64

Calvary

Bryn

The days I had spent raising an army and traveling to the First City weren’t nearly enough to prepare me for a dragon flying overhead and spewing green fire into the air. I heard Tove Kroner curse under his breath, and his hands hung limply at his sides as he stared up at it.

“I didn’t really think there would be fucking dragons,” he said.

Someone screamed, and I gripped my sword tighter and snapped my attention back to the battlefield. Áibmoráigi was larger than Doldastam, and the ruins and vast empty spaces between crumbled buildings and rotting barns gave it a more sprawling and spread-out feeling. Like Doldastam, the city was walled off—in this case by the sheer mountain to the south and the steep cliff to the north.

The ruins provided a fair amount of coverage, but most everyone appeared to be running around like chickens with their heads cut off. The sight of a fire-breathing monster had sent everyone to chaos.

A fire burned in green and yellow, but the largest blaze was set at the far northeastern end of Áibmoráigi, before the plateau ended. A tall gazebo with a teardrop-shaped roof of crimson-blue was engulfed in a red fire.

That’s where everyone seemed to be coming from. A few of them seemed to be charging at us, ready to fight, but the rest were just running in terror.

I shifted my stance—rolling my shoulder and flipping my sword—and I stepped toward them. I had no idea how to kill a dragon, but I sure as hell knew how to handle a guy in a red cloak running at me with a spear in one hand and a kasteren axe in the other.

He grunted as he raised the stick, but I blocked it easily with my blade, and his spear snapped in two. He tried to come at me with the axe, and I ducked down, dodging out of the way. While crouched down, I grabbed the broken staff and used it to knock his legs out from under him.

He cried out—something in a language I didn’t understand—as he fell back to the ground. I straightened up, and I saw the shadow darken his face—

“Bryn! Look out!” Ulla shrieked at me from the cover of a nearby wall.

I dove back out of the way in time to see the Älvolk I’d been fighting go up in a green burst of flames as the wyrm lit him up. I was still close enough that I could feel the heat singe the bottoms of my feet. The Älvolk’s screams died almost as soon as they started, so at least the death was quick.

I scrambled back from the burning corpse as the wyrm flew on, lighting more of the city on fire. It was enough to darken the sky, the smoke creating a thick gray-green fog that settled over anything.

Coughing, I got to my feet and looked up, watching the wyrm. My eyes were drawn back to the cages on the mountain. I had noticed them when we were first marching up to the plateau. Cages of stone and iron had been carved into the mountain face, making it look as if bird cages had somehow grown into rocky formations.

Each one of them contained a sinewy Ögonen, standing with their long fingers wrapped around the bars, their eyes following the battle below.

Despite the wyrm’s best efforts to burn the First City down to dust, the Älvolk and their warrior daughters kept coming back at us.

But they weren’t the only ones. The smog was destroying the visibility, but I could see the odd, lumbering silhouettes of the other monsters that had followed the dragon here.

I didn’t entirely understand what they were or where they came from. Ulla hadn’t exactly sounded certain when she’d called to ask for my help three days ago. But I had spent my entire life protecting the troll kingdoms, and I wasn’t about to stop now.

Especially since my biological father was one of the ones that had helped create this mess. Indu Mattison had to be here somewhere, and I wondered dimly if I would recognize him from the few grainy photos Bekk Vallin had shown me.

As I stalked across the battlefield—knocking out an overzealous tween Älvolk with the hilt of my sword—I heard rocks falling behind me. I turned around to see a spider the size of a small Siberian husky climbing down a pile of stone, but its spindly legs kept knocking rocks loose.

Despite the unstable footing, it was horrifyingly fast, and I moved quickly to drive my sword through its thick abdomen. Viscous lime-colored blood oozed out onto the ground and the spider let out a high-pitched shriek as it died.

I pulled the sword out and looked back to see a tall blonde with a bloodied lip arguing with a shorter girl, who had black hair coiled on her head and blue makeup smeared across her eyes.

“Tuva, this is madness!” the blonde yelled at her.

“I am the chieftain!” Tuva shot back at her, and she held her bardiche like a staff as she glowered up at the blonde. “We fight until all our fathers cross. And only then do we follow.”

A spider jumped at her from behind, and with a flick of her wrist, she spun her pole weapon like a pinwheel around her body. She slipped it behind her back, and in a matter of seconds, she’d sliced through the arachnid.

One of the Skojare guards that followed me here was nearby, fighting an Älvolk, and the blonde rushed over to assault him.

I went to Tuva, intercepting her before she could join her comrades in attacking my ally. She immediately swung her weapon at me, and I blocked it with my sword. But she used enough force to knock me back on the ground. Tuva shouted at me in another language, but it definitely sounded like an angry slur.

I kicked her hard in the abdomen, but my blade was wedged in her wooden pole, so it went with her. An abandoned kasteren axe was just to the left of me, and I rolled over to grab it.

The dragon cried in the sky, and I looked up, searching the green fog for a shadow. Instead I caught sight of another monstrosity slithering toward me. It was bigger than my horse, Bloom, with skin like leather, a thick shell, and a long mouth of angry teeth.

It was a murder snail, and it was coming right for me.

I got to my feet, and Tuva stood on her bardiche to pull my sword free. For a moment, she wielded both weapons, and I stood a few feet away with the murder snail barreling toward us.

She looked to it, then tossed me my sword. I chucked the axe at the monster, and it landed in the shell with a thwack.

Tuva swung her weapons until the blade caught in the skin did not give easily. The creature whipped its long neck around, and Tuva barely got in another blow—chipping off a chunk of shell—before it bit her.

She let out an agonized scream as the murder snail chomped into her arm. I could hear the teeth grinding against her bone.

I grabbed the kasteren axe still stuck in the shell, using the handle to pull myself up. I straddled the muscular neck of the snail, and it finally released Tuva. Before it could snap back at me, I drove my sword through the top of the head with a wet squelching sound, and it fell dead.

Tuva lay on the ground, convulsing, and her fresh bite wound dripped with red blood and frothy green venom.