Page 121 of Frost Like Night
Lekan frowned, confused, and sprang to his feet to join Caspar, who stood on an overturned crate and peered down into the valley.
The explosions continued, eliciting mangled bellows of pain. Still Ceridwen waited. This many cannons meant one would surely rip through their ranks. . . .
The darkness in her roiled with fury.I will not end this way. I have strength now.
But beyond that, the small, clear part of her shrank, silent and tired and . . . ready.
“Soldiers,” Caspar told Lekan, but his words carried all around, to every waiting, exhausted fighter hiding in this cluster. “Under Yakim’s banner.”
Only a handful of Yakimians remained with them, but they instantly cheered, waving their fists and hooting into the sky.
“They’re firing weapons,” Caspar continued. “Like Angra’s cannons, only smaller.”
“Angra’s cannons?” Lekan’s face contorted. “Are they fighting alongside his soldiers?”
But Caspar smiled. “No. Leave it to the Yakimians tofigure out a way to re-create Angra’s own weapon and use it against him.”
The area this group occupied was cramped with soldiers, but space had been made around Caspar, enough to allow movement to see the field. In this clearing a great ripple of maroon light fractured the empty air, bending and contracting until a man appeared.
A manappeared.
Even the magic in Ceridwen didn’t react to it, her shock too potent.
It wasn’t Angra. Soldiers instantly whirled on him, weapons upright, but the man didn’t seem the least bit concerned. His dark skin stretched as he smiled, a scar through the right side of his face coaxing a memory into Ceridwen’s beaten mind.
She had seen this man before, in Putnam. He was the servant who had escorted them to the university and showed her and Meira around the library.
Rares.
He looked straight at her. “You did a brave thing,” he said, and encompassed the soldiers. “You all have. But the Winter queen has reached the chasm. The end is drawing near, and we have come to help usher it onward.”
We?
Ceridwen stood again, her bound arms against her spine. As she rose, she saw more of that refracted maroon light throughout the battlefield. Nearby, within their soldiers;far off, near the approaching army, who marched into the battle alongside small wheeled cannons. Everything Meira had told Ceridwen filtered through her mind like sunlight through a dirty window.
Paisly. The Order of the Lustrate.
Rares drew a blade from his belt, the long, heavy sleeves of his robe swaying as he lifted it into the air. “Those who still wish to fight, do so knowing this war will soon end,” he shouted.
At Ceridwen, Rares leveled a single determined look.
“Hold on,” he said before he dove away, toward Angra’s soldiers. He met them with even greater speed than they showed, blocking their attacks with invisible bursts that sent them flying through the air. From somewhere down the valley, a crack of thunder erupted over the continuing explosions of the Yakimian weapons, and lightning plummeted out of the sky in a sizzling bolt that shattered one of the cannons.
The Paislians were fighting Angra’s soldiers with magic. The Yakimians had come to help too—Giselle must have had a change of heart.
Ceridwen wavered as the voices around her rose from the murmurings of soldiers in the throes of defeat to the cheers of people given hope. This was what they needed—something to even the battle. An advantage to keep the fight going long enough to help Meira.
But Angra had gone after her.
Ceridwen took Rares’s words, repeating them over and over to combat the tide of hatred and need that still filled her.
“Hold on,” she said, a plea that rose until she was screaming, begging Meira to hear it and keep fighting. It was all she could do now. They had all come together to fight for this world, to fight forMeira, and, burn it all,she would succeed.
“Hold on,” Ceridwen begged.“Hold on.”
37
Meira
