Page 214 of Kingdom of Ash

Chaol shook his head and gestured to the field, to the black mare and her rider. “I call Farasha Hellas’s horse. I’ve done so from the moment I met her.”

As if meeting that horse, bringing her here, was not as much for him as it was for this. For this desperate race across an endless battlefield.

Yrene clasped his hand, like she understood, too.

Silence fell along their section of the battlement. There were no words left to say.

“Lorcan!”

Elide’s voice broke on the cry. She’d lost count of how many times she’d shouted it now.

No sign of him.

She aimed for the lake. Closer to the dam. He would have chosen the lake for its defensive advantages.

Bodies were a blur beneath, around them. So many Valg lying on the field. Some reached pale hands for Farasha. As if they’d grab her, rip her apart, beg her for help.

The mare trampled them into the mud, bone snapping and skulls cracking.

He had to be out here. Had to be somewhere. Alive—hurt, but alive.

She knew it.

The lake was a gray sprawl to her left, a mockery of the hell to be unleashed at any moment.

“Lorcan!”

They’d reached the heart of the battlefield, and Elide slowed Farasha enough to stand in the stirrups, biting down on the agony in her ankle. She had never felt so small, so inconsequential. A speck of nothing in this doomed sea.

Elide dropped back into the saddle, nudged the horse with her heels, and tugged Farasha farther toward the glittering silver expanse. He had to have gone to the lake.

The horse plunged into motion, her chest heaving like a mighty bellows.

On and on, black and golden armor, blood and snow and mud. The dam still held.

But there—

Elide yanked on the reins, slowing the charging horse.

There, not too far from the water’s edge, lay a patch of felled Morath soldiers. A swath of them. Not a single set of golden armor. Even where the khagan’s army had swept through, they had lost soldiers. The distribution across the battlefield had by no means been even, but therehadbeen corpses in golden armor amongst the mass of black.

Yet here, there were none. No arrows or spears, either, to account for the felling of so many.

A veritable road of Valg demons flowed ahead.

Elide followed it. Scanned every corpse, every helmeted face, her mouth going dry. On and on, the wake of his destruction went.

So many. He had killed so many.

Her breath rasped in her throat as they neared the end of that trail of death, where golden bodies again began to appear.

Nothing. Elide halted Farasha. Gavriel had said he’d last seen him right here. Had he plunged behind their ally’s lines and moved on from there?

He might have walked off this field, she realized. Might currently be back at the keep, or in Oakwald, and she would have ridden here for nothing—

“Lorcan!” She screamed it, so loud it was a wonder her throat didn’t bleed. “Lorcan!”

The dam remained intact. Which of her breaths would be her last?

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