Page 29 of A War of Crowns

All three were armed with halberds, though. All he had was one of their short-handled sickle-like weapons tucked into his belt.

Once upon a time, those sorts of odds would have frightened him—the thought of squaring off against three men and one witch, all twice his size. These days, though, he found it hard to be frightened by anything at all.

Now that he, too, couldn’t die.

“There you are, little phantom,” the witch purred. “You know you can’t run forever.”

“You’d be surprised,” he muttered, drawing the sickle from his belt.

He liked the Arathian sickle blades, though he didn’t know the proper name for them. They were small and easy to handle. And they reminded him of home and all the years he had spent harvesting wheat in the fields alongside Dane.

Dane.

This time, the witch didn’t bother trying to scorch him alive with the fire she could breathe as easily as he did air. Instead, her three companions stepped forward with their halberds at the ready.

Hedley shifted his weight and watched them through the slit in his helm, waiting to see which would attack first.

It was the one in the middle. The glassy-eyed one.

Hedley lunged forward and swept the first man’s halberd up and out of the way. He side-stepped the second before he could be skewered like a fish in a stream. But the third halberd, he missed.

The sharp point of the polearm crunched between the plates of his borrowed armor and speared into his belly. The force of theimpact was enough to knock the air straight from his lungs. The sensation of the weapon embedded in his flesh was an odd sort of pressure he was keenly aware of, ringed with throbbing pain and all the fire of his body screaming from the strangeness of it all.

But there was no blood. And he knew the pain was but a fleeting inconvenience.

Hedley looked up at the witch and cocked his head at her.

Her smug smile died in an instant. “What are you?” the witch hissed, a note of alarm ringing in her voice.

But Hedley didn’t bother answering her question.

He no longer knew the answer.

Pressing into the halberd, Hedley drove the man wielding it backward and brought his sickle down on the enemy soldier’s nearest arm. The Arathian screamed and fell back.

Hedley wrenched the now abandoned halberd from his midsection and tossed it to the ground before he turned to the next Arathian. The two remaining soldiers simply stood there, as if unsure of what they were supposed to do now.

“You can’tpossiblybe witchsworn,” the witch mused aloud. Her luminescent eyes still crawled over him as if she were trying to dissect him with her gaze alone. “Who is your mistress? Answer me, boy.”

Hedley looked up at the woman and snarled, “I havenomistress,” before he dove in between two tents and ran as fast as his legs could carry him.

That was a lie.

He was aware of her—the witch who had taken a piece of him that night in the Roost. Night and day, he couldfeelher.

Just as he could feel the air behind him shift. Just as he could smell the strange tang that always seemed to accompany witchfire stirring on the wind.

Hedley veered to the right a mere moment before the world behind him erupted into flames. The smell of burning canvas chased him as he fled for the last trebuchet darkening the horizon.

In the distance, he could see a black smog lifting into the night and writhing over the fort, thick and inky. There was no way the usuri could fly in something like that.

He swallowed against the sudden lump in his throat and ran all the faster, trying to ignore the ache in his chest.

Halberds through his stomach brought him fleeting pain. Arrows sinking into his shoulders were as harmless as the wind brushing his skin. But being apart from the witch who had stolen a sliver of his soul?Thathurt.

His body screamed at him as he ran toward Mysai. But his witch, the woman the Arathian man had called Skatia, was no longer there. She was elsewhere, somewhere behind him. To the south.

He ached to join her. Every day they were apart was pure agony.

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