Page 100 of Kingdom of Ash

Turning them all to bloodied splinters.

CHAPTER 28

Aelin ran.

Her weakened legs stumbled on the grass, her still-bound hands restricting the full range of motion, but she ran. Picked a direction, any direction but the river mists to her left, and ran.

The sun was rising, and the army camp … There was motion behind her. Shouting.

She blocked it out and aimed right. Toward the rising sun, as if it were Mala’s own welcoming embrace.

She couldn’t get down enough air through the mask’s thin slit, but she kept moving, racing past tents, past soldiers who whipped their heads toward her, as if puzzled. She clenched the poker in her ironclad hands, refusing to see what the commotion was, if Cairn raged behind her.

But then she heard them. Bellowed orders.

Rushing steps in the grass behind, closing in. People ahead alerted by their cries.

Bare feet flying over the ground, her exhausted legs screamed to stop.

Still Aelin aimed for the eastern horizon. Toward the trees and mountains, toward the sun cresting over them.

And when the first of the soldiers blocked her path, shouting to stop, she angled the iron poker and did not falter.

Death sang to Lorcan.

From the birds of prey that speared farther and farther into the camp, he knew Whitethorn was close to Cairn’s tent.

Soon now, they’d get the signal.

Lorcan and Gavriel steadied their breathing, readying their power. It thrummed through them, twin waves cresting.

But death began beckoning elsewhere in the camp.

Closer to them. Moving fast.

Lorcan scanned the brightening sky, the line of the first tents. The entrance with the guards.

“Someone’s making a move this way,” Lorcan murmured to Gavriel. “But Whitethorn’s still over there.”

Fenrys. Or Connall, perhaps. Maybe Essar’s sister, who he’d never liked. But he wouldn’t give a shit about that if she hadn’t betrayed them.

He pointed north of the entrance. “You take that side. Be ready to strike from the flank.”

Gavriel sped off, a predator ready to pounce unseen when Lorcan attacked head-on.

Death glimmered. Whitethorn was nearly at the camp’s center. And that force approaching their eastern entrance …

To hell with waiting.

Lorcan broke from the cover of trees, dark power swirling, primed to meet whatever broke through the line of tents.

Freeing the sword at his side, he searched the sky, the camp, the world as death flickered, as the rising sun gilded the rolling grasses and set the dew steaming.

Nothing. No indication of what, of who—

He’d reached the first of the hollows that flowed to the camp edge, the dips narrow and steep, when Aelin Galathynius appeared.

Lorcan didn’t expect the sob in his throat as she raced between the tents, as he beheld the iron mask and the chains on her, hands still bound.

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