Chapter 76. Neither of Us Was Fast Enough To Stop The Inevitable

Chapter 76: 76. Neither of Us Was Fast Enough To Stop The Inevitable

Velora moved. She cut through the frozen puddles in three strokes, shattering them into dull gray fragments.

Elsbeth flung out a hand, and every pane of frost on every window in the courtyard went matte and white.

In a minute, there wasn’t a shiny surface in the yard larger than a coin.

Cassian stepped toward the nearest window and stopped.

He frowned. It was the first real expression I had seen on his face all day, a faint, puzzled crease between his brows, like a man who has reached for a light switch that isn’t there.

’Feeling powerless now, aren’t you, son of a bitch?!’ I smiled.

He turned and looked at me, and I swear his smile came back a little narrower.

"How clever," he said. "You really are a human after all."

I didn’t answer. Like... what is that supposed to mean by calling me ’a human after all’?

"The queen did say that you were clever." He sighed and tapped his cane against the paving. "A pity that it will not be enough..."

He was right. It wasn’t enough to beat him.

But it was enough to hold him for a while, and I counted that as a win. But I had no idea how long a while was.

I counted the seconds under my breath like a man bailing a sinking boat.

The horn sounded from the south, low and deep and enormous.

HOOOOOOOOONNNNKKKKKKKKKKKKK!

I thought, at first, that it was the Chain’s. Then I saw the banner.

It flew from the crest of the southern hill, a red flag with two curved horns above a white moon, and beneath it, pouring over the ridge in a long, dark river, marched an army.

Elarune had come.

They’d come early, impossibly early. I found out later that Magnara had marched them through the night and all of that day without stopping, driving them over the mountain passes on pure stubbornness.

They were gaunt with exhaustion. Dust and snow clung to their faces.

But they came on, in a long column of horns and hooves and iron, and in front of them, with an axe resting easy on her shoulder, strode a woman eight feet tall.

The minute the column crossed into the range of Cassian’s note, I watched it stagger.

About half of them went down.

Not all at once, but in waves, as the sound hit them.

I saw the glow flare in dozens of eyes and saw hands go slack on spear shafts. A row of minotaurkin soldiers swayed and began to turn on the ones beside them.

Magnara didn’t hesitate.

"Bind them!" Her voice cracked across the plain like a thunderclap. "Do not kill them!"

"Bind them and carry them!"

I saw the officers around her stare. I could hear the confusion in the ranks.

These were soldiers who’d been told they were riding into a slaughter, and their commander had just ordered them not to slaughter.

They obeyed.

It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Heavy, burly women in battered armor wrapped their arms around their own sisters and held on.

They looped rope over their comrades’ shoulders and dragged them to the ground with gentle, careful strength.

A big woman with a boar’s tusks sat down on her glowing-eyed friend and hugged her until she stopped struggling. Nobody died. Not one.

Magnara came through the gate like an avalanche. She swept up the first rank of Chosen on the flat of her axe and flung them across the yard like skittles.

Her horns were humming. I could see the strain in her jaw, the sweat standing on her face, but she kept coming, and she didn’t stop until she stood at my side.

She looked me over, from my torn sleeve down to my shaking hands.

"You look terrible," she said.

"You should see the other guy," I said while looking at Cassian.

"I did... He looks fine to me."

I laughed. And I couldn’t help it.

It came out of me like a cough, short and cracked, and it hurt, and I was grateful for it more than I can say. As if it was the last real laugh I had that day.

"Where are the others?" I asked. "The people from the canyon? The Oathglass?"

"In the cave, under guard." She looked grim. "I could not bring them..."

"The speed and the sound... We left a small detachment to hold them."

"They will keep until morning, I hope."

"And then?"

"Then we shall see."

She turned her head and looked across the courtyard.

At the broken lights, the shattered ice, the smiling golden figures, and the slender man in white standing on the steps with his hands folded.

"So," Magnara said, very softly. "That is the man, eh?"

Cassian saw the way the tide was turning, and he did something I should have predicted.

He looked up, past all of us, to the northern wall.

The warmother stood there. She had not left her post once.

All day, through the screams and the smoke and the collapse of her own people, Hrafnhild Evershade had held the high battlements with a spear of ice in her hand and her white cloak streaming behind her.

She had been shouting orders at her Hearth Guard, pulling the wounded out of the line, standing between the crystals and the people she had sworn to protect.

She was bleeding from a cut on her scalp, and her eyes were red with exhaustion, but she hadn’t bent.

Cassian smiled up at her with real admiration.

"Such a magnificent custodian," he said.

He lifted the Throne Glass.

I saw him do it. I saw the great gold stone flash in his hand, and I saw Ylva, standing at his elbow, let out a thin, strained cry as her own crystal blazed.

The note he had been sending out all day swelled to a crescendo. A shock wave of sound rolled across the keep, and I heard every window in the place shatter at once.

On the wall, the Warmother fell to her knees.

I heard Elsbeth scream.

It wasn’t a word. It was the sound of someone watching a house burn down with her family inside it.

She started running, vaulting a barrel, and skidding across the cobbles, and I ran after her, and I knew with perfect, awful clarity that we would never get there in time.

Hrafnhild looked up.

For one second, in the middle of all that noise, her eyes were clear. They were the same deep red as her daughter’s, and they found Elsbeth across the length of the courtyard.

"Do not... let them take the hearth...!" she said.

It was barely a whisper. I’m not sure how I heard it.

But I did, and I knew it was the last thing she would ever say.

Her back arched. Her mouth opened in a long, ragged howl, and I heard the sound of bones going, a wet, grinding crack like a tree splitting in a storm.

Her gray-streaked hair streamed out and thickened into a mane of frozen spikes. And her fine white cloak tore apart at the seams.

The ice spear in her hand melted into a puddle at her feet.

She grew.

She grew until she was the size of a house, a monstrous silver wolf with ice for fur and a crown of blue shards jutting from her brow like antlers.

Her eyes blazed with cold light.

Down the side of her face, through the thick white fur, I could see a pale, thin line where an old scar had cut through her eyebrow.

She threw back her head and howled. And the whole thing shook.

RAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!