But where Hybern’s magic shields held out … Rhys, Azriel, and Cassian sent out blasts of their own power to shatter them. Leaving them vulnerable to those Siphons—or pure Illyrian steel. And if that did not fell them … Keir and his Darkbringers cleaned up the rest. Precisely. Coolly.
The field became a blood-drenched mud pit. Bodies gleamed in the morning sun, light bouncing off their armor. Hybern panicked at the unbreakable Illyrian lines that pushed and pushed them back. That battered them.
And as that left flank broke apart, as its nobles fell or turned and fled … The other Hybern soldiers began descending into panic, too.
There was one mounted commander who did not go easily. Who didn’t turn his horse toward that river behind them to flee.
Cassian selected him as his opponent.
Mor gripped my hand tight enough to hurt as Cassian stepped out of that impenetrable front line of shields and swords, the soldiers around him immediately closing the gap. Mud and blood splattered Cassian’s dark helmet, his armor.
He ditched his tall shield for a round one strapped across his back, crafted from the same ebony metal.
And then he launched into a run.
I could have sworn even Rhys paused on the other end of the battlefield to watch as Cassian cut his way through those enemy soldiers, aiming for the mounted Hybern commander. Who realized what and who was coming for him and started to search for a better weapon.
Cassian had been born for this—these fields, this chaos and brutality and calculation.
He didn’t stop moving, seemed to know where every opponent fought both ahead and behind, seemed to breathe in the flow of the battle around him. He even let his Siphons’ shield drop—to get close, to feel the impact of the arrows that he took in that ebony shield. If he slammed that shield into a soldier, his other arm was already swinging his sword at the next opponent.
I’d never seen anything like it—the skill and precision. It was like a dance.
I must have said it aloud because Mor replied, “For him, that’s what battle is. A symphony.”
Her eyes did not stray from Cassian’s death-dance.
Three soldiers were brave or stupid enough to try to charge him. Cassian had them down and dying with four maneuvers.
“Holy Mother,” I breathed.
That was who had been training me. Why Fae trembled at his name.
Why the high-born Illyrian warriors had been jealous enough to want him dead.
But there Cassian was, no one between him and the commander.
The commander had found a discarded spear. He threw it.
Fast and sure, I skipped a heartbeat as it spiraled for Cassian.
His knees bent, wings tucked in tight, shield twisting—
He took the spear in the shield with an impact I could have sworn I heard, then sliced off the shaft and kept running.
Within a heartbeat, Cassian had sheathed both shield and sword across his back.
And I would have asked why but he’d already picked up another fallen spear.
Already hurled it, his entire body going into the throw, the movement so perfect that I knew I’d one day paint it.
Both armies seemed to stop at the throw.
Even with the distance, Cassian’s spear hit home.
It went right through the commander’s chest, so hard it knocked the male clean off his horse.
By the time he was done falling, Cassian was there.
His sword caught the sunlight as it lifted and plunged down.
Cassian had picked his mark well. Hybern fled now. Outright turned and fled for the river.
But Hybern found Tarquin’s army waiting on its opposite bank, exactly where Cassian had ordered it to appear.
Trapped with the Illyrians and Keir’s Darkbringers at their backs and Tarquin’s two thousand soldiers on the other side of the narrow river …
It was harder to watch—that slaughter.
Mor said to me, “It’s over.”
The sun was high in the sky, heat rising with every minute.
“You don’t need to see this,” she added.
Because some of the Hybern soldiers were surrendering. On their knees.
As it was Tarquin’s territory, Rhys yielded the decision about what to do with prisoners.
From the distance, I picked out Tarquin from his armor—more ornate than Rhysand’s, but still brutal. Fish fins and scales seemed to be the motif, and his azure cloak flowed through the mud behind him as he stepped over fallen bodies to get to the few hundred surviving enemy.
Tarquin stared at where the enemy had knelt, his helmet masking his features.
Nearby, Rhys, Cassian, and Azriel monitored, speaking to Keir and the Illyrian captains. I did not see many wings amongst the fallen on the field. A mercy.
The only mercy, it seemed, as Tarquin made a motion with his hand.
Some of the Hybern soldiers began screaming for clemency, their offers to sell information ringing out, even to us.
Tarquin pointed at a few of them, and they were hauled away by his soldiers. To be questioned. And I doubted it would be pleasant.
But the others …
Tarquin stretched out his hand toward them.
It took me a heartbeat to realize why the Hybern soldiers were thrashing and clawing at themselves, some trying to crawl away. But then one of them collapsed, and sunlight caught on his face. And even with the distance, I could tell—could tell it was water now bubbling out of his lips.
Out the lips of all the Hybern soldiers as Tarquin drowned them on dry land.
I didn’t see Rhys or the others for hours—not when he gave the order that the Illyrian war-camp was to be moved from the border of the Winter Court and rebuilt at the edge of the battlefield. So Mor and I winnowed to and from the camps as the exodus began. We brought my sisters last, waiting until many of the bodies had been turned to black dust by Rhysand. The blood and mud remained, but the camp maintained too good a position to yield—or waste time finding another one.
Elain didn
’t seem to care. Didn’t seem to even notice that we winnowed her. She just went from her tent to Mor’s arms, then into the same tent rebuilt in the new camp.
Nesta, however … I told her upon arriving that everyone was fine. But when we winnowed to the battlefield … She stared at that bloody, muddy plain. At the weapons soldiers of both courts were plundering from the fallen enemy.
Nesta listened to the low-level Illyrian soldiers whispering about how Cassian had thrown that spear, how he’d cut down soldiers like stalks of wheat, how he’d fought like Enalius—their most ancient warrior-god and the first of the Illyrians.
It had been a while, it seemed, since they had seen Cassian in open battle. Since they’d realized that he’d been young in the War, and now … the looks they gave Cassian as he passed … they were the same as those the High Lords had given Rhys upon seeing his power. Like them, and yet Other.
Nesta watched, and listened to it all, while the camp was built around us.
She did not ask where the bodies had gone before her arrival. She wholly ignored the camp Keir and his Darkbringers built beside ours—the ebony-armored soldiers who sneered at her, at me, at the Illyrians. No, Nesta only made sure that Elain was dozing in her tent, and then offered to help cut up linen for bandages.
We were doing just that around the early-evening fire when Rhys and Cassian approached, still in their armor, Azriel nowhere to be found.
Rhys took a seat on the log I was perched atop of, armor thudding, and silently pressed a kiss to my temple. He reeked of metal and blood and sweat.
His helmet clunked on the ground at our feet. I silently handed him a pitcher of water, and made to grab a glass when Rhys just lifted the pewter container and drank right from it. It sloshed over the sides, water pinging against the black metal coating his thighs, and when he at last set it down, he looked … tired. In his eyes, Rhys seemed weary.
But Nesta had jolted to her feet, staring at Cassian, at the helmet he had tucked into the crook of his arm, the weapons still poking above his shoulder, in need of cleaning. His dark hair hung limp with sweat, his face was mud-splattered where even the helmet had not kept it out.