Page 227 of Spring Guardians & Songbirds

Why had they laid her on the dirty ground?

I dropped beside her and waited for my senses to pick up the thrum of her vibrant heartbeat, the same one that fluttered so loudly and alive as always. Perhaps I was tired from the fight before. I had to be tired because I couldn't hear anything. She had to be freezing laid there. “Cori?” She didn’t answer.

Reaching over her, I put a palm on her chest. The hollow in my chest suddenly filled with something—something harrowing. “Where is it? Why can’t I hear it?”

A hand rested on my shoulder. “Snow.” It was Nia. Why was Nia crying? “She is gone.”

Gone?

What…gone?

I ran my trembling hands over my head, clutching my hair tight, pulling and waiting for the pain to snap me back to reality. “What will I say to your mother, Cori? What will I tell her? She made me promise. She made me make a promise. A real one. It was her dying promise. It was her dying wish for me to keep you out of harm's way.”

“No one saw her,” Nia said, kneeling beside me. “She joined the soldiers without being seen.”

I dug my fingers on my scalp, the burn no longer soothing, only reminding me how much the threshold of my pain had changed this very moment. No. Not Cori.

Someone reached to move the blanket over her face and I jumped, grabbing their wrist. “Don’t touch her.”

“Let go, Snow,” Tristin said. “Don’t do this to her, too. She deserves to rest.”

Her, too? Slowly, I peeled my fingers from Tristin’s hand, and I watched Cori's young pale face disappear behind the cloth.

Nia held me tight. But not tight enough. I stood, anger holding me up because my legs had given up. I met every stare around me while rage filled me to the brim. It tipped with need for carnage, to punish whoever had made me break my promise. “Who was responsible for watching her? Who was watching her when she went to die?”

Someone stepped forward, an elderly woman I knew well. Cori’s governess. The woman who had stayed behind when Cori’s mother and father, the previous leaders of Kvan, had died during a Fogling attack. Cori had been but a wee thing when the governess had taken over to raise her. She’d raised her as though her own. “Whatever your punishment is, I will welcome it, my queen. My Cori is gone. My babe is gone.”

Quiet had fallen over the city. They knew how I punished. They knew no one survived my punishment. Maybe for the first time ever, I reconsidered. For Cori. For the little girl who had only ever known this woman as her parent. So I said, “Let her death be punishment enough for you.”

The elderly woman’s eyes splintered with tears. She sobbed silently, limping toward Cori’s lifeless body. From her cries, I realised I’d given her a worse punishment than death.

Bells went off around Kvan, one after the other they echoed around the southern mountain range and then like dominoes, a signal from the Volants rang off in the distance, the echo carrying it closer and closer to us.

A winged Volantian broke through the clouds, landing right before us. Part of his wings were torn and he had three gushing wounds on his stomach. “Isjordians are crossing the mist,” he wheezed, before dripping to the ground with a thud.

My feet began backing me off, carrying me with a mind of their own—itching to run. When I couldn't feel my sword on its scabbard, I pulled one laying on the ground from a dead soldier and backed away.

“Snow,” Cai bellowed. “No!”

I took off in a run and just when I was far enough from hurting anyone, I bolted.

The zgahna screeched in my ears when I landed in front of the thick mist. Pulling my hood up and my veil down, I descended the mountain face toward Myrdur, where I could make a dozen or so bodies making their way to me.

The mist whispered in my ears as I moved through it. It swirled around me, dressing my limbs till I was only a grey shadow—it became one with me. The essence of my elders. The essence of all the Elding before me.

“Raghair,” I whispered retreat and the ancient magic echoed the sound around the ruins for my soldiers to leave before they were caught in what I was about to do.

Electricity skittered below my feet and the ground charred with my every step as I descended the ruins of Myrdur, breathing fury.

When the Isjordian soldiers spotted my form, weapons were drawn and heartbeats shifted.

The mist slithered around my arms and then extended into tentacles in the direction of the men. The moment it touched their swords, they were sent flying back onto the air. Electricity zapping in their metals.

The soldiers didn’t hesitate, unfolding their magic, sending sharp blisters of ice flying in my direction. The mist vortexed in front of me, swallowing their pathetic attacks and I gave them a touch of my less pathetic one, sending bolts of lightning piercing right through their guts. It didn’t take me long to have all dozens of them turned to charred flesh.

Right as I was about to step back into the mist, a blood curdling roar filled the air. One I knew well.

The green thing dropped from the sky right in front of me, sending the rocky ground to splinter in half. Its nostrils flared, sniffing the air and then carefully, it took one step after the other toward me.