But the sun continued its arc across the sky, and the battle continued in the bay, the Illyrian lines battering the Hybern fleet from above while Tarquin’s armada pushed from behind.
Slowly, we purged the streets of Hybern soldiers. All I knew was the sun baking the blood coating my skin, the coppery tang of it clinging to my nostrils.
We had just cleared a narrow street, Mor striding through the felled Hybern soldiers to make sure any survivors … stopped surviving. I leaned against a blood-bathed stone wall just outside the shattered front window of a clothier, watching Mor’s quicksilver blade rise and fall in lightning-bright flashes.
Beyond us, all around us, the screams of the dying were like the never-ending pealing of the city’s warning bells.
Water—I needed water. If only to wash the blood from my mouth.
Not my own blood, but that of the soldiers we’d cut down. Blood that had sprayed into my mouth, up my nose, into my eyes, when we’d ended them.
Mor reached the last of the dead, and terrified High Fae and faeries finally poked their heads out of the doorways and windows flanking the cobblestoned street. No sign of Alis, her nephews, or cousin—or anyone who looked like them, amongst the living or the fallen. A small blessing.
We had to keep moving. There were more—so many more.
As Mor began striding back to me, boots sloshing through puddles of blood, I reached a mental hand toward the bond. Toward Rhys—toward anything that was solid and familiar.
Wind and darkness answered me.
I became only half-aware of the narrow street and the blood and the sun as I peered down the bridge between us. Rhys.
Nothing.
I speared myself along it, stumbling blindly through that raging tempest of night and shadow. If the bond sometimes felt like a living band of light, it now had turned into a bridge of ice-kissed obsidian.
And rising up on its other end … his mind. The walls—his shields … They had turned into a fortress.
I laid a mental hand to the black adamant, my heart thundering. What was he facing—what was he seeing to have made his shields so impenetrable?
I couldn’t feel him on the other side.
There was only the stone and the dark and the wind.
Rhys.
Mor had nearly reached me when his answer came.
A crack in the shield—so swift that I did not have time to do anything more than lunge for it before it had closed behind me. Sealing me inside with him.
The streets, the sun, the city vanished.
There was only here—only him. And the battle.
Looking through Rhysand’s eyes as I once had that day Under the Mountain … I felt the heat of the sun, the sweat and blood sliding down his face, slipping beneath the neck of his black Illyrian armor—smelled the brine of the sea and the tang of blood all around me. Felt the exhaustion ripping at him, in his muscles and in his magic.
Felt the Hybern warship shudder beneath him as he landed on its main deck, an Illyrian blade in each hand.
Six soldiers died instantly, their armor and bodies turning into red-and-silver mist.
The others halted, realizing who’d landed amongst them, in the heart of their fleet.
Slowly, Rhys surveyed the helmeted heads before him, counted the weapons. Not that it mattered. All of them would soon be crimson mist or food for the beasts circling the waters around the clashing armada. And then this ship would be splinters on the waves.
Once he was done. It was not the common foot soldiers he’d sought out.
Because where power should have been thrumming from him, obliterating them … It was a muffled rumble. Stifled.
He’d tracked it here—that strange damper on his power, on the Siphons’ power. As if some sort of spell had turned his power oily in his grip. Harder to wield.
It was why the battle had gone on so long. The clean, precise blow he’d intended to land upon arriving—the single shot that would have saved so many lives … It had slipped from his grasp.
So he’d hunted it down, that damper. Battled his way across Adriata to get to this ship. And now, exhaustion starting to rip at him … The armed soldiers around Rhysand parted—and he appeared.
Trapped within Rhysand’s mind, his powers stifled and body weary, there was nothing I could do but watch as the King of Hybern stepped from belowdecks and smiled at my mate.
CHAPTER
37
Blood slid from the tips of Rhys’s twin blades onto the deck. One drop—two. Three.
Mother above. The king—
The King of Hybern wore his own colors: slate gray, embroidered with bone-colored thread. Not a weapon on him. Not a speckle of blood.
Within Rhys’s mind, there was no jagged breath for me to take, no heartbeat to thunder in my chest. There was nothing I could do but watch—watch and keep quiet, so I didn’t distract him, didn’t risk taking his focus away for one blink …
Rhys met the king’s dark eyes, bright beneath heavy brows, and smiled. “Glad to see you’re still not fighting your own battles.”
The king’s answering smile was a brutal slash of white. “I was waiting for more interesting quarry to find me.” His voice was colder than the highest peak of the Illyrian mountains.
Rhys didn’t dare look away from him. Not as his magic unfurled, sniffing out every angle to kill the king. A trap—it had been a trap to discover which High Lord hunted down the source of that damper first.
Rhys had known one of them—the king, his cronies—would be waiting here.
He’d known, and come. Known and not asked us to help him—
If I was smart, Rhys said to me, his voice calm and steady, I’d find some way to take him alive, make Azriel break him—get him to yield the Cauldron. And make an example of him to the other bastards thinking of bringing down that wall.
Don’t, I begged him. Just kill him—kill him and be done with it, Rhys. End this war before it can truly begin.
A pause of consideration. But a death here, quick and brutal … His followers would turn it against me, no doubt.
If he could manage it. The king had not been fighting. Had not depleted his reserves of power. But Rhys …
I felt Rhys size up the odds alongside me. Let one of us come to you. Don’t face him alone—
Because trying to take the king alive without full access to his power …
Information rippled into me, brimming with all Rhys had seen and learned. Taking the king alive depended on whether Azriel was in good enough shape to help. He and Cassian had taken a few blows themselves, but—nothing they couldn’t handle. Nothing to spook the Illyrians still fighting under their command. Yet.
“Seems like the tide is turning,” Rhys observed as the armada around them indeed pushed Hybern’s forces out to sea. He had not seen Tarquin. Or Varian and Cresseida. But the Summer Court still fought. Still pushed Hybern back, back, back from the harbor.
Time. Rhys needed time—
Rhys lunged toward the king’s mind—and met nothing. Not a trace, not a whisper. As if he were nothing but wicked thought and ancient malice—