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 evil inside of you. 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 and 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 of me, readying for another strike.
Angra comes at me again and I drop 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 a 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 for 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.