Then let us begin.
The King’s presence surges forward. Not an attack—an offering. I feel it pressing against the walls I’ve built in my mind, asking for entry rather than demanding it. A door where there was once only barrier.
I don’t open it. Not yet.
“When I return,” I say. “When the Consortium is at the gates and there’s no other choice. Then I’ll let you in.”
Cautious. Even now.
“Cautious is how I’ve survived this long.”
Cautious is how you’ve become so very, very alone. The King’s voice softens, almost gentle. Go, then. Find your woman. Protect her from the army that seeks to destroy us both. And when the moment comes—when you are ready to stop being cautious—I will be waiting.
I turn and run.
The thornpaths open for me with desperate speed—Briargrave recognizing the bargain I’ve made, the alliance that might be its only hope of survival. Trees bend out of my way. Roots smooth into solid ground beneath my feet. The forest is terrified, and its terror makes it cooperative in ways I’ve never felt before.
I smell smoke before I see the battlefield. Burning wood and burning flesh, blood and steel and the acrid tang of flame weapons discharging.
The Engine’s scream has reached a fever pitch, drilling into my skull with relentless intensity.
Then I crest the final ridge, and I see her.
Xela stands in a field of corpses.
She’s covered in blood—her own and others’—her armor slashed in a dozen places, her movements slower than they should be. Bodies litter the ground around her, at least fifteen, maybe twenty. Consortium soldiers who thought a single human woman would be easy to bypass.
They thought wrong.
Three soldiers circle her now, pressing an attack she’s barely holding off. Her left arm hangs at a bad angle—dislocated, from the look of it. A gash across her temple drips blood into her eyes. She’s exhausted, wounded, outnumbered.
And she’s glorious.
She parries a blow meant to take her head, pivots, drives her blade through a gap in her attacker’s armor. He goes down screaming. The other two close in, and she meets them with the same ferocity she’s shown since the moment she entered my forest—the bloody-minded refusal to die that makes her the most dangerous thing I’ve ever encountered.
I don’t think. Just move.
Roots explode from the ground, catching one soldier by the legs and dragging him down. Vines whip from the branches overhead, wrapping around the other’s sword arm and wrenching the blade from his grip. Xela doesn’t hesitate—sees the opening and takes it, her blade finding his throat before he can recover.
She turns, weapons raised, and freezes when she sees me.
“Took you long enough.”
“Traffic.” I close the distance between us, checking her injuries with my eyes. Bad, but not fatal. She’ll survive if we can get her somewhere safe. “The King?—”
“Later.” She grabs my arm with her good hand, pulls me toward a gap in the burned trees.
“More coming. Engine’s a hundred yards from the grove. Maybe less.”
We run.
The hollow she leads me to is small—barely big enough for two people, hidden beneath a tangle of roots that have somehow escaped the fire. We tumble inside, and the darkness swallows us.
For a moment, we just breathe—soldiers shouting in the distance, the Engine’s scream a constant pressure against my thoughts. But here, in this cramped space with her body pressed against mine, everything else fades.
“Your arm.”
“Dislocated.” Her voice is tight with pain she’s refusing to acknowledge. “Happened about ten soldiers ago. Can you?—”
