Snow Like Ashes

by Sara Raasch

  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 around 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 life of the Winterians.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  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 the 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.

  A group of Winterian men tackle a charging cluster of Spring soldiers, and I use the chaos to shield myself from other enemies. They fall backward and I run, dashing over bodies, discarded blades, stacks of crates. The iron tang of blood and old weapons hangs in hot, heavy balls of repulsion, smacking into me as I barrel for the thin wooden door that stands between the Cordell-Autumn army and me.

  I sheath my blades and draw out my chakram before planting a firm kick that sends the door banging into the wall. Inside the gatehouse, two soldiers flip around and, just as quickly, two blades fly through air, small knives that spin with desperate determination for me. I duck and one flies over my shoulder while the other grazes my wrist.

  But it’s my turn now, so I bite back my wince. I let the chakram go, my blade slicing the soldiers’ necks in deathblows. As their bodies fall, I jump over them, eyeing the lever in the center of the room. A thick metal rod stretches into the air at an angle, nearly as tall as me, from a hodgepodge of gears. The rod sticks out more to the left than the right, so maybe if I move it to the right….

  I holster the chakram and throw all my weight into the rod. It groans against my movements, the old iron creaking in angry rebuttal against being opened. I brace my foot on the wall of the gatehouse, pulling and heaving, begging the stupid thing to just give in and release.

  A hand slides on the lever over mine. I flinch back, already half reaching for my knife, when Garrigan stops me. Conall stumbles in behind him, a bloody sword in one hand, and moves around me to grab the rod too.

  We heave as one, and the crank releases under our collective weight, giving up as if it can feel the impending collapse of its kingdom. It slams into place and beyond the gatehouse, beyond the fight, the massive wall of iron starts to lift into the air, grinding and groaning.

  Conall, Garrigan, and I run out of the gatehouse. Winterians and Spring soldiers alike pause, eyeing the lifting gate, analyzing what it means for Abril.

  As soon as the gate gets high enough, a wave of men pours through, adding Cordell’s green and gold to Spring’s black-sun armor and Winter’s stark-white hair. Mixed with the Cordellan soldiers are copper-skinned men in maroon and orange that fly between batches of enemies with an exotic grace, slicing through flesh with hair-thin blades and hurling balls that spew toxic smoke. Their heir may be too young to wield her conduit, but Autumn soldiers can still make a sword fight look like a choreographed dance and wield weapons that are just as functional as they are gruesome—like chakrams. As a few spinning metal discs soar into the air, I grin. Sir originally got my chakram from Autumn, and seeing dozens of them shooting all around me now makes me feel even more united in this effort. A Winterian wielding an Autumnian weapon, using Cordellan allegiance to bring Spring crumbling down.

  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 f
elt 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.

  “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.

  Mather nods, his eyes on my face while mine are on Sir’s, his determined focus, the familiar way he curls his upper lip when he’s decided to kill someone.

  “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 his death is the desperation, the 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.

  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 thud 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, registering everything before I know what’s going on. 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 p
ieces 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. The surrounding battle halts in the chaos, 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 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, both of us burying our faces in each other as the force tosses rocks through the air.