Page 65 of The Blade in the Ashes
“You don’t know, though. None of us do. Not anymore.”
He cleared his throat, following my gaze upward. “Then we’ll ask Thea. We’ll ask her the second we get her back.”
As if the solution were that simple.
He said it so easily, as if Thea could just pop into the Underworld and come back and tell me that my mother was happy.
“You’re assuming she has her powers.”
She hadn’t when we left the castle. If they’d come back, why hadn’t she returned already?
Rankor sighed and stood, brushing off the tiny grains of sand from his pants. “Right now, we all have to assume that.”
I looked at the ocean once more, focusing on the sound of the waves crashing onto the shore. In and out. Slamming down and then retreating. It was a kind of steady, reliable pattern that existed nowhere else in this realm.
Rankor extended a hand down to me, and I let him pull me to my feet, following his lead back to the house where our horses and my sisters waited for us to continue onward. Onward to Rankor’s brother and Clay’s sister, as if this memorial for my mother were nothing more than an unfortunate stop in the journey that was war.
Chapter Eighteen
Clay
Splatters of ink coated my aching fingers. They throbbed from hours spent drafting letters to anyone I could think of asking for their alliance. My return to the war camp we’d created at Nikolai’s compound was supposed to have been nothing more than a brief stop on my longer campaign, but when I’d arrived back to the unfortunate news that Tenebris had already sworn allegiance to Hyrax, my plans had changed.
It had been irritating to learn that Nikolai had spies hidden within my castle and had for some time, but the update had been valuable nonetheless.
Valuable and completely demoralizing.
Tenebris had a large army, and frankly, I’d been counting on their support given my close relationship to Damon.
That left only the Gelumont and Promissan governments as potential allies, and I wasn’t feeling confident in those relations.
So, I was instead reaching out to men like Nikolai—powerful men around the world who might have private legions of their own I could capitalize on. So far, we’d had some luck gathering small numbers of men loyal to the cause, but we didn’t have nearly enough soldiers to win any war, let alone a war against a God.
Sighing, I cracked the knuckles on my fingers, pushing my chair out from the tiny wooden table I’d been using as a desk. Before he and Iris had left, Nikolai had allowed me a permanent room in the main house, while he stationed the others in various rooms around auxiliary houses on the property.
My accommodations were nice enough, complete with an enormous bed covered in a dark quilt. The small table meant for dining, where I had instead been doing much of my correspondence, sat to the left of the two sitting chairs near the dusty hearth. An unused chess table sat in the middle of those chairs, mocking me.
A game of strategy right in front of my eyes.
All while I was losing the very real game of strategy that I was currently engaged in.
Pulling magic out of my core, I blew a plume of dragonfire towards the fireplace, lighting it in brilliantly blue flames that settled into sparks of orange and yellow.
It still felt cold.
Most places felt cold these days.
A rumble of shouts stole my attention, and I rose swiftly to my feet, brow furrowed as I stepped towards the large arched windows that overlooked the front lawn.
Men moved into a practiced formation, each moving rapidly to line up arrows against bows and unsheathe swords to hold them at the ready. They formed lines, shields held at the front.
Shit.
“Clay!” Elaina skidded to a halt outside my room, grabbing onto the frame of the door to steady herself. “Dragons.”
She barely had time to move out of the way before I was barreling past her, undoing the buttons of my shirt as I did. “How many?”
“Two.”
