Page 123 of Crown of Wrath

I want to scream, but I need to focus. When I glance at Cole, he’s holding the bloody piece of sword in his hand, and Casimir is still bleeding all over, not moving. “It scratched his heart,” Cole says. “It won’t heal quickly, Maeve. We have to get him out of here. Maybe we need to regroup.”

I nod to him, and the stone wall rumbles, cracks appearing across it. He’s beating it down. We need to regroup and recover. We need a plan, but we can’t lose him down some secret passage through the Keep of Steel.

There’s only one answer. I grab Cole and Casimir’s arms and pull all of us into the void, but only long enough to call for Echo. “Take them somewhere safe and have a shadow walker stay with them until they’re ready to come back to the fight.” I turn to Cole and say, “I love you.”

Echo says nothing, but a shadow wraps around each of them. Like a wind in the darkness, I hear Cole say, “I love you, too.” I don’t have time for anything more than that, though. I go right back to face Gethin by myself. Not to fight, but to stall. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that we were woefully unprepared for this fight. My powers may be just as strong as his, but I don’t have the experience to put up a real fight. I don’t know what I can do, but Gethin knows every bit of his powers and all of mine as well.

Cole and Casimir could have won this fight against him if he hadn’t had that damned Gauntlet. No matter how he manipulated his body, they could have cooked him until there wasn’t anything left. He’d have been forced to wear normal steel armor just like the rest of the soldiers. Then we could have ripped him apart together.

That Gauntlet lets him have all the protection of steel with none of the problems, and I don’t know how we’re supposed to beat him.

When I reappear in the breezeway, Gethin’s armor has retracted, pulled into the gauntlet on his left hand. He’s standing all alone again and seems just as unlikely to attack me as he did initially. His eyes are focused on the battle at the gates of Draenyth. So I do the thing all the Kings and Queens of the Great Houses are unprepared for. I let him talk.

Chapter 61

My father was a great many things, few of them good, but he gave his life for the House of Flames. He gave his life for me, for my people, and for the world. He was lonely and miserable for thousands of years, and his only reward was those few weeks we had together. If only I’d understood. My father was a great man, even if I hated him for a thousand years. The King of Flames must embrace pain, and the pain in his heart and soul was more than anyone else could have borne.

~Cole Cyrus, A History of Flames

Cole

My father looks like he’s going to die. The blade—my blade—nicked his heart when Gethin threw it. He’s so still. Unnaturallystill. Memories flood my mind of him throughout my life. That look of determination was always in his eyes. It was a clarity that I never truly understood. He seemed to be sure that he was completely right in every decision, but now I know the truth. Every moment was a fight to keep his House alive.

I can’t forget the way he treated me. I can’t forgive him for the Shattering. I can’t even begin to forgive him for the way he used Darian and Lee against me.

But I do understand. It’s no different from how Brenna used her only daughter to save the world. I used countless people to prepare for the moment I pushed Maeve toward Draenyth.

People in terrible situations do terrible things. He is the King of Flames. He is my father. He is not my Da any more than Brenna is Maeve’s Ma. Some decisions burn bridges, and the decisions he made consistently throughout my life did more than burn a bridge between us.

He made me see him as someone I’m not sad to lose.

I lay him down in front of a triage tent alongside dozens of humans who have been injured, and I catch a human nurse by the arm. I point to my father and say, “Don’t treat him. He’ll either heal or he’ll die. There’s nothing you or anyone else can do for him. But if he lives, tell him that his son is still alive and fighting. Do you understand?”

The woman should look frazzled dealing with all the blood and gore of this battle, but she looks surprisingly unfazed by it all. This isn’t her first battle. “Prince Cole?” she asks.

I nod to her, and she says, “I’ll tell him. If he wakes up.”

“Thank you.” I let her arm go, and she goes back to caring for the groaning men and women under her care.

I step out of the tent and look up at the battlements above the gate of Draenyth. A hundred feet tall, the walls loom, covered in soldiers, any of whom could kill hundreds of humans without being injured in most situations.

But there are dead House of Steel soldiers littering the ground between here and the walls, examples of how effective those miniature ballistas are. When Steel soldiers are in the air, they’re limited by their wings. Even with as strong and fast as High Fae are—especially House of Steel High Fae—they’ll never compare to birds in flight, and humans have been shooting birds out of the air since the invention of the sling.

Yet, there’s no movement from either side. A stand-off, exactly as we wanted. Immortals have looked down on humans for as long as they have existed, but history has told us that humans have won almost every war between the two sides. There are too many of them. They’re clever and reproduce too fast. Where Immortals will have a handful of children in five hundred years, humans will have the same number in twenty years.

And while magic generally equalizes the battlefield between humans and Immortals, it doesn’t do enough. There are ten thousand soldiers from a single human country against two thousand Immortals on the walls.

A shadow walker appears at my side, and the black cloak that cascades in billowing waves around him reminds me of the Shadowed Cloak. Would we be better off if I were wearing it? He’s older with a salt and pepper beard and black eyes, a sign that the darkness has begun creeping inside him and he could lose himself to it soon.

“I’m here to take you back to the Queen when you’re ready,” he says. I don’t respond, knowing that she won’t be fighting on her own. Maeve’s smarter than that. I stare at the gate for a few moments longer, trying to figure out a way to win a fight with Gethin. I don’t have answers. So I move to where Sia agreed to stay.

“Any information on the House of Flames soldiers?” I ask the djinn, who has her eyes closed.

They’re free. No one tried to stop the shadow walkers other than a few guards.

The report gives me pause. “Rhion wasn’t guarding the cells?”

No one has seen Rhion. Darian has been looking for him, but he can’t seem to find him.There’s a pause, and I smile. That means that Lee might be right. Rhion might have chosen her over his father. He might have chosen us.

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