“Someone get me Rafe!” I shout. “And Tyton.”
A runner sprints off as soon as the words are out of my mouth, vaulting up the steps to find them. I watch the wall above, searching for a familiar silhouette.
Cal works a manic rhythm, perfect as a machine. Step, turn, strike. Step, turn, strike. Like me, he finds an empty place where survival is the only thought. At every break in the oncoming rush of enemies, he re-forms his soldiers, directing the Reds in their fire, or working with Akkadi and Lory to eliminate another target in the darkness. How many are dead, I can’t say.
Another corpse tumbles from the ramparts, end over end. I grab his arms to drag him off before I realize his armor is not armor at all, but scaled pieces of stony flesh, smoldering with the heat of a fire prince’s anger. I draw back surprised, as if burned myself. A stoneskin. The few clothes on his dead body are blue and gray. House Macanthos. Norta. One of Maven’s.
I swallow hard against the implication. Maven’s forces have reached the walls. We aren’t just fighting Lakelanders anymore. A roar of fury rises in my chest and I almost wish I could storm through the breach myself. Tear through everything on the other side. Hunt him down. Kill him between his army and mine.
Then the corpse grabs me.
He twists, and my wrist breaks with a snap. I shriek against the sudden bleeding pain racing up my arm.
Lightning ripples from my flesh, escaping me like a scream. It covers his body in purple sparks and lethal, dancing light. But either his stony flesh is too thick or his resolve is too strong. The stoneskin does not let go, his pincerlike fingers now clawing at my neck. Explosions blossom along his back, the work of bombers. Bits of stone slough off him like dead skin and he howls. His grip only tightens with the pain. I make the mistake of trying to pry off his hands, now locked around my throat. His rocky flesh cuts my skin, and blood wells up between my fingers, red and hot in the frozen air.
Spots dance before my eyes, and I loose another blast of lightning, letting it pour from my agony. The blow rockets him off me and back into a building. He crashes through headfirst, body hanging out into the street. The bombers finish him off, exploding through the exposed skin on his back.
Davidson trembles on his feet, still holding the thinning shield. He saw it all, and could do nothing unless he wanted the invading force to overrun us. A corner of his mouth quivers, as if to apologize for making the right decision.
“How much longer can you hold?” I ask, gasping out the words. I spit blood on the street.
He grits his teeth. “A little while.”
That’s not helpful, I want to snap. “A minute? Two?”
“One,” he forces out.
“One will do.”
I glare through the shield as it weakens, the vivid shade of blue fading with Davidson’s strength. As it clears, so do the figures on the other side. Blue armor and black cut with red. Lakelands and Norta. No crown, no king. Just shock troops meant to overwhelm us. Maven won’t set foot in Corvium unless the city is his. While the Calore brother on the wall will fight to the death, Maven is not foolish enough to risk himself in a fight. He knows his strength is behind the lines, on a throne rather than a battlefield.
Rafe and Tyton approach from opposite sides, having held their stretch of wall. While Rafe looks meticulous, green hair still slicked back from his face, Tyton is positively painted in blood. All silver. He isn’t wounded. His eyes glow with a strange kind of anger, burning red in the churning firelight over our heads.
I note Darmian along with a number of other wreckers, all of them gifted with invulnerable flesh. They carry wicked axes, their edges worked to razor sharpness. Good to combat strongarms. At close range, they’re our best chance.
“Form up,” Tyton says, taciturn to a fault.
We follow, organizing into hasty lines at Davidson’s back. His arm shakes as we move, holding on as long as he can. Rafe takes my left, Tyton my right. I glance between them, wondering if I should say something. I can feel the static energy blooming from them both, familiar but strange. Their electricity, not mine.
In the storm, the blue thunder continues to rage. Ella fuels us, and we leech to her lightning.
“Three,” Davidson says.
Green on my left, white on my right. The colors flicker on the edge of my vision, each spark a tiny heartbeat.
“Two.”
I suck in one more breath. My throat aches, bruised by the stoneskin. But I’m still breathing.
“One.”
Again the shield collapses, opening our insides to the oncoming storm.
“BREACH!” echoes along the ramparts as the forces turn their attention on the gap in the wall. The Silver army responds in kind, surging toward us with a deafening yell. Green and purple lightning shudders through the killing ground, leaping along the first wave of soldiers. Tyton moves like a man throwing darts, his minuscule needles of lightning exploding into blinding bolts that toss Silver troops into the air. Many seize and twitch. He has no mercy.
The bombers follow our lead, moving with us as we close the breach. They only need an open line of sight to work, and their destruction churns stone, flesh, and earth in equal measure. Dirt falls with the snow, and the air tastes like ash. Is this what war is? Is this what it feels like to fight in the Choke? Tyton tosses me back, throwing out an arm to move my body. Darmian and the other wreckers surge before us, a human shield. Their axes cut in and out, spraying blood until the ruined walls on either side are coated in mirrored swaths of liquid silver.
No. I remember the Choke. The trenches. The horizon stretched in every direction, reaching down to meet a land cratered by decades of bloodshed. Each side knew the other. That war was evil, but defined. This is just a nightmare.
Soldier after soldier, Lakelander and Nortan, pulses into the breach. Each pushed by the man or woman behind. As on the bridges, they funnel into a killing ground. The crowd moves like the pull of the ocean, one wave drawing us back before the other goes forward. We have the advantage, but only slightly. More strongarms pummel at the walls, hoping to widen the gap. Telkies lob rubble into our line, pulverizing one of the bombers, while another freezes solid, mouth fixed open in a silent scream.
Tyton dances with fluid movements, each palm blazing with white lightning. I use web on the ground, spreading a puddle of electric energy beneath the pounding feet of the advancing army. Their bodies pile up, threatening to form another wall across the breach. But the telkies just wave them away, sending corpses spinning into the black storm.
I taste blood, but my broken wrist is just a buzz of pain now. It hangs limp at my side, and I’m grateful for the adrenaline that won’t let me feel the snapped bone.
The street and earth turn to liquid beneath my feet, running with red and silver. The swampy ground claims more than a few. When a newblood falls, a nymph jumps on him, pouring water down his nose and throat. He drowns before my eyes. Another corpse lies on her side, roots curling from her eyeballs. All I know is lightning. I can’t remember my name, my purpose, what I’m fighting for—beyond the air in my lungs. Beyond one more second of life.
A telky splits us apart, sending Rafe flying backward. Then me in the opposite direction. I spiral forward, over the top of the force pushing through the wall breach. To the other side. To the killing fields of Corvium.