Page 191 of Ash and Feather

And now—after a minute of furious searching—I actuallysawthe idiot.

“Focus,” Mairu urged. “Just because he’s here doesn’t mean he’s going to be leading the charge into battle.”

“I doubt he’s here to surrender, either,” Valas put in, earning himself a scowl from the Serpent Goddess.

I turned my back to both of them—and the bustling war camp—for a moment, doing my best tofocusas Mairu insisted.

I had to.

There was too much at stake to think only of my brother, even though all I wanted to do in that moment was fly down and confront him.

Fuckingidiot.

“There’s movement in the trees at the Hollowlands’ edge,” Mairu said suddenly. “Lots of it.”

I slowly turned back around, and the three of us watched those trees for several minutes, trying to gauge what kind of numbers we were up against.

We would use our magic to keep the humans and elves separated, biding time for Karys to accomplish whatever task Malaphar had appointed to her—that was our plan, in its simplest form. And it would be easier than keeping the two sides separated at Mindoth, I thought; there were fewer natural barriers to contend with, here—no raging sea, no underground caves.

Even so, something about the amount of movement in those trees was…unsettling.

“How many are there, Mai?”

She closed her eyes and breathed slowly in, slowly out, several times, feeling for the energies of the hidden bodies. She could usually pinpoint the auras of individual beings even in the largest of crowds, but…

Judging by her confused silence, there were too many here to easily estimate.

“That can’t be right,” she finally whispered, blinking her eyes open and narrowing them on the rustling trees once more.

A few human soldiers had ventured closer to inspect the movement, but nothing emerged to meet them.

Not yet.

“Worse numbers than we feared?” Valas guessed.

She didn’t answer, but the horrified expression on her face said enough.

“You’d think we would have learned to assume the worst by now,” Valas moaned. “Why am I such an eternal optimist? It honestly makes no sense.”

While the Winter God continued to have a conversation with himself, I moved stealthily over the clifftop, getting a better view of that camp taking shape below us, sizing up their numbers as well as any potential strong or weak points.

There was another cliff like the one I stood on almost directly across from me. Together, they pinched in the land below and created a narrow passage that would be easier to defend. The majority of the camp was already behind this narrow point, save for a few smaller companies patrolling the areas closer to the Hollowlands.

Among those smaller companies, of course, was my fool of a brother.

Fallon was on horseback, trotting dangerously close to the Hollows and its hidden dangers. He sat tall and proud in the saddle, shouting commands, his voice occasionally rising into a booming rallying cry.

“We should funnel all of them back behind that narrow spot,” Mai said, walking over to me even as she kept her eyes on the trees. “So they’ll have to go around these cliffs to get to one another—which will slow both sides down, at least.”

“My thoughts, exactly.”

We wasted no time.

She went first, wings soundlessly unfolding and carrying her down the cliffside. She landed gently in the crook of a dead tree, just close enough to better see which soldiers were giving the orders.

Her magic could control every tiny twitch of a body—every breath, every heartbeat—but with so many to deal with, commanding each individual body would be difficult. So she merely took hold of the leaders among them and twisted theirwill into her own, guiding them into a hasty retreat toward safer ground. The rest of the crowd, I assumed, caught a subtle piece of her power as well—enough to help persuade them to follow those leaders without question.

Within minutes, they were all funneling toward the larger group, past the narrow passage, gathering a safer distance from the Hollows.

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