matter how many of them fall, there’s only more and more. Our numbers have dwindled significantly and the Velryric gate is still too far too see.

"It is ice."

I whirl, confused. "What?"

Thane’s booted feet sweeps over the blood on the ground elegantly. "Long ago, a river carved this place. What you tread is only ice, thick with centuries of frost. It is most brittle at the center. If you break it, they will sink." He tilts his head left. "I’d wager the center is to the west of the perfectly safe ridge."

I look at the ground. Centuries of frost? "Why didn’t you say anything?"

There’s that tortured look again. "We may be deity, Valka, but even we cannot always foresee the roads you choose. Your unpredictability twists fate itself, opening doors, slamming others shut, and every time we reach through those shifting paths, it costs us more than you can fathom." He looks to the bleeding woman at me feet and pain reflects in his gaze. "And it isn’t often that a father so willingly gives up his own children to save those that condemn them."

"Your children?" I blink. "You are... You are Thandric, the Condemned."

He smiles sadly, inclining his head toward a riderless horse dressed in the enemy’s gear. "Quickly now, Valka. Your window of opportunity closes."

I mount the horse and ride to the front. The entire time, I feel Thane’s presence like a warm hand on my shoulder, even if I do not see him.

"We need to change course," I yell over the chaos once I find Rafe.

There’s blood on his armour and a healing yet dangerous close cut on his neck. He looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. I point west. "We won’t reach Velryric in time. There’s a ridge--"

"We stay on course."

"I know you see me as nothing but a devious liar. But I had no choice. There isn’t enough time to explain why I lied and frankly, I owe no one an explanation for taking up a sword to die for the people I love." The din of the battlefield grows silent as I stare into his grey eyes. "I’m not asking you to trust me. I’m asking you to trust that I will not let these men take my home and kill the numerous innocents, including my mother, who is somewhere behind that wall, defenseless. This is the only way to save the lot of us and win this war and I’ll do whatever it takes to make it happen. I ask that you trust in that and head for the ridge as fast as you can."

Unreadable eyes search mine. "And you?"

"I’m going to shatter the ice. At its centre."

He seems to put two and two together quickly and I give the man credit for that. "But you will fall in."

I smile. "Then let’s hope to the Goddess that I swim as hard as I fight." I fish out a letter from a pouch by my waist. I’d written it in haste before we left, as was the tradition when you ride to your death. "If I don’t make it out, my mother--"

He pushes my hand back to my chest. "Give it to her yourself, Ironfang. You do not ride alone."

We part, then. Prince Rafe leading the army east, me breaking apart from the group last second, headed west with a unit of four hundred men assigned to protect me.

More than a third of my unit died before I ever reached the centre. I couldn’t even grieve them. These men who died trusting me, I didn’t even know their names.

But I swore that if I survived, I’d learn them. Every single one.

"Hurry, Valerian!" Bryn yells behind me as I roll off the horse and slam my foot into the ground, testing Thane’s theory.

I didn’t know what I expected to find, but it felt just as solid. The only difference was that I could actually see the ice. "Here is good!" I reach for the sledge-hammer I’d picked off a dead soldier’s body and slam it into the ground with that otherworldly strength in my veins.

It barely makes a dent.

"I need help!" I yell, but we are knee-deep in shit, at the heart of the enemy’s army, and what is left of my unit is too busy fighting and dying to spare a glance. For every failed second I spend trying to break the ice, a man falls.

Upon my twenty-fifth strike, the steel of the hammer began to chip.

There are only fifteen men left--fourteen now as Darian’s head flies off his shoulder and lands at my feet. His mouth is still open wide on a scream.

It is fruitless, I think, as I let go of the hammer. Thane was wrong. And I’d killed three hundred men to prove that.

And an army of less than two thousand--less than half the size of men who had ridden with us yesterday--I note as they finally reach the ridge, but the enemy remains on their trail.

All...is lost.

"You have my blood in you, Valka. There’s not a mountain that exists you cannot shatter," Thane’s voice comes to me curled in smoke.

My hands tremble. "I can’t do it."

"Pick up the damned sword and fight, worm!" Leander snaps at me, his back hitting mine.

It’s a sight I never thought I’d see. Comical that my most frightening bully and I die together, back to back.

So I pick up the sword and do what I know best. I fight. But you see, the Goddess has a cruel sense of humour.

I feel him before I see him. That otherworldly force that makes my insides want to combust.

"Gods above," Leander breathes, blocking a strike from a tawny eyed male before cleaving his arm off. "What the hell is that?"

Somehow, I knew. Under that black helmet, violet gold eyes fix on me, an arrow with my name on it notched for my head. The Dark King. It was him all along, the one who killed nearly a hundred men with one critically precise shot. The one who lead his army. He was the entire front line.

His aura cripples me, blood suddenly dripping from my nose. I turn to Leander and Bryn, the only ones left of my unit and I whisper with cold fear, "Run!"

But he fires before we take one step.

It should have been me. I will never understand why he did it.

Bryn knocks me out of the way and the arrow tears into his chest, splitting it wide as an open letter.

He’s dead before he even hits the ground, eyes staring listlessly at the sky.

I’d never seen Leander cry a day in his life, but he falls beside Bryn, shaking the man viciously like if he did it hard enough, Bryn might open his eyes and swat him off.

But I knew it would never happen. His mate and daughter would never see him again.

Those cold violet eyes never leave mine as he pulls another massive bow from his silver quiver.

It couldn’t all be for nothing. I won’t let it.

An ancient wrath unfurls beneath my skin, searing, endless. My nostrils flare. My fist clenches. I stare at the ice beneath me, at the prison holding us all, and will it to bend, to break.

Power rushes through my veins, alien and inexhaustible, fusing with my marrow, with the breath in my lungs, with the very name I bear.

That beast sleeping inside me opens it’s other eye. Her voice, low and dark, whispers into my thoughts as a mental barrier I hadn’t known existed me fractures like glass.

"Who are you?"

Valka Ironfang. You?

"My name cannot be spoken by mere mortals. But you may call me Ilya." A pause. "We are on the verge of death, half-breed. You must let me in."

Gladly.

I feel the merge. I feel the world change around me. My skin stretch over my bones, my teeth rip into canines.

And with a guttural roar of joy and pain, I drive my fist into the ice.

The world cracks.

Spiderweb fissures splinter outward, shrieking across the frozen ground. The ice groans, moans, collapses beneath its own weight. Leander’s wide, frozen stare catches mine. With a snarl, I seize him, hauling him upright, and we run as the earth crumbles underfoot.

"Fuck me," he whispers, breath ragged as we sprint. "You’re one of them."

I don’t answer. My eyes are on the chaos behind us, enemy soldiers screaming, falling, swallowed whole by the breaking earth. The ones who survive bolt for the ridge. But the ice is hungry, cracking faster and faster, as if eager to drag all of us down.

We’re almost to the ridge when the ground collapses under me.

"Go!" I shove Leander forward with all my strength hurling him to safety. His body hits solid ground. Mine does not.

I plummet, screaming.

The waters have long receded, leaving only a plunge so deep it might as well have been the mouth of the underworld. No matter how hard you fought or swam, you’d never touch the surface again. To fall was to die.

"VALERIAN!" A voice roars and a strong hold catches my wrist.

I look up, breathing hard and I’ve never been more grateful to see Rafe.

His hand is all that keep me up, and he stares at me for a long moment with those eyes that are still so unreadable. He shakes his head. "You’re fucking crazy, Valerian. Is that even your name?"

I laugh as the world falls apart behind us. "My name is Valka."

He nods. And for the first time, his smile is unguarded and real, pearl white teeth flashing in a painstakingly handsome face that makes my heart squeeze. "Thank you, Valka. We couldn’t have done this without you."

But his brows pull together in a grim look and his smile fades. "But you must understand. There is no place for your kind in Silvermoor."

And then, the Crown Prince of Silvermoor, my mate, whose life I’d just saved amongst a thousand others...

...he pushes me to my death.