Page 53 of The Serpent’s Shadow

Hm. Maybe the othersdoknow what he did, and that’s the result?

For some reason, in a way I would never admit, seeing the iceshaper’s beautiful features marred made me angry.

Around Arne, the Lepers Who Leapt fought like the soldiers they were trained to be. Taught by the academy, then discarded.

I imagined they had waited ages for this moment of retribution.

Frida and Dieter fought fast and smart. Dieter wielded a heavy morningstar and dented more than a few helmets and punctured more than a few breastplates with the spiky ends of the ball at the top of his weapon.

Frida, I curiously noted, did not aim for mortal blows. She fought to incapacitate—hamstringing a man with a dagger, then quickly dashing to the next to get behind him and throw him to the ground.

It was Grim who finished the job, stomping on the fallen soldier’s head and crushing it like a watermelon filled with bone and brain. It sent Frida skittering back with a yell.

Corym and I watched with bated breath as the mayhem unfolded in front of us, down the hill.

The battle had understandably turned away from us, to focus on the new additions that were wreaking havoc on the Huscarls.

The twelve who had chased us were quickly being cut down, and I felt a resurgence of hope in my bones.

Then a second swarm of Huscarls barged in from the east, the right, and charged around trees to join the melee. This group mostly wielded spears, with expert cruelty.

The battle quickly shifted once more, throwing everything into chaos as the sharp scent of blood, steel, and ripped flesh carried on the wind uphill to my nose.

“Let’s dance,lunis’ai,” Corym said to me. He started downhill before I could reply. The elf glided down the waterlogged soil—still shimmering wet from my spell—like a skier sluicing a snowbank.

When he reached the halfway point of the decline, he launched himself into the air, sword poised and glinting moon off its silver steel. His hair glistened in the light as he seemed to go weightless, in slow motion, in the air.

Then he landed with a violent crash onto the back of a turned-about Huscarl and shoved his blade overhand through the man’s shoulder, down to his heart. The Huscarl went rigid, immediately dead, and crumpled to the ground with the elf standing over him.

Corym pushed himself off the body. I could only blink in amazement, slightly nauseous at the intense brutality and ferocity of the fight before me.

No one here was sparring lightly or seeking to disarm or capture, except Frida. Everyone was fucking dying or killing.

The two sides were playing for keeps.

I watched in stupefaction as two Lepers fell a few seconds apart, skewered by spears, clutching their bodies as they winced and groaned and went still on the forest floor.

The new dozen Huscarls, who had managed to redouble their efforts and expertly engage our flank, stomped over the deadbodies and kept pushing the line. They reinforced their dying comrades and put a wrench in the gears of the brawl.

Dieter barely managed to spin around the side of one lunging Huscarl, who came in from the east. The pepper-haired Leper slid down the haft of the soldier’s spear and back-swung his morningstar into the man’s head in a slap of flying teeth, blood, and metal helmet fragments.

I snapped to my senses, ripped to the ruthlessness as Corym dislodged his blade from his dead enemy’s blood-spewing shoulder. He moved onto the next foe, slinging blood off his magical blade as he moved.

Another gang of four straggling Huscarls charged in from the south—the way Grim and the others had come.

As they barreled through the trees toward our back flank, my heart stuttered in my chest. I found myself running downhill, and nearly called out Arne’s name since he was the closest to the new wave of Huscarls.

The iceshaper felt them at the last second and spun around, already Shaping runes with his loose blue tunic billowing. His arms stretched wide and he pushed his spell toward the quartet.

A blanket of thick ice congealed into existence, stretching from a far-left tree to a far-right tree, creating a six-foot glacial wall that impeded the enemy’s path.

The Huscarls on the other side of the ice barrier shouted in muted, muffled voices. I heard their weapons chipping away at the sudden ice block, but for now they had been removed from the fight.

Battle-sense came over me. Even with the assistance of my mates and friends, this looked like a tight fight. We were still outnumbered. I had todosomething.

But when my eyes met the dark amber orbs of Grim in his bear form, everything changed.

I stuttered to a stop, gasping as the bear locked gazes with me across the bloody battlefield, through heaps of fighting and dying people.

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