“We stick close—you don’t get out of sight,” Mor said, smoothly and precisely. “We don’t go down a hall or stairwell without assessing first.”

I nodded again, at a loss for words. My heart beat at a gallop, my palms turning sweaty. Water—I wished I’d had some water. My mouth had gone bone-dry.

“If you can’t bring yourself to make the kill,” she added without a hint of judgment, “then shield me from behind.”

“I can do it—the … killing,” I rasped. I’d done plenty of it that day in Velaris.

Mor assessed the grip I maintained on my blade, the set of my shoulders. “Don’t stop, and don’t linger. We press forward until I say we retreat. Leave the wounded to the healers.”

None of them enjoyed this, I realized. My friends—they had gone to war and back and had not found it worthy of glorification, had not let its memory become rose-tinted in the centuries following. But they were willing to dive into its hell once again for the sake of Prythian.

“Let’s go,” I said. Every moment we wasted here could spell someone’s doom in that gleaming palace in the bay.

Mor swallowed once and winnowed us into the palace.

She must have visited a few times throughout the centuries, because she knew where to arrive.

The middle levels of Tarquin’s palace had been communal space between the lower floors that the servants and lesser faeries were shoved into and the shining residential quarters for the High Fae above. When I had last seen the vast greeting hall, the light had been clear and white, flitting off the seashell-encrusted walls, dancing along the running rivers built into the floor. The sea beyond the towering windows had been turquoise mottled with vibrant sapphire.

Now that sea was choked with mighty ships and blood, the clear skies full of Illyrian warriors swooping down upon them in determined, unflinching lines. Thick metal shields glinted as the Illyrians dove and rose, emerging each time covered in blood. If they returned to the skies at all.

But my task was here. This building.

We scanned the floor, listening.

Frantic murmurs echoed from the stairwells leading upward, along with heavy thudding.

“They’re barricading themselves into the upper levels,” Mor observed as my brows narrowed.

Leaving the lesser fae trapped below. With no aid.

“Bastards,” I breathed.

The lesser fae did not have as much magic between them—not in the way the High Fae did.

“This way,” Mor said, jerking her chin toward the descending stairs. “They’re three levels down, and climbing. Fifty of them.”

A ship’s worth.

CHAPTER

36

The first and second kills were the hardest. I didn’t waste physical strength on the cluster of five Hybern soldiers—High Fae, not Attor-like underlings—forcing their way into a barricaded room full of terrified servants.

No, even as my body hesitated at the kills, my magic did not.

The two soldiers nearest me had feeble shields. I tore through them with a sizzling wall of fire. Fire that then found its way down their throats and burned every inch of the way.

And then sizzled through skin and tendon and bone and severed the heads from their bodies.

Mor just killed the soldier nearest her with good old-fashioned beheading.

She whirled, the soldier’s head still falling, and sliced off the head of the one just nearing us.

The fifth and final soldier stopped his assault on the battered door.

Looked between us with flat, hate-bright eyes.

“Do it, then,” he said, his accent so like that of the Ravens.

His thick sword rose, blood sliding down the groove of the fuller.

Someone was sobbing in terror on the other side of that door.

The soldier lunged for us, and Mor’s blade flashed.

But I struck first, an asp of pure water striking his face—stunning him. Then shoving down his open mouth, his throat, up his nose. Sealing off any air.

He slumped to the ground, clawing at his neck as if he’d free a passage for the water now drowning him.

We left him without looking back, the grunting of his choking soon turning to silence.

Mor slid me a sidelong glance. “Remind me not to get on your bad side.”

I appreciated the attempt at humor, but … laughter was foreign. There was only the breath in my heaving lungs and the roiling of magic through my veins and the clear, unyielding crispness of my vision, assessing all.

We found eight more in the midst of killing and hurting, a dormitory turned into Hybern’s own sick pleasure hall. I did not care to linger on what they did, and only marked it so that I knew how fast and easily to kill.

The ones merely slaughtering died fast.

The others … Mor and I lingered. Not much, but those deaths were slower.

We left two of them alive—hurt and disarmed but alive—for the surviving faeries to kill.

I gave them two Illyrian knives to do it.

The Hybern soldiers began screaming before we cleared the level.

The hallway on the floor below was splattered in blood. The din was deafening. A dozen soldiers in the silver-and-blue armor of Tarquin’s court battled against the bulk of the Hybern force, holding the corridor.

They were nearly pushed back to the stairs we’d just exited, steadily overwhelmed by the solid numbers against them, the Hybern soldiers stepping over—stepping on—the bodies of the fallen Summer Court warriors.

Tarquin’s soldiers were flagging, even as they kept swinging, kept fighting. The closest one beheld us—opened his mouth to order us to run. But then he noted the armor, the blood on us and our blades.

“Don’t be afraid,” Mor said—as I stretched out a hand and darkness fell.

Soldiers on both sides shouted, scrambling back, armor clanging.

But I shifted my eyes, made them night-seeing. As I had done in that Illyrian forest, when I had first drawn Hybern blood.

Mor, I think, was born able to see in the darkness.

We winnowed through the ebon-veiled corridor in short bursts.

I could see their terror as I killed them. But they could not see me.

Every time we appeared in front of Hybern soldiers, frantic in the impenetrable dark, their heads fell. One after another. Winnow; slash. Winnow; thump.

Until there were none left, only the mounds of their bodies, the puddles of their blood.

I banished the darkness from the corridor, finding the Summer Court soldiers panting and gaping. At us. At what we had done in a matter of a minute.

I didn’t look too long at the carnage. Mor didn’t, either.

“Where else?” was all I asked.

We cleared the palace to its lowest levels. Then we took to the city streets, the steep hill leading down to the water rampant with Hybern soldiers.

The morning sun rose higher, beating down on us, making our skin slick and swollen with sweat beneath our leathers. I stopped discerning the sweat on my palms from the blood coating it.

I stopped being able to feel a great many things as we killed and killed, sometimes engaging in outright combat, sometimes with magic, sometimes earning our own bruises and small wounds.

But the sun continued its arc across the sky, and the battle continued in the bay, the Illyrian lines battering the Hybern fleet from above while Tarquin’s armada pushed from behind.