Page 7 of Spring Guardians & Songbirds

Her brows rose. “Save you?” She reached into a thigh pocket and made toward me. Taking my palm in her hand she placed something light there. “The things I save, Princeling, are the things that were meant to wither anyway.”

I glanced down at my hand and stared at the small branch of white flowers. Lily of the valley.

“Pretty, aren't they?”

The eudemons. The unblessed. The frost. The drought. The floods. The lily had bloomed like a blanket all over the cities each time one of those things had happened. I shook my head. It couldn’t be. How?

“What are you saying, Snow?”

“Those hungry for fear will feed on tendrils of faith. And when you are starved of the very thing you are taught to feed on, you people would rather go hungry to death than try doubt. I took a page out of your very own fairy tale book. And who knew, a little flower would help me starve your people of the very thing they live for. Starved out of faith.”

“You left the flowers.”

“I did.”

“How?”

She pointed a finger toward the sky. “The same way I’m not letting Isjord take what is mine to ruin.” She huffed a tired sigh and pointed to the gate behind her. “They need their undead commander. I will shut the gates. Let’s keep my new toy nice and shiny, shall we?” With that, she backed toward the gates, ice blistering the narrow roof corridors of the Highwall with each step she took. White bolts of electricity skittered behind her, crawling to her back and forming a set of wings that carried her up in the air before she dropped from the wall to the gates.

The prophecy—she stood before me. Fuck.

Chapter two

Nivalis

Snowlin

Heights have always fascinated me. The higher up, the more clearly you could see what laid beneath you. From the roof of Highwall I could see the signs of my rage, the signs of my father’s insanity and the signs of the Adriatian weakness. All three were confirmation of my victory. It shouldn’t amuse me, but it did. Destruction always amused me. I was taught to enjoy it—beaten to crave it.

I’d shut the three gates of Highwall. My soldiers lined the long perimeter, Sebastian and Albius on the other side held back anyone attempting to return to Isjord. They had seen too much. My death was leverage. I ought to stay hidden from the world.

Isjordian troops had thawed to lifeless bodies and were being buried by the Adriatians. Though they’d escaped unscathed, they didn’t win. The calm after the storm was often louder than the actual storm. Silence was the loudest sound. I ought to make it quiet.

A winged Volantian approached me, bowing his head. “How do you wish for us to proceed, my queen.”

“Man the wall. No one leaves Adriata before I tell them to. The Crafter will be here soon to mend the veil back. Report to Sebastian if there is anything strange roaming around the entrances. No one comes in and no one goes out. No one.”

Clutching my uncle’s head tight, I dropped from the wall. The land beneath my feet charring from the force of lightning. One of the many gifts of an Elding—bolting. We were the between of a spiritual and an elemental Aura. My magic was a symbiote that fed on my mana and that of the spiritual. It was why there was no monster like me. But there was another reason why there was no monster like me. And they were about to find out.

Snow, my snowflake, mother’s voice drifted past me, whispering all sorts in my ear of prayer and plea as it had done relentlessly ever since Aryan had pushed me off that tower.

“Shhh, ma. You will want to hear this well.” And for the first time, I blocked her from my mind with more noise—thoughts of how I’d make sure her death was made just.

Adriatian soldiers halted their movement as I made past the field of injured they were tending to. The faces that previously wore disdain were now dressed in fear. I could feel the rapid heart thrumming in their chest, like that of a hummingbird.

Taking a deep breath, I savoured the way tendons of fear latched onto their necks like leashes. All slaves of my power.

Funny. The thing I always forbid myself to use was what served me most well.

My soldiers had clustered by the edge of river Nyx. Cai’s irritated scowl was visible from a mile away. He’d not taken well to the new plan I’d forged to aid Adriata. He’d not taken well to the little fiasco with Aryan either. This time I’d properly messed up from the way he refused to even acknowledge me. How many times had I promised him to not do what I did that day.

The general from Highwall, Larg, stepped toward my men. “Do we get an explanation for all this, or are we expected to keep a blind eye that a bunch of Olympian Aura just aided us from Isjord?”

“That would be the least of your worries,” Lazarus, the Volantian general, answered boredly in a thick Olympian accent.

The Adriatian general frowned. “What is it that you want?”

Kicking my uncle’s head to Lazarus’s feet, I crossed my arms behind. If I had them free, I’d be too tempted to wrap them around someone’s throat. “I have what I want. Lazarus, would you be a dear and take that to the Crafter? I’d hate for it to rot from all this blessed heat.”