All was silent. The onlookers at the beach, the distant ships preparing to unload their deadly cargos, all were still.
Then someone burst from the ocean, thrashing weakly. Ella’s heart thudded with pounding jolts as she tried to see who it was.
The figure was black.
A boat sped out from the foremost ship. The reaching hands of gray-robed necromancers pulled the man in black clothing aboard, before turning back to the ships.
Ella waited, and waited. Long moments passed. A hundred heartbeats became a thousand.
But the old man never came to the surface.
Evrin Evenstar was dead.
“Evrin,” Ella sobbed.
Layla held Ella back as she tried to pull free. Tears sped down Ella’s cheeks as she desperately scanned the surface of the water, knowing her search was futile. The battle between the Lord of the Sky and the Lord of the Night was over. Sentar was evidently wounded, terribly so, but he had emerged the victor.
The ships came forward. The warship that Sentar Scythran had returned to retreated, and soon it was hidden by the line of encroaching vessels.
The line of ships passed the site of the battle and continued forward, crossing into the aqua-blue water. There were suddenly so many of them that they fought for space. With sounds of tearing and groaning, each vessel ran aground bow-first, tilting to the side as keels ground against the sand, sails hurriedly downed.
They had no landing boats: the revenants simply poured off the sides. Tiesto had a few cannon—they would have to abandon any brought here, so most were back with Miro—and thunderous booms split the air as he fired. Splinters flew from the ships and water fountained in great splashes, pieces of enemy warriors flying into the air. Still they came.
Six ships were now aground, and dozens more found gaps between them and made their own landings. Soon the line of enemy vessels crowded the beach; Tiesto’s gunners suffered from no lack of targets.
Ella fixed her reddened stare back on the ridge and waited for Tiesto’s signal. Constructs would sink in the water so this first charge would be made by infantry. Ella would fight with them.
Along the ridge the men in green and brown held their weapons ready. Fighters from the free cities nervously exchanged glances while the Dunfolk archers surrounding Ella readied their bows. Ella saw enchanters in green robes and bladesingers in armorsilk. She saw faces she knew: Jehral, the only man in black, waited near Tiesto’s command center, and with surprise Ella recognized Fergus the ferryman standing not far away with a determined expression on his round face.
A clarion blared and a red light shone from the solitary dirigible flying high above, maintaining a position back toward Castlemere.
“Charge!” the defenders roared with a single voice.
Ella set her mouth with anger. She’d heard Miro speak of battle rage, and it was something she’d felt a few times herself: as the primate’s army crushed the refugees at the Sarsen and at the prison camps in Tingara.
It was the rage that came when trying to right an incredible injustice.
“Go,” Layla said.
Ella ran forward with the infantry as they charged.
The rush to the water’s edge took an eternity and was over in a heartbeat. Ella ran with men and women defending their homeland from the darkest evil. There were thousands of soldiers, all well armored and prepared for what they were about to face.
The waist-deep water thronged with revenants.
Volleys of arrows sped overhead, plunging into the enemy warriors. Some wore ragged barbaric clothing, big men and women with double-bladed axes and heavy two-handed swords. Others wore the uniforms of their old regiments, lands across the sea now utterly destroyed. All were in advanced stages of decay, with lips rotted away to reveal yellow teeth, mottled black-and-blue rot taking hold of limbs and heads, and grotesque wounds on throats, faces, and bodies, revealing how they’d been killed, or how they’d refused to be put down since.
The defenders formed a long line in the knee-deep water. The crack of musket fire sounded from the ships, and some of the Veldrin defenders returned fire with their own barreled sticks. The arrows of the Dunfolk sprouted from enemy warriors, sending shoulders jerking back or tearing into throats, but making little impact; these warriors simply kept coming.
Ella held her wand in front of her with a shaking hand. The hazel wood felt warm in her palm, then hot as she activated it with a series of chanted runes. The prism of gold-flecked quartz sparked with yellow fire.