Page 324 of Burn of the Everflame

74

OPHIUCAE

She’d surprised me.

Not many had ever claimed that honor, and all the others were dead.

I might not have known, had my excitement not gotten the better of me. I’d come to teach my errant child a lesson, and when I saw her army near, I couldn’t resist sending my message earlier than planned.

But when I pushed into her soldiers’ feeble minds to show her how easily what was hers could be made mine . . . something pushed back.

She’d found a way to keep me out.

Clever, clever girl.

Pride, not anger, filled my chest. What a force she could be. My salvation and my weakness, my only worthy opponent and my only treasured heir.

How deeply it would grieve me to kill her.

Did she know that I could? Could she feel how easy it would be for me to extinguish her spark and all the others’? Did she see that every life I spared, I spared for her?

But there was no use in sparing a body that was already dead. The people of Emarion were beyond redemption. To save this world, I would bury its corpse and let new life grow in its place.

If she joined me, I would do it as a father’s gift to his daughter. If she didn’t, I would do it to honor her memory.

She believed she’d already made her choice.

But I was a patient man.

And I still had a lesson I’d come to teach.

75

DIEM

“Look—his shield. It’s moving.”

“Is he retreating?”

“It’s working. He’s running away!”

Excited voices buzzed around me as members of our third and final wave inched forward for a closer look. Our second wave had done exactly as we’d hoped, decimating Ophiucae’s numbers. We’d taken losses, too, but the tide had turned in our direction. Ophiucae had pulled his shield back, forming it into a dome that covered him and only him. It was as clear a message as he could send that the only life he cared to save was his.

And mine.

But my soldiers had mistaken his change in strategy for a defeat. Ophiucae wasn’t running. He wasn’t retreating.

He was still just waiting.

“Get back in formation,” I barked. “Prepare to engage.”

Alixe shot me a questioning look that I didn’t return. Our third wave was our most vulnerable, made up of our weakest and least-trained troops. Their purpose, grim as it was to admit, was to form a human shield around our long-range weapons—the Guardians’ ballista, catapults to launch their bombs, and our cadre of archers—but the battle had become such a scrum that using any of them now would kill as many of our troops as theirs. Our best strategy was to let the first and second waves finish off Ophiucae’s army, then turn our collective strength on him.

“You heard Her Majesty,” Alixe said loudly. “Don’t get distracted. Be ready to move on my command.”

The soldiers grudgingly returned to their lines, though the excited whispering continued. I glanced at Luther. “Any sign of Taran or our parents?”

He shook his head, but his eyes weren’t on the fighting, they were on the miles of empty flatlands that led to the Sacred Sea.