Page 210 of The Reckoning of Starlight

Glaives low, he stalked through the mist toward the formation, murder leashed to every step, all that violence straining against the limits of his control because Jassyn had asked for mercy in the middle of a war.

With empty hands, Jassyn followed in his wake, the earth humming with every step.

Stolen ice shrieked toward them in a fan of serrated spears.

Jassyn flung both hands forward.

Roots ripped from the flooded ground, knotting into a wall of living wood as the spears struck. Ice punched into bark and vine with a crack that split the air. Jassyn released the growth, and the roots plunged back into the mud around his boots before a shaman could claim them.

A human soldier burst through the steam at Lykor. He reversed one glaive and smashed the haft across the man’s temple, sending him sprawling into the mud without breaking stride.

Thirty paces.

Coercion stirred in Jassyn’s veins, his stomach clenching at how little effort it would take. The shamans’ minds crowded the edge of his awareness, each distinct and vulnerable, a flame he could seize or smother.

But he refused to use it to twist their compliance.

Bhreena’s eyes locked with his at twenty paces.

He could see her clearly now, auburn braid streaked with blood and soot. Her nostrils flared as her attention swept his empty hands, the distance to Lykor, the shamans at her back. The calm on her face fractured just enough for him to read the calculation. Alive, he was worth a king’s ransom.

Jassyn opened his mouth.

The ground erupted.

A vine punched through the mud by Bhreena’s feet and speared through her side. Her scream broke across the shore as the root ripped her off the ground.

The earth swung her toward Blossom’s lifted head, jaws opening wide.

The vine flung Bhreena between the waiting fangs.

Blossom crushed through armor and bones. Essence flared once against her teeth, then vanished behind a stream of blood.

Blossom swallowed.

Bhreena’s scream ended inside her.

Jassyn stood with his lips parted, the words he’d crossed the battlefield to offer withering on his tongue.

Blossom didn’t stop.

The earth under the shamans split open, roots bursting through the flooded mud. One shaman plunged into the fissure, and the ground closed over him, smothering his howl. Another staggered as bark burst through her chest. The rest broke formation, portals flaring open across the shore.

Blossom’s vines snatched those who’d opened rifts.

Jassyn could only watch as she took the vengeance he had no right to deny.

Two strides brought Lykor back to his side. “We need to get to Rimeclaw.”

Blossom thundered along the shore after the fleeing shamans, each stride carrying her farther from the roots still cinched around the Tidecrasher. Frost raced through the loosened vines. One snapped. Then another. Water swelled over his buried body as he heaved against the failing earth.

Before they could move, power erupted from the Drowned Spires. The water thrashed, the shore shuddering as a crushing weight swept across the lake.

Every glass tower blazed at once. Essence speared upward, turning the platform into the brightest thing on the battlefield.

CHAPTER 55

SERENNA