Page 18 of Crown of Wrath

Darian moves, and I ignore the people in the cell, my legs moving faster than ever before. I remember the description of the prison cell that the Shade told to the blacksmiths. The thickness of a breastplate.

If the walls are covered in metal that thin, the door won’t hold me inside it.

I hit it with my shoulder, and the hinges rock. I can feel the door bending where my shoulder is pressed against it. It’s not enough to break it down, though. I take a step back and ram my shoulder against it again. It shudders hard again, and I can feel the hinges deforming even more. But it’s not enough.

Anger explodes inside me, but then Darian and Lee are beside me. “You’re not all alone,” Lee says.

I smile. All three of us hit the door together, and it flies backward. It impacts the opposite wall hard enough to turn the granite into dust, along with the High Fae that was standing between the door and the wall.

The Shade is still in the cell, and I say, “Darian, get Casimir. Lee, take care of the Shade. I’ll take care of the guards.”

I stare down the approaching group of House of Steel soldiers. All of them are covered from head to toe in steel. They work in formations built for these hallways. Two Immortals carry massive shields in front. Two behind them wield long spears, and behind them, two more are holding heavy crossbows that look like they’re large enough that their bolts could punch through even heavy gauge plate armor.

It's a formation that’s meant to fight nearly any set of Immortals. Luckily, I’m not just any Immortal.

I close my eyes and press my hands to the floor. There’s the reverberating sound of a bowstring, and pain sears through me. I’m shoved to the ground, and my eyes flash open. The four foot long steel shaft of a crossbow bolt extrudes from my shoulder. The bolt pierced my stone armor and must have shattered myshoulder blade. Half the arrow is coming out of my back, and my vision swims.

I try to move my arm, but it doesn’t move the way it should. In a flash, Lee is in front of me. The entire corridor explodes in light so bright, I don’t know how anyone can see through it. Darian’s behind me, and he whispers, “This is going to hurt.”

It’s worse than anything I could have imagined. There’s a cracking sound as Darian breaks the bolt and rips the shaft from my shoulder. I can’t stop the scream that claws its way out of my throat. Another bolt flies and clatters against the granite.

“Hurry,” Lee hisses. I can already feel the splintered bones knitting together now that the steel is out of my shoulder. I push myself to my feet and feel the anger rippling through me, so similar to the way I’d felt when Calyr had refused me all those months ago.

I’ve worn the Painted Crown for three months, and I’ve fought nearly every day in life or death battles. In each of those battles, the rhythm of peace flowed through me. Now, I embrace the lightning of anger as I feel for the soldiers.

They’re staying back, trusting that we’re trapped and I’m bleeding. They’re waiting for reinforcements—probably Rhion. I don’t want to deal with that. “Move,” I say through a snarl, and I run past Lee. I don’t even bother to get my knife out of its sheath. Sometimes a razor-sharp blade is the right weapon for the job. There are other times that it’s the last weapon I’d ever want.

As I pass Lee, the light shifts just a touch, and it’s enough that I can see what’s in front of me. Six soldiers from the House of Steel. Just like before. This time, though, I’m not trying to be clever.

They’re shading their eyes, and I leap at them. Two shields, two spears, and two crossbows. If I were to stand in front of those shields, they would do their work far too well. But if I can get behind them, none of these soldiers have anything thatcan touch me. At least not without unsheathing a weapon. It’s enough time.

They see me as I leap. My right shoulder still throbs fiercely from the crossbow bolt, a reminder that it may not be of any use. I’m going to have to fight all six of them with just my left arm.

My body straightens out horizontally in the air. The two Immortals with spears try to stab me, but I’m moving too fast and at too strange an angle as I soar at shoulder height. Their spears brush against me, hitting my armor and sliding over the interlocking stone plates as I spin in the air. I slip past all six of them, and I land in a roll on the opposite side of the Immortals carrying crossbows.

I’m on my feet in an instant, but as I turn, one of them fires his crossbow at me. It hits me in the thigh but flies through the muscle, leaving a thumb-sized hole in the muscle and skin, missing the bone.

The pain is enough to make me grit my teeth, and I stumble. I’m moving again before the second has a chance to fire. The spearmen haven’t been able to turn their weapons around, but instead of trying to maneuver their weapons like that, they just drop them. Both of the spearmen’s hands become sword blades made of stone.

Their stances change to reflect their new weapon, and it’s obvious that this is something that they’ve trained. The shield bearers slide between them, moving to cover the crossbowmen.

As the two crossbowmen reload their weapons, I charge.

It’s pointless, though, because the Shade appears behind them, rising out of the shadows at their feet. A midnight black blade is held in each hand. He slips those blades through the eye slits in the two crossbowmen’s helmets, sinking the impossibly sharp shadow daggers into their skulls.

They slump to the ground. The Immortals with swords for hands try to spin on him, but that only brings their eye slitscloser to him, and in these cramped spaces, the unwieldy long swords that are attached to their bodies only keep them from being able to wrestle him and possibly protect themselves.

His daggers are in their eyes before they’ve even turned all the way around.

The shield-bearers have even less chance. Each of them is pulling a sword from their side, but they aren’t wearing helmets, and the Shade’s blades are in their skulls before the ones with swords for hands have hit the ground.

They all seem to slump simultaneously, falling around him as he gasps for breath. “We need to leave,” he hisses. “Now.”

I nod to him, his words shaking me out of the stupor that I’d fallen into. I’d struggled against them, and I might not have been able to win that fight, but the Shade had killed them all while barely having the energy to stand.

I squat down, closing my eyes as I touch the gray granite floors. We’re nearly at the bottom of the Keep of Steel. To the west lies the mountain. To the east lies the wall of Draenyth. Just like in Stormhaven, I reach down to the mountains below Draenyth, and I pull. Stone flows from the ground like water, becoming a wall in the middle of the hallway. I may not be as capable a warrior as the Shade, but I have a few tricks up my sleeve.

As soon as the barrier is in place, Darian picks up Casimir, who is still passed out and hopefully will stay like that until I pull the toxin out of him. When I touch the stone of the hallway, I force it to flow downward. It’s only enough space for us to walk through, and Darian has to stoop until he shrinks while he follows behind me. The Shade is behind him, and Lee covers the rear.

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