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I squinted, focusing on the keep again. Saw nothing. But then, Sebian was a pathfinder; his sight keener than any of my ravens’.
“I see shadows,” he confirmed, his voice tinged with a cautious kind of hope as he stepped forward. “It’s faint, but… I swear I see shadows drifting from some of the windows of the keep.”
“You have to be absolutely certain,” I said, “or I’ll lead hundreds of Ravens to their—”
A deafening crack rent the air, its force vibrating through the earth beneath my boots. My eyes snapped toward the city, watching as an entire section of the mountain had sheared off, as though cleaved by some divine blade. It slid away and down in a billowing cloud of stone dust until—
Crash!
Chaos erupted.
The fragment smashed into the city below, fracturing upon impact into a hailstorm of projectiles. Stone shards, large as boulders, slammed into the wall, each collision sending tremors through the fortifications. One tower shattered on impact, its debris triggering a chain of collapse that reached its neighbors. Within moments, two more towers buckled, their stones giving way as they were reduced to rubble.
Sebian let out a low whistle beside me, his eyes wide with disbelief. “But you did see that, didn’t you?”
The very core of me quivered in savage delight as I clamped down the urge to laugh, but a grin split my face, promising violence and retribution. “That’s my little dove…”
The clang of a bell that rang out in the distance. Two bells. Three. It carried over the wind, melding with the brash cry of a horn.
“Ammarett is calling its defenses to the keep,” Asker said. “She did it!”
“We have to get to her. Now!” I gave a tug on the sleeve of my black chainmail that I wore beneath my cuirass. “Any last-minute visions about this attack that you care to share with me, Asker?”
He exchanged a quick glance with Sebian, then shook his head. “I will fight beside you. May the goddess guide my visions, and my visions our swords.”
Sebian grabbed my shoulders, turned me toward him, and pressed his forehead against mine, the bloodlust already rimming his eyes. “We see this through, don’t we, Malyr?”
“Until the end.” I turned and looked down over the other Ravens. Deathweavers, pathfinders, those fates with swords quicker than their visions… they all looked at me from faces alight with anticipation. “If you value the home she has returned to you, then you will value her life. Save your future queen! Show them what we do with those who dare harm the unkindness!”
The camp erupted into a chorus of battle cries and the clangor of weapons just as Asker shouted, “Avoid the arrows. Stay away from the rubble or it might bury you. Breach that gate and flood the halls with the cries of dying men until she is safe. Unleash a darkness onto them that not even their nursemaids have warned them about in nighttime stories about Ravens.”
“Fly!” Sebian screamed.
Hundreds of shifts ripped through the camp in a torrent of shadows and feathers that whirled through the trees like a surging tide of darkness. For a moment, the world ceased to be anything but plumes and wings, caws and feathers, shadows and chaos.
My shift surged through me. We dashed into the sky and took our place at the head of the formation, our collective unkindness a swelling tempest, a dark maelstrom that spiraled up and forward. Below us, one massive shadow eclipsed the land, a moving night that crept toward the city, swallowing the light.
The horn sounded again, ripping through the orange hue of the setting sun. Arrows followed, hissing through our flock. We veered, swerved, shot upward. Most arrows missed, but not all. A dullthud. A gutturalcaw. A nearby raven plummeted from the sky, a feathery mass hurtling toward the ground.
Split and spiral,I commanded through the unkindness.
We fractured into smaller clusters, each spiraling in opposing directions. It was like watching paint drops scatter in water, unpredictable and hard to aim at. Arrows sliced through the spaces we’d just vacated, finding only air where ravens had been a second before. Then, as every Raven learned from a young age, we converged back into a unified mass, banking toward the gate of the keep.
Deathweavers, let your shadows breach the gate!Asker’s shout vibrated through all of us.Fates, clear the plateau and protect the weavers!
We swooped low, our shadow stretching over the plateau before the keep’s gate, darkening the faces of the soldiers below. Whistles of swords filled the air as we cut through, dodging metal as energy spliced through us.
Feathers still drifted around me as I pulled my sword, its coldaerymelsinging, slashing through the air.
“Right hand!” Asker shouted.
A soldier lunged at me from there. The clang of metal against metal rang in my ears as I parried, harmonizing with my pounding heart. I ducked under a wild swing, spun, and drove my blade through another soldier. I yanked my sword free as he fell, narrowly dodging an arrow that zipped past my ear.
“Archers above the gate,” Sebian ground out where he stabbed one dagger into the thigh of a soldier, while the other slashed across another’s throat. “Malyr!”
“I’m with you!” With no time to waste, my form disintegrated into a rush of feathers and darkness. We soared high and darted through one of the narrow arrow slits in the stone.
Sword in one hand, I lunged at the nearest archer, while Sebian skewered another with his daggers. A quick parry, a spin, and the archer’s screams joined the cacophony below as my blade found its mark. Sebian moved fluidly beside me, his daggers sprinkling arcs of red on the stone each time he pulled the blades from another corpse.
