Page 307 of Blade of the Nightking

Another stumbled into view.

Then another.

And another.

Within moments they were everywhere.

Men. Women. Children.

Their clothing hung in filthy tatters from bodies in every stage of decay. Some were little more than skeletons draped in strips of leathery flesh, ribs jutting through collapsed chests. Others still wore enough of their faces to hint at the people they’d once been, though black veins webbed their sallow skin and clouded eyes stared from ruined faces, mouths snapping open and shut around thick, blackened tongues.

A tide of death spilled silently through the forest.

There were hundreds.

They passed beneath us, my fingers tightening around the hilt of my bone knife until they ached, sweat slicking my shaking palm. I scarcely dared to breathe.

All around us, the Bone Women sat motionless among the branches, their bows drawn and arrows nocked, all pointed down toward the endless horde stumbling below.

If they saw us, we were dead. There were far too many to fight.

One little girl limped past our tree, dragging a rag doll behind her by its matted yarn hair. Black corruption seeped from a bite on her cheek.

I bit my tongue until I tasted blood, searching their faces. Had I known any of these poor souls? Had any of them once been my neighbors? Were they the people from Midland who'd gone missing?

Would I see Laurie stumbling past, his eyes dark, sunken pits, his decomposing body nothing more than a puppet for Tharnyx to wear?

Minutes stretched into an eternity measured only by dragging feet and gnashing teeth, until finally the procession began to thin. One by one, they disappeared into the trees until only the faint scrape of their footsteps remained before fading into silence.

The smell lingered a while longer, clinging stubbornly to the night air as though it had poisoned it. Slowly... mercifully... it too ebbed away.

In the tree across, Saskia lowered two fingers.

As one, every Bone Woman eased the tension from her bowstring.

Not a word was spoken. Not a soul descended. We remained where we were, balanced upon branches scarcely wide enough to sit upon, backs pressed against the trunks while the hours crawled toward dawn. Every shifting breeze made me stiffen. Every rustle of leaves sent my pulse skittering before reason returned and reminded me that the horde had passed.

And beneath it all was dread. Guilt. Fear. And grief.

It wasn't fair. These people—who'd lived divided from the rest of Elantis for three hundred years, who’d scraped and starved and fought for survival in a dying land—should have been able to finally share in the renewal the fall of the Veil had brought. The land itself was healing, reclaiming what had been stolen from it. Yet while the forests flourished, humanity had only fallen further. They’d been swept into endless servitude to monsters, neither living nor dead, their corpses shackled to the Bone-Wrought's will, destined to be unleashed upon the very world that had abandoned them.

I bowed my head.

There was a cruel sort of justice in it. The Fae had sealed the Veil and left the humans beyond it to perish, never once looking back. Now those same forsaken people would become the instrument of Elantis's reckoning. But there was no satisfaction in vengeance stolen from the dead.

For the first time in longer than I could remember, I prayed to gods that didn't exist for the souls trapped within those broken bodies—for whatever remained of them, if anything remained at all.

We'd spent centuries waiting for the Veil to fall, believing a return to Elantis would end our suffering. Instead, it had only changed the shape of it.

Humanity had been doomed from the very beginning.

To die.

CHAPTER 64

Midland was infested.

There was no other way to describe it. Even from miles away, the smell of death had saturated the air, thickening until it became almost unbearable. Every instinct in me screamed to turn around, to flee back toward the Barrows, back toward the rest of Elantis where the air was still clean, where the Infection had not yet reached.