Snow Like Ashes (36 page)

He pulls back, gasping through a rapid array of emotions before he nods firmly, decisively. “Go to them, but don’t die. Primoria needs people like you,” he finishes, and dashes into the empty hallway, leading the way to the two large front doors, blades glinting for hidden enemies. My body follows but my mind is stuck on the feel of his lips on mine. Beautiful and equal, gentle and certain, making me cold and warm all at once.

We ease out the doors and slink down the great obsidian steps, not stopping once our feet hit the rolling expanse of Angra’s lawn. It’s empty here too, all soldiers either guarding Angra inside or busy at the front gate, where the firing of cannons echoes back at us. Theron shoots me a small smile of reassurance before he flies across the lush grass, running and running for cover at the north end of Angra’s palace complex. From there, he’ll go east, opposite his father’s approaching army.

But my path lies southwest.

My feet move before I realize I’m running, the palace complex whooshing past me in a blur of black and green. I leap over the garden Nessa and her brothers have been working in for weeks. The entire area is empty, no soldiers or workers. It’s late afternoon now, the sun high and bright, with plenty of light left to force out a few more hours of work. But no one is here, so that must mean they’re in the camp, a panicked switch in their daily routine, or—

I won’t think about
or
.

Anxiety pushes me faster as I twist out a side gate and fly into Abril.

This part of the city is not so empty. Spring’s upper-class citizens prepare their houses, servants and stable hands nailing planks of wood over windows at their masters’ orders. They don’t care when I run by, don’t even flinch in my direction when the blur of white and black flashes past them. I scale the side of a bridge and I’m gone, leaving them to their worries.

The bridge drops me into the lower part of the city. I surge down alleys, leap over piles of trash. The residents of these buildings stay exactly where I’ve always seen them—huddled behind windows, peeking through doorways, staying out of the way in the hope that life will pass them without too much notice. As if, if they don’t acknowledge the approaching battle, it can’t hurt them.

One last bend up ahead will put me right in front of the entrance to Abril’s work camp. I slow to a walk, holding my breath to keep from gasping for air. It may be empty in this alley, but it’s not quiet—noises filter to me from up ahead. Soldiers shout orders at each other, and beyond their mangled barks lies the hum of people in confusion. My people.

The words feel wrong, like they don’t belong to me, like I’m not worthy of calling them that. But it doesn’t matter what I call them, what they call me. I have the ability to free them, therefore I have the responsibility to free them. That’s all that matters now.

That’s all that has ever mattered.

I stop parallel to the corner.
One more step, Meira. Just one more.

I march onto the road, pulling my chakram out so it dangles like a harmless toy from my hands. Five buildings ahead of me, the gate is madness. Spring soldiers on the outside throw blades and fists against the bending, creaking metal, punching back the swell of Winterians who push against the other side. The Winterians cry and scream, flinching against the blows. They’re confused, jerked out of their routine of work and forced back into their prison in chaos.

The first soldier drops without a fight. My chakram whizzes across the back of his neck, severing the top of his spine from his skull, and thunks back into my palm as the man collapses on the soldier next to him, pulling attention to me. First the dead man’s neighbor, then the man next to him, then every soldier charged with keeping order in the work camp. All eyes are on me, one lone Winterian girl against a whole battalion.

One soldier steps forward, his thick sword dinged with age and use. “Herod’s toy escaped,” he sneers.

“Herod’s toy killed him,” I respond, and a satisfying flash of shock takes over his face.

Another voice cracks out over the street. “Meira, run!”

My eyes flick behind the line of soldiers to the gate. Conall presses against the iron, the wire leaving streaks of blood on his cheeks and arms. He’s panicked, seeing me on the street. There’s a light in his eyes now, a light so different from his usual hatred that I have to be imagining it.

But no—it’s hope. He wants me to live.

Angra senses it too. He knows somehow, this hope they all have, and the Spring soldiers fly at the gate in one organized mass, raising all their weapons at the same moment. A strangled moan pops out of my lungs. Angra’s dark magic. He’s told them to—

They start striking to kill now. Jabbing their blades through the metal, stabbing chests and necks, no longer mere warning blows. I can feel Angra’s order pulsing out of their driven bodies:
Slaughter them.

My chest numbs, and for once I know what it is. Cold, icy cold, darting out to my shoulders and rushing down to my fingers. The conduit’s power churns around me, surging in and out of my body like an uncontrollable snowstorm, begging to coat the world in glorious white.

Winter has a conduit now too. And we won’t be weak anymore.

I drop my chakram at my feet and shoot my hands out, fingers stretching to the Winterians in front of me. The cold blasts out of me, an eruption of such perfect chill that I wonder if I’m nothing more than a snowstorm now, a great twirling column of flakes. The cold rushes around the Spring soldiers and plunges through the gate, flooding every frail, white-haired body, every pair of wide blue eyes, every bleeding, tired soul with strength, power, energy, healing their bruises and soothing their cuts and making them stronger, stronger, stronger—

The magic pours until every free space in every body is filled with strength. Their eyes shine brighter, their bodies stand straighter, their fists clench tighter. Cold and frost, so much beautiful power that when the icy sensation stops, I’m left gasping in the aftermath of such wonder. Adrenaline courses through me, blissfully combatting the pull of exhaustion that makes me sway forward under all the power I just exerted.

The Winterians scream, something far beyond their cries of pain and anguish, something breaking out of them in a rush of freedom. The Spring soldiers’ attack pauses in the echoing war cry from their prisoners. And the Winterians, their eyes fiery with life, slam forward, breaking open the gate with a frantic determination.

“Attack!” a Spring soldier cries, and charges at me.

I hook my chakram with my boot and kick it into the air, grabbing it and launching it in a great spin of death into the approaching stampede of Spring soldiers. A few fall as my chakram smacks back into my palm, but the soldiers are too close now, a few seconds from colliding with me. I return the chakram to my back and yank out the sword and dagger I stole from Herod, body coiling down. Four seconds. Three . . .

The farthest soldiers go down as one, their legs falling out from under them. The next row glances back, panicked, and falls just as easily, pulled to the ground by the mad hatred of sixteen years of oppression. The Winterians rise up and over the Spring battalion in a deadly wave of destruction, tearing weapons out of hands and turning those weapons on the shocked faces of soldiers who never thought they would lose.

The last row of Spring soldiers reaches me, caught between fear behind them and fear ahead. My dagger jabs into one’s stomach, my sword through another’s neck. I twirl between the soldiers, my body a machine of slice and stab and duck.

I move around one last dying man, my boots kicking up dust around me, and stop in front of Conall. He’s bloody and wild, his white hair streaked with red, his hands clasped around a pair of short knives. Beside him, Garrigan is just as untamed, a beast inside them unleashed, and behind them are the other Winterians.

Arms clamp around my neck in a storm of white and tears. “I knew you’d free us,” Nessa breathes.

Conall steps forward, his knives glinting with Spring blood. “We’re not free yet. What next, my queen?”

My queen. How does he know?

I pull back from Nessa and stare at them, all of them, every eager face. Every innocent, patient soul, accepting the power from me without question, without hesitation.

And I feel Hannah in me. Her gentle, waiting presence, as connected to the conduit’s power as I am. She’s in all the Winterians too, connecting us in an inexplicable and marvelous world all our own.

She is my daughter,
she whispers to them, a voice so quiet they could mistake it for their own thoughts.
It’s going to be all right. I’m sorry I lied to you, but your freedom is so close.

The hope on the dirt-smudged faces fills me with a different emotion, one that snuffs out any fear of who I am now. Happiness.

“Cordell and Autumn are at Spring’s gates, but our freedom is not theirs to win,” I shout over the crowd. The next words stick in my throat, building and building alongside all the bubbling anxiety, the years of abuse, the scars and blood and gore. “We are Winter!”

Conall and Garrigan tip their heads back, arms outstretched as they shout to the sky. A battle cry that spreads to every Winterian, their voices creaking, their eyes shining.

“We are Winter!” Nessa echoes, and leaps over the fallen Spring bodies, running up the road with her stolen sword blazing above her head. They follow her, dashing over bodies, waving weapons like banners of victory.

Their strength, conduit-given or not, is invigorating, filling me with my own magic. I want to bask in it forever.

You’re so close now,
Hannah says.

I fall into line with them, running just as hard, screaming just as loud, lost in the voices and the power and the lives of the Winterians.

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.