Snow Like Ashes (37 page)

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.

My fingers dig into Mather’s arm, my heart freezing.

“Sir?” I breathe.

The tension in my chest loosens. It doesn’t matter who I am now, queen or not, because Sir’s here. Sir’s alive. And he’ll be able to help me through this.

When I look at Mather, he nods. “You healed him, Meira. Everyone thought he was dead, but when he awoke after the battle, he told us you healed him. A fluke in conduit magic that somehow you harnessed,” Mather whispers.

I grab onto his words and try to fit them into the gaping puzzle around me. What I remember most about Sir’s death is my desperation, my thoughtless need, pure and strong, for him to live. Maybe that was a type of surrender—opening myself up to anything, everything, that could save him. An unconscious decision, like when I healed the boy.

Mather reads the distance in my eyes, my swelling exuberance. He bows his head. “My queen.”

That pulls me back to the present, roaring and horrible. To Mather, a broken look in his eyes.

“You know?” I gasp on the words and feel everything else come crashing down on me. All of Mather’s worries and concerns and strain, how he wanted so badly to be enough in a station where he never would be. And now—none of that matters, because it isn’t him anymore.

Mather bobs his head again. Around us the battle rages on, but in that one moment of looking at each other, I can’t tell if he’s relieved or scared. All I can feel is his strength, the determined way he looks at me, a soldier to his ruler. He’ll hold on as long as I need him to.

The locket half still sits around his neck, a physical reminder of the lie of his life. My eyes lock on it before swinging away, a rush of adrenaline pushing through me as I look back at Angra and Sir trapped in a flurry of swords. Angra’s conduit dances through the air and Sir’s focus follows it, his gaze hungry and desperate.

A weight drops in my stomach. Sir needs to know what it really is, what he’s really fighting. The way he looks at Angra’s staff, like he wants to obliterate it into a million pieces—that cannot happen. Angra’s conduit
cannot
be broken, the magic allowed to link with him in an endless feed for the Decay.

A blade comes out of nothing, the cannon debris making the air a dark and dangerous place. I scream and shove Mather down, buckling under the sword as the Spring soldier continues his swipe through the air. Mather turns, throws me his blade, and I grab it midair before barreling headfirst into the soldier’s stomach. We fall, rolling down a slight incline in a fit of darkness and dirt as my sword slides home into the soldier’s gut.

A series of screams. Names shouted in rapid order, panicked screeches that make me pivot in the dirt.

“Mather, grab it!”

“William—”

“MATHER!”

I struggle to my feet, eyes flashing over the space now between me, Mather, Sir. A swell of horror pulses in me and I’m frozen, watching it all happen.

Sir knocks Angra’s staff from his hands. It flies through the air, flipping end over end to land in a clatter at Mather’s feet. Sir lunges away from Angra as he reaches out to Mather, something horrible and terrified exploding out of him like nothing I’ve ever seen. Panic pushes up my throat, tasting like the iron tang of blood.

Mather picks up the staff.

“Break it!” Sir’s voice is strangled. He swipes at Angra, knocking him to the ground. “Destroy it!”

“I will kill you!” Angra screams, scrambling against the dirt. He flies up and Sir tackles him next to Mather’s feet. One of Sir’s curved knives slams into Angra’s shoulder, pinning him to the earth with Sir hovering a breath above him.

Mather looks at me. There’s that determined severity again, some great pull of desperation. He’ll protect me. He’ll keep me safe. He can still do this one thing, even if he isn’t who he always thought he was.

He raises the staff over his head. Angra’s conduit. The Decay that overtook the land, the hideous, unstoppable evil that came to Angra, joined with him and has been gaining strength from his corrupt magic use. Mather’s arms tighten against the coming impact as he pulls the staff through the air, a slow and painful draw.

Dismay overcomes me, so palpable it rushes in molten rivers through my body as all the last lingering pieces click and I fly forward, scrambling toward Mather.

“Mather, no!” I shout.
“Stop!”

But he doesn’t hear me. He doesn’t know, doesn’t even think about it. No one did. No one would have thought the answer was so simple, the power so close.

The staff cracks against the earth in a glass-shattering burst. Darkness explodes out of it, a storm unleashed, a funnel of smoke that erupts in a shaft of black. In the chaos, the surrounding battle halts, the wind whipping into screams, desperate fingers of sound that plunge through the crowd of watching soldiers. The column of black launches up into the sky where thick clouds have gathered, twirling around and around in a vortex that will destroy us all.

I throw my arms around Mather and pull him back from the shattered staff, the embodiment of all that has held us captive for so long. We collapse on the ground, my arms around his shoulders, his eyes twisted in confusion. Around us, everyone has stopped. Spring, Cordellan, Autumnian, Winterian—everyone casts aside their fighting to gape in unabashed wonder.

Everyone except Angra. His eyes meet mine, barely two steps from where I cling to Mather. The hilt of the knife sticks up in the gap between Angra’s breastplate and arm piece; blood runs from a gash through his cheek. But his eyes flash, the pale green depths reflecting the whirring gale. The expansion of magic in the Royal Conduits that even he didn’t know about until he saw me, until he pieced together my use of the magic without the locket and realized what I am now. The magic and Decay that are locked in his conduit will join with him, feed into him, become one. He will be able to use his magic for evil at an unstoppable rate—without a staff or an object conduit, because he will
become
the magic’s conduit, and the Decay will grow more powerful than anyone can control.

The column of black sucks into a thin line and holds, waiting, ticking through time. On a great gust of wind it explodes, slamming into the ground and unfolding over us with a powerful burst of air and debris. Mather throws himself on top of me, and we bury our faces in each other as the force tosses rocks through the air.

It’s over. Just like that. No final explosion, no departing scream of death. Just nothing, like it was never anything more than the shattered ball of glass and metal at Mather’s feet.

I push away from Mather, but I know what I’ll see before my eyes find it. The magic in me whispers it in the deepest, most open parts of my mind, a quiet nudge of knowledge.

Sir sits back on his heels, staring with wide eyes at the empty splotch of dirt under him. His knife still sits in the earth, poised vertically against the gentle current of wind.

But Angra is gone.

CHAPTER 31

THE WORLD IS
wrong, tilted off balance, and when I stand on shaky legs I fall forward, scrambling in the air.

Sir catches me. He cradles me against his chest, his strong arms wrapping around me so tightly I know it must be a dream, and I expect him to call me his sweet girl and for Alysson to be just behind us, serving dinner to Nessa and her family.

But Sir is real. He is here. He is alive. And when I push back from him, look up at his face, the world stops tilting quite so much.

His lips part. “It’s over.”

My eyes fall behind him, to the empty expanse of dirt where Angra’s body was. Like the staff breaking destroyed him. Like it was just that easy.

Everyone thinks it was. Everyone including the Spring soldiers, who dropped their weapons at the disappearance of their king and magic, now cowering in reluctant surrender while their enemies rejoice. Green and gold and maroon and white bodies dance around the square, cheering at the cloudy sky.

I close my eyes, breathe in, focusing on the air flowing in and out of my lungs, on Sir’s arms around my shoulders. I focus beyond him, on the sound of the Winterians’ pure and shameless happiness turning this miserable city into a paradise just for a moment.

“Meira.”

I open my eyes to see Sir staring down at me, his face locked in an expression I’ve never seen on him before. It takes me a moment to realize it’s admiration.

“We decided long ago that I would be the one to tell you. The others who escaped, I mean,” he whispers. “I don’t know how Angra found out. I should have—”

My body goes cold, the swirling conduit-magic now awakened and wild. I inhale, trembling as I put a hand on Sir’s arm. “No.” I shake my head. “It was Hannah’s secret to tell, not yours.”

Sir frowns. “Hannah?”

I shrug, not sure how I can explain this, but Sir shakes it away. He takes a step backward and drops to his knees as he lifts a fist up to me. Dangling out of that fist is a silver chain.