Snow Like Ashes (Snow Like Ashes, #1)(94)

“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.