CHAPTER 30
WE FOLLOW THE sounds of battle to the square at Abril’s front gate and find Spring soldiers sprinting in perfectly lined groups, cannons firing with lethal precision, cranks lifting weapons up and down the walls. Angra’s conduit pushes them with a threat that makes every movement deliberate, in line, perfect.
A horn cries out as we surge down the streets leading to the gate. Angra’s faultlessly aligned soldiers pivot toward us, snapping out of their conduit stupor. Angra warned them we were coming, but knowing does not a prepared army make.
We raise our weapons, raise our voices, raise our speed. We are one body now. One all-consuming wave of white and filth and sixteen years of death. Angra’s men realign themselves to face us, their backs to the gate, more than half of their focus pulled away from Noam’s attacking army to us. The one thing Abril in all its war-mindedness never prepared for: a breach inside the wall.
We collide with Angra’s men, pouring into them like a plague. They return with just as much force, pushing into us with strength pulled from the Decay in Angra’s conduit. There are only a few hundred of us and most are no more fighters than the children and elderly who stayed behind. Our advantage of surprise won’t hold for long.
I impale a Spring soldier and drop to the ground, pulling his body down beside me to serve as a shield. The square before the gate is nearly the size of Angra’s palace grounds, wide and open to allow for ease of movement. Two staircases frame the gate and lead to the walkway above, and a small building leans against the wall on my left. The gatehouse.
A group of Winterian men tackle a charging cluster of Spring soldiers, and I use the chaos to shield myself from other enemies. They fall backward and I get up and run, dashing over bodies, discarded blades, stacks of crates. The iron tang of blood and old weapons hangs in hot, heavy balls of repulsion, smacking into me as I barrel for the thin wooden door of the gatehouse.
I sheath my blades and draw out my chakram before planting a firm kick that sends the door banging into the wall. Inside the gatehouse, two soldiers flip around and, just as quickly, two blades fly through air, small knives that spin with desperate determination for me. I duck and one flies over my shoulder while the other grazes my wrist.
But it’s my turn now, so I bite back my wince. I let the chakram go, my blade slicing the soldiers’ necks in deathblows before it shoots back to me. As their bodies fall, I jump over them, eyeing the lever in the center of the room. A thick metal rod stretches into the air at an angle, nearly as tall as me, from a hodgepodge of gears. The rod sticks out more to the left than the right, so maybe if I move it to the right . . .
I holster the chakram and throw all my weight into the rod. It groans against my movements, the old iron creaking in angry rebuttal against being opened. I brace my foot on the wall of the gatehouse, pulling and heaving, begging the stupid thing to just give in and release.
A hand slides on the lever over mine. I flinch back, already half reaching for my knife, when Garrigan stops me. Conall stumbles in behind him, a bloody sword in one hand, and moves around me to grab the rod too.
We heave as one, and the crank releases under our collective weight, giving up as if it can feel the impending collapse of its kingdom. It slams into place and beyond the gatehouse, beyond the fight, the massive wall of iron starts to lift into the air, grinding and groaning.
Conall, Garrigan, and I run out of the gatehouse. Winterians and Spring soldiers alike pause, eyeing the lifting gate, analyzing what it means for Abril.
As soon as the gate gets high enough, a wave of men pours through, adding Cordell’s green and gold to Spring’s black-sun armor and Winter’s stark-white hair. Mixed with the Cordellan soldiers are copper-skinned men in maroon and orange that fly between batches of enemies with an exotic grace, slicing through flesh with hair-thin blades and hurling balls that spew toxic smoke. Their heir may be too young to wield her conduit, but Autumn soldiers can still make a sword fight look like a choreographed dance and wield weapons that are just as functional as they are gruesome—like chakrams. As a few spinning metal discs soar into the air, I grin. Sir originally got my chakram from Autumn, and seeing dozens of them shooting all around me now makes me feel even more united in this effort. A Winterian wielding an Autumnian weapon, using Cordellan allegiance to bring Spring crumbling down.
The Winterians roil into a frenzy, adding their brute hatred to Cordell’s organized attacks and Autumn’s skilled warriors. But Angra has numbers. It makes for a horrifying and mesmerizing fight, black and orange and green and white.
An arrow whizzes past my ear from somewhere on the other side of the square. My eyes find its source and a white-haired man in Cordell’s armor slashes through the Spring archer before he’s swallowed by a group of black-clad soldiers. Mather? Or maybe Greer or Henn—
I dart around parrying enemies, duck under flying blades. Angra’s men swivel the wall’s cannons to focus on the square inside the gate. Their blasts send mounds of earth scattering into the air around me, making it rain rocks and rubble. Blades up, I slash blindly at Spring soldiers where I can as I work my way to that flash of white hair in Cordellan armor. A pair locked in combat swings around me and I twist to narrowly avoid a blade to the head, sliding on my knees in a small patch of grass on the other side of the square, where Abril’s slums rise into the sky.
For a breath I pause, scanning the area, muscles tight and waiting, until a blade lunges at me. I spin and catch it, instinct driving me as I see beyond the blade, to the soldier holding it.
Not just a soldier—Angra.
And it isn’t just a blade. One hand holds a thin, strong sword, the other grasps his staff, a weapon in its own right.
Angra wears his own version of Spring’s armor, but his is fine and gleaming. He pulls back, taking his sword and staff with him, and glares down at me as our men kill each other around us. “All this time,” he growls. “I should have felt the magic in you long before you were able to use it.”
My fingers turn white on my blades. “You shouldn’t have let yourself become corrupted.”
Angra growls and rears back. I leap to him, talking as fast as possible, squeezing words into the space between us. “There’s a way to defeat it, Angra,” I hiss. “The Decay. If you let the other monarchs know, we can vanquish it like they almost did thousands of years ago!”
Angra pauses, blade and staff raised, his eyes narrowing in something like shock. I hold my breath in the roar of adrenaline around me, latching on to the flicker of hope in his face—
But someone shouts my name, a distant warning on the edge of my subconscious. I flinch and Angra strikes, swinging his sword out, his staff close behind. He bats the knife from my hand as I drop, sliding away from the falling metal. He’s far more experienced than me and uses my momentum to bring his sword back to meet me halfway, his blade slicing clean through my shoulder.
I groan and fall on my arm, pain searing across my skin. Can I heal myself? Angra doesn’t give me time to try. He drops to the ground on top of me, a knee pinning me to the grass between one of his dilapidated slum buildings and the chaotic battle. He swings his face down, blond curls matted with sweat and filth.
“I don’t need saving,” he spits, and flies back off me, readying for another strike.
Angra comes at me again and I release my sword from my injured right arm to flip backward, watching his blade impale the grass where my head was a heartbeat ago. He slashes and thrusts, not giving me a chance to retaliate, chasing me as I scramble on hands and knees across the lawn to the square. Legs fly out of my way, allies cut down by Angra’s swinging, biting weapons, forging a haphazard path through the chaos that allows me to crawl away.
“Meira!” someone screams, but I don’t have time to look for who it is.
A Spring soldier runs at us, intent on helping his king. But Angra rounds on him in a flurry of hot anger. “She’s mine!”
I use that opening to hurl my last weapon. My chakram flies through the debris-heavy air only to smack feebly off Angra’s armor. He knocks it out of its spin, sending it skittering over the ground, and turns to me, manic glee streaked over his face.
“That’s all you have? Hundreds of years of war, and this is your kingdom’s grand finale?”
“No.”
The voice rumbles over the lawn, over the world. It floods me from the recesses of Angra’s cruel nightmare, when I knelt on the floor of a cottage in Jannuari and Sir held me, rocking me back and forth.
But this isn’t a nightmare. This is real, better than anything I dared dream up myself, and as my eyes lock onto him, I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to breathe again.
Sir is alive.
Angra turns as Sir leaps through the air, two curved knives slicing the wind into fragments and speeding straight for Angra’s heart. Only a breath passes before Angra reacts, swinging his staff up to stop one of the blades and his sword to catch the other.
“Meira!” Mather slides to the ground beside me, his arms coming under my shoulders to pull me to my feet. I blink at him, caught in another cruel dream. Mather’s here. And Sir—
I stare, trying to get the last image I have of Sir to make sense with what I see now. Bleeding and broken on the ground outside of Bithai; dancing through the air on grunts and thrusts, driving Angra back just as viciously as Angra returns his blows. His body is whole and strong, flying around as his muscles do what they were made to do. He and Angra are matched blade for blade, moving before us through the bloody massacre of war.