“We’ll leave retreat an option,” Kyrian says. “Chaos is right. The sooner the engagement ends, the more lives will be spared. I’m not eager to expose the draken riot to any more auric steel than I must. Scouts are seeing a hell of a lot of archers.”
Archers who will be armed with arrows I helped forge. Arrows that, should they hit their target, will paralyze the draken. Trap those glorious creatures in a prison of their own body. That’s torture. There is no other word for it. Painful, horrible, torture. All because of the alloy I make.
And yet… Had the marching army not been thus armed, Kyrian’s draken riot would have destroyed them all in a matter of minutes. There wouldn’t have been a battle. Only slaughter. The human’s greater numbers would only matter for the size of the grave that no one would be left alive to dig.
Stars, this whole thing is a mess.
I’m suddenly not hungry, much to Logan’s consternation. “What’s the third option?” I ask.
“Stealth. We advance in small, concealed units.” Kyrian traces his finger along the map, pointing out the natural features of the terrain. “Instead of a head-on army vs army melee, we pickat them with scalpel operations. A raid on supplies. A scrimmage to break their lines. A slew of small disorienting engagements all designed to distract and confuse while the draken herd their forces toward these narrowed paths. Paths that funnel the Eryndor soldiers into killing zones.”
I shudder. I can’t help it.
“Perhaps the battle doesn’t sit well with you, Rowan?” Auri says.
“It doesn’t, and it shouldn’t,” I snap back at her. At least my indignation sits on solid ground. “I’m no more excited about you slaughtering humans than I am about their arrows hurting the draken. Would you truly expect me to feel otherwise and still have a soul?”
“Seems to me, at least half of that soul crushing problem is in your ability to solve,” Auri’s voice has a song-like musing tone. “You can take the auric steel out of play. What’s that term that’s been making rounds about camp? Rust-dust. Why don’t you rust-dust some of those auric arrows and protect the draken from a fate worse than death?”
“She can’t.” Kai snaps before Auri can even close her mouth. “The last burst of magic nearly killed her. She still hangs onto life by a thread. I can feel it. Rowan will use no magic tonight.”
“But if not for her weakness, she’d?—”
“- Enough.” Kai takes a step toward his twin, his canines bared. “You are not going to play your hypothetical ‘what if she could’ games. And let me save you the trouble anyway. The bargain I made with Rowan never included her raising a hand against her kind. And I wouldn’t ask her to.”
“Bargain?” Auri steps back, her hand fluttering to her heart. “Is that what they called love-proposals wherever you’ve been skulking the past years?”
The tips of Kai’s ears darken.
Hot fury shimmers through the bond and it takes me a moment to realize the emotion isn’t actually mine. And that behind the blazing fury is a sheen of something comfortable and familiar.
“They do this a lot, don’t they?” I murmur.
Autumn crosses her arms. “I’d go so far as to call it a past-time.”
“Wait.” I hold my hands out between the siblings, desperate to get a word in before it's too late. “There’s another option. Eryndor is only waging this battle because they believe you intend to attack them. And you are only attacking to make sure Eryndor doesn’t mount an inconvenient assault first. You don’t actuallywantto fight the humans. The only reason you’re even contemplating it is because you have something precious to protect.”
Kyrian nods, but his brow furrows. He doesn’t see where I’m going with this. And he isn’t sure he likes it.
I hurry on while I have the chance to speak. “Well, the humans are in a hard and very different position. No one wants to be battling; Eryndor is fighting to protect its borders and cities. The damage a single draken could do is not known, nor is the value placed on the draken.”
“So what are you saying?” Auri asks.
“I am saying that this is a battle — a war — that neither side wants to be fighting. So if you don’t want to fight Eryndor, and Eryndor doesn’t want to fight you, what if you go and talk to them. Negotiate. Commander to commander. What if we come out of this with peace? Or at least a cease fire.”
All the fae shake their heads, though there is something like sorrowful empathy in Autumn’s gaze. Kai’s on the other hand is ice cold.
“Any show of weakness on our part will be blood in the water for Ainsley,” Kai says. “If there is anything I’ve understood overthe two years at the Spire, it’s to never negotiate from a position of weakness.”
“Plus, discovering that the commanders of the enemy force are the fae agents who’ve been deceiving the Commandant for the past two years and then kidnapped her daughter, isn’t going to inspire trust,” Kyrian adds with blunt finality. “The only way the queen will back down is if she’s given no choice. Until then, any human commander who does less than kill every fae they see will be executed or worse.”
“We fight,” Kai says with such chill that it echoes all along my spine.
Dark silence fills the tent.
“Well, that settles that.” Ellie says after a moment. “So then, which option have you distinguished warriors decided on?”
It’s all I can do not to flinch. Not to give any sign of how much the answer matters. On why it matters.
