We hadn’t made any attempt to explain the Naiads to the Calderians. I’m sure that they’d caused quite a stir, a hundred women materializing through trees and snow, flooding in as the army worked hard to drain the town of its people. Soft male gasps followed me as I left my little caravan behind, and Selena’s horse trailed me across the town square. Kolibri’s horseshoes clacking against the stone street, the sound somehow hollow and bare.
Do not bow,I ordered Nori.These men would find it even more odd than they already do.Her brows rose, and she lifted a hand to the side, a motion that signified the instruction to hold their position. My thoughts stretched to meet Kye.Can you take your friends somewhere else?
We’ll gear up and meet you in the fortress,he sent back. Hooves thundered behind me, the group splitting from the square.
“Did everyone make the journey safely?” I asked when I couldn’t hear the horses anymore.
Nori gave a stout nod. “Everyone is here.”
I glanced around them. “You have no weapons.”
“We are Naiad, My Queen,” a dark-haired beauty from the second row called with a sharp smile. “Weareour weapons.”
“Very well.” I scanned their faces, asking the group at large. “You are alright revealing yourselves to human men?”
Olinne tilted her head. “We reveal nothing. We can fight standing exactly as we are now, without lifting a finger.”
I exhaled, my breath a phantom in the air. I knew well enough how to fight without appearing to. How to boil blood or freeze organs. How to trap air or drown a body on dry land. Backing Kolibri up enough to see them all, I projected my voice across the square. “Most of you have never seen snow. It takes a considerable amount of energy to melt it and wield the water. There isn’t moisture in this air. Conserve what you can and try to avoid relying on your environment to supply your attacks. Focus on bodies instead.
“The enemy likely keeps a diet of shield weed.Incantthe enemy if you can, but have a back-up plan in case you cannot. Do not wear yourself beyond the point of exhaustion. We are two weeks from a full moon, and tonight the skies will be dark. How many healers are among you?” I asked Nori.
Her eyes flicked to Aitne. “Five.”
“Form groups of twenty and meet us at the gate leading to the pass.”
75
Kye
These women gave me the fucking chills.
They didn’t like me. Of that, I was certain.
They gazed at Maren with adoration, which I could only be grateful for. But when I crossed eyes with any of them, that adoration dropped, and they simply watched me with guarded, predatory stares that raised the hair at the back of my neck.
I’d been raised among enough vultures to know when someone lies in wait for your death, if only to pick your bones for themselves.
It didn’t help that Leal was beside himself with their introduction to our group. I’d placed strict orders upon the members of my entourage. Stay away from the women who looked like they just stepped from a fucking art gallery, don’t ask questions, and don’t talk to them unless you want to wake up with lost memories and a raging headache.
The headache, of course, would come from me.
But that didn’t prevent Leal from drooling in their direction. Which he did.
For their part, the sirens acted as though we didn’t exist, which was fine with me. Infuriating at times, but fine.
We pushed through the snow-laden path, angling ourselves up the frozen incline. The Naiads claimed the helm of our pack, rotating the lead like shining black wolves, and I wondered if they were taking turns melting the snow ahead. They marched on foot, dressed head to toe in that slippery silk, swaths of it wrapped around their arms and necks and up their legs, their skirts cut up the center to make their dresses flare like floor-length coattails behind them. If they were cold, they didn’t complain.
The world was quiet. The sirens were quiet. Maren was quiet.
But the fear that drifted through the air, clinging to my clammy skin and cutting me to the bone, wrenching all color from view and leaving us surrounded by haze and blinding, withering white—that was loud. Loud and white and fucking dark.
Snow began to fall as we reached the top. The Naiads stopped and angled their eyes up into the trees where Calderian sentries hid in the tall limbs. I suffered through the eeriness of it. Theprecisenessof it. How their bodies sensed the men that, had I not known where to look, I’d never have seen.
Sun and stars and fucking sky, I was happy they were on our side.
I rode to the front as the sentries dropped down to meet us, pointing us down the slope and back up again to where our army hid in wait. My eyes met Maren’s across the landscape so achingly familiar. We broke through the ash wood, five horses and a hundred women on soundless feet, overtaking trees and boulders that she and I had passed once before. And a certain dread curdled in my stomach.
Maren’s voice quietly entered my mind.What are you afraid of?
