Page 355 of Kingdom of Ash

So Evangeline smiled up at Darrow. “I would very much like that.”

The bone drums beat all night long.

What new horrors would be unleashed with the dawn, Manon didn’t know.

Sitting beside Abraxos in the aerie tower, she stared with him at the endless sea of blackness.

It would be over soon. The desperate hope of Aelin Galathynius had flickered out.

Would any be able to escape once the city walls were breached? And where would they even go? Once Erawan’s shadow settled, would there be any stopping him?

Dorian—Dorian could. If he had gotten the keys. If he had survived.

He might be dead. Might be marching on them right now, a black collar around his throat.

Manon leaned her head against Abraxos’s warm, leathery side.

She would not be able to see her people home. To bring them to the Wastes.

Tomorrow—in her wicked, old bones she knew it would be tomorrow that the city walls fell at last. They had no weapons left beyond swords and their own defiance. That would only last so long against the endless force waiting for them.

Abraxos shifted his wing so that it shielded her from the wind.

“I would have liked to have seen it,” Manon said quietly. “The Wastes. Just once.”

Abraxos huffed, nudging her gently with his head. She stroked a hand over his snout.

And even with the darkness squatting on the battlefield, she could picture it—the rolling, vibrant green that flowed to a thrashing gray sea. A shining city along its shore, witches soaring on brooms or wyverns in the skies above it. She could hear the laughter of witchlings in the streets, the long-forgotten music of their people floating on the wind. A wide, open space, lush and evergreen.

“I would have liked to have seen it,” Manon whispered again.

CHAPTER 105

Blood rained over the battlefield.

Blood and arrows, so many that as they found marks in Lysandra’s flank, her wings, it barely registered.

Morath had been reserving its arsenal. Until today.

With the dawn, they had unleashed such a torrent of arrows that getting into the skies had been a lethal gauntlet. She had not wanted to know how many Crochans had fallen, despite the best efforts of the rebel Ironteeth to shield them with their wyverns’ bodies.

But most had made it into the air—and right into the onslaught of the Ironteeth legion.

Below, Morath swarmed with an urgency she had not yet witnessed. A black sea that crashed against the city walls, breaking over it every now and then.

Siege ladders went up faster than they could be taken down, and now, the sun barely cresting, siege towers inched forward.

Lysandra barreled into an Ironteeth witch—a Blackbeak, from thedyed leather band on her brow—and tore her from the saddle before ripping out the throat of her wyvern.

One. Only one out of the mass in the skies.

She dove, picking another target.

Then another. And another. It would not be enough.

And where the Ironteeth legion had been content to engage them in battle these past few weeks, today they pushed. Drove them back foot by foot toward Orynth.

And there was nothing Lysandra, nor any of the Crochans or rebel Ironteeth, could do to stop it.

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