Snow Like Ashes (Snow Like Ashes, #1)(92)

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.