by E. A. Copen
“We’re no good to our families maimed, Sir Knight,” an archer to my left said.
I turned, walked down to stand in front of him. He lowered his gaze to the stone. “You might lose an arm. Maybe a leg. You could take a spear through the chest and lay pinned to the ground for days before someone comes for you. But all of that will be nothing compared to what Kellas and his troops will do if they get in here. Make no mistake. Kellas would strangle your kids with your own intestines if he had the chance.”
The archer paled.
I turned away. “Run if you want. Cower in some hole somewhere. But it won’t save you. You’ll spend the rest of your days miserable and wondering what if. What if I had stood on that wall instead of running? What if I’d been faster, stronger, just a little better? Could I have made a difference? You’re not here to fight to win. You’re here to defend what’s yours, and it is yours, no matter whose ass is decorating the throne. You’re immortal fucking faeries, dammit! Now stand and fight like it!”
A rousing cry went up from the fifteen hundred troops.
I stomped back to stand next to Foxglove, trying to hide the fact that I was trembling.
He smirked and passed me a canteen. “You’ve got a knack for this sort of thing.”
“I watch a lot of TV.” I took a long pull from the canteen and almost choked when it burned my tongue. “Faerie wine?” I hoped not. Legend said that anyone who drank Faerie wine would never be able to stand human food or drink again.
Foxglove chuckled. “No, it’s mead. Got it from a very nice frost giant on my last trip to Jotunheim.”
I stared at him. This guy had just talked about a fabled realm straight out of Norse myth the way I talked about going to Walmart. Faerie was weird.
Below, a horn bellowed. Trolls roared and orcs snorted. The siege towers groaned, and the army charged.
Foxglove took the canteen back swallowed some of it himself before passing it to the archer on the other side of him. He didn’t seem the least bit concerned. “Archers! Nock and hold!”
The collective creak of eight hundred arrows being drawn echoed through the castle.
Foxglove raised an arm. “Draw!”
The army drew closer.
My heart drummed in my ears. I shifted my grip on the staff, wishing I knew how to handle a bow so I could be useful. But my part would come later. I had to hold.
“Hold,” Foxglove shouted.
The first soldiers were nearly to the moat. I could count the trolls’ teeth when they roared.
“Loose!”
Eight hundred arrows whistled into the sky, forming a mass of black wood against thunder and lightning. They rained down on the Shadow army, with more than half finding what would’ve been a lethal target on a human. Bodies fell into fresh mud, writhing and pierced through the chest, neck, kneecap, or eye. They became footholds for the soldiers behind them, trampled living into the dirt.
“Loose!”
Another volley of arrows sliced through the rain, cutting down more. It wasn’t enough. The army broke against the moat, leaping into the water. An orc misjudged the distance and impaled himself on one of the spikes, but never stopped waving his ax.
“Fire at will!”
Next to me, Declan drew his bowstring taut and let fly an arrow that found the shoulder joint of a troll pushing one of the siege towers. Three more arrows from elsewhere struck the same troll, sinking in deep enough only the fletching stuck out. The troll roared and yanked the arrows free with a roar, sending black blood flying.
I would have missed the ram completely if I hadn’t been so focused on the troll. An armored dome moved past the troll at a steady pace, decorated with emblems of a black bird. A raven. The semicircular bits of armor were overlapping shields lifted high to protect more Shadow soldiers carrying a battering ram. With the drawbridge up and the moat in the way, I wasn’t sure how they planned to use said ram until they reached the edge of the moat and the front shield shifted.
Flying monkeys. The Shadow Court had flying monkeys.
No time to focus on the ridiculousness of it all. I grasped Foxglove’s shoulder and pointed. “There!”
“Take down that ram!” Foxglove shouted at the archers.
Three archers nearby leaned forward, bows nocked and drawn. A giant boulder smashed into the wall beneath them before they could let their arrows fly. The wall crumbled and all three fell screaming forty feet to the yard below and didn’t get up.
One of the trolls hefted another giant rock and tossed it. This one landed on the wall and rolled over four more archers, leaving them flattened, twitching piles of broken bone and flesh.
Summer’s archers targeted the ram, but most arrows didn’t penetrate the dense wall of layered shields. One did and managed to slice into the flying monkey’s wing. He tumbled onto the spikes in the moat, and the others shifted forward without missing a beat. The ram slammed into the wooden door. I watched it bend under the weight, but not break. It was only a matter of time before it did.
Even if the battering ram failed, we still had siege towers to contend with. The first tower had finally reached the moat. The troll pushing it gripped the braided rope at the base and ripped it apart, letting the top-heavy tower tumble forward. Orcs already crawled along the outside of the tower, hanging on like hungry spiders as the tower fell into the outer wall. The first orcs over the wall were met by swords, cut down by the first line of fae on the wall.
My staff awoke in my hands, blazing crimson and smoking. I flinched away and considered dropping it altogether. The light show was bound to make me a target. William’s voice sounded in my head, reminding me that I couldn’t control the power of the Summer Knight. Open yourself to it, let it take you and Kellas will not have a chance. But if I lowered all my defenses, I didn’t know if I’d be able to control the disgusting urges the ghoul virus was causing. Seeing all that blood and violence shouldn’t have excited me, but there was a part of me that wanted to run through the killing fields naked and roll in the bloody mud. My stomach rumbled, reminding me how much I wanted a big, juicy steak.
“I’ve got an idea,” Declan said next to me. He held his hand out. “Give me the mead.”
Foxglove ripped the canteen away from the man next to him and passed it to Declan. Declan doused an arrow, dropped the canteen, and held the arrow to the end of my staff. The arrowhead erupted in brilliant blue fire. Declan drew and fired a perfect shot into the closest siege tower to have touched the wall. It went up in flames along with all the orcs still on it. A flaming orc fell from the outer wall into the courtyard.
All I could think of was what orc meat might taste like.
The staff creaked in my hands, and the wood bent under the force. “I shouldn’t be up here. I should be over there. Killing something.”
“Patience, Sir Knight,” Foxglove urged. “You go down there now, you get yourself killed. That’d be the worst thing for morale right now. Up here, you’re visible. As long as they see you, they’ll fight. You disappear, and I can’t guarantee that.”
“I can’t do anything from here, though.” All my powers relied on solid ground or being close enough to grab someone. I hadn’t mastered any distance spells yet. I hadn’t mastered much of anything at all except how to split open the ground and cause a small earthquake.
Lightning shot through the sky, lighting up the battle on the walls. So far, we had repelled the bulk of their forces, but sixty or seventy orcs had already made it over the wall and were fighting their way down into the yard. The walls were breached, the door was splintering under the force of their battering ram, and trolls were still hurling boulders at us, smashing four to six archers with every rock. We needed some way to turn things around, and fast.
A black shape suddenly flew into the sky, casting a massive shadow over the wall. I looked up and saw Roshan had taken flight. His giant, membranous wings flapped and tilted to one side, bringing him around for a shot at the Shadow army. Super-heated air swelled in his
open maw, turning to a stream of liquid fire a second later. It fell on the Shadow troops in a straight line, breaking up their ranks, and burned two of the siege machines before Roshan ran out of gas. The elves on the wall and Declan cheered. I started to, but stopped when I saw Roshan turn and come back for a second pass. He was too low. One of the flying boulders clipped him in the nose. His head whipped to the side, and his wings drew in. Roshan plummeted into the moat and impaled himself on four large spikes. Our dragon was down for the count.
The ram slammed into the wooden door and splinters flew. Athdar and his Dryads ran to reinforce it, but they wouldn’t be able to hold it forever. The Shadow soldiers were coming through, and we were running out of bodies to throw at them.
“That’s it. I’m going down there.” I jogged away from the safety of the interior wall with Foxglove calling my name. He could shout at me all day, and I wouldn’t come back to hide where I couldn’t do any good. The fighting down in the yard would be the thickest when the door broke, and I intended to be right in the middle of it, ripping out as many Shadow souls as I could.
I reached the stairs to the yard and stopped. Once they got into the castle, it didn’t matter how many we killed. There were still twice as many of them as there were of us. We couldn’t stop them all. Our best bet was still to keep them from getting into the castle at all.
“Athdar!” I called storming into the yard.
The Dryad was the first one to reach the gate and hold it. He turned away at my call, and the gate nearly buckled. Three more Dryads stepped forward to take his place when he came to answer me. “The gate will not hold.”
“I know. I need you to tell me if there’s another way out that will bring us in behind them.”
He tilted his head to one side. “You wish to leave the safety of the walls? But the Shadow army is on the other side.”
“I need three good men,” I said. “Men who won’t run, no matter what. Men who will stand and fight even if it means their death. If I have that, we can hold them.”
Athdar pursed his lips and nodded slowly. “There is another way. A secret way. And I will be one of your three.”
“As will I.”
I turned to find Declan standing behind me, his quiver empty. He smiled nervously and nodded. Declan was the last person I wanted out there with me, not because he wasn’t brave or strong—he was all those things—but because what I was about to do could easily turn into a suicide mission. In the absence of other volunteers, however, I had to take who I could.
I nodded back. “That makes two. I just need one more.”
“If you’re going beyond the wall, you’ll need someone who can actually fight.” Foxglove stepped off the stairs and drew his sword. “I’m your third.”
“Who’s in charge if you’re down here?” I asked him.
“My son,” he replied. “Believe it or not, Knight, there is a chain of command. I just happen to be one of the few people who knows what it is. The defense of the castle walls is in good hands. Now please, if we’re going to go on this suicide mission of yours, let’s get it over with before they break down the door and we miss all the fun.”
“Okay, Athdar. Show us the way.”
***
Athdar’s secret way was through a small drainage pipe that had been sealed off. He punched a hole through the wall as if it were nothing and pulled aside enough bricks to let us pass through the narrow, dim tunnel. A grate blocked the way forward halfway, but he led us down a secondary pipe and through a degraded section of bricks to get around it.
“How did you know all this was here?” Declan asked as we hurried through the broken brick.
“Odette,” Athdar said simply. “She hid in these places. I helped her.”
I reached out to put a hand on Athdar’s arm. “I’m sorry she’s gone. She cared about you, Athdar.”
“It is enough to know her child lives. We must protect the child.”
I nodded and let him go.
The drainage pipe spilled onto a narrow ledge at the edge of the moat near where it flowed into the sheer rock face. There was no way across the moat that I could see, so I stopped at the edge of the pipe to think.
Athdar slid past me, flexed his fingers and closed his eyes. After a minute, the muscles in his arms began to grow like vines. They twisted and braided themselves around elongating arms and giant hands. He was manipulating his own body, forcing it to grow to monstrous proportions. With a grunt, he swung his arms over the chasm between the drainage pipe and solid ground. “Go.”
Foxglove hopped onto Athdar’s overgrown arm and made the crossing as if he wasn’t walking over a pit of deadly spikes, squatting on the other side.
Declan swallowed. “I don’t know if I can do this.”
I helped Declan up. “Of course you can. Just don’t look down.”
He nodded stiffly and started across.
I went behind him so that when he stopped halfway across to look down, I could push him the rest of the way, which he inevitably did.
Once the three of us were across, Athdar gritted his teeth and pulled himself across by shrinking his arms and somehow managing to keep the rest of his body rigid. It was a feat of strength and acrobatics I’d never seen, nor would I ever see it again.
Where we squatted on the edge of the moat, we were far removed from the battle taking place. I could see the flying monkeys with their battering ram, smashing a hole through the door. Several broken siege towers burned, despite the rain. Roshan struggled on the spikes, down but not dead, despite having taken a spike through the throat. Say what you want about the fae, they’re hearty sons of bitches.
“I hope this plan of yours works,” Foxglove grumbled.
“If not, at least we won’t have much time to think about it,” Declan said.
“Just get me there.” I stood, and the others stood with me. With as loud a battle cry as I could muster, I charged the whole Shadow army.
Chapter Twenty-Six
In 480 BC, the Persian army invaded Greece. Three hundred Spartans gathered at Thermopylae and held off the invading army of a million men for seven days.
Or so Hollywood would have you believe.
In reality, the Spartans had a couple hundred Thespians with them, (as well as some Thebians who ultimately surrendered), there were probably only about 100,000 Persians, and there were only two days of actual fighting. Still, the Spartans were outnumbered about a hundred and fifty to one, and they held the narrow pass at the Hot Gates for two days, losing ground only when they were betrayed.
When the battle for Summer began, we faced better odds than the Spartans, outnumbered only two to one, and we had something the Spartans didn’t: magic.
The left flank of Shadow shifted their attention away from the hail of arrows to engage the four idiots who’d charged in, hooting, screaming, and carrying on drawing their attention. So far, so good. As we closed, Athdar broke off to veer right, swinging his tree-trunk sized arms to knock three soldiers at once from their feet. He plowed into the line, carving a niche of bad guys to smash.
Declan hung back and unleashed a flurry of arrows in rapid succession, faster than I had ever seen anyone move before. One to the eye. One to the neck. Another to a knee. He didn’t even have to pause to aim. Just thwack, another arrow in another Shadow soldier, right in some weak point of his armor.
Foxglove stayed close to me, but stepped to the right, clearing a line of sight for me. He didn’t engage the line but waited with sword drawn for them to come to him. And come they did. They threw themselves at him, screaming and stomping through the mud like wild beasts. Foxglove cut them down with practiced precision, not a movement wasted. Each swing of the sword was a deadly twitch of muscle. He took sword arms at the elbow, legs at the knee, and buried the blade in ribcages as if no armor stood in his way. I was almost stunned into inaction watching him work.
My path was clear for the next phase of the plan, and everything else hinged on me to get this spell jus
t right. If I failed, we’d die where we stood.
I skidded to a stop, throwing up a spray of mud, grasped the staff in my left hand and dropped the mental barriers I normally held between me and my magic. Power flooded my body. I tried to funnel it down my right arm and into my hand, but it was like grabbing a live wire and trying to recite Shakespearian sonnets at the same time. The staff smoked, then blazed to life, an eerie green flame speeding down the wood. I fought the urge to drop the staff when it reached for my hand and held on.
The green fire licked at my skin, no warmer than intense sun on a hot day, but with all the power of explosive growth and torrential rain behind it. A raging storm fueled the power of Summer and fed the land, and I was trying to contain it in my body for a brief second. The Summer mantle threatened to rip me apart, limb from limb.
I funneled all of that pain and power down my right arm with a scream and slammed my fist to the ground.
Faerie shuddered. With a crack, the ground yawned, creating a fissure two feet wide and four feet long. Two Shadow soldiers tumbled into the gap, screaming as they fell into darkness. I pushed more power into the ground beneath my fist, and the fissure grew, stretching another ten feet and widening another two feet.
The move attracted the attention of a troll who sneered and stomped toward me.
I pushed more power into the ground and widened the hole.
Foxglove narrowly avoided being swallowed by leaping onto the backs of more soldiers and kicking them into it in his wake. The move took him too far away to guard me, and Athdar was still knee-deep in soldiers, slamming heads together and stomping on them.
Declan’s bowstring twanged next to my head as he put an arrow in the troll’s lip. His next arrow found the troll’s shoulder, and the next struck its eyelid. The troll roared and ignored every single one to come at me from the side. Declan tried to step in the way when it reached for me, but I shoved him. Troll fingers closed around my body and squeezed.
As I struggled not to pop like a grape under someone’s shoe, I counted myself lucky. If he squeezed me to death, at least I wouldn’t have to smell him anymore. The troll reeked of rotting fish.
